“My world is crumbling. My world is changing. Everything I once had has fallen away and I find I am happy to see it all go.”

“I should find a recorder for this. Surely the thoughts of one of the Vast and Mighty Neoteric Lords of the New Creation should be captured?”

“Oh how she would have laughed at that.”

“Not so vast in our creations as that which we destroyed. Not so mighty as to hold the world still in our hands, locked in the perfect moment we’d each imagined we alone could craft.”

“Foolish old lot we were.”

“Or perhaps only some of us. It seems not only unkind but terribly inaccurate to say she was as foolish as the rest of us.”

“Foolish in her own manner, certainly. Faced with the end of all things, and she choose to save us from armageddon by embracing an apocalypse of her own design? One that she knew would lead to her own destruction.”

“Most unkind.”

“But even endings must end it seems, and so on the horizon I see the light of a new day, of the world changings. And on the wind which hasn’t blown in lifetimes, the scent of life renewing itself dances.”

“Our working are not yet undone, and perhaps never will be completely, but I can still feel sparks of joy crackling to life in my long dead heart.”

“I think I would like to see this new world, but I feel as though it lies beyond me.”

“I have lingered, beyond the end of the world and the end of myself, beyond all the schemes I have laid down and beyond so many of the ones which were meant to ensnare me. I have seen the valiant rise and the valiant fall. I have seen monsters prowl the wastelands and monsters hold sway over the last flickering flames of life.”

“Now though comes something new. An age undreamt in all our plotting, a world beyond my calculations. Her world. Her time. But before it can come to pass, one final obstacle remains.”

“Our greatest sin.”

And so we come to my last cruel request, if I can call upon you one more time my dearest Helgon.

– Helgon observing Jyla’s victory before being joined by an old friend.

There was so much left to do. You might think that destroying Mazana The Holy Tree and rendering Sasarai the Neoteric Lord into a mindless worm (god) would have been more than enough work for, say, a lifetime. 

In a sense I suppose it had been too. I mean, my life as I’d known it had kind of ended. Between being burned up in divine grace, and my essential nature becoming something not-entirely mortal anymore, I wasn’t exactly sure if I qualified as being ‘Jyla’ anymore.

I certainly didn’t feel like her. I mean, apart from the scales, and strength, and ability to more-or-less choose what I looked like, the fear that had lived within me for so long finally had a sparing partner. I’d beaten Sasarai. Not without cost. And absolutely not alone. But I’d beaten him. I’d rejected him, and I’d told him exactly what I wanted to, and I’d survived.

In fact turning from the life I’d hated had left me so much better then only thing I knew I would regret was that I hadn’t had the strength to do it so much sooner.

But sooner wouldn’t have worked.

I’d needed Theia to give me to boot she had.

I’d needed Xalaria, and Fulgrox, and Kilkat and the army they’d assembled

I’d needed Little to show me the way forward.

And I’d needed Kam.

My idiot brother.

My longest supporter.

Who was, to be perfectly clear, still an idiot.

But he was my idiot and I loved him.

So he was the first one I’d gone to see.

Only, he wasn’t alone when I got there.

“There is so much to see here though,” Kam said as I landed with silent wings outside the castle room he’d been given near the conference chamber Xalaria and the others had been coordinating things from.

“But we must go back. The Garden is our home,” my mother said.

“Yes. This is a city of wonders, but it is not our city,” my father said.

“It could be,” I said, folding my wings around my shoulders like a cape.

My parents looked at me without any recognition, which I couldn’t blame them for. Their daughter did not tower over them by more than a head height, nor had she possessed scales as luminescent as mine.

“Jyla! Awesome!” Kam said, displaying more perception than I would have granted him credit for in a thousand years. “Tell them we should stay here. My Gloria is…it’s glorious!”

Yeah. My brother and words, not a match made in the heavens.

“Jyl…?” my mother started to say and trailed off.

“Who? How?” My dad didn’t even bother trying to guess.

And what was my response supposed to be to that? ‘Hi folks, I know I look a little different, saving the world took a lot out of me?’

“Hi,” I said, clearly being a master of words myself.

“There’s so much going on here,” Kam said. “Important stuff! We got the fragments from most of the Neoterics! There’s like, I think three that we couldn’t find anyone to get into the vaults? So, yeah, we still need to do that. We can’t go home yet. I mean the First Tender is definitely still angry right?”

“Sasarai isn’t angry at all anymore.”

“We are forgiven?” my mother asked.

“Forgiven for what?” I asked. “What do you think you ever did wrong?”

It wasn’t the right tact to take. I knew it the moment the words left my mouth. They had spent their lives defining themselves as servants of a higher power. I wasn’t going to argue them out of those beliefs.

Which wasn’t fair.

I’d spent my whole like believing the same things they had, right?

Except I hadn’t.

From the moment Draconia came into my life, I’d believed I was apart from the ‘good’ residents of the Grove. I’d believed I was bad, and that had left me with nothing but to look endlessly for the ‘good’ that I was missing. In hindsight it was so clear how much effort I’d spent on disbelieving all the bad things I’d seen. 

But I had seen them.

Girls forced into lives of cheerful servitude, being selected and assigned to people they not only didn’t love but couldn’t stand.

Boys being twisted into thoughtless, compliant worshippers with no chance to pursue their own dreams, existing merely as an expendable resource to grow the Holy Tree’s roots ever deeper.

A whole society bound and in terror of the whims of madman with a religion that taught them that terror was joy and suffering was happiness.

“We don’t belong here. We should go home,” my mother said, stepping back as though my question was a prelude to violence.

“Please,” my father said and the fury I still felt at Sasarai deflated.

“I can do that for you,” I said. “You too Kam. You should probably see the Garden as it is now.”

“Wait, did you do something to it?” That wasn’t a large leap of intuition but I was still surprised. How much had been underestimating Kam all these years?

“You should see it for yourselves,” I said. “If you want to leave after that Kam, you can always call on me and I will carry you literally anywhere you want to go, anytime you want to go there.”

“Carry me? Oh oh! Do we get to fly!” He was exactly as excited about that idea as my parents were not.

“Anytime you want,” I said smiling because it was impossible not to echo his delight. “For now though, I thought we’d take a shorter route.”

Had I ever opened a door through my hoard before? No. Was that a standard power a Sentinel possessed? Also no. Was I at all concerned it wouldn’t work, or that I couldn’t manage it? Why would I be worried about that?

The room I led us into was vast, big enough to fit the whole world in it, because while the world wasn’t mine to claim, I was part of something so much larger than it.

Scattered around the hoard room where bits and pieces of the treasures I held. Memories of laughter and love. The good bits of the Garden I wasn’t willing to leave behind. Images of my new friends and a tiny little shrine to the growing crush I had on Theia (though I kept that one out of sight – I wasn’t ready to share that with ANYONE yet). 

And over it all, an image of Draconia at her proper scale, larger than anything or anyone could do, and yet so close and personal.

It’s a delightful likeness. I wish I could show it to Umbrielle, she would be so jealous.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to make another god jealous but wasn’t sure I didn’t either. I filed that away for future mischief as we stepped out of my hoard and into my house (Sasarai had given me that back to the silly old dolt).

Or rather what was left of my house.

The Garden wasn’t what it was, what with the ashes of the Holy Tree covering everything and the trees having come to life.

“Where are we?” my mother asked but my father answered before I could.

“We’re home. I know this place,” he said and reached out to stroke the bark of a tree which had grown up where our kitchen had once been.

“You damn well should,” my uncle, his brother, who’d been dead for twenty years, said. “We had to clean this place up after you spill dinner often enough!”

“What? Pomol? How…” His surprise was pretty reasonable but not something I was going to be able to help either of them work through. The living trees of our lost family would either be able to sort them out or nothing would. 

I grabbed Kam’s arm and led him outside, letting a hope linger behind that, maybe, maybe once my parents heard from those who’d gone before them, maybe they would accept how much of what they’d believed were lies and be able to start rebuilding their understanding of the world based on answers that weren’t meant to enslave them.

I’d be there for them if they could, but if not, I’d hold tight to the family I did have.

“Uh, I’m not seeing things am I?” Kam asked, staring around at the alien landscape before us.

“I don’t know, I’m seeing a lot of things, so I’d say, yeah, you probably are too.”

He bapped me in the arm.

Which was fair.

And a delightful sign.

I might be a seven foot tall dragon-plant lady, but, to him, I was still his mouthy little sister.

Which was exactly how things should be.

“You know what I mean,” he said. “There’s kinda something missing isn’t there. Like, you know, right about there.” He waved his hand to cover the large swath of sky which should have been dominated by the Holy Tree.

“Oh yeah. That,” I said. “Got rid of it.”

He turned to see if I was being serious, and to fair, I was trying hard not to be, but the evidence was right in front of us.

“You have got so much you need to tell me about,” he said.

And I did.

We had spent so much time together without really knowing each other. I’d had visions of helping to build a new world, one where the things that were vital and precious to us would be protected. I’d imagined that new world starting with rebuilding architecture or creating new homes, but those were just the trappings of the world. The material bits which could be treasured but weren’t ever the most valuable pieces of it.

“I think you deserve the whole story,” I said. “Want to hear it on the flight back to Mt Gloria? There’s some people there who I think could really use our help.”

With a breath I relaxed and resumed my proper form and as soon as Kam was sitting comfortably on my back we rose into the sky and headed toward the radiant glow of a new dawn.

“It worked!”

“Do I detect a note of surprise there my dear Helgon?”

“More than just a note! You yourself said our odds of success were only ‘fair’ at best.”

“And I stand by that appraisal.”

“Yes, we might have overdone it on the Apocalypse summoning didn’t we?”

“Shall I tell you a secret Helgon?”

“I usually enjoy learning secrets, though at this juncture I’m more impressed that we have any left to keep.”

“Oh a few still remain. Just unimportant little things though.”

“Well I should still like to hear this one, given that it occurs to you in what everyone will assume is our moment of triumph.”

“That will be the assumption, though in fact that moment remains lifetimes distant still.”

“It cheers me to hear you speak of lifetimes. I was afraid we would have far less time to enjoy our newly exalted states.”

“I know. And you will. Not so many perhaps as you might like I would venture to guess, but I believe you’ll find plenty of quiet days to pursue your dreams.”

“Dyrena, you must know, my dreams, they are all of…”

“The Beast is small.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“The Beast we summoned. The End of All Things. It is small.”

“I confess I am not understanding you, and I feel I often do. Leaving aside the measurements we’ve taken, there is the matter of its demonstrated might. At a minimum, the Beast lies at or beyond the outer edges for our calculations. In what manner is it ‘small’.”

“Our calculations were based on assumptions about universal cosmic laws. Ones which we presumed must apply elsewhere given that reality as we know it requires their precise structure. We didn’t calculate for alternate cosmic laws because we had no means of winnowing down a field of multiple infinities.”

“But you did. No, wait. You didn’t perform the calculations for all possible laws. You built a cosmos with different laws than our own?”

“Only a very tiny and very brief one. I had to validate the hypothesis that different laws were possible.”

“And you discovered that they were. Why keep that a secret though? We survived this Beast through good fortune and a clever scheme by Night. If we’d known this was as good a result as we might have achieved the others might have been persuaded to abandon this plan.”

“That is why. Our plan needed to go forward. It was the one chance to break the forbidden rituals.”

“That’s not something we can ever allow the others to become aware of. They would destroy you almost immediately if they learned you’d led us so close to disaster that we wound up reliant on the last remaining god.”

“Oh, but that’s something they must discover, and, though I know this is cruel, you must be the one to tell them.”

– Helgon attempting to celebrate the Neoterics’ success in the Sunfall while Dyrena toppled another domino in the plans for her own destruction.

Sasarai hadn’t gone anywhere it turned out. Which wasn’t terrible surprising. He had become a god after all, and where else would one expect to find a god than in a temple?

