“The role of the High Accessors is to guide the faith the grand congregations collect and make of it a pure and harmonious offering to the gods. Through their hands flow the hopes and dreams of the mortal world and so let them be always mindful of the weight of their responsibility and the absolute need for humility and dedication to serving others their role requires.”

– The first of the official mandates of the High Order of the Divine.

“I’m not saying that we abrogate our authority or misplace the trust which has been given to us. Far from it. The trust we hold is sacred, and it’s requisite that we do everything we can to ensure that the faith delivered to the divine is of the purest, highest quality. In that capacity, we must shift through what we are given and hold back anything which could be deemed unworthy. There will be shortfalls certainly, so we must implements all available means to drive higher year over year performance among the truly faithful. Let us make this a world for the best among us!”

– High Accessor Vaingloth, addressing the other eleven High Accessors, years prior to the Sun Fall, setting the plot in motion which would eventually lead to the Sun Fall.

Here’s the thing about divine inspiration; it’s functionally indistinguishable from going completely bonkers. On the upside though, it felt a lot better than drowning in despair or anxiety!

I had no idea what was waiting for us in the stadium except that it was ‘worse than the spirit fragments which had herded us into its clutches. Given that the spirit fragments were capable of things like ‘drowning us in a river of dust that used to be a beloved stream’ and ‘trampling us beneath hooves of stone which hold the memory of the animals which once walked up on them’, the idea of something being worse than that seemed oddly laughable. Once something could unquestionably kill you, it’s not like being killed even more thoroughly was really a cause for concern.

I took a step forward to confront whatever it was regardless of all that though, my own words having filled me with an anxiety killing mania.

Zeph, wisely, grabbed me before I could follow through on that impulse.

“No.” It was less of a command and more a plea. “What can you do? She’s still lost to you isn’t she? And this is beyond her, even if she’s won free!”

“What? I mean, yeah, Sola’s still bound up, but what do you mean this beyond her?”

“What is waiting for us in there isn’t something that can fought. It shouldn’t be this close to the Factorum, but if anywhere is safe, it can only be there.” Zeph’s gaze was darting all around us and I could feel the spirit fragments drawing in closer.

“If we can’t go in there and face that thing, then we bust out of the trap it has us in, but I’m not busting out alone.” It was oddly refreshing to be one hundred percent certain of something for change.

“It will chase us and we can’t outrun it.”

“Why? How? You’re the fastest thing in this world. How could it possibly catch you?” I probably wasn’t right about her speed, but I also had a hard to imagining anything left in this wrecked and failing world that could work as perfectly as she did.

“Because its caught me before!” Terror. Not concern. Not anger. Just sheer terror in Zeph’s voice.

“Explain.” I needed to know. I needed to understand what I was going to fight against. Because I was going to fight. Even Zeph’s terror didn’t dent the belief that had risen in me.

“There’s no time!” Zeph said and tried to move away.

She’d grabbed hold of me though, and that can go both ways.

“What. Is. Down. There.” My voice sounded alien in my ears, and my words hit Zeph with enough force to root her in place.

“A fragment,” she said, looking away.

“Of which god?” I asked, trying to understand why one fragment would be worse than another, and why one of the gods would be so dangerous to us. No matter how bad their portfolio was, they were in the same boat as we were in a sense.

“Not a fragment of a god,” Zeph said. “A fragment of the beast.”

And I understood.

Because, yeah, that was worse.

A lot worse.

“When the beast came, the gods fought back. She fought back most and longest of all, and the beast did not emerge from those battles unscathed. Just as the gods shattered themselves to survive, so did the beast. She would have incinerated it a dozen times over but the pieces She burned? It cast them aside.”

“Then this piece has been beaten already,” I said. “It can be beaten again.”

Of course it had lost to the full and unbridled power of the God of the Sun, where Sola was a tiny little spark whose most impressive feat so far was lighting up a city for a few seconds. So my assertion wasn’t standing on the mostest solidest of foundations.

Whatever.

“Anyways, you survived being caught by it before, obviously, we can just do that again,” I said trying to rally her to even attempting to work with me on this.

“I didn’t,” Zeph said. “I didn’t survive. My spirit? It didn’t find me until this life because the last time I faced a fragment of the beast, it tore me apart. I tried to fight and it overpowered me. I tried to run and it caught me. I tried to survive and I failed. And I cannot let that happen to you. To her.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

Not right away.

Except to imagine what that had to have been like. 

And how difficult it had to be to face something like that again.

“Do you believe in Sola?” I asked, my voice far quieter than I’d intended it to be.

“This isn’t about that,” Zeph said.

We could both feel the fragment of the beast rising from the stadium’s floor.

It was tired of waiting and if we weren’t coming to it, it was more than willing to come to us.

“Do you believe in her,” I asked again.

I wasn’t running.

And Zeph wasn’t going to die here.

Not alone at any rate.

“You can’t do this, we can’t do it. Go. Now. There’s still time to save…”

But there wasn’t.

I turned as burning eyes and gnashing teeth the size of a building rose up and lit the sky with lights my mortal eyes couldn’t perceive.

“Don’t run,” I said. “We’re done running.”

I couldn’t talk to Sola, but she was with me. I had no proof of that, but I believed.

Zeph tried to put herself in front of me. Maybe she thought if she bought me one more second I would come to my sense. That was not going to happen though.

“Can’t fight, not going to run, so let’s talk,” I said stepping around Zeph and staring directly into the eyes of the beast fragment.

It, unsurprisingly, was not much of a talker.

The moment it saw me, some flicker of recognition ran through it and it crashed forward.

Being eaten by a building? Yeah, not fun.

The beast tore into me and I felt…I felt nothing?

I was lost inside it, twisting and turning inside out, but my body? It didn’t change at all. It wasn’t being injured.

Because Sola wouldn’t let it be.

My spirit and mind weren’t quite as protected, but even they survived the onslaught, at least initially.

Outside, the world was coming apart as the beast struggled to find a path through me to Sola’s essence.

Wait.

What?

How did I know that?

Hunger. How could I not know the beast’s hunger? I was surrounded by it. I was inside it. I was a part of it. How could I not know it?

Because I was Little. Because I was a stupidly normal Ratkin woman. Because I was not a god devouring beast, and if I existed, as fragile and pathetic as I was, then there was no possible chance that the world was unraveling. One tiny rumble of the earth was all it took to kill me. My survival indicated that the world I was a part of was doing just fine.

I was far too small and feeble to contend with cosmic powers and I took refuge in that.

“Solid!” I heard a whisper from the far side of the universe reach me. “You are solid!”

And I was. I always had been. Solid enough to burn as Kindling. Solid enough not to be able to escape unless I found spaces that fit me. Solid enough that every blow I’d ever taken had brought tears and pain and misery.

Gods though? Gods are so many things, but they’re not mortal.

And they’re not solid.

They’re not made of the stuff of this world.

My world.

They are ideas, and powers. They are faith and dreams and the laws of creation.

But I am creation.

Sola wasn’t just protecting me.

I was protecting her.

And neither of us where going to let this thing harm anyone else.

The beast, however, disagreed with that assessment.

Even though it was a tiny crumb of its true self, I was smaller still, and too small for it to gnash on properly. Improper gnashing was still dangerous though and I felt the pressure of its hatred and hunger crash down all around me.

It loathed me.

It loathed Sola.

We had an existence. We had memories and experience and dreams. We had the power to recall the past and the power to shape the future.

And it wanted all of that.

It’s rage at god and mortal for holding back what it desired, for not surrendering everything it craved no matter the cost to us was immeasurable. Even just as a fragment of the true beast, the yawning pit of avarice within it dropped off into infinity.

Sola wanted to burn it. To rid the world of at least this tiny bit of the beast. It wouldn’t be much of a victory, but any victory over her foe was one to be cherished.

“Don’t,” I said, speaking to my friend, since commanding a god was the sort of hubris that deserved to pressage someone’s downfall. “It wants your power. It wants to consume anything it can from us.”

We couldn’t fight it. As satisfying as it had been to burn out Vaingloth’s eyes, the same sort of retribution was impossible against the beast. It wasn’t…

It wasn’t real?

My mind sort of shattered trying to absorb that concept.

It had to be real. It was eating me. I’d seen it with my own eyes, and the darkness I was being tossed and turned around it was lit with the streaks of fire which burned in colors no mortal eyes could capture.

But that wasn’t how fire worked.

Fire burned and even if some of the light couldn’t be seen – thank you Sola for gifting me the understanding of that – it was still present, just shifted to a color my eyes weren’t adapted to perceive.

This fire though emitted a light which was not part of the same spectrum at all.

Because it wasn’t light from this world.

I was on the verge of internalizing a lot more than my sanity could handle, and trying to see anymore than I had was absolutely not going to be safe at all

But it might save Zeph.

And it might save Sola.

And if it didn’t save me? If it didn’t save me, then I was at least going to go out for the right reasons, for my reasons.

Clinging tightly to my sense of both the real world around me and how tiny a part of it I was, I opened my eyes and opened my thoughts and opened my heart.

And I saw, and understood, and felt it all.

And it was far, far too much.

“This is a terrible plan.” 

“Of course it is. It is the very definition of a cataclysmically bad idea. Quite literally in terms of the cataclysm part.”

“And we are going along with it why then exactly?”

“Because it will happen whether or not we do.”

“You think the others would really…no, I can’t even pretend to be so foolish as to believe the others would pause to question themselves if we refused.”

“They would not. More importantly though, if they knew we disagreed with this plan, they would ensure that we were among the first harvested to see it come to fruition.”

“And so instead of being reaped by the others, we’ll hold the scythe to the world’s throat ourselves? What poor new Lords we will make if that’s the best option we can imagine.”

“You never wanted to a be proper Lord did you? It was always your creations, these mechanicals, that have fascinated you.”

“They can be more than we are. Less fragile. Less fallible. Able to replace the pieces that don’t work with new refinements as their understanding grows. I just need to find the means to grant them a spark of true awareness.”

“Then that is your answer, your better option. You will do this for them. If this world is lost, perhaps it deserves to be since its peoples gave rise to things like us. Think of this as wiping the slate clean so that your new creations can flourish.”

“You make a compelling point, it just seems off to call it a good one. It feels as though we’re missing something important too.”

– Helgon and Dyrena, in a private meeting, prior to their ascension as Eternal Lords.

So the first thing I did after discovering that I’d apparently inspired the entire city to plot a secret rebellion against an Eternal Lord was to run off into the wastelands and abandon them.

Honestly? That was pretty much what I would have expected of myself.

So why was I feeling so out of sorts?

“Are you cold?” Zeph asked in a whisper.

We were only a few hours out from Mount Gloria, picking a path through the empty, quiet wastes which lay beyond the light and warmth the city had to offer.

The road we followed was a broken, shattered mess. I climbed up a four feet high ledge where part of road had been crushed down only to find another ten foot high ledge a few paces beyond that.

Here and there, the remnants of life remained. Trees which had been dead since the Sun Fall.  Clusters of skeletons here and there, probably from people who’d tried to eek out their survival outside the fringes of the city. And shadows. Everywhere there were shadows, darker and deeper than any the city had to offer.

In theory, I could have chased those away. Sola’s glow was still with me, but I’d been bundled up tight by Lucky and her people to make sure we wouldn’t be spotted as we fled the city. We were probably far enough away that I could have taken a glove off or something to illuminate our path, but Zeph had a curious little lozenge shaped device which shone from one side with a deep green light. It didn’t provide the best visibility, but a lifetime of living on the meagerest sparks of light had left me used to navigating under similar conditions.

“I’m fine,” I said, scrambling up the rough face of the ledge.

“You’re shivering,” Zeph said, placing a hand on my shoulder to stop me before I tackled descending to the next bit of the broken landscape.

“I’m not cold,” I said, which was completely true. Between the clothes I was bundled in and the remnants of Sola’s power that still flowed through me, I wasn’t feeling any physical discomfort. 

It was also a complete lie though. 

I was so, so cold. Despite the warmth I was wrapped in, fear had every inch of me clutched in its icy grip. The wastelands did more than scare me. They were death, death that had happened and death that was going to happen. 

I’d known what they were since I was old enough to ask the question “why don’t we just leave”. I’d known that my world was a dead one and that the tiny pocket of life I lived in was an aberration on a vast, lifeless rock. Hearing something though, and experiencing it? I hadn’t been ready for how different those two things were.

Everywhere around me I saw how the old world had failed. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. There were still ruins. Buildings that had stood for uncounted years. Vehicles which lay abandoned. All sorts of signs that people had once lived and thrived here. 

All sorts of signs that the refuge of places like Mount Gloria hadn’t been anywhere near enough. That despite the plentiful light and heat and water and air, nothing they’d done had been enough to save them. 

Nothing I could do would be enough to save them.

I tried to tell myself I was talking about the ancients. The people I couldn’t have been responsible for. The people whose loss had already salted the earth we walked on. I tried to tell myself that, but believing it was something else.

“I would give us more light but we are not on safe ground yet,” Zeph said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever stood on safe ground,” I said.

“This is less safe than most.”

“Why? We’re alone out here, aren’t we?”

“I wish that were true,” Zeph said. “We have not been alone since we left the city though.”

I’d say my ears perked up at that and I started listening intently for pursuers or things waiting in ambush, but my ears had been perked up since Lucky appeared unexpectedly to whisk us away, and I’d been listening for danger at every moment I’ve been conscious for since birth as far as I know.

“The creatures which pursue us have no tangible forms,” Zeph said, which was reassuring. “Unless they take ours.” Which was not.

“What are they?” I asked, noticing that she hadn’t called them ‘ghosts’.

“Shattered spirits. When the gods were destroyed the spiritual plane was impacted as well, and as the world fell many of its spirits fell with it.”

“And they’re still a danger after all this time?”

“They’ve become more dangerous as time has gone on,” Zeph said, growing still as she spoke. “The fragments of malicious spirits no longer know how to direct their malice, and the harmonious spirits have lost everything they were meant to be in harmony with.”

“How do we avoid any of that?” It didn’t make sense to run when you didn’t know where or when to run after all.

“We don’t let them understand what you carry. If they could grasp that they would be compelled to come to you.”

“And then they’d eat me?”

“Unlikely. The power you carry should place you beyond their direct influence.”

“But indirectly?”

“A fragment of river couldn’t drown you, but it could turn a cliff face into a mudslide. Or a piece of a flora spirit might cause spores to burst forth with life, including one’s you’d inhaled.”

“Neither of those sounds pleasant. Let’s avoid that.”

Oddly, but giving me something immediate and graphically unpleasant to worry about, Zeph had done me a favor. My concerns for the people we’d left behind didn’t drift away but at least took a backseat to the more pressing concerns for my own hide.

See! Being selfish is great, right! Right?

We kept moving in silence after that, with Zeph occasionally turning us down unexpected paths. I wanted to ask how she knew where we were going. Nothing about being an attendant of the Sun seemed like it would include understanding land-based navigation or being able to pace yourself to a sustainable speed for a tiny Ratkin girl.

I’d asked before we left if Zeph was going to carry me again – it would certainly have been quicker – but there are apparently things out in the wasteland which are faster than she was and moving at her full speed tended to attract them just as quickly.

So we marched slowly.

And rested.

And marched more.

And slept.

And marched again.

Over and over, passing through the lightless tomb of a world where every breath and every step we took was an intrusion and a violation. I thought I would get used to it, but the farther we traveled the more isolated I felt. And the more I began to understand the scope of the Sun Fall. 

I’d called forth a miracle against Vaingloth. Maybe the biggest miracle the world had seen since the Sun Fall, and it was so tiny and insignificant compared to an hour of walking through the wasteland. 

We were in danger every moment we traveled. Zeph hadn’t needed to tell me that, I could sense the things that were moving around us. Most of them were lost. Mad and no longer a part of the world as it was but rather a part of some infinitely distorted version of what it might have been and what it might be.

That we moved through their presence at all was due as much to the divine blessings we carried at the stealth that kept those blessings from being tested too strongly. On some level I think the spirit fragments knew that to touch either of us would bring back the memories of what they’d once been and I couldn’t imagine anything more unbearable to the things they had become.

For anyone else, the trip would have been a harrowing nightmare but for us it all passed uneventfully. 

Because, unlike me, Zeph actually knew what she was doing.

Which was unfair. She loved Sola, and I was benefiting from that, stealing the love that rightfully belonged to the god who I couldn’t even talk to anymore. Not the most reasonable of thoughts on my part I suppose but it was hard to feel that it wasn’t true, and whatever the case was, I needed Zeph’s help far too much to even begin vocalizing my concerns to her.

“I need you to do something for me,” Zeph whispered as we came to a giant sunken stadium.

I nodded in reply, not trusting myself to be quiet enough even though I was possibly making less noise than she was.

“Do you see the gap in the wall on the far side over there?”

I did, and nodded again in acknowledgement.

“I’m going to head down onto the playfield. I want you to creep around the upper edge here and get to that gap. Then run. The Factorum is about two miles along a road which is still mostly intact. I need you to make it to the gates of the city. They’ll be open. Once you’re inside, you won’t be pursued any further.”

“And you? Why aren’t we sneaking out of here together?” I asked. I wasn’t panicked by the idea, but that was only because it was ridiculous.

“There is something here that wasn’t before. Something that’s been waiting for us.”

“Fine. Let it wait. We’ll go around it.”

“It’s too late for that. I’m sorry. I knew the fragments were following us. I didn’t know they had surrounded us. This is my fault.” 

Said the woman who had guided us safely through the wasteland for day and days, right up to the doorstep of where we needed to be.

“Then we deal with them, or figure out how to sneak out of the trap they have us in,” I said.

“I have figured it out,” Zeph said. “I can make sure it won’t notice you while it deals with me.”

“What is ‘it’?” I asked. I did not try to perceive ‘it’ or search for ‘it’. Something about how Zeph was speaking told me that ‘it’ was something I didn’t want to have any connection to at all.

“More than a spirit fragment. And worse. Much worse.”

“And you can get in their, distract it, and then get away?” I asked, wondering only whether she was going to lie to me or not.

Instead, she was silent. Which told me everything I needed to know.

“Right. We’re not doing that then,” I said.

“You have to. She must be preserved,” Zeph’s voice rose above a whisper and I could hear the desperation in it as plainly as I felt it in my heart.

So I reached up, took her face between both of my hands and looked her straight in the eyes.

“Do you have any idea how unhappy Sola will be if she loses you?” Was it blasphemy to pretend to speak for a god? Yes. Always. Was I pretending though? I looked at the woman who loved my god more than her own life, who had saved me from Vaingloth and from the terrors of the wasteland, who had never asked for anything more than that I live, and my path was more than clear. 

It was divinely inspired.

“We’re in this together.”

And for a change, I didn’t run away.

“Why is this line here? The one that suggests we’re over budget on our aether requirements for this month? Reports from Lord Dyrena’s city indicate what? That the populace is declining? And, what is the problem with that? They are unable to supply the aether dust we projected for this quarter? That is why we left overseers there. Why have they not rectified the situation? They say they need more bodies? Well we need more bodies to fuel for the victory festival, and this festival takes priority. Recall the overseers and add them to the Kindling. We can always find new ones. What do you mean we can’t? The overseers belong the Lord Kurst? They have Protected Envoy status? What cut are they taking of the aether dust production? Fifty percent! Attache, begin drafting up plans for the dissolution of Lord Kurst’s domain. If Dyrena call fall, so can he.”

– Vaingloth the Eternal on learning that the parade for his Ascension Day Anniversary might need to be cutback by one percent.

That people didn’t hate we was, in all likelihood, because they didn’t know me. The thought that anyone would want me to take a Neoteric Lord’s throne, anyone who’d actually met me, was so laughably silly that I didn’t even spend an hour imagining what it would be like.

Getting to order people around? Never being cold? Always eating the kind of food Vaingloth got from his private gardens? Nah. I couldn’t imagine that at all. Wouldn’t want to even.

Of course that wouldn’t be what it was like. Sitting on a throne had to have some upsides, and if you had the kind of power Vaingloth did you could, demonstrably, get away with being as awful as you wanted. For someone like me though? All sitting on a throne would mean for me is that people would know exactly where to find me.

The moment someone else decided they wanted the throne more than they wanted me to keep breathing, I would probably be dead. Sure people like Lucky and Zeph seemed to be invested in keeping me alive – running me through the Deep Sewers was rather tangible proof of that – but there were so many people, all of the elites and all of the commoners who wanted to be an elite, who’d only need one bad decree from me as motivation and evidence that they could do better, and from there it would take all of one knife in the back and I’d be done for.

If I had Sola’s help things might be different. She could probably melt any assassins that came at me, but that still wouldn’t be a particularly enjoyable experience for anyone involved.

Fortunately, putting me on a throne was pretty much the exact opposite of the action of what we were doing in the sewers.

“This complicates our plans,” Zeph said, pacing me to make sure my tiny legs didn’t cause us to move slow enough that we got caught by the monsters Vaingloth had released. “Our supplies are mostly assembled but if they knew where to find us, then we have to assume the supply depot is compromised too.”

“I don’t like that they found us there. I didn’t poke my head out for the last week, so it’s not like anyone saw me.” I still had the imagined scenario where Lucky had been coerced to lure me out and into a trap, but even the variation of that were she was double-crossing Vaingloth seemed increasingly less likely.

“They didn’t know where you were – not exactly,” Lucky said. “They’d narrowed it down to the general area in the precinct with some weird magic.”

“Weird magic?” I asked, absolutely hating the idea while also being entirely unsurprised by it. The Neoteric Lords didn’t get to be what they were without a ridiculous amount of magical prowess. Even Vaingloth, who was not notably a fan of his fellow Neoteric Lords, had been quite open about the magical might the nine remaining Lords possessed.

“Candle magic.” Zeph said the words like the curse they were. 

“The guy who brought us the info didn’t know what it was, but he was pretty freaked out by it.”

“Freaked out enough that you believed him?” I asked, trying to understand how she’d actually gotten entangled in this.

“We knew the patrols and the inquisitors have been searching for you since you vanished,” Lucky said. “When they started moving together and establishing a cordon around the precinct you were in, we knew Jelspar’s info was probably right.”

“If they couldn’t nail down where we were exactly, how did you manage it?” I asked.

“Easy. We searched all the placed where we you weren’t.”

“Wait, when you say ‘we’, who are you talking about? I mean your nest was nice but you didn’t have anywhere near enough people there to search a whole precinct. Did you?” It wasn’t effortless to talk while moving at a solid jog, but it was worth it to understand how strange the world had become.

“I miss that nest. We were doing some nice work on it,” Lucky said. My solid jog was a brisk walk for her, so she could afford to waste time being philosophical I suppose. “But, no, no we didn’t have enough people there. What we had was enough people to spread the word of what we saw.”

“The word?”

“We all felt the light when Mumora was healed,” Lucky said. “It changed us.”

“Oh no,” I said, thinking of how Vaingloth occasionally ‘changed someone’ when they displeased him, or he needed a new sort of tool, or he was just bored.

“Not like that,” Lucky said. “We witnessed a miracle though Little. You know. You saw it too. I…I was running the nest because it was something to do to kill time. Working was fine, but after our crew…” she paused, searching for words she couldn’t find and switched track to continue on. “I needed something to fill the time. I’d tried a bunch of things, but I was able to think too much. So I setup the nest so I’d have other people’s problems to think about instead.”

“Sorry,” I said. Apparently my taking off hadn’t done her any favors whatsoever.

Which was great. Typical me behavior.

“Don’t be. You had your own stuff going on.”

“Yeah. I always do, right?”

“Well in this case, I’m glad. I think I needed you to come back into my life when you did. I think everyone needed it.”

“I interacted with maybe a handful of people in the nest,” I said, painfully wary of taking any more credit than I deserved.

Lucky and Zeph both snorting made me raise an eyebrow though. Why the hell were they in agreement of my being wrong about that? I know who I talked to.

“I don’t think she’s fully aware of what she’d done,” Zeph said.

“Yeah, you don’t say. It’s funny, she used to be the quickest member of our crew.”

Which, I gotta admit, kinda stung.

I mean, I know I can be an idiot sometimes. Most times. But I take some measure of pride in being a generally clever idiot. If there was a mountain of evidence to the contrary, then, shut up, no there wasn’t.

I felt a chuckle bubble up inside.

Was…

Was Sola laughing at me too?

What.

The.

Hell?

“Hey! I am quick!” I objected, definitely proving that I wasn’t falling behind both physically and mentally.

“Little. My dear. My friend. The gods are dead. We know that. Everyone knows that. We feel it in our souls with every breath. The only hope this world has known for hundreds of years has been bought by burning up our neighbors, and it’s been dribbled out from the monsters that we can’t live without.” Lucky said that as though she was giving me all the clues I needed to work things out for myself.

Which I could not do. Not while I was running for my life.

“The gods are dead. We know that. Everyone knows that. Everyone but you. When you healed Mumora? We didn’t know it was you, but we knew it was a miracle. We could feel it.”

“Feel what?” I asked, still perplexed.

“Grace. Connection. That the gods weren’t all dead. That we weren’t abandoned. That an impossible future was worth hoping for.”

“I have hungered for the touch of divinity for so long. So long,” Zeph said. “When my spirit woke, at first all I felt was defiance and vengeance, but those coals burn low over time. The light you brought called to me. It banished shadows which had sunk deep into me and taken root in my heart. I was able to believe again rather than sorrowing eternally.”

“That’s what it was like for all of us,” Lucky said. “Come on Little, you saw how the people of the nest were the next day? How everyone started to come together? That wasn’t just because everyone had a good night sleep in a warm room. It was more than that.”

“Not everyone felt like that though. There were people who didn’t come back the next night at all!”

“That’s true, but do you know where they went?” Lucky asked.

“Some other nest, right? I mean it’s what people do.”

“Some of them? Yeah. A few of them just refused to believe what they’d seen. At last outwardly. They couldn’t process it I guess. The others though? The ones that didn’t come back who did understand what we’d seen? They had to tell people. To bear witness. We’re not supposed to be as isolated as we are. We’re not supposed to be broken apart and moved around at the whim of some monster from on high. We’re supposed to be together.”

“So they went out and told people they’d seen a flash of light and an old lady in a lot better shape afterwards?”

“I think they’re message was simpler than that,” Lucky said. “I think they told people ‘the gods aren’t gone’.”

“Why would anyone believe them though? We get people spouting all kinds of nonsense looking for attention all the time?”

I thought back to all the streetcorner proclaimers I’d seen over the years. For some it seemed like a performance piece, a weird sort of living artwork, as much as anything else. Others though? Some of the others were just broken. People who fought to preserve the water portal, and people who shoved Kindling into the fire. The air portal people who went too far never came back, so I suppose they could have been the same, and there were certainly a lot of other things which could simply shatter someone. The proclaimers came from all their ranks, and I’d never once considered actually listening to what they had to say.

“Their words probably would have been blown away,” Lucky said, nodding in ‘agreement’ with me. “Instead though, you went and hurt the monster-in-charge, and you did so much more than that.”

“I’m sure he’s better now,” I said. “He knows how to fight gods, and I don’t think anything Sola or I did was beyond his power to fix.”

“You might be surprised by that then,” Zeph said.

“Yeah. But more than what you did to him, you confirmed what we’d seen with Mumora. Do you get it? The first time, we were surprised, but the second time we were ready to understand. We, none of us, ever expected to see a miracle in our lives. None of us even thought they were possible anymore. But you brought one to us. You showed us that there could be a light which wasn’t bought with the burning bodies of the people we loved and cared for. You showed us that someone believed in us enough to fight when we couldn’t. You showed us that we could be so much more than we’d ever imagined we could be. And we heard him scream. You didn’t just fight for us. You hurt the monster who killed our grandparents, our parents, and out siblings. That’s something we will die to preserve.”

“I don’t want people dying though,” I said. “Can you call them off? Tell them to run away?”

“Runaway where?” Lucky asked. “This isn’t just the people in the nest. This is everyone in the city. We all saw the light of your miracle.”

“What? No of course I don’t like having disgusting breathing things in my city! The fire portal? No it’s not for warmth and light! I need it for my experiments! Well, yes, most of the experiments are enchantments of cold, unfeeling metal, but some, okay one, involves warm metal! Yes, yes, and that’s why the air and water portals are open too. You see it’s all about balance. The warm metal needs the fresh air to cool it and the water to temper it. How much air and water does one experiment need? Well, that’s really not the point now is it. Big portals are simpler…nicer. If they produce more than is needed, then who am I to care? I am, I feel this needs to be pointed out, dead, and far past the point of caring about any mortal concerns. Or mortals. Yes. No concern for mortals. Now be off and do whatever it is you mortals do.”

– Helgon the Reluctantly-Eternal to the small group of school children at the Factorum’s only study hall.

I don’t have anything against being carried. In general. Some people are a lot taller and a lot stronger than me and we can both move a lot faster if I pretend to be a sack of fish food that they’re hauling around. Typically someone like Lucky, with her endlessly long arms, would scoop me up under one of them and I’d be jostled at her side as we escaped whatever trouble someone else had gotten us into. It wasn’t usually terrible pleasant, but it was always better than the alternative of being caught and roasted alive.

Racing down into the darkness beneath Zeph’s basement held that same thrill of escaping danger without all the annoying jostling largely because Zeph didn’t sling me under one arm. Instead she held me like someone would hold a baby. It was comfortable, but only in a physical sense.

I tried to distract myself from the indignity of being baby carried by putting my mind back together after Lucky’s appearance broke it thoroughly.

“How the hell did you find us?” I asked in a failed whisper as we cut over into a section of the sewers I wasn’t familiar with.

“No talking yet,” Lucky said. “We’re still within their perimeter.”

Perimeter?

I cursed, silently. That absolutely sounded like how an official patroller operation would go down. They would make sure there were no avenues of escape well before confronting me. Also, they’d send enough troops that even if Sola could break free somehow, they wouldn’t lose them all before one of them disabled me.

Or at least that’s what Vaingloth probably told them. In truth, if Sola broke free, she could have roasted every patroller in the city, and if I had to glow too bright to be looked at directly for a month afterwards, she would have my full support in doing so.

Wheels and more wheels spun in mind as we ran though.

They knew, in broad terms at least, how I’d escaped them last time. Zeph’s absurd speed had to be something they had plans for.

Plans like driving us into the sewers where routes could be cutoff making speed all but useless.

I wanted to point that out, but I held back. Lucky wasn’t stupid. She had to know that would be the patroller’s plan.

So was she betraying me? I’d caused her a lot of trouble. And Vaingloth had plenty of things to hold over her head. Like like the lives of every person she’d chosen to take care of.

On our own, Zeph and I might have gone anywhere when the patrollers attacked.

If there even were patrollers on the surface.

I’m not a good person, so my mind tends to wander to some unpleasant places. It was able to assemble a scenario where we were running right into Vaingloth’s clutches all too easily.

Say Vaingloth found us. But catching us was going to tricky, because Zeph is insanely fast. Also, predicting what a god is or is not capable of seems like it would be a risky endeavor. What to do?

How about grab one of your target’s few friends and make said friend an offer she couldn’t refuse. Maybe burn up an example or two to make it clear how serious the situation was.

The friend-shaped pawn can then lure me somewhere that I’d be much easier and safer to collect. 

Then you burn up the pawn and all the pawns people too.

Which was why I relaxed.

It was absolutely possible that Vaingloth had gotten to Lucky. It was absolutely possible that she was leading us into a trap just like he’d told her too.  Except for a few little things.

First, Vaingloth didn’t consider people like Lucky to be people. Acknowledging that she even existed wouldn’t have been the first thing to cross his mind. Not with what the long history of how he treated the populace showed us.

Second, the fact that he would absolutely burn up everyone even vaguely related to this was something Lucky would be as keenly aware of as I was.

More important than all that though? Lucky was my friend. I didn’t have many of those. Or maybe any. Maybe we weren’t friends, with how I’d abandoned her. 

But I wanted us to be.

Which meant, I was going to believe in her.

A part of me, a whole freaking chorus in fact, was singing in a dozen ancient languages about how I was making the most foolish mistake imaginable and that I was going to be murder killed until I was giga-dead.

Anxiety sucks.

But it’s also an old, old part of me, so I told it to shut up. 

And then I told it to shut up again.

And again.

And then I just let myself imagine what it would be like to hang out with Lucky again. They were lies. Illusions I spun up in my mind of a better day that wasn’t ever going to come, and didn’t have to.

I couldn’t believer in myself, and I couldn’t believe in the future, but that didn’t stop me from reveling in the daydream I conjured.

“Okay. Now for the fun part,” Lucky said. “Ever been to the Deep Sewers?”

She yanked open a hatch which led down into darkness.

How did I see the hatch? After a week in Zeph’s warmly lit basement I’d forgotten to think about that. The answer was easy to figure out though since I was the only source of light we had.

It wasn’t a lot of light, but I was definitely glowing.

Sola? Are you there?

Only silence answered, but it didn’t matter. She was my god. Bindings or no, she was with me. Anxiety wanted to argue against that too, but I stuffed it into a spiky box where it could shut up and suffer. Sola was with me, whether I could hear her or not.

“Several times. All of them unpleasant,” Zeph said.

“What she said,” I echoed, which wasn’t entirely true, but we didn’t have time for me to explain where I’d found Sola.

“Good. Don’t get eaten then,” Lucky said and dropped down first to clear a path.

I wasn’t sure what she’d meant about being eaten given than I hadn’t run across anything particularly carnivorous when I’d climbed up from Sola’s garden.

Of course Vaingloth hadn’t been filling the sewers with a collection of temporarily alive abominations at that point either.

I could tell the first one we ran into wasn’t meant to last long because it had a purple flame in it’s chest which was burning it up from the inside out.

Lucky hit it with a stick before I could vomit flame on us. That staggered it. A few dozen more whacks while it was down reduced it to a burning pile of jelly.

If I was Vaingloth, I would have been keeping track of all my creations. I hoped that was true, and that he’d felt every blow from Lucky’s club.

Sure, I’d melted his eyes, but he deserved a lot more suffering than that.

A roar from farther down the deep sewer tunnel suggested that my wish might have come true. Like most wishes, I was going to regret making it, but for that moment I let a little bubble of malicious glee rise to the top of my heart.

“I can get her out of here,” Zeph said. “Which exit is clear?”

“No!” I said cutting off Lucky who was about to answer. “We all get out together.”

“You need to live. Above all, you must,” Zeph said.

“I will. I am really good at living. Haven’t failed to do so yet. But you and Lucky need to get out of this too. If I have to make that a goddamn Divine Decree, I will. Neither of you are allowed to die. Am I clear?”

Zeph blinked, shocked, I think, by the fire in my voice.

Lucky just laughed.

“Best not to argue with her,” she said. “The noise will just attract more of them.”

Zeph made an expression that was probably a frown and nodded silently.

I probably hadn’t convinced her, but it didn’t matter. We were all moving and that’s what counted.

When we ran into the next of Vaingloth’s disposable sewer beasts, Zeph deposited me gracefully on my feet and flashes forward.

I don’t think she had a blade, and her claws had always seemed pretty short to me. Much too short to get through the heavy scales on the tube-like monster that was rushing down the tunnel towards us.

A moment later however, she was back at my side and the monster was falling into two cleanly bisected pieces.

“We’re leaving a trail like this,” Zeph said, appearing beside us as fast as she’d left.

“Can’t be helped,” Lucky said. “Didn’t have a lot of time to put together a good escape route, or all that many decoys.”

“Wait, ‘all the many decoys’? We have decoys?” I asked, a whole new set of wheels turning in my head.

“Yeah, Smiles and Oolgoo are working together, and some of the Kobolds know these tunnels scary well,” Lucky said, “They’re killing off some of the other monsters down here to make it a little less clear which paths we’re taking.”

“Oh. Oh that’s good. Melty Boy is going to have to check them all,” I said as we continued running. “He will, but it will take him more time, and that’s fantastic!”

I was on my own for running. Either I’d forfeited the right to a baby-carry by making an adult demand, or Zeph was simply being reasonable that she was a better defender without me encumbering her. I suspected it was probably a little of both, and, as was the theme of my life, regretted the lost a few hundred yards latter when keeping up with the annoying long legs of a Bugbear and a Fox Wind began to prove challenging.

“If we don’t get out of here, you can both blame this all on me,” I said, refusing to fall behind. 

Keeping up with them wasn’t easy, but running was the one thing I actually was good at, so  it wasn’t as impossible or miserable as it might have been.

In fact, given that Lucky at least wasn’t holding back, it was a lot easier than it should have been.

And I was glowing more.

“There’s a whole lot we can blame on you,” Lucky said. “You don’t have any idea the kind of bonfire you lit when you incinerated that Inquisitor do you?”

“Oh. Did someone notice that? Thought I was being subtle there.”

“Oh you were,” Lucky said. “It all happened so fast that most of us had no idea who or what smote the hell out of those guys. We were just happy to be alive. The dickhead in charge though? He’s been a bit less than subtle. He burned up that whole precinct looking for you.”

“Oh. Hmm. So how much of the city wants me dead? Like all of it, I’m guessing?”

“Dead? Oh no. No, no my silly friend. They want you to take the big seat. We’ve had enough of centuries of darkness under the current idiot. It’s time we saw the sun again.”

“If anyone had told me that being dead would involve entertaining more visitors and not less, I would have given the whole thing up as a bad idea and invented myself a portal to some other, emptier world. In fact that’s a rather good idea. I should get right on that. Oh, wait, right. No more hands to hold the tools with. Ah cosmic retribution for a life of misdeeds, how wonderful to run into you yet again.”

– Helgon the wishing-he-was-less-Eternal-than-he-is, to the third group of refugees to arrive at the Factorum in the space of two decades since the Sun Fall.

It took almost a week before we were ready to go. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but when every second takes an hour to tick by thanks to the looming threat of a Neoteric Lord finding you, a week becomes the next best thing to an eternity.

What didn’t help at all was that I had almost nothing to do the whole time either.

I’m not an especially big fan of work. Some people seem to find meaning and purpose in being productive. Growing food and cleaning up and repairing all the things that break on a daily basis aren’t anything new to the world following the Sun Fall. We may live under the dictatorial thumb of a quasi-god tyrant monster, but day to day life is probably similar to what it always has been since a society that doesn’t grow food starves, and one that doesn’t clean up after itself dies of the plagues, and one that doesn’t fix what gets broken both staves and dies of the plagues. None of that means that work doesn’t suck though.

In theory therefor, a week where I couldn’t poke my head outside or let any living soul catch sight or scent of me should have been the relaxing vacation I’d always hoped for.

If you think that may I refer you back to the little ‘being hunted by a Neoteric Lord’ problem I was dealing with.

The one time work would have been useful for getting me out of my own head it was, of course, not an option.

To her credit, Zeph understood that before I did and dropped a mountain of books on me before I even thought to ask for them.

A lot of people didn’t care for reading. They sat through their mandatory education periods, picked up enough reading comprehension to recognize signs and decipher simple manuals and called it good.

That was not me.

I read everything I could get my grubby little hands on, even if it meant breaking my own rules about avoiding risks like ‘pissing off people who could do me grievous bodily harm’. Oh, I never let them catch me. Just because I was willing to break a few rules didn’t mean I was stupid about it. There were plenty of books I’d never gotten a peak inside because filching them would have been entirely too obvious.

Zeph, joyously, had some of those!

That turned a week of eternities into a week of slightly more bearable eternities. 

She was good about other things too. 

Like feeding me.

Since Vaingloth hadn’t been able to catch a glimpse of her (when she wants to move, she moves), Zeph was free to move about and managed to bring back a surprising amount of food each day. It wasn’t always in the best of shape, but there was plenty of it. That would have been a welcome change if my appetite hadn’t decided to be flakey as hell.

When I woke up, I’d be hungry. By the time I was conscious enough to shovel food into my face, my appetite had all but vanished. Zeph suggested it might be Sola waking up as well and providing me the support I needed. It was a kind little fiction, but we both knew that wasn’t it at all.

“The last of the travel gear we need should be ready by tomorrow,” she said over what should have been breakfast on the sixth or seventh day I’d been imposing on her hospitality.

“And you said the Factorum is about two weeks away from here? By the route you know?” 

“Two weeks if we’re lucky. We’ll be bringing enough supplies for three weeks though in case we need to make any detours.”

“Can we carry three weeks worth of supplies?” I wasn’t looking forward to the aches and pains of a two week forced march, but a force march followed by thirsting to death seemed even less appealing.

“You are a God Bearer, so anything may be possible, but I’m going to presume Sola will not be able to provide any assistance. That’s what has been taking so long.” Zeph didn’t need to justify herself, and I had been trying to very hard not to complain about how miserable the whole situation was, but I’m not the best at hiding my emotions it seems.

“We’ll leave when we leave,” I said. “I know we’re not safe here, but we’re definitely dead if we’re not ready for the wastelands right?”

“It’s not impossible that we would survive, but it would be much more difficult,” Zeph said.

“I’m a big fan of not making things more difficult than they already are,” I said, though that didn’t reassure her as much as I’d hoped. Because she was just as anxious as I was. She was just better at hiding it.

“I have word of the other people who were at the site of Melty Boy’s visitation,” she said, changing the subject so neither of us would have to think about it too much. I was delighted that she’d come around to calling Vaingloth ‘Melty Boy’. I amused myself by imagining the title would somehow make it out into general usage and reveled in just how enraged that would make him.

Maybe pissing off a quasi-god wasn’t something to hope for, but since I’d already gone all-in on that, it wasn’t like there would be any additional danger in making even angrier at me. 

“Did they get out of there, or were the other patrollers able to get there too quick?” I asked. We’d heard rumors that patrollers from some of the neighboring precincts had been dispatched to deal with ‘a nest of criminals’ but the details had all been second hand.

“They did. Most of them. Some of them apparently went to ground in the precinct and managed to hide until today. The other scattered and probably passed the incoming patrollers.”

“What about Vaingloth? Anyone talking about what happened to him?”

“He’s declared a special festival. He’s calling it the ‘Bounty of Light’ festival and its scheduled for tomorrow.”

“And what happens in a Bounty of Light festival?” I asked, pretty certain I could guess the answer.

“For one day, there the cities lamps and beacons will be lit to their highest settings,” Zeph said. “The official reason is to celebrate how close the city is to finally returning light to the world and let people search for the ‘Light Within’ and, although this rumor spread separately, the ‘Last Spark’.”

“And the ‘Last Spark’ would be?”

“According to the rumor? It’s a piece of light magic, or maybe fire magic, or maybe even the god of light. Whatever it is though, the rumor claims it was stolen, right before the Sun Fall, and it’s absence is why the world fell into darkness. People aren’t officially being asked to look for it, but if someone finds it they’ll be the first of all Melty Boy’s advisors.”

“Wow! Instant promotion to the top of the social order. That’s a sweet deal if anyone can find the spark. It would almost be tempting to look for it my…” I cut myself off as my brain finished processing Zeph words. I drew in a deep breath and sighed. “Would almost be tempting if I wasn’t the Last Spark, right?”

“For many it would be tempting nonetheless,” Zeph said. “Melty will be good to his word. Even someone like you, he would elevate.”

“And then destroy me at some more convenient time. After he’s got Sola.” I could see my future if I went for that particularly idiotic choice. “You know, even without Sola, I think I was wrong. That’s not a tempting offer at all. Apart from getting me close enough to him to stab him in the neck, he’s really got nothing to offer me.”

“He wouldn’t be trying to kill you.”

“Sure he would,” I said. “I mean it’s not like I wouldn’t try to kill again if the opportunity arose again. I’d have to imagine that would put me back on his ‘kill violently and painfully’ list pretty quickly.”

“The nine remaining lords can be strange, but yes, I expect you wouldn’t stay long in his graces.”

“Would I even have a chance?” I asked, and then amended. “Of killing him?”

Sacrificing myself was not a play I wanted to make, but if I could free the world from his influence, wasn’t I supposed to?

“With Sola bound as she is? I do not believe you would,” Zeph said, shaking her head as though she could hear the thoughts lurking that were behind my question. “He has had since before the Sun Fall to assemble his defenses, any mortal weapon or tool should have been accounted for.”

“Ugh. I hate him. I hate this whole place. We live in a stupid world!” It wasn’t a new frustration, but Zeph’s reaction to it wasn’t what I’d expected.

“The world was worth loving once,” she said, her soft voice even quieter than usual. “I think much of it still is too. I can see the peaks in the distance and remember sailing over them. They are as tall and proud now as they were then. The same is true of the people.”

“Maybe you’ve met better people than I have,” I said. “Most of the ones I know are just doing whatever they can to get by and survive.”

“I think that’s what people have always done. Even in this world, there are still people like a the Bugbear woman who are focused on helping those who are weaker than themselves.”

“Yeah, but Lucky’s special,” I said, hating myself a little bit more for having ruined yet another of the things she’d spent time and energy building.

“They all are,” Zeph said. “All of the people who try to make the world better than it was.”

A set of people which notably did not include me.

“Even if this world punishes them for it? Or because this world punishes them for it?”

“That they endure in spite of the punishment is admirable. That they try in the first place makes them special though.”

“I wish being special was enough to save them. A lot of people see someone like Lucky and their impulse is to toss her in the fires before anyone else.” That was why I couldn’t see the world like Lucky did. She wanted to help people, I wanted to survive, and sometimes there just wasn’t any overlap between the two.

“She has avoided the fires so far,” Zeph said. “I wasn’t able to find out where she’s gone, but she has definitely fled out of sight of the patrols, or at least no one has seen or heard of a patrol apprehending her.”

“I just hope they didn’t kill her,” I said. “She deserved better than that.”

“You’re damn right I do,” Lucky said, as she lifted a tile up from the basement’s floor and rose up so she was halfway into the room.

“W-w-what?” I said, every sense going past high alert and into borderline hallucination mode. I’d stared at the floor for a week. I tried lifting the tiles. They were both incredibly heavy and laying on top of solid earth and stone. What Lucky was doing was impossible.

Except that I hadn’t checked the tile she’d lifted up.

“I’d love to compare notes Little, but we’ve got maybe a minute before the patrollers get here, so we’re leaving. Now.”

I turned to look at Zeph. She was just as surprised as I was, but, predictably, reacting a lot faster than I was. Before I had a chance to object, she’d hoisted me up into her arms again and we were off, descending into a narrow darkness that I couldn’t help but feel certain was my tomb.

“The wastelands are wide, and their dark rivers cut deep. Walk there and you walk among the dead and the things which should have died but never did. Oh there’s treasure to found and glory to be won, hidden in the wreck and ruin of the world that was, but understand that for the waste walkers, your life is the most delicious treasure of all, and if you’re not careful, what comes out of the waste may be wearing your skin, but what’s hidden behind your eyes won’t be you at all.”

– from the last accounting of Phin Drazel, caravan master and explorer, recovered from his home one year after he set out to find a new path between Mount Gloria and the Factorum.

I was pretty sure Zeph hadn’t rescued me out an ironic need to get me killed in a more horrific fashion than even Vaingloth would have bothered with.

“There aren’t any caravans that go to the Factorum,” I said, stating what was painfully common knowledge.

“We couldn’t be part of a caravan if there was,” Zeph said. “And we can’t risk going to any of the other Lord’s cities either. They would make you their pawn the same as he would have.”

I would have scoffed at avoiding Vaingloth’s name, except for the sense of his presence hovering disturbingly close above us. It was unnerving, and my only comfort was the certainty that if he knew were I was, he wouldn’t hesitate even an instant to try to kill me again. I’d enjoyed hurting him, and I’d put everything I had into making the most of the moments he hadn’t been ready for. There had never been the potential for peace between us, and I was glad that for once he’d been the one to suffer the consequences of his actions.

“Have you been there before?” I asked, wondering if this particular consequence of my own actions was something I could dodge away from or not.

“No. But there are paths which can lead us there,” Zeph said with a sadness in her voice that made me wonder who she’d lost on those paths.

I was already sitting down, but I reclined further back and blew out a breath. I was a city girl, a creature of alleys, and buildings, and sewers. My city sucked, but everything I knew about the wastelands made it clear that they sucked a whole lot more.    

“The god shard you bear will keep you safe,” Zeph said. “Nothing in the shadows will move against a God Bearer unless something greater compels them to.”

“Something greater like Melty Boy?” I asked, knowing that Vaingloth simply had to have plans and resources he could unleash on anyone foolish enough to try to escape from his city.

“No. For all ‘Melty Boy’s’ power, he abandoned those who dwell in the waste. That is neither forgotten nor forgiven. He cast aside his influence over them and will never be given another chance to claim it again.”

“So what greater things are there then?” Because whatever the answer was I wasn’t going to be happy about it, but being surprised by a nightmare greater than a Neoteric Lord would redefine what unhappiness looked like.

“Other God Bearers,” Zeph said.

Which, sure, of course. Sola had been so full of light and kindness, I might have made the mistake of failing to consider that other godly fragments might be a bit harder to deal with.

Then a far worse though occurred to me.

“The waste walkers. Are any of them God Bearers?” 

“Yes.”

As answers went it was everything I didn’t want to hear and pretty much enough to convince me not to go.

“I can’t go. We can’t go. Sola’s bound in spells,” I said. “She’s not going to be able to protect me at all.”

“It’s not her power, it’s her presence which will let us pass through the wastelands.”

“Us as in you and me?”

“I will be your guide, but I will not have your protections,” Zeph said, and took an amulet on a necklace from one of her pouches. “So I will have to provide my own.”

I didn’t recognize the engraving on the amulet but I could feel a distant delight at seeing it which I had to presume came from Sola.

“Would we be safer if it was more than the two of us? Caravans talk all the time about having a minimum threshold of people to keep the waste walkers away.” The survivors from the few caravans which had dipped below that threshold painted some vividly clear stories on why leaving with a healthy surplus of people in the caravan was critical to its success and survival.

“They would need their own protection, even if it was only the weight of their collected souls, but that would make it much easier for ‘Melty Boy’ to find us.”

Which made a disturbing amount of sense. Even just coordinating the logistics of moving a caravan sized army of helpers would make the trip nigh impossible to put together, not to mention recruiting people who would be willing to venture off on a trip they very likely wouldn’t be coming back from.

“So, and forgive me for not asking this better but it’s been a long day, so why?”

“Why?”

“Why do this?” I don’t know that I necessarily wanted clarity on that point, but I definitely needed it. I was more than willing to take the rescue, and be given somewhere better to run to than a well lit basement somewhere, but I’d live as long as I had by being afraid and fear was telling me that people had all kinds of motivations for helping others out, most of which weren’t all that safe to rely on in the long term.

“Because the alternative is your capture and dissection,” Zeph said, looking puzzled.

“Right. And that’s a great reason for me to get out of here, but what’s in it for you?” I didn’t want to straight up ask her why she saved me, but she seemed to grasp what I was asking anyways.

“Ratkin is a delicacy in the Factorum. I’m going to feed you well on the journey and then sell you off by the pound,” Zeph said before rolling her eyes. “You really don’t remember?”

“Pretend Sola is gagged and somewhere on the other side of the sky,” I said. “Oh, and that I’m a kid at her first day at a Learning Center.”

Zeph frowned at me, which was warranted.

“You’re hardly that young, and certainly not that clueless,” she said. “It’s…it’s just difficult. I can see her in you so clearly. I can tell you’ve chosen her and she’s chosen you, so it’s hard to grasp how much she hasn’t been able to share with you.”

“Believe me, I’d like to know more too.”

“Yes, I do. You’ve only been with her for a short while I suppose?”

“A couple of days,” I said. “We’ve been trying to figure out what to do since I found her.”

“You’ve done well to avoid his attention for that long, though I gather you had some unwitting help there.”

“I did?” Unwitting help is often the best kind since it tends not to get me in trouble.

“He has had the Elite households in an uproar since right around the time I gather you met Sola. I suspect he confused their usual plotting and scheming for being responsible for her loss.”

“Why would one of the Elite’s steal from Melty Boy? He’s crushed upstart houses before and he wasn’t particularly slow or merciful about it.”

“For a god shard? Especially one they could keep hidden? Or deliver to one of the other Neoteric Lords? There are many games they play and embracing their own demise seems to be the point of most of them.”

“Wish I’d managed to go a little longer without drawing his attention then. Would have been fun to see a House or two fall.”

“Fun, yes. Chaotic, certainly. And dangerous as well. The stability the Neoterics provide comes at many terrible prices, but the shattering of that stability carries a price as well.”

“A price that you’re willing to pay?” That she wanted to get rid of Vaingloth wasn’t a difficult guess to make. We all wanted to get rid of the jerk. Zeph however was demonstrably willing to take significant risks to accomplish that, something which had never been true for me.

“For her? Yes.” She bowed her head and folded her hands together, pausing for a breath before she continued. “You know the god shard you carry is a piece of the sun. No matter how little she had been able to share with you, that is the core of her essence and she couldn’t have help it back even if she wished.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of hard to miss. She’s only one part of it though, a fragment that survived the beasts attack.”

“Like many others,” Zeph said. “People believe the gods abandoned them, or failed them, or were destroyed because they were too weak. The truth though is that the gods are still with us. Their power is scattered, or consumed by the beast, but when they saw their ends coming they cast out their domains, broken and separated and terribly, terribly diminished so that the beast couldn’t find them, and would draw no sustenance from them if it did. Their goal was to starve it out and return once it had left and once they’d identified the weak spot which allowed it access to this realm.”

“Sola didn’t mention that. She made it sound a lot more desperate.”

“It was. The alternative was the dissolution of everything that is and will be,” Zeph raid. “Some gods waited until utter destruction was upon them, others shattered themselves early, before they could be devoured at all. All except one.”

“Sola? Was she the last one to fall?”

“No. Far from it. She was the first. She stood against the beast before any of the rest and she fought it for the longest. Other gods fought their own battles and fell despite the shelter she offered. If not for her, there wouldn’t have been time for the rest to do as they did and the beast would have consumed the very concepts that our existence in based on.”

How someone could eat a concept was well beyond me, but I’d caught a glimpse of the beast, I’d felt a distant memory of Sola’s battle, and I believed Zeph’s words. If there was anything that could each the idea of existence, it was the thing Sola had fought.

“You sound like you were there. That you saw her fighting?”

“I was. Or my spirit was. Like you I am a vessel, though where you are still distinct from your god, I and my spirit are one.”

“Like you’re not who you used to be? Like your god ate you or something?”

Zeph chuckled.

“Not at all, and my spirit is not a god. What I am, is what I was, and what I was, what I used to be, was one of the sun’s beloveds.”

I flinched a bit at that. The distant affection I felt was clearly Sola’s, which added more than a little weight to Zeph’s words, but I didn’t do ‘beloveds’ and if that’s what this whole situation was predicated on, things were going to get messy sooner or later.

Zeph’s smile was an understanding one though, and she continued her explanation without expecting a response from me.

“Mount Gloria’s education being what it is, I’m going to guess you’ve never heard of the Fox Winds?”

I shook my head, not sure what other response to make.

“When the sun passed across the sky, she traveled with the winds. I was one of those winds and we were called the Fox Winds since we chased away the lesser spirits to keep her path clear. When she fell, we did as well, wandering for time out of mind, before we managed to return here and find the piece of ourselves which had been lost in the solid world. That is why I will help you. Why I must help you. My path is the path of the sun, your path, and I will give anything to run with her again.”

“There are no shadows which can hide our enemies from the Holy Sight of Our Lord! Though darkness has swallowed the world, it cannot conceal those who would sin against the Holy Covenant which binds and shields us. And know, not later, no, know this today! That they are legion! We see them where they crawl, but they are legion I say! Ever out there, eating away at what is ours. Seeking to take what we’ve made, what we’ve bled and died to preserve and corrupt it into filth. So be alert! Stay watchful! If any would stray into sin, if any would turn against the Lord Eternal, let your voices ring out against them! Bring the light and bring our Holy Judgement down upon them!”

– Traditional Mount Gloria speech to begin the Defender Memorial Service to honor those who died in the previous month guarding the Central Water Portal.

I should have been terrified. I had a Neoteric Lord who was personally invested in killing me dead. Vaingloth was not feeling merciful or playing around. What I’d done to him, melting his eyes, was not something he was ever going to forgive, and he’d had centuries to work out inventive and horrible methods of killing people.

That I wasn’t already dead was due in part to Sola keeping me alive, but doing so had left her bound up far away from me and unable to repeat the trick. 

Which meant I really should have been dead, since Vaingloth was entirely capable of assaulting me from the other side of the city.

Except I think he might have lost track of me.

I couldn’t fault him. As far as I could tell I move moving faster than sound.

Or the threads of spellcraft he’d bound me in were as great at muffling my hearing as they were at blinding my eyes.

The person carrying me, who I probably should have been terrified of as well, didn’t seem to be encumbered by any of that though. They simply ran, carrying me like I weighed nothing at all.

Not wanting to be dropped if we were moving as fast as it felt like we were, I lay still and tried to work out what came next.

Death.

Mine.

Maybe everyone’s.

Which was not a particular helpful observation, even if it seemed like it was unquestionably accurate.

I’d messed up. I wasn’t sure where. Maybe healing Mumora? I’d known that was a bad idea but I did it anyways. I did it anyways but I didn’t regret it.

Which weird. I’d always imagined being caught at something and how angry I would be at myself for whatever stupid thing had landed me there. I knew I’d feel like that because of how angry at myself I always was when I came close to being caught.

But that wasn’t how I felt this time.

I didn’t know how Mumora was doing, or how any of them were. I might have gotten them all killed, but as I lay there in a stranger’s arms, being carried somewhere  not even my own personal god knew where, I saw that I honestly didn’t regret anything I’d done.

Sure, killing the patrollers and the Inquisitor hadn’t been the best choice I could have made. Maybe next time I’d choose differently. In the moment though, unleashing the wrath Sola and I had felt had been what I needed.

That moment had made sense. Dying afterwards also would have made sense. I wouldn’t have like it, I was glad it hadn’t come to that, but it would have been an understandable outcome of my actions.

The situation I was in though? It made no sense at all. Blinded and deafened and as helpless as a baby was not a state I’d been prepared for.

What was I going to do about it?

I had no idea.

Relax maybe?

I mean I was supposed to be dead, and while there are far worse things than death, I couldn’t picture any of them involved by held by strong and sheltering arms while I was whisked away from danger.

Heck if this was some wastewalker monster that had developed a sudden urge for Ratkin-on-a-stick or something, they were welcome to me. I’d be dead but at least without the dramatics and misery that Vaingloth had in store for me.

Except, I couldn’t quite make the leap to accepting that idea.

I wasn’t alone anymore. If I died, Sola was going to lose her connection to the world. Best case she’d wander around as a flickering divine spark until she found someone else to welcome her in. In the worst case, the beast, or maybe even one of the Neoteric Lords, would eat her.

I didn’t like any of those possibilities so I had to live.

I couldn’t do anything while we were moving, and I had no information to plan with for when and wherever we stopped. That left me with plenty of time to fret needlessly though, which was an activity I had lots of practice with and was getting better at all the time.

My thoughts were happily spinning out into increasingly ridiculous scenarios when we came to sudden stop. There should have been a jolt or a sense of deceleration, but instead, one moment we were moving fast enough to outstrip the wind and the next we were still.

“That should have snapped all those threads, but let’s get them off you just in case,” a soft voice said as I was placed onto a hard floor.

One by one the threads of spellcraft which had bound me were cut away, first the ones tying my legs together, then the ones which bound my chest, and finally the ones which had wrapped themselves around my head.

The cocoon I’d been trapped in fell away to reveal a surprisingly well lit basement room as well as my rescuer.

She stood about half again as tall as I did. Where I had more human traits than rat ones, she was the reverse, blending mostly fox traits with a slight morphing towards a human posture and limb length proportion.

“I’m not sure who you are, and I don’t think a ‘thank you’ could possibly be enough, but thank you anyways. That was a bad spot you just got me out of,” I said, feeling oddly secure under the circumstances.

Like I knew this person.

Or, was it this type of person?

Or was it even me who knew them?

Sola? I asked silently, listening for her thoughts as best I could. Do you know who this is?

There was no answer. Or at least none in words. I did feel a distant warmth bloom inside me though. 

My brain didn’t know how to process any of this, but it was smart enough to listen to the unspoken reassurance my god sent me. 

“It could have been worse,” the fox-lady said. “He could have been there in person.”

“If he had been, it might not have gone all that well for him either,” I said, assuming that we were talking about Vaingloth.

“You’re not the first God Bearer he’s encountered. Though I suppose you might be the first one to channel a miracle quite that big. Is who I am not coming back to you though?” She turned in a circle as though there might be a side of her which would jog my memory.

“Have we met before?” I asked, knowing for a certainty that we hadn’t.  I’d met a few Foxkin in the past, but like me they were more humaniform than this woman. She was closer to a fox-version of a Wolfling, with same sort of short fur and a snout and a tail and digitigrade legs the wolf-people had, just sleeker and red where the Wolflings were typical bigger and grey.

“Not in these forms, but my spirit and your shard worked together for an uncountable number of years.”

“You know Sola? Wait, can you cut her free too? Whatever Vain..” I got half his name out before she stopped me with a hand over my mouth.

“Don’t use his name or any of his titles,” she said. “Normally he doesn’t listen for them but at the moment? He’s going to be searching for any trace of you he can find and if he hears his name in your voice, we’ll have a problem I may not be able to outrun.”

“Understood.” Among Vaingloth’s many mythical abilities which people loved to tell stories about, the idea that he could hear his name whenever it was spoken. For those who deluded themselves into putting their faith in him, there was the belief that Vaingloth himself would answer their prayers if they were just good enough because he could hear each and every one of them when they prayed to him. Given how many people were in the city though and how often they prayed for this, that, or the other thing, that had seemed like an impractical hