#3: The Statue

The statue had been old, it had been beyond ancient. It predated the pyramids by tens of thousands of years. It had been made by a civilization that was no longer even a myth to modern man. Then it had been passed on to another civilization, another and another. Modern man had no clue that any of those unthinkably ancient civilizations had ever existed, only the statue remained.

It had sat, atop a vine covered stone temple, atop a small hill, in the jungle of what was now Cambodia, greeting the sun each morning, for millennia...undisturbed.

The statue wasn’t all stone. Most of it was but part of it’s head was something else. Early priests had claimed it to be the skull of a dead dragon. The SoulStone in it’s forehead wasn’t stone nor was it bone. It had been in self induced stasis for untold years before it had been found and used as part of the statue. When the RPG had destroyed the statue the SoulStone had been blow free... to fly a short distance through the air much like shrapnel. Then, much like shrapnel, it had embedded itself into Shelby’s brain. It had come to rest in the space between his two brain halves, just behind his forehead. The SoulStone’s sensors noted that it was once more surrounded by a biological medium. Processors spooled up almost instantly. Data was analyzed at electronic speeds. Nanites were dispatched in a flood. Templates were tested. It was determined, almost before Shelby’s head had stopped bouncing off rock, that it was in a completely alien organism unlike anything in it’s databank. Heuristic programs booted like lightning ...systems flashed into activation....

Repair procedures were activated as the roof collapsed under Shelby’s prone form. The SoulStone didn’t yet, know what kind of organism it was embedded in but it recognized gross damage.

It could fix that.

It WOULD fulfill it’s function. No matter what.

Shelby should have already died, many times over...but he hadn’t.