“You seem convinced that he’s still here, but when you burned up, he took the brunt of that blast,” Theia said, searching around inside the temple with me. “Night was able to save me, because, well darkness and light have that kind of relationship. Sasarai didn’t have that to fall back on though. All he had was that divine fragment you’d given him.”

“Believe it or not than was part of the plan too,” I said.

And what part was that? Diyas asked. 

She was lingering around to inspect the work she’d done on my new body I think. It had been quite a while since there’d been any Sentinels in the world, and I would guess relatively few of them chose to adopt a hybrid Dragon-Sylvan form like the one that felt both convenient and comfortable to me.

“With you as his only fallback, I presumed he’d try to make use of your healing domain if  anything happened to him,” I said. “Granted I’d been expecting it to be one of the other Neoterics that was ‘going to happen to him’ but this works too.”

And you would have seen him healed so that he could suffer further? Diyas asked, sounding intrigued at than idea rather than disapproving.

“If that was how it worked out, I wouldn’t have shed any tears, but your Blessed was able to give and deny access to your domain, which made it the safest one by far to let fall in Sasarai’s hands.”

“Even with the possibility that he might use it to make himself immortal?” Theia asked, continuing to search for our missing Neoteric.

She didn’t need to, I’d already found him, but I was enjoying our conversation so I didn’t interrupt her.

“He was already powerful enough that it was going to take impossible levels of effort to kill him,” I said. “Adding a bit of self-healing to that wasn’t going to make much difference.”

“But he did die, right? I can’t smell any of that gross Neoteric magic left here anymore.”

I gave the air a sniff. My sense of smell, especially in a hybrid form, wasn’t even vaguely close to Theia’s and even my full divine senses probably weren’t up to snuff in comparison to her. As far as I could tell though, she was right. There wasn’t any of the twisted, narcissistic Neoteric magic present at all.

“Nope. He’s not dead. He’d right here in fact,” I said and gestured to the small spot on the ground I was kneeling beside.

“There? But there’s nothing there? Just a worm,” Theia said.

I gave her a moment.

Theia’s a quick girl.

I like that about her.

And her ears.

What? The world wasn’t ending anymore, I was allowed to acknowledge how cute she was.

“Oh. Uh. Hold on…” she said, eyes going wide as she saw the slimy little critter wriggling blindly in the dirt.

“This wasn’t part of the plan, but I feel it does show why we should have faith,” I said, feeling smug.

Does it now? Draconia asked, an echoing smugness in her voice.

“So how long did you spend imagining this?” I asked her.

Seeing Sasarai brought low? Since about five minutes after he captured me. This particular fate however? Credit for that must go to Diyas.

It was a shared project, Diyas said. My domains reknit the physical form, but it was several of us who collaborated on ensuring he was gifted with the godhood he’s always coveted.

“Godhood? I mean, but….what? How? WHY?” Theia asked, her claws flexing in and out of her fingertips.

“He was too powerful to destroy. Talking with Little showed me that. Heck, meeting you showed it to me too. Night is powerful enough to hide our whole world from a Beast that destroyed the gods, and yet she’s hasn’t dealt with Sasarai or any of the other Neoterics. Not directly at least.”

“Night’s not usually a direct sort of person,” Theia said, “but I see where you’re coming from. You needed a trick.”

“More than a trick. I needed to give him something he wanted. I thought that would be access to Diyas’ healing domain, but they did so much more with it.”

Yes, he wanted godhood and with the return of all the grace his silly shrub was holding there was plenty available to add to the power he already possessed, Draconia said. Not to mention so many vacant positions he could fill.

“So what is his domain?” Theia asked.

“Worms. Mindless, common, worms.”

So many cycles of the world have been broken, Diyas said. Life cannot sustain itself outside the few havens the Neoterics erected. The worms will play a role in rejuvenating the soil so it can bear life once more.

“So we’re going to let him rebuild the world? Wasn’t that his plan in the first place?” Theia asked.

It was, which was made it so easy to lure him into his current role, Draconia asked.

“And how does he feel about it? Is he sitting in the heavens somewhere cackling about all this or is be being petty about getting stuck with a minor role like this?” Theia pointed at the worm which was futilely trying to dig through the stone it was laying on.

“He’s not in the heavens,” I said. “He’s right here.”

“Yeah, I know the gods are present everywhere their domains are. I’m talking about the part of him that remembers being an Neoteric Lord.”

“Yeah, so am I,” I said and gestured at the worm again. “That’s him. That’s all of him. A little god, wiggling away in the dirt.”

“No. Really? So if I step on him?” she asked.

Then he’d be the god of crushed worms as well, Diyas said. Probably best not expand his domains even that far.

“Would that make him more dangerous?” I asked, wondering what sort of calamity we were leaving for future generations to deal with.

Not especially, Draconia said. There might be someone more worthy of that domain though.

“So what’s he scheming up as a worm?” Theia asked, her gaze hard locked onto the hapless god at our feet.

He is his domain, Umbrielle said. Right now he’s scheming how to dig and find nourishment. Tomorrow he will be scheming how to dig and find nourishment. The day after that, the month after that, and all the years after than he will be eating dirt, forever in search of food to stave off starvation.

“And he’s not going to grow to be some building sized monster, right?” I felt it was a valid question given how much of a problem the Holy Tree had become.

That would be the domain of Giants, and it has been newly claimed by its first Blessed in this age, Umbrielle said.

“I thought you gods were supposed to be conceptual entities only? That the whole point of us Blessed was that we could manifest your powers in the material world,” Theia asked, a note of suspicion in her voice.

You are, Umbrielle said, and that is how it was. Perhaps one day we will return to the divine realms, but we won’t return unchanged, we can’t. We are what we’ve become here. 

Yes. What we were before? Even if we retrieved all our missing pieces, they wouldn’t fit back together as they once did, Draconia said. That doesn’t make us lesser. If anything, knowing this world as we do now, knowing you, who we were always so distant from, has made us more than we were.

“And Sasarai is going to get to enjoy that too?” I asked, unsure how I was feeling about his fate after all.

He will enjoy it or suffer it to the full capacity of a common worm, Umbrielle said.

Well, for now at least, Draconia said. He is something of an experiment after all.

“An experiment?” Theia asked, her voice as dubious as mine would have been.

The chance that we can regain all of our missing pieces is nonexistent, Umbrielle said.

The End of All Things destroyed so much of what we were, Draconia said with an unexpected tone of satisfaction in her voice.

What you’ve shown us is that among the things we’ve lost are the restrictions our earlier natures imposed on us, Umbrielle said.

The gods had been speaking amongst themselves it seemed, and while I was still fairly sure the broad strokes of what had happened hadn’t been either of their schemes, that didn’t mean they weren’t capable scheming on their own.

“He’s a new sort of god isn’t he?” I asked. “I can sense the divinity in him, but he’s bound in a material form.”

Exactly so, Draconia said. We cannot carry the weight of our domains alone anymore. We must shoulder the burden with you, and so with you is where we wish to be. A part of this world which we fell for, and which has brought us to a new life once more.

“I’m supposed to be fearless. This was my plan after all. So why am I here talking to no one but myself?”

“Well if I start answer myself will that be a good sign or a bad one?”

“I’m not sure. I can feel them dying. The deathless gods. Our shepherds and our guardians. Falling one by one whether they can fight the beast we summoned or not. So much power being lost, so much being gained.”

“The others must be reveling in this.”

“Or maybe they’re terrified too. The beast we summoned is stronger than I’d ever led them to believe it would be. And the gods are losing so quickly.”

“Is it too late? My message to Night should have already reached her. I know she’ll act on it, and I know she’ll succeed, but could I still back out?”

“Pass away with the world? Take the painless path out? Leave behind the people you promised to save? No. It’s not too late for that. Not yet.”

“Would that be preferable to sharing a world with the monsters who discovered the forbidden rituals once again?”

“I’ve given them so much power. Terrified? No, they’re drunk on their new found divinities. Each one scrambling to claim their share of the lost fragments which are falling from the heavens above.”

“Well, perhaps not all of them. Helgon has his part to play and I’m sure he’s hard at work, just as he always is. I’ll have to see when he notices the surfeit of grace overwhelming his senses and tease him about that later.”

“…”

“It is so tempting to call out for forgiveness, but who is there to offer it? And in what world could I ask for it? Not this one certainly.”

“Oh ‘but what choice did I have’ and ‘if not this time the rituals where discovered then when’ and ‘how else can armageddon itself be unmade’? I have such pretty excuses, such unassailable reasons for my conduct, and yet…”

“And yet, I did this. I broke this world. I have emptied the oceans and filled them with the blood of the innocent and the tears of the divine. And there will be no reckoning called against me.”

“Except for the one I call against myself.”

“It’s going to take the others so long to consolidate their power. And longer still to feel secure enough in their new holdings and their understanding of the new world.”

“Is it fair that they will destroy me first of all? Not for them certainly.”

“I’ll have to wait for that distant day of reckoning though for my real work to begin.”

– Dyrena the First Neoteric Lord, alone and indulging in the remorse she could never again let herself feel as the Sun fell.

I could have landed anywhere. The world was changing beneath me and there was so much of it to see, and so many who would want to know what had become of me.

There was someone I needed to see though.

One of the world’s newest gods.

“I don’t know where she is. She went poof in a flash of light that blinded me. Me! Right through Night’s cloak!” Theia said. 

She was searching around the temple where I’d confronted Sasarai but looked up in time to see me descending.

I tried to call out a greeting to her but my vocal cords were brand new, and I wasn’t used to using them in their current configuration, so what I intended as a “Hi!” came out as a far deeper roar than I’d planned for.

“Jyla?” Theia said, confusion radiating from the tips of her ears to the end of her tail.

I held up a clawed hand in a gesture that I hoped would be reassuring and spent a moment clearing my new throat and making to do the “sound out words” thing.

“S-o-rry. St-ill getti-ng used to t-his,” I managed to say.

“What in the…? Where did you go? What happened?” She seemed to tiny but I knew that was a trick of perspective, given what I’d become.

“I…I don’t know where to start?” There were words that vaguely described what I’d been through, but conveying the true scale and sensation of it? If those existed I didn’t know them.

“How about with all this…” she gestured towards all of me. “When did you get this big?”

This was the girl who’d ridden on my back when I’d transformed into a dragon using Draconia’s power, which was probably how she’d recognized me in general. The problem was I was just a tiny bit bigger than I’d been then.

Like big enough that I could have encircled the Garden and still peered over the Thorn Wall.

Which was growing inconvenient.

So I did something about it.

I remember as a kid, trying to squeeze myself down into a tiny ball. I had goofy ideas like anyone else, but on reflection a desire to be overlooked was something of a running theme in my life, even when it was uncomfortable.

In this case, I wasn’t interested in hiding anymore, at least not from Theia, but squeezing myself down from the city-sized dragon which felt truly like my natural form into a more convenient person-sized body was a bit of a challenge.

I’d been thinking to return to the Sylvan size and shape that I’d known for years, but, well, I didn’t want to.

It wasn’t right.

The closest I felt like going towards it, the form that felt the closest to ‘also right’ was a bit taller with a similar geometry to what I’d had before, but with my lovely lovely scales still in place. 

Thank you Diyas! I said thinking that I was still drawing on her domain.

This is all you my lovely, the God of Healing responded before withdrawing. She left me with the impression that, while she was more than a little pleased with what I’d done, she did have a lot of others things going on which demanded her attention.

“I thought this might make it a bit easier for us to talk,” I said.

Or we could have spoke like this, Theia said with a roll of her eyes.

Because, right, we both still have divine bonds.

Though mine were…I wasn’t sure.

They’re yours now, and yours alone. You don’t need to borrow them from me anymore, Draconia said. Still close to me. Still a part of me, even if she didn’t have to be.

“What does that mean?” Theia asked, tilting her head to inspect me from a different angle. “What are you now?”

The short answer is whatever she wants to be, Draconia said.

In the past we would have called her a Sentinel, one of Draconia’s personal retinue, Umbrielle said.

“Oh. Like Zeph is with Sola?” Theia asked.

The same sort of association, but with different duties and responsibilities, Draconia said. That title is not one Jyla needs to claim however. I am not what I was, and she has the chance to become something entirely new.

“I feel like I’m already something entirely new,” I said. I felt light and strong and connected. So very connected. It was like the whole world was still pulsing through me. “Though becoming your Sentinel doesn’t sound bad either.”

Let’s leave any decisions about that until you’ve had a chance to discover a bit more about what you are now. Draconia was trying to be reasonable but I thought I could feel her hope that I’d chose to stick with her.

And, yeah, obviously I was going to.

But she was right too. Rushing into decisions when I was very definitely still off kilter wasn’t a wise move.

“Does anyone know what’s happened with the other Neoterics?” I asked, that being a rather important question since I was pretty sure I could not handle another seven repositories like the Holy Tree spilling their power out into the world.

“We’ll have to check with Xalaria, she was coordinating the groups we had in place. It definitely felt like your idea worked on some of them though,” Theia said.

Out of curiosity, when did you discover the secret to the Neoteric’s vaults? Umbrielle asked.

“Well, there’s when I discovered it and when I realized I’d discovered it,” I said. “The answer to the first is a long time ago. It was how I got in the first time.”

“I thought you said there was a secret tunnel that led you into it?” Theia said.

“There was. But that was a spot that had literal divinity level protections cast on it. Anyone else could have stumbled on that tunnel, and probably did, over the years, but I don’t think they would have been able to see it. I’m wondering if even Sasarai would have been able to see it.”

“But it appeared for you because of Draconia?” Theia said, repeating my earlier words when I’d explained my plan.

“Right. From talking with Helgon and just thinking about how Dyrena had to have set the defenses up, the vaults had to allow the owners in or, being divine defenses, they would have been impossible for anyone to breech. Since I was pretty sure neither Sasarai nor any of the other Neoterics would have wanted to seal away their divine fragments so that they themselves couldn’t use them, there had to be an opening in the defenses for people with things inside the vaults to get in and claim them.”

And since you were one I would give my Blessing to, you held a claim on my fragment, Draconia said.

“Hence, it was just Sasarai’s vault. It was mine too.” I was delighted to hear that I was still close enough to Draconia’s domain that declarations like that still seemed to carry a bit of divine weight behind them.

“And once you worked that out, figuring out who we should send to each of the vaults was easy because Draconia’s the God of Guardians? But shouldn’t the vaults have hidden their contents from even divine influences?” Theia said.

“They did from every other god,” I said, unreasonably proud of Draconia in that moment, “but people forget that she’s not just the God of Guardians.”

Guardians and Treasures, Umbrielle said. You didn’t have to overcome the vaults, you knew which fragments were in each vault because they were all being hoarded as treasures by the Neoterics.

To be fair, it wasn’t until Jyla accepted my Blessing that I regained even that much awareness of the world at large. 

“And without Kalkit’s secret network, we won’t have been able to find people who could carry the Blessings of the gods in the different vaults, so any attempt to free them would have been doomed from the start.”

Not that things went off without a hitch, Draconia said. I know some of the vaults remain locked down, with noone claiming a Blessing from the trapped divinities within, and there’s the small matter of the world almost ending.

“I’m sorry, what?” Theia asked.

“I sort of underestimated how much power Sasarai had built up in the Holy Tree. When I claimed it, that all became mine. Very briefly.”

“That was when you vanished in the flash of light I take it?”

“Probably? I was terribly aware of the world for a while there. Fortunately a lot of gods were freed and there are a lot of new Blessed out there now.”

“So you gave the power to them?”

“Not exactly? They held me disperse it, but none of us could carry that much. Not without, well, did I die there?”

Technically no, but practically, sort of, Umbrielle said. Your mortal existence was fundamentally altered and partially erased. As you are still standing here however, and your soul is mostly intact, you are arguably still alive and never truly died.

“That sounds like you are splitting the finest of hairs there,” Theia said.

“I’m just happy with how that particular split turned out. Under any other circumstance, it should have gone the other way.”

Funny that, eh?

Thank you Dyrena, I said to absolutely no one at all.

I definitely didn’t hear a little chuckle in the silence of my mind. Just a stray bit of imagination I’m sure. Even though it sounded like a voice I’d never heard before.

“Now, before we go, I’d like to pay a quick visit to the newest god in the world. Have you seen where Sasarai got off to?”

“What do you think it will be like?”

“Terrible.”

“Not all the deaths. I mean the Transcendence.”

“I know. That’s what I was referring.”

“You think it will destroy us? But the others have been so careful with their calculations?”

“I don’t think anyone has run the sort of calculations that you have Helgon. I’m not sure any of them are capable of doing so.”

“You are.”

“No. I have my own techniques, but you’ve put together calculations that produce results which surprised even me.”

“I haven’t always been right.”

“No one ever is.”

“Why do you think the Transcendence will be terrible then? From what I can see we should remain in control of our faculties throughout the deification process, and past that we’ll each have the power to correct any issues that remain from our mortal lives.”

“That’s what will be terrible.”

“Please Dyrena, you know I am not as clever as you.”

“As Novices we are taught that the meaning of our lives comes from what we bring to world. It’s a good foundation, though not a complete one. The truth is that there is no inherent meaning to life. Meaning is something which is created and we are the ones, all of us, from Highest Accessor to the lowest of the Outcast. We all decide, from the choices available to us, what is important enough to spend our lives on.”

“And you think that with divine power at our fingertips and unlimited life there will be nothing we could choose to spend our time on which will matter to us in the end?”

“Not at all. An unlimited life could be turned towards fulfilling ends quite easily. We could undertake projects which would require centuries to come to fruition, plant seeds to nurture society until all stand on the divine stage with us, even should that take a thousand thousand years.”

“But we won’t.”

“We are the only ones who would even want to, and that won’t be our fates.”

– Helgon and Dyrena accepting a thing they know they can’t change.

I couldn’t change anything about the world, but everything was changing through me. Even with so many new Blessed, the power of the Holy Tree was difficult to channel.

When I’d said I was burning, that had been both literally and spiritually true. My body, my old one, hadn’t been capable of holding even the first drop of grace from the Holy Tree. Draconia had stepped in there, both to help channel the power and to grant my physical form a measure of divine resiliency. 

Unfortunately, as only a fragment of her former self, Draconia did have her limits, and bearing the full force of the Holy Tree was well beyond them.

My original plan, for what it’s worth, had been to claim the tree and then turn its power against itself. I’d really thought “burn the tree and choke Sasarai to death with its ashes” would come close to some form of justice for what he’d done.

It wasn’t an obviously terrible idea either. I’d had a lot of training in safely calling on the Holy Tree’s power. With some divine assistance on my side, drawing on that power without a specially prepared ritual should have been fine.

I’d just made one little mistake.

When I claimed the Holy Tree as mine, I didn’t need to ‘draw’ on its power like I had in my classes. The tree was mine, its power was mine, and there was no carefully constructed barrier protecting either of us from the other.

In the end though, with the help of Blessed and Gods, a lot of things I’d never expected happened. 

First, I survived. Which was delightful. Continued existence was a wonderful treat. It hadn’t been guaranteed, was unlikely and not required, but well worth the trouble.

Second, the Holy Tree did, in fact, burn. 

And then it exploded.

The ashes I’d hoped to cram down Sasarai’s throat until he died rose until they hit the edge of Night and swirled from there covering an area hundreds of miles in radius.

And from those ashes, life arose.

The Garden was the first to see the new life which carried the wisps of the Holy Tree’s stored grace. It wasn’t a single great tree but a forest of living, speaking trees infused with voices of those who’d been lost in the roots below the Holy Tree.

The thorns which ringed the Garden burned with the Holy Tree, collapsing in on themselves in some sections and remaining as jagged deterrents  in others. 

From the divine perspective I enjoyed during the process I could feel exactly how unhappy the Sylvans of the Garden were. There were people who buried their fear under so thick a blanket of hate that even godly eyes had a hard time seeing what was inside them.

But there were others too. 

And a surprising amount of them.

People who hadn’t been happy with how things were, or who had questions, or who were as curious as they were afraid.

More than a few of those found their connections to the freed divine fragments. 

There were going to be problems there. Long, difficult problems. Too many people had been snared in Sasarai’s cult for too long. Too many had invested too much of themselves into their unquestioning beliefs to ever be able to accept that their world was changing.

Would it have been simpler to direct some of the divine power that was flowing through me into smiting the ones who would only hate or cling to the worship of ‘the First Tender’?

No.

It would have been simple to do it. I had so much power flowing through me that almost any act of destruction would have been trivial to enact. Destroying a person is never trivial though.

If they were going to be problems later, then those were problems we’d solve, not through destruction but by the much harder process of creating something new and better.

 New and better was something I was definitely going to need to, since the old me was definitely a bit less embodied than was typically required to be considered ‘alive’.

Perhaps I could be of service? When Sola spoke I could feel how carefully she was whispering but on the divine plane, where most of my senses were hanging out, even those whispers were thunderous.

Uh, yes, please? I said, proud of myself for still retaining the capacity to form ideas at all, much less words!

Let me lift that burden from you then. It was never meant for a mortal to carry. Her voice was gentle but it was impossible to miss her raw might and majesty.

This had been the first god to rise in battle against the End of All Things and she had been the last to fall, and standing in her presence as I had no problem believing that.

Quite willingly therefor I gave my claim over the Holy Tree’s power to her, more than confident that it would neither overwhelm her nor be misused. Sasarai had amplified the power he stolen and grown it exponentially since he founded the Garden and it was still the tiniest spark when compared to the majesty of the unbridled sun.

For my gift, I received a priceless treasure in return – I fell. Down from the divine realm, I plummeted, still burning, always burning from the divinity I’d absorbed, but becoming steadily more solid as wind whipped around me.

You know nothing will be the same again, Draconia said, her voice close and comforting.

That was kind of the point of all this, wasn’t it? I asked. The idea of the world returning to what it had been wasn’t impossible, but it would take the turning of many ages for anyone to be in the position the Neoterics had been.

I mean between us, Draconia said.

Why? I asked. Falling was so blissfully restful that I simply refused to an erg of energy on imagining anything bad.

Because neither of us are the same as we were, Draconia said.

That woke me up a bit. Don’t get me wrong, falling was still a wonderful feeling. No need to expend any effort at all, just happy drifting as I returned home. The idea that I’d broken something in Draconia though managed to send a little jolt through my system. Only a little one since she was still talking to me which meant I hadn’t screwed up too badly, but still I hated the idea that I might have hurt her at all, even if she had been in favor of the plan too.

What did I do? Can I fix it? I asked, opening eyes that I might not have had a moment earlier to see a layer clouds drifting far below me.

This isn’t something that can be fixed. It’s not something that needs to be fixed either.  Draconia said with an oddly playful tone in her voice.

What? I asked, and turned my sense inwards, looking for anything different about the connection between us.

Only to discover that it was missing.

No! What happened! What did I do! 

Panicking while in freefall? Not terribly helpful it turns out. 

Also, not entirely unexpected it seems as I felt warm, scaly arms wrap around me.

You did what none of us could have imagined, Draconia said. We knew the Neoterics had stored our stolen power, we had no idea how much they’d captured though.

But wait, Helgon must have known, why didn’t he warn us of this!

This isn’t something he could have foreseen either, Draconia said and paused before adding, Or maybe he did but didn’t want to get our hopes up.

Our hopes? But this is terrible, where are you?

With you. For as long as you wish me to be, Draconia said, not claiming me as her own but not abandoning me either.

Which for the God of Guardians and Treasures was unusual to say the least.

So why can’t we be what we were? How did I lose your Blessing?

Blessings are limited things, Draconia said and I felt like I was in class with one of my teachers again. They connect the divine with the material, the ephemeral with the solid. They are, by their nature, temporary since mortals must eventually pass away, as is their gift.

Dying doesn’t seem like much of a gift.

If often doesn’t from a mortal perspective, Draconia said and I wasn’t sure if there was sympathy in her voice or if there were things about it that she couldn’t tell me. Maybe both?

But why should that matter? I’m still…

Except I wasn’t.

I’d burned in divinity. What was ‘me’ had been taken apart, cell by cell, thought by thought, until all that remained were my hopes, my memories, and the things I held as dear to me. Even my soul felt a bit singed, and that wasn’t something I was supposed to be able to feel.

Was it?

Wait, what I am? I asked, reaching out with the divine senses Draconia had Blessed me with to search for an answer.

It came, in part, all too quickly.

I hadn’t lost those senses.

But they weren’t Draconia’s anymore.

They were mine.

Not MINE.

Just mine. Just a part of me. 

A divine part of me.

Am I…? I didn’t even want to ask. It felt sacreligious.

Draconia, still able to hear my thoughts it seemed, helped me out.

No. You’re not a god. You’re becoming more solid with even moment, reclaiming the place in the world that you deserve.

You’re welcome, Diyas said as I felt her healing domain knitting back handy things like hands and feet and ears and such. The more the sensations of the world returned the more different they felt though.

I was still falling, and the world beneath me blossomed in detail as I passed through the highest of clouds. I wasn’t afraid though as the ground loomed every closer. I wasn’t going to hit it after all.

Not when I had wings to bear me wherever I wanted to go.

“I’ve been doing some calculations.”

“And in other news, the sky is up. Do these calculations have anything to do with our current topic of discussion Helgon?”

“Of course they do Vaingloth. You know our Helgon is as committed to this scheme as any of us, he is simply using own unique tools to ensure it’s success.”

“Thank you Dyrena, and yes, this is relevant to the grace storage mechanisms we have been speaking about.”

“That was two hours ago Helgon.”

“Was it? Oh, well, it’s a new calculation and I don’t have my proper tools here. Did I miss anything important?”

“Why don’t you share the results your calculations have produced Helgon. I can bring you up to speed on the population exclusion process the others have developed.”

“Oh, of course. Well, a few hours ago apparently now, we were discussing our schemes for collecting and storing the grace which will be cast off when the gods fall, as well as the subsequently generated grace produced by our protectorates.”

“Yes. We all recall the discussion Helgon. Do you have something to relevant to add or did it take you this long to catch up with us?”

“I’m not sure Vaingloth. Did we talk about how any one of us will vaporize the planet if our containment devices fail?”

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“Oh, Sasarai I hadn’t seen you there. Um, yes, with the amount of grace we’re speaking of, if one of our proposed containment structures fails, there’ll be a tipping point reaction triggered. Unbound grace at that concentration with flood the bindings which hold together other grace bound systems.”

“Everything is bound by grace.”

“Yes, you see the problem the Vaingloth! Living creatures, solid objects, the air itself. There’s grace everywhere. Once the threshold is crossed, each extra spark added will increase the reaction. And it won’t be slow. Perhaps ten milliseconds for complete planetary conversion.”

“Are you sure Helgon? I thought…can I see you’re calculations.”

“Oh course Dyrena. Please check them over. It’s possible I made a mistake somewhere.”

“No it’s not, but I’ll check them over anyways.”

“What does this mean?”

“What it means Sasarai, is that we need to make sure one of our storage systems ever fails someone is there to absorb the overflow before it destroys us all.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“We’re about to do many things which aren’t possible. What’s one more?”

– The High Accessors creating a system which unintentionally provided the mutually assured destruction which should have kept them in check.

I survived. Sorta.

I’d told Sasarai I wanted “my home”, and “my Holy Tree”, and the Garden back. And I did. The longing in my voice for my old life had been dredged up from a real place. 

I hated him, and I hated the life I’d been forced to live, the mask of lies I’d struggled to cram myself into out of the absolutely correct knowledge that to do otherwise would have meant being killed.

But the Garden was what I’d known. It held so many promises, and I’d invested so much of myself in it. 

And I knew there were good people there. Misguided? Tremendously so. Unlikely to appreciate me exposing their beliefs as standing on lies? Unquestionably. But there had been kindness, and there had been laughter too, and I missed bits and pieces of it.

So my lie had been spoken with truths.

I did want those things.

And I had been willing to offer Sasarai the divine fragments in my hoard.

All of them, which, as it happens to be, was one. A fragment of Diyas, God of Healing.

Had Sasarai expected that I still held his hoard? Yes. Who would be mad enough to give up 1/8th of known divine fragments on the planet? 

Better still, had Sasarai expected that I also held the other 7/8ths of the known divine fragments? I’d never claimed that, but I’d certainly led him to believe it, and the other Neoterics explosion of rage on discovering that they’d lost their individual troves had certainly helped foster that misperception.

I hadn’t claimed the divine fragments for myself though. They were mine to protect and mine to deliver. I held them because they needed to be brought to people who could bear their Blessing and, as it turned out, my new friend Little had a whole city full of people with different strength, ideas, and priorities, which was exactly where the divine fragments I’d carried needed to be.

As for the other cities?

For that I had to thank my other new friends. Xalaria was divinely gifted when it came to tactics and planning, at least as far as I knew. Fulgrox’s position as Blessed of the Harvest meant he had contacts everywhere people ate food, which kind of obviously covered all the places I needed help reaching, and Kalkit as the Blessed of Secrets apparently set up little secret societies wherever they went, as an amusement or something I think?

Anyways, between the three of them, all we had to do was give people in each of the other Neoteric’s domains the key to getting into the vaults, a timetable, and a workable plan for coordinating their actions. 

Seven cities. Seven heists. 

Had they all gone off smoothly? Probably not, but, crucially, enough of them worked out somehow that Sasarai had believed me and had seen a fleeting chance to escape being torn apart by his fellow Lords, and the price I’d demanded? It would have galled him, but it was exactly what I should have wanted and so very, very small compared to what he stood to gain.

And so he gave me my home.

And he gave me the Holy Tree.

And they were MINE.

Could have wrenched them back? I don’t know, maybe. If he’d acted the moment I claimed them, it would have been an interesting struggle.

He hesitated for an instant though since nullifying our agreement meant the other Neoterics were going to do to him what he’d done to his own gods.

And so I burned.

Yeah, turns out the Holy Tree had a lot more power bound up in it than any of us had known.

Let us carry this, Draconia said as my skin literally caught fire.

Yes, as the demon says, we are here for you, Umbrielle said and another blessing was layered onto the dragonscales that emerged from under my burning skin.

It was not enough.

The world was lost in pure ecstasy. I wasn’t simply touching divinity or gazing on it. Every cell in my body was filled to bursting with cosmic unity from the first drop of grace that spilled from the Holy Tree.

And there was an ocean left to drink.

Somewhere farther away than the edge of the universe, Sasarai was screaming on the other side of the room.

I could have wondered why, but I didn’t need to. The cosmos was my thoughts, the beat of my heart was gone and it’s place the ringing of the cosmic stings sang.

Greedy Sasarai had taken the one spec of divine sand I’d given him and sought to impose his will on it. Why? I could see into his mind as easily a glass a water. 

If he had control over one divine fragment and the other Neoterics had none he would still reign supreme over them! 

Did he not know of the danger we were all in?

What I had done was cataclysmically ill-advised, to put it mildly. When I failed, and there was no ‘if’ in that, the entire world would be reduced to less than dust.

But, no, he didn’t care. He simply had no capacity to care about anyone except himself. We were nothing more than toys to him. 

It was sad. He should have been better than that.

I would fix it.

With a divine hand I would fix…

Nothing.

Because I didn’t have hands anymore it seemed.

Oh.

Right.

I was in the process of losing everything, even the concept of existing. I wasn’t going to be saving anyone.

Good luck thing we’re here to save you, Diyas said.

The Guardian never seems to consider that she needs protection sometimes too, Polsguls, the God of Small Problems, said.

Their help preserved me as me, at least conceptually, for a moment longer, which I appreciated, but we’d only managed to handle a few drops from the Holy Tree and there was so more, an unfathomable ocean that was flooding into me.

Thank you Draconia, my demon, mine, I said. It was important that she know I was happy she’d come into my life, even if I was going to lose it.

She didn’t answer.

I tried to feel her with me, but I was pretty far past the point of feeling anything.

Were the god fragments burning in the Holy Tree’s power? It was too much for me, and it was probably too much for them. I couldn’t tell, I was dissolving into the “all knowing divine” but losing too much of the ‘I’ in that for there to be a ‘me’ who could know anything.

Don’t lose hope, Umbrielle said. You haven’t been abandoned.

But I couldn’t feel anything.

And then I couldn’t hear anything.

It was too much.

Not more than I could bear, more than anything could bear.

The Holy Tree wasn’t heaven.

It was a hell of inescapable power, gathered far beyond any worldly need until it rotted and could only be turned to destruction and madness.

I’d thought the time had come to cast down the tyrant who ruled my little part of the world, but that time had been so long ago. 

What Sasarai, what all of them, had created was a malignancy and it had done nothing but grow and grow worse the longer they reigned.

I feel under the weight of it.

It was too much.

I couldn’t.

How many had died when the sun fell.

I couldn’t restore them.

How many had died because they made the mistake of being who they were?

I couldn’t lift them back up.

How many had withered and become horrible when they should have been joyous and wonderful?

I couldn’t renew them.

I couldn’t.

I couldn’t.

But there were things I could do.

The Holy Tree was mine.

MINE.

It’s power was MY power.

I couldn’t shape it.

I couldn’t control it.

And I absolutely couldn’t contain it.

But I could share it.

So long as there was a ‘me’, burning, dissolving, lit in every cell by cosmic destruction, but still ‘me’, then the Holy Tree was MINE and, as MY TREE, I was the channel through which its power would pass into the world.

Not as a flood to destroy everything.

Not while the world was MINE to guard and treasure.

I think she’s still there! The voice was unfamiliar but unbearably welcome to here.

Of course she is! We’re still here aren’t we? Another unfamiliar voice.

Then let’s lighten that load a bit shall we? I’d never met the God of Strength, or their new Blessed.

I hadn’t met any of the thousand other Blessed who’d discovered their gods in the last five seconds either, but Oh Sweet Draconia was I glad to hear anything at all and their chorus most especially. 

Together they…sang? Was there another word for what they were doing? For people coming together because they believed in helping not themselves, but the world who needed them? 

Even with a thousand voices, I didn’t know if we could withstand the force of the Holy Tree’s power but they weren’t giving up, so neither was I.

And that let a thousand more join us.

Again and again, as the divine fragments found their Blessed hosts, those people chose to turn from their lives to save others, to save the ones without power, the ones who needed them most.

It wasn’t easy reaching across the world like that, Draconia, wonderful Draconia, said. But as you claimed. This is OUR world.

And I could see again.

Our world.

Garbed in a beautiful dress of darkness and stars with so many voices and so much life still.

Even the broken bits, the fallen and shattered spirits, even the fragments of the beast, lurking their lost corners, all of it, OURS.

Is this how you always saw the world?

No. Only through your eyes has the world ever looked like this.

“Do you imagine we will experience the same ebbs and flows of the grace which the gods currently contend with?”

“That seems likely Helgon. Why do you ask?”

“Sasarai mentioned something about how the naturalistic patterns he’s planning to use for his ‘Divine Tree’ will be especially adapted to such changes. I’m considering if that is something we should suggest the others adopt as well? I know you’ve been working on a similar storage issues though Dyrena and I didn’t want to step on your toes as it were.”

“This is very considerate of you Helgon, but in this case my toes are quite safe. Sasarai’s assertion is only arguably correct. His storage mechanism assumes there will be regular cyclical changes in grace, because he’s most familiar with natural processes which follow various seasonal or day/night cycles. My projections show that while the Neoterics are likely to experience variable levels of grace generation, the variations will be on an irregular schedule.”

“Have you shared this with Sasarai?”

“Not as yet.”

“Is this the sort of thing he doesn’t need know?”

“Quite possibly. The other Neoterics seem to be designing fairly idiosyncratic systems for collecting their power. Each will have unique pitfalls, but the diversity may prove to be useful.”

“That would be humorous would it not?”

“Given the impact on the planet’s diversity our scheme will have?”

“And it’s divine diversity. Replacing the myriad of deities we can call on now with twelve gods who will answer no ones pleas but who are in turn dependent on the meager diversity they can muster suggests some form of cosmic justice lurks in the future.”

“Would that I could believe in justice, cosmic, divine, or otherwise.”

“But of course the world has justice in it.”

“And where would I look for this justice?”

“I would suggest a mirror, after all are you not part of the world?”

– Helgon and Dyrena planting seeds together.

The expression I wore was one of abject confusion and horror. Certainly I had done well? I was deserving of praise wasn’t I? I had executed my master’s plans and delivered to him the resources from “every other” Neoteric in the world. It was the opening and closing shot of a war that could never be allowed to start and was entirely unavoidable.

The horror was a reflection of Sasarai’s own.

After all I had just revealed “our” treachery in a space that was imperfectly cloaked.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. It was a good cloak. I should have had every reason to believe that it would keep our words private.

And Sasarai had confirmed that we were in a location where it was safe to speak.

So the other Neoterics just couldn’t be watching us and hearing literally every word I spoke? Right?

I am not the Blessed of Acting, I’m not even sure if any fragments of the God of Acting remain. If they do though, I was their avatar in that moment based on how very hard I fought to keep a manic grin from shattering the mask I was wearing.

“No…no…what have you done?” Sasarai asked.

I hated giving him any credit, but he hadn’t gotten where he was by being a complete idiot. He understood exactly what I was really saying there. 

If I telling the truth, then every other Neoteric was going to have to strike immediately before he had a chance to consolidate the power the divine fragments offered him. If I was telling the truth, I’d tipped the balance of power off the edge of cliff and we were all caught in a moment terrible free fall.

Of course I could have been lying too. He new the claim I was making was a partial lie. He knew I wasn’t an agent working in his name. He knew I hadn’t discovered the secret to raiding the vaults the Neoterics used. He absolutely knew I wasn’t going to give him power over everything and everyone.

With all of those, I had to be lying. Playing for time. Trying to goad the other Neoterics into attacking him before he could regain the divine fragments I’d taken from him.

And that would have been a great idea! In fact it was close to what my original idea had been. There was only one tiny thing wrong with it, one itty bitty detail that Sasarai had gotten wrong.

I did know how to break into the vaults.

And I wasn’t alone.

Not anymore.

“Oh….oh no!” I said, letting the color drain from my face. “Are we not…can they hear us?”

Sasarai looked at me is stark disbelief, because of course the other Neoterics were listening to our every word.

Or they had been. It was hard to imagine that they weren’t teleporting to their vaults or something similar to discover if my claim was correct.

A tremor shook the ground and I felt several blasts of rage rip across the surface of the world.

Someone had noticed that I wasn’t lying. A lot of someone’s it sounded like.

“We need to hide!” I said, calling a divine fragment to my hands, my very best panic coating my words in pure poison as the true cloak of Night descended on us.

That was the last bit of theater I needed to perform. Either the other Neoterics believed my show or they were too distracted by the loss of their access to godly domains, in either case I had nothing more to sell them on.

“I will kill you. I will kill this world!” Sasarai began to grow, manifesting more of his power as he prepared a spell that would do something unutterable to both myself and Draconia.

It wasn’t an unreasonable response.

I had pretty much just killed him, and if he was going to die why would someone like him think the world had any reason to exist without him?

“You could do that,” I said, dropping the subservient act with the greatest of relief, “but why would you want to when there was so much to bargain for?”

“BaRgAin?” Sasarai’s voice had turned so inhuman he was barely able to produce a single word but he managed to croak it out the right one in time.

“I have something you want, now more than ever I would think,” I said, as calm as a frozen pond. 

I’d thought I was going to be terrified at this moment, and I’d been right. What I hadn’t known was that past a certain point, fear falls away. Sasarai was absolutely capable of destroying me. He was capable of smashing Draconia into small enough pieces that she would never pose a threat to him again (and not be terribly useful but rational thoughts like that were definitely unlikely in the face of what I’d done). 

I could feel his power surrounding me, bearing down with enough weight that my bones would have shattered if they weren’t protected by dragon scales and all of Draconia’s good will.

I knew I wouldn’t survive and I didn’t care. I didn’t want to die, but I had to do this, for the world, for the people I cared about, and most of all, for myself.

I showed Sasarai the divine fragment I’d called forth. It wasn’t one of Night’s – the true cloak that shielded us from the other Neoterics for a moment was a gift from Meluna, where the limited one had been Theia’s doing. Instead I held a fragment of Diyas, the God of Healing, but not the one which had been Sasarai’s stolen originally.

I had all of a split second to wonder if Sasarai could tell that before he swiped it from my hand and began to try to make use of it.

Which was rude.

And also something I wasn’t about to let happen until he made the deal I wanted.

With a snap of my fingers, it disappeared from his grasp though – what was mine was mine – settling back into my hoard where it belonged.

“Not so fast. You have something I want.” This part I wasn’t at all sure of, but in a sense it didn’t matter either. I’d either get what I really wanted or I wouldn’t leave the temple I was standing and either way, Sasarai was beaten.

“What.” With a glimmer of hope luring him onwards, Sasarai returned to a more restrained form, though none of his power had dissipated.

“I’ve seen the world outside the Garden now. You lied to us about a lot of things, but you weren’t kidding at how awful it is out there. The things that walk in the wasteland are going to give me nightmares for years, and I know you, but the other Neoterics could be anything. If I have to take my chances with one of you, at least I know how to work with you.”

“What do you want?” If there was a god dedicated to annihilating patience, Sasarai would have been their Blessed in that moment.

“I want my home back. I want my Holy Tree. I want to be able to go the Garden again. I hated my life in there, but if I can be who I am now, I can’t think of a place that would be safer to be.” I said, uttering not a single lie in the process. “Especially if you were the only Neoteric to have any of the divine fragments. I’m not asking you to shower me with honors, but I am willing to give you the divine fragments in my hoard – the ones that will be too dispersed for any of you to find if you kill me – in exchange for what I asked for.”

None of that was a lie.

Not directly.

Only by omission.

“They will not allow this,” Sasarai said.

“Does it matter what they allow at this point?” I asked, conjuring Diyas’ divine fragment to my hand again.

“No,” Sasarai said, taking the fragment from me delicately. “No, it does not.”

“We have accord then?”

“For you alone. Let your penance be that you shall never again see the family you cared so much about that you could steal them from me as well.”

“I understand,” I said, and I did.

I’d just won.

“I will have your hoard then,” Sasarai said, new confidence dispelling the terror which had gripped him.

“And I will have what is MINE,” I said.

Sasarai’s confidence blinded him for the instant it took before the light that erupted from me did the job far more thoroughly.

“Your hoard!?” he objected, unable to conceive of what had happened.

“YOU ARE HOLDING IT.” Could I say it was my voice that spoke? I don’t know. There was FAR too much divine power suffusing my being, more than my soul could ever have held even if I’d become a True Immortal, unlike the pitiful little wretches that called themselves the Lord of the world.

As it was, claiming the Holy Tree Mazana as my own turned out to be both the best and worst idea I’d ever had.

On the plus side, Sasarai had totally missed the opening I’d asked for and agreeing to our deal had let end the last threat he’d posed everyone else. On the minus side, hundreds of years of accumulated grace from a city full of absolutely devout believers, augmented by every technique Sasarai had been able to employ was enough to melt me body and soul and there was literally nothing I could do to prevent that.

I was not the Holy Tree and without it’s incredibly specific and purpose built structure, the grace I’d claimed as mine was sufficient to blast not only me from the face of the world but also a fair portion of the world as well.

I hadn’t counted on that.

I’d never understood exactly how vast the gods had been.

This is more than you. This is more than even I. Draconia’s voice was lost in a rush of joyous power as things within me I’d never understood burned. 

As you say though, you are not alone.

“That was the thirteenth Non-Agression Proposal we have shot down. At what point do we determine that there are no valid and divinely enforceable options to guarantee peace between our cities?”

“We have not ruled out all of the possibilities yet Vaingloth! Or do you want us to wage war on each other like the savages we’re going to be leaving behind?”

“Of course not Sasarai, but I feel that you are missing a crucial point. Our need for a divine mandate for peace is so vanishingly small as to likely be irrelevant. With a dozen of us, each of even vaguely equal strength, and in control of all this world’s available grace, there will be almost nothing for any of us to gain through aggression.”

“We have eternity to think about though. Will ‘almost nothing’ be enough of a guarantee to see us through ten thousand million years?”

“It may have to be I’m afraid. I know you and Vaingloth have been the genesis of the plans we’ve reviewed so far, but the more I see, the more convinced I’m becoming that there is no artificial mandates which can be guaranteed to constrain us. We will be powers the likes of which this world has not seen since it’s inception. Unlike the gods we know, our power will not be spread widely but rather concentrated in beings who will be laws unto themselves.”

“And should those laws come into conflict Dyrena? What then?”

“Oh, I’m certain they will. As Vaingloth says though, what would be worth risking against eternity? For minor conflicts, I assume we can come up with some form of game to play. Perhaps I gain a Blessed among my people who would benefit Vaingloth. Would he attack me for some perishable an asset? Of course not. He’s too wise for that, as are we all. No, I imagine we might meet and devise some form of amusement to determine the outcome. Or perhaps arrange for a swap of some kind. There are as many methods of resolving conflict as there are of initiating it.”

“Though it pains me to admit it, I believe Dyrena may be correct in this case. There are other avenues of research we could pursue, other geas we could investigate, but our time is not yet limitless and there is as much peril in binding ourselves as there is in relying on one another in perpetuity as we must rely on each other now.”

“I feel we are so close to an answer, but I have to confess, I have felt like that for each of the last seven drafts. Perhaps you and Dyrena are right Vaingoth. Perhaps our accord cannot be based on divine strictures but rather our innate trustworthiness.”

– Sasairai and Vaingloth addressing the gathered High Accessors with the final step of the scheme to leave open the possibility of destroying another Neoteric, just as Dyrena hoped they would.

The wastelands were not a very welcoming place to be it turned out. I mean, it wasn’t like I hadn’t known that. I’d been pretty much counting on it, and the fact that there were plenty of forgotten ruins where a clandestine meeting could happen which would be difficult to observe.

That, among a number of other things, Little had helped me out with. And Meluna. And Theia. And Kilkat. And a lot of others.

In case it wasn’t clear, my original plan was pretty terrible.

My current one wasn’t in the neighborhood of “good” but I had enough people helping me that it seemed like there was some hope it might work out. Even better, there was at least a small chance to I would survive it!

I don’t find your survival to be an optional part of this plan, Draconia said. She was annoyed with me, understandably so since I’d been cut off from her so completely while wrapped in Little’s darkness that, from her perspective, I’d been obliterated. 

Also there was the small issue that I wasn’t telling her much of what Little and I had talked about. 

I’m just trying to be realistic, I said. I’d really prefer surviving this too, but even if I don’t, we can still manage a win here.

Since all most people could manage, even with their utmost effort, when opposing a Neoteric was to be a momentary and minor annoyance, having the chance to make a real difference was something I had to believe was worth it.

I’m not sure any of this counts as realistic, Theia said, speaking silently. 

Could the Neoterics listen in to divine conversations? Normally, it would be a safe bet to say they could but we had two blessings to prevent that where they only expected one.

I’d say you could back out, but I don’t think this plan works without you, I offered making the regret in my mental voice clear.

Few plans do, Theia said, adopting a lofty air, Backing out sounds no fun though. I’d of curiosity if I didn’t see how this was all going to turn out.

You may die of curiosity in either case, Umbrielle said. She was the least happy with the plan, in part I think because she had the least to do, and had to accept that she would fail.

I believe we’re here, Draconia said and I saw her mark, or what was left of it emblazoned on the floor of the room we’d arrived it.

Ruins come in all shapes and sizes. The fallen world had been developed in some many places that, even with all the destruction of the Sunfall, there were a lot of sites which still remained mostly intact.

I hadn’t thought we’d be able to find a temple to Draconia, but my brother had suggested meeting in one might lend some support to my idea, and Little had known of a spot that wasn’t too far outside Mt Gloria.

The journey there had been interesting, for lack of a more terrifying word. With Theia’s company though, we’d been able to move under enough of a cloak that without the physical presence of a Neoteric in the area, we wouldn’t be detectable.

How did we know that?

Having divine wisdom to draw on was incredibly handy, but even Umbrielle admitted that the Neoterics might have devised means to see through the basic cloaking spells Theia knew. Had we been left with only that to draw on, I still would have insisted we try, but we had another resource to work with.

Kalkit.

The Blessed of Secrets.

You know what’s really horrible for an octet of God-Kings with powers unlike those ever seen before? Someone who knows all the things they haven’t let anyone else discover.

With Helgon’s assistance, we had a good inventory of what the other Neoterics were known to be able to do. Kalkit then filled in the blanks of what the Neoterics kept hidden.

It still wasn’t perfect. Kalkit didn’t know all of their secrets, they only carried a fragment of Secrets after all, but it was enough to plan around.

And that plan had led us to Draconia’s temple, which proved to be more about as closed and secure as I’d imagined it would be.

Down a long flight of stairs, and behind a door which had fortunately been left open (or was that more of Dyrena’s planning?) lay a room with hundreds of thick metal doors mounted into the walls. At the far end of the temple, a statue of Draconia rearing above a donation box stood on a low altar.

I’m not backing out, but there’s still time for you to reconsider if you want to, Theia said, which was possibly the nicest offer anyone had ever made to me.

I want to see this through. Maybe we’re caught up in some grand plan, but it doesn’t feel like that. I think all that was left was opportunities and what happens is about what we choose to make happen. And I really want to make this happen.

Was I letting rage guide me? 

No. Of course not.

Rage was walking beside me, on a leash I held.

The leash was a little longer than usual, and Rage was expecting to dine well, but it wasn’t guiding me. Rage wanted to hurt Sasarai, and hurt him again, and then hurt him some more. For all the shame, for all the fear, for all the needless, senseless evil he’d inflicted on us, and for what we’d become at his urging, my Rage wanted nothing more than to hit him and keep hitting him while I had an ounce of strength left in my body.

Rage is kind of stupid like that.

I wasn’t going to hit Sasarai.

I was going too destroy him.

All I had to do, was be the girl I’d been.

It’s time, I said, nodding to Theia before she stepped back into shadows which concealed her from me.

With the dome of shadow we’d been moving in still covering me, I called on the Seeing spell my instructors had tried to teach me what felt like a lifetime ago.

It was just a flicker of a spell, hold for less than a blink of an eye. Too short for anyone to notice.

Or at least anyone but a Neoteric, and even then they would have to be paying extremely good attention.

Sasarai arrived less than a breath later.

He wasn’t actually there of course. It was just a projection. 

So I couldn’t have punch him anyway (as I said, rage is stupid).

“You called me at last,” he said, misplaced confidence oozing out of every syllable and I nearly exploded with glee. I had a script I wanted to run though but his reactions had been something I’d been worried about working around.

“Yes First Tender!” I said, sliding my old and ill-fitting mask over myself as easily as a lifetime of practice allowed. “Is this a secure enough location to give you the divine fragments?”

“You…?” That wasn’t what he’d been expecting me to say, especially not with the meek and subservient tones a proper Sylvan was expected to speak in. Semi-predictably though, the lure of his missing power bludgeoned all other thoughts aside. “Yes. Give them to me immediately!”

In a sense that was the perfect response. I was still annoyed though. I’d come up with a dozen different scenes to lead him into incriminating himself by saying something even obliquely related to that and Sasarai, the idiot, just blurts out exactly what I needed him to? Seriously? How did the other Neoterics work with him? Why did anyone follow him? And why, in the name of all the fallen gods, had I ever been fooled by him? 

I’m an idiot. There’s no other explanation. Or at least a recovering idiot.

And an idiot who was good enough at hiding her feeling that he saw none of that.

“Certainly First Tender,” I said and bowed my head low. “I must apologize too, I know it was part of the plan, but I cannot forgive myself for what I had to say to you in Mount Gloria.”

“Yes. Whatever. The fragment!” Sasarai said, manifesting more fully in the temple.

He didn’t need to be with me physically to take ownership of the divine fragments, but physical possession was a highly useful in retaining ownership, as he’d already learned.

“Which vault should I transfer them from first O’ Holy One?” I asked. It was easy to keep my head down and my eyes averted and a heroic effort of monumental proportions keeping a  smile splitting my face like a melon.

“Vault?” Sasarai asked, finally understanding that my warning about leading him into a trap had nothing to do with luring him to a temple where Draconia’s power would be at its peak.

We couldn’t overpower him. We all knew that.

So I was using Draconia’s power ‘in service’ to him.

Just like all of the other Neoterics would expect.

“Yes,” I said, allowing all of the nervousness I wasn’t feeling to put a quaver in my voice. “We are secure here aren’t we? I can give you all of the fragments we took from the other’s vaults. Isn’t that okay?”

“You took…?” It was a delight beyond what any rageful fit could have given me to watch as Sasarai put the pieces together.

“All of the Divine Fragments held by the lesser lords. The ones which should belong to you. You said they’d be focused on me and I tried to be what you asked. Did I do well enough? I know the others you sent out have been successful. All of the vaults are empty now. We have all of the fragments of the gods.”

“Damn it. Sasarai developed better vault wards? Sasarai? You have to be lying.”

“I wish I was Vaingloth, but he asked me for a review yesterday and I had to give him a 4.0 rating.”

“No. You don’t give 4.0 ratings, Dyrena. The highest you’ve ever given was a 3.6 and that vault was specifically impossible to open, by anyone, ever.”

“That was what cost is the .4 points it lost. As a means of securing something that one was unparalleled, until now, it simply lost points for practicality.”

“And yet you expect me to believe that Sasarai, the Sasarai whom we have both known for years, that Sasarai, somehow managed to build a flawless vault.”

“Oh, no, of course not.”

“Thank you.”

“A rating of 4.0 doesn’t mean flawless. A flawless vault would be useless.”

“I likely should have studied more in this area as I feel the most terrible of headaches coming on, but still I must ask; What?”

“We’ve known how to build a flawless vault for aeons now. Sadly the only material a flawless vault could be constructed from would be the essence of a god, and the only place it could reside would be in the god’s domain. I trust you can see why, under our present circumstances, that would be both impractical and ill-advised.”

“Yes. If flawless is not an option for us though what distinguishes Sasarai’s technique?”

“Sasarai took a novel approach after reading a few of the fundamental papers I directed him towards. He filled the vault with flaws.”

“Of course. Flaws. How obvious.”

“They are, and that’s what makes them so clever. Tell me, if you saw a door that was secured with a bar which you wanted to get through, what would you do?”

“I presume you are looking for ‘lift the bar’.”

“Indeed. And when you discovered that there was a latch holding the bar in place?”

“Undo the latch.”

“Oh but the latch is coated with poison.”

“Have a minion open it.”

“Your minion has died, but the latch is unmoved.”

“Use more.”

“They all die, with no movement of the latch.”

“I see where this is going.”

“Exactly. The wards on Sasarai’s vault are nothing but an endless fractal of such issues. Every flaw leads into deeper problems and traps.”

“And how would one ever be sure that one of the flaws wasn’t real?”

“That’s what earns Sasarain’s invention its 4.0; You never can. An attacker can be trapped endlessly in searching for a means into the vault.”

– Dyrena providing assistance to the other soon-to-be Neoteric Lords on the design of the chambers where they would house their divine fragments.

Revealing the existence of a second full fledged god in the world had seemed fairly perilous. In theory doing so anywhere the End of All Things could see or hear us was the worst of all possible ideas, but Little turned out to be right; we were simply too insignificant for the Beast to notice us at all.

“Meluna knows already, doesn’t she?” Little asked.

“I’d have to guess it would be pretty hard for Night to have missed the presence of the only other god our world probably has.”

“And she’s never mentioned anything because if she did…” Little trailed off with an air of disliking what came next so much that she couldn’t voice it.

“The Neoterics would definitely try to move against her.” I said, choosing clarity even if it was horrible.

“What could they really do to her though?” Little asked the question as much to herself as to me it sounded like.

“I don’t know. I mean there’s the obvious option of revealing her presence to that thing.” We were shrouded in endless darkness but I was sure Little caught me pointing outwards towards where the Beast lay.

“I don’t think any of them are that apocalyptic. They were prepared for the last one and it still turned out a lot worse than they’d thought it would.”

“Is that what Helgon said?”

“You know, I haven’t had a chance to ask him about it. No, we found some of Vaingloth’s personal journals and I had Zeph read them to me. He was ridiculously conceited, even in his private writings, but the entries from just after the Sunfall showed pretty clearly that they were all well out of their depth.”

“What went wrong? I mean, aside from the obvious.”

“The world was supposed to be a lot more preserved. They each had plans for their own City-States that would have been the scale of a small country, but the Beast was a lot stronger than they’d understood. If Night hadn’t stepped in just as she had, the divine realm would have fallen and then the physical realm with it. Even with all their stolen power, the Neoterics would have been free floating dust the same as the rest of us.”

“And none of them knew that? How did they miscalculate so much if they managed to get everything else to work?” I asked and in response a sneaking suspicion crept into my heart.

“According to Vaingloth’s notes, the Beast which answered their summons was an order of magnitude larger than their projections, but those projections were known to be based on incomplete information.”

I had to shake my head, even if it wasn’t visible to anyone and did nothing to change the darkness which had swallowed my vision.

“I can’t believe they went ahead with. I mean, I can’t believe anything would be greedy enough to destroy the gods, and I hate that Sasarai was right about that, even if he was speaking from personal experience, but how could they take a risk like that?”

“They wanted the prize so much they convinced themselves that the signs they could see pointing towards their victory had to be true,” Little said and I could hear the shrug she wrapped her words in. “And, hey, they weren’t completely wrong, they did wind up being victorious after all.”

“Some more than others I’m guessing…” I said as the idea which had occurred to me took root.

“Oh I wish I’d been able to tell Vaingloth about that,” Little said. “He would have been incandescent with rage.”

“Is there any chance he’s still around? I mean, if Dyrena and Helgon kept existing after their ‘deaths’, could the other two be out there waiting to jump on us at some point too?”

“I can only speak for Vaingloth, but no, he’s not out there anymore. He’s gone.”

“What happened to him?” Just because I had a plan for how to deal with Sasarai didn’t mean it was a good one, or that someone who’d already taken out a Neoteric might not have a better idea.

“There are fragments of the Beast still lurking in the world, the same as there are fragments of the gods,” Little said. “I found a big one and dragged him into it.”

“That…you mean you threw him into it, right?”

“Nope. Though I suppose ‘lured’ might be more accurate. He was immensely powerful. Even with Zeph racing me away from him, he almost caught us, broke through mountain to catch up. It was maybe not the best idea I’d ever had, but he was so mad at me that when I leapt into the Beast Fragment, he followed.”

It should have been a relief that her plan sounded far more insane than mine. Sadly it was not, largely because her plan had worked and mine was still pretty uncertain.

“That sounds like a fatal mistake, but I can’t help but notice you’re still here, so…?” I didn’t want to point out the obvious but I kind of had to under the circumstances.

“Am I?” Little asked.

“Well, I’m talking to someone.”

“True, and there is a part of me that’s still Little. Even before I lured Vaingloth into the Beast Fragment though, I’d become something else too.”

“I think we sensed that, Draconia and I, and you said the other Blessed could too?”

“It’s hard not to notice when you have senses like ours,” Little said and I could feel the distance it had brought into her life.

“They didn’t throw you over the wall though!” I said, trying to be reassuring.

“They didn’t what?” she asked, as confused as she should rightfully be.

“Ah, sorry, it’s a Garden thing. The unfaithful and undesirable are supposedly thrown over the wall to die in the wasteland outside, except of course what’s outside the wall is the town that supports all the people inside the wall, and the wastelands aren’t at all what Sasarai made them out to be.”

“Vaingloth just burned people to death. Or send them to drown past the Water portal, or turn into vegetation past the Air Portal. He was really great like that.”

“I’m glad you killed him.”

“Oh it was a lot worse than killing him, and, yeah, I still don’t regret it. Except that I can’t torment him a bit more. Especially with the Dyrena stuff. When the Beast got to him though he wasn’t quite able to work with it like I had so he got consumed the same as all the god fragments that don’t exist anymore.”

“That’s kind of the other thing I wanted to talk to you about,” I said, remembering my original reason for seeking her out.

“You want to pitch Sasarai into a Beast Fragment too?”

“No, or yes, that would be great, but I probably wouldn’t survive it either would I?”

“No one has. Me included. And trust me, I’m aware of how weird that sounds, but the person I was is not who or what I am now. I’m more of a negotiation at this point, and maybe a choice. That’s what let me get away with what I did to Vaingloth and even so I didn’t get off without paying for it.”

“You don’t sound like you’ve got any regrets about that either though?” I asked, wondering what the price was for being certain a Neoteric was dead and if it was one I would hesitate for even a second to pay as well.

“Most days, no, it was definitely worth it. It would be nice to be able to see again though but, eh, Sola makes up for a lot of that,” Little said with a resigned air.

“Wait, you’re blind?”

“Mostly. I can make out some things thanks to Sola but things like ‘reading books’, otherwise know as my favorite activity ever, are a bit beyond me.”

“But, wait, can’t Sola just heal your eyes?” I knew how fierce Draconia was about protecting and how much she’d spend to keep me healthy, I couldn’t imagine Sola was any different.

“My eyes are fine, for certain values of fine. When I brought myself back together though the second time, my vision wasn’t something I was able to bring back. Or maybe I brought back too much of the Beast’s essence with me? I don’t know, but given how lucky I am to be here at all still, it’s not the kind of thing I want to experiment with all that much. Things could have turned out much worse. And they still could if I tried it again.”

“You don’t need to though, right? Mt Gloria is safe for now?” Not that ‘safety’ was anything like a permanent state anywhere in our world.

“For now. It’s part of what’s held the other Neoterics back I think. I doubt I could take out all of them, at least not without inviting the Beast to dine on all of us. If dealing with the Beast isn’t what you wanted to talk to me about though, what had you had in mind?”

“I wanted to ask if you’d found Vaingloth’s divine fragments yet?”

“I found Sola, obviously, but she was alone, acting as a light source for his personal garden.”

“No others though?”

“We looked but it seemed like he hadn’t kept them. We figured he’d traded away the ones he didn’t keep on himself to the Lords beyond the portals for their favors.”

“He didn’t.”

“How could you know that?”

“Because giving up power isn’t something any of them would do, and I know how Sasarai hid his.”

“And should we come to disagree about locations in the wastelands? What then?”

“Monlock, why would anyone care about something in the wastelands?”

“ Why I don’t known Vaingloth, perhaps because there will be resources sitting unclaimed which any one of us might take a fancy to. We’ve agreed that with our cities, we will have absolute authority, but the disposition of the lands outside our claimed realms is, to be charitable, unclear.”

“Are you suggesting that Vaingloth is attempting to leave open to possibility of a land rush Monlock?”

“I am suggesting nothing of the sort Dyrena. I am asserting that there is an oversight in the divisions of authority we have thus far agreed upon.”

“There are likely innumerable such questions which will arise, that is what the creation of the Speaking Stones is intended to address.”

“Umm, Vaingloth, you do recall that I have mentioned the problems we’ve run into with the implementation of the Speaking Stones, do you not? I presented them that at the start of the session, and I know we didn’t have time for a full explanation of the aetheric conductivity gaps that Monlock’s defensive ward algorithms will present, but I could go into that now if we need. I have copies of the reports printed out for everyone!”

“No, Helgon, we are all aware of the challenges you’ve spoken of, just as we are aware that you have said those challenges can be overcome.”

“Well, yes, it’s the timing which is problematic you see. I’m sure a solution exists to make the wards and the speaking stones coexist, but it may take more time than we have before the rest of our plans need to put into motion.”

“In this future, lead with that.”

“It’s in the reports. I thought you’d all read them?”

“Of course dear Helgon. We all read all of your reports. Some of us simply have poorer recall than others.”

“Yes. Of course. For now perhaps we can simply declare the wastelands under the authority of no one. Excursions through them must be allowed of course, but harvesting, collection, or refinement of materials, aetheric energies, or spiritual patterns will be forbidden until we can reconvene and work out a fair an equitable division of the resources the wastelands hold.”

– The High Accessors developing a plan for dominion of the world which all agreed to and none obeyed.

I was swallowed in darkness absolute. I’d asked for it. Out loud and clearly. I’d broadcast the fact that I was going to be doing some secret that Neoterics wouldn’t be able to spy on. I’d thought I was being clever, but, as it turns out, I hadn’t been quite clever enough.

“I know this can be a bit unnerving,” Little said. “Trust me it is much, much worse for the Neoterics.”

“This is more than just darkness, isn’t it?” I asked, giving up on trying to see my hand in front of my face and struggling to even feel my hand.

“It is. This is what the Beast brought to our world. I think Night’s spells can block the Neoterics, she’s still a full and unsundered god after all, and even at the height of their powers none of the Neoterics went directly against the gods. On the other hand they have had about two centuries of gaining power and learning how to use it, and for something like this they’re going to be willing to get creative.”

“Can we get back from this? I feel like we’re not even sitting together in the room they took us to anymore?”

Without explaining anything else for the Neoterics to pick up, I had asked to meet up with Little like we’d originally planned. I’d also asked Meluna to give the two of us some privacy, knowing that her god Night could cloak us if she chose, and that remaining every Neoteric in the world was scrying us and would have to wonder what plan Little and I had concocted. 

It hadn’t take us long to find Little, she was the center of a bustle of, as it turned out, very mundane action. From what I gathered, there were two mostly unused buildings that a local group wanted to refurbish into temples. Little had been called in not as ‘The Sun Queen’ (apparently that wasn’t an actual title however much it made sense to me) but as someone who could speak to the god fragments in question to get their input on the designs the locals had come up with. Little herself seemed to have some input as well, being familiar with the sewer system which ran under the buildings, and offered some suggestions based on her purely mortal perspective.

And it was easy to think of her as purely mortal. Seeing her interacting with people, she was almost the polar opposite of Sasarai. She talked over no one, demanded no specific attention, and far from insisting that they give her opinions any special weight, called on people for their counter opinions with phrases like “but’s that’s probably a terrible idea, Lucky, what did I miss there?”

The people around her seemed too used to that for it to have been a staged play for anyone’s benefit, so forgetting that the Ratkin girl I’d come to see was anything other than a normal person had been easy.

Right up until the door closed on the windowless room we’d been given.

Little hadn’t done anything special. She hadn’t pulled out a menacing voice, or suddenly changed posture or glowed violently. She had just reached up and skitched the ear of her….

Pet was not the right word.

Whatever was beside her was nothing like a pet.

It was nothing like anything that had ever existed in the world.

Or that should ever exist in the world.

Draconia had gifted me with senses beyond the mortal realm, and they were all screaming at me to RUN.

But Little was petting it.

And it was…

Not purring. Whatever it was doing, that was not purring.

But it did sound happy, and nothing in my divine senses suggested that it was an entity capable of things like ‘happiness’ or ‘feeling anything at all’.

I don’t know what that is, Draconia said.

And then she paused.

I could feel her drawing back. Turning her regard on the pair before us. And coming up blank.

I don’t know what SHE is, Draconia said.

She’s mine, and you can’t have her, Sola said.

For some reason that made me laugh.

You two have met before I see, I said, speaking to the two gods.

We’ve worked together often, Sola said.

And I have never claimed something of yours, Draconia said, still unsettled.

“I wonder if there are any divine fragments I’ll run into who don’t react like that?” Little asked aloud to no one in particular.

“You’ve run into others?” I asked, hoping that she might already know the answer to the question I’d originally come here to ask.

“Yep. I think you’ve met some of them. Xalaria was going to find you right?”

“She was, and she did, but before we talk anymore, it might be good if we had a bit of privacy before I let you know what I’m planning,” I said. My plans were far less important than the other things I wanted to talk to her about but any bit of misdirection might be the one to trip up the people listening in.

Fortunately one of the people listening in was Meluna and from the corners of the room, shadows rose to wrap us in a bubble of darkness that only a small candle flame in Little’s palm illuminated at all.

“We should be safe from prying eyes now,” Little had said before adding, “Can I ask you to trust me though?”

Given what I could sense of her, that was a difficult question to answer, or it should have been.

“Happy to,” I said, slightly exaggerating my feelings perhaps, but willing to back up the claim with two justifications. First, the danger I sensed conflicted too strongly with the behavior I’d observed. Just because our instincts say something is bad, doesn’t mean it is. Sometimes our instincts were simply missing the full picture, and other times they were misformed thanks to the society we grew up in.

The other justification was even simpler to explain; if I was right about what I was sensing, then my chance of escaping the room was zero. Not small. Zero. So I really had nothing to lose by trusting her.

That was when she’d  summoned her own darkness.

It hadn’t spilled out of her companion.

It had come from her.

The ‘Sun Queen’.

Who was something else entirely.

“We’re not in the room anymore,” Little said from somewhere in the darkness. “Technically I think we’re not in the world at all anymore, so no worry about any prying eyes except for those.”

I couldn’t see her gesture, but her intent reached me and I looked upwards, beyond the cover of night, to see the End of All Things watching us.

“Before you panic,” Little said, as a wave of terror crashed down on me, “We’re much too tiny to be noticed, and there’s some peril for the Beast if it does.”

“P-p-peril?” I asked. My thoughts had fallen apart, my questions were forgotten, but I was able to form a complete word, which was a feat unrivaled in the history of the world, or so I felt.

“A bit of it changed, if it lets itself notice us, it would notice that first, and, well, existence is a complicated thing for it.”

“Oh good,” I said, madness spiraling my thoughts into a cacophony that only grim humor seemed to be able to escape from. “Glad it’s not just us that has a problem with existing then.”

“Yeah, I know this is a bit much, I had a hunch that we really needed to have some privacy though, and no one but us is going to hear what we say here.”

And when she meant no one, that, apparently, included our gods.

Draconia? I asked and got no response.

“You haven’t lost her!” Little was quick to reassure me, somehow sensing the new distress that shot through me. “Like I said, this space is outside of ‘what is’. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but we’re safe here.”

I breathed. I could still do that it seemed, but I knew I wasn’t breathing air, which was odd.

“Well, you did ask me to trust you, so I think I need to say thank you, because you’re right, what I need to ask you is worth all this.”

“You want to know how to take out a Neoteric, don’t you?” Little asked.

“Oddly, no,” I said. “That I actually do have a plan for, what I need to ask you is about is one who already was ‘taken out’?”

“Helgon?”

“Comparing notes on him might be a good idea too, but I’m thinking more about Dyrena.”

“The first one they killed?”

“Yeah. Did you know she was aware that would happen?”

“Helgon has mentioned that she was the wisest of them all, but he made it sound like the others tricked them both. From what he said, she put up a hell of a fight, almost as destructive as his was, when they came for her.”

“Did he mention whether he came to her aid?”

“Huh, you know, I don’t think he did?”

“But he was definitely in love with her right?”

“Oh, absolutely. Like I could tell he was the first time he mentioned her name and I’m the definition of clueless about that kind of thing.”

“Of the four ‘dead’ Neoterics, isn’t it interesting that only two of them obliterated their own holdings and people when they fell?”

“Well, Vaingloth didn’t have a chance to nuke Mt. Gloria. I tried to make extra sure of that, but you’re right. I take it you have some idea as to why?”

“I have a lot of ideas, most of which aren’t anything more than wild guesses at this point, but one of them I feel pretty sure of.”

“That Dyrena is still alive?”

“No. She’s definitely dead, the other Neoterics wouldn’t have missed something like that, but I don’t think ‘dead’ means the same thing to her as it would for us.”

“Helgon kind of gives that away, but he’s claimed she left the world, and him, behind.”

“Maybe she did. Or maybe she’s become something more.”

“More than the ghost of a Neoteric like Helgon? What, like a…” and I heard her pause.

“They had so much divine energy to work with, and for as much as the Neoterics call themselves gods, what’s the one thing they refused to give up?”

“Their solidity. They’re too present on the mortal plane to ever fill the role of a true god.”

“Dyrena though? The one who gave up her mortal existence first?”

“Wouldn’t have anything holding her back. And there wouldn’t have been any gods there to contest her taking their place,” Little said, the idea sounding like it was blowing her mind as much as it had mine. “But what would her domain be?”

“She had as many divine fragments as the rest of them, and I think she maneuvered things so that fragments which fell into the wastelands wouldn’t have been scooped up,” I said.

“Which makes her…”

“The Guardian of the Gods,” I said and in the distance I heard light, musical laughter.

“Never have I heard so absurd a suggestion.”

“I tell you, the birds are changing. They are becoming something sinister. Something that watches us.”

“Birds watching us? Why next you’ll tell me that fish are evolving so that they can swim. What do you suppose birds do all day?”

“Normally, I would say hunt for food. These however seem to be inclined to hunt for us.”

“And what attacks have these Sinister Hunting Birds made on the good people of our enclave?”

“None. Yes. That is the most sinister thing about them.”

“Oh please, now you’re just being idiotic. It’s sinister that the birds who are watching us are not attacking us as well? Against what sort of rational world are we to measure a statement such as that.”

“I am trying to explain that! I am trying to tell you what I have seen, what others have seen. If you would just look at this report here. I have collected accounts from over a half dozen people who can corroborate my findings.”

“Read that report? I doubt I could lift it. And why should I? I can disprove your brainless theory myself with hardly any effort at all.”

“We need to leave here. Now.”

“Why? Because two birds should happen to alight on the bird feeder in the courtyard?”

“Those are not birds.”

“I assure you they are. See; beaks, wings, talons. Clearly a bird. Unless perhaps I am mistaken and cats have changed attributes with avians? And look, there is not a menacing or sinister twist about them.”

“Yes. They are at the bird feeder, but do you not see; they are not feeding. Why did they fly to feeder if all they wish to do is watch us. Why are they drinking no water nor consuming any seeds?”

“Likely because they’re wondering at the ninny who is staring back at them. Come now, I will settle this once and for all.”

“No! No don’t walk up to them!”

– The last words of Brothers Bonren and Galtos

I wanted to smite Sasarai. 

That shouldn’t have been my reaction. I was supposed to be afraid of him because of the frankly ridiculous power the Neoterics wielded. Even with Draconia’s blessing I could feel how outmatched I was by all the raw power Sasarai had accumulated over the centuries. If that wasn’t enough to overwhelm me, they I should have been quivering from the instilled terror of a life grown and raised under teachings that placed ‘The First Tenderer’ as the closest emissary to god there could ever be.

I wasn’t afraid though.

I wanted to smite him. He had so earned it.

Some of my resistance to the fear his presence was supposed to instill in me came from Draconia. She was ready to burn the world to ash if that’s what it took to incinerate Sasarai. Her rage might have been powerful enough to do it too, but fortunately her nature was stronger than her anger and as a Guardian before anything else, she would not act to destroy the world.

I could though.

So what held me back?

Mostly that Sasarai wasn’t actually in the palace with us.

“I hate you,” I said. The words held no special weight and carried no deadly fire. So I offered an explanation to go with them. “You know how I was raised. You know how we are taught. Devotion to the Holy Tree. Devotion to you. Obedience. Joyful servitude. And love. Love most of all. For you, for the tree, for our beautiful Garden home, but mostly just for you. You conditioned us to love you above all others. All that work. My whole life. A whole society built so that we could convince you that you weren’t just a scared little, worthless man. And in the end? The moment I learned what you really are, I hated you. And somewhere inside, you know that I’m right to, just like you know what every other Sylvan in the Garden will feel when they see how weak and pathetic you truly are.”

I was surprised I’d gotten to say my peace. That I’d been marching up to him, step by step with each word may have held the others back, but it was the surprise I saw hiding in his eyes which truly bought me the time I needed.

“Look up,” he said, confidence and victory oozing around each syllable.

“At what?” I asked, letting a deadly smile crack my lips open. 

He was distant and whatever summoning spell he’d invoked apparently didn’t allow him to sense through his creatures eyes. Thinking about it, that was smart. His projection was less than a shadow. I doubt the other Neoterics could possibly have sensed it. If he’d been inhabiting a flight of death-dealing birds however, his presence would have been far more noticeable.

The downside to being smart, in this case, was that lacking any presence in the Death Bird’s he’d summoned to descend on us, he didn’t have the awareness Draconia had blessed me with. Specifically the sense which allowed me to feel when the Sun decided she didn’t care to share the sky with any interlopers.

She could have burned them to ash.

It would have been a very “sun” thing to do.

But she didn’t, in part I think because the actual sun was still unfathomably far away, and in part because she caught the true peril of the ‘Death Birds’, being, you know, kind of bright.

I chuckled as that thought went through my head.

What? I’m not that old. I can be childish sometimes still.

Sasarai was, unsurprisingly, less amused. 

“Did the sun just get really bright for less than blink?” Theia asked.

“Much less than a blink,” Zeph said.

“She is very clever like that,” Meluna confirmed. “Now, what was that about not covering failure states that you were saying?”

Sasarai vanished rather than reply which was, perhaps, the worst possible thing he could have done.

From our point of view.

“He’s moving already isn’t he?” I asked, turning back to Meluna.

“Most assuredly. He knows he has run out of time. The attack on the Garden is at this point both an inevitability and quite imminent,” Meluna said, sounding neither concerned nor unhappy about the prospect.

“He’s not going to rely on tricks the next time then,” I said.

“What was the trick he tried this time?” Theia asked.

“He summoned a creature that’s only supposed to exist in the root caves beneath the Holy Tree. Their touch is death, and, disturbingly, that doesn’t change after you kill them.” 

There were lots of “scary” stories told to kids about the monsters that lived beneath the roots. I’d grown up believing they were real but probably just embellishments on the truth. The moment the Death Birds had appeared in the skies about though, I’d known exactly how real they were.

“So, it we’d shot them all down?” Theia asked.

“Then whatever they fell on would have died. And any who came across them. And anything that was near them. Had Sola burned them up the results would have been far worse though,” Meluna said.

“Because the dust…” Theia said, working out the ramifications of Meluna’s words.

“Is fatal too.” Was I surprised that Sasarai had tried to kill an entire city with a casual display of his power? No, how could I be? Was I angry? Again, no, but that was due having already reached the limit of my ability to hate anyone.

“So Sola did what exactly?” Theia asked.

“What you see as the sun, is only a portal to draw it’s light and heat to us across the veil Night has cast over the world,” Zeph said. “She simply widened it for a sufficiently brief moment that we wouldn’t suffer an ill effect, and then kept the Death Birds on the other side of it.”

“So they’re, what, floating beyond the veil now?” Theia asked.

“By now I imagine their frozen and orbiting Sola’s main body. They’ll fall in eventually,” Zeph said.

“But that won’t hurt her, right?” I probably didn’t need to be worried, but losing the sun seemed like a particularly terrible idea at this point.

“If the birds could gift her with death, they would simply be adding a domain to her portfolio,” Zeph said. “There is the matter of scale to consider however, and, as a point of reference, our entire world could fall into Sola’s body and she would struggle to notice unless she was paying very careful attention. So no additional domains for her I’m afraid.”

“Can you imagine how insufferable your mistress would be if she held both life and death?” Meluna asked. “Better to let the Beast win.”

“And does Night share your assessment?” Zeph asked, mild curiosity disguising what I thought had to be an insult of some kind.

“Our deities must occasionally trust in our judgment when theirs are lacking,” Meluna said.

“So was it you or Night who arranged for Sasarai to arrive just then?” I asked.

Meluna turned to me with a smile for that.

“You imagine I control the Neoterics?” It wasn’t a safe or simple question, and I felt Theia involuntarily take a half step away from me.

“I don’t imagine anything of the sort,” I said, trying and failing to match her tone. “It does occur to me though that Night, of all the gods, would have been the most adept at keeping our conversation private and preventing Sasarai from knowing where we are, if the desire had been there.”

“But that is the thing about desire, isn’t it? Our desires may prove the undoing of achieving themselves all too easily.” Meluna may not have been intending to be as opaque as it seemed from her answer. For all I could tell, she could have simply been out of practice at explaining things simply.

Fortunately, Theia was there to act as a translator for me.

“The problem with cloaking someone is that if someone else is looking for them and fails to find them, they’ll know something important is happening and may, from timing, or location, or previous circumstances, be able to make a solid guess as to where and why the cloaked person is where they are.”

“So, we’re still being watched by Sasarai then I take it?” I asked, seeing the warning that was hidden in their message.

“Watched by, listened to, probably scented for as well knowing the weird things the Neoterics get up to,” Theia said.

“So if I were to go into great and specific detail about how the ‘Holy Tree’ is going to burn to the ground around him and then we’re going to choke him to death with it’s ashes?”

“He would know that you are taunting him and rest easy in the knowledge that there is no practical method you could use to accomplish that,” Theia said with a nod, as though that was the point I’d been trying to make.

“And if I remind him that he’s never going to get back what I have claimed? That I would gleefully die just to spite him like that. Especially since it means that the other Neoterics will obliterate him?”

“He would know the truth of that as well.” 

“Bear in mind that he knows all of that already,” Meluna said. “Sasarai has many failings, a lack of imagination certainly among them, but while he was far from the brightest, or the most talented of the Neoterics, he was capable of taking ideas from those who were his betters and adapting them to his own use.” Meluna spoke as though she was talking only to me, but I don’t think it was lost on anyone who her audience really was.

“Do you think he knows that the other Neoterics are listening in as well?” I asked.

“Almost certainly. He’s dim, but even he’s not that oblivious,” Meluna said.

“So if I were to offer to meet with him at a spot of my choosing, would he understand that it was trap?”

“I fail to see how he could miss such a thing.”

“But at this point, would he have any option but to come for me anyways?”

“Oh, my dear girl, none of them would be able to risk leaving you alone.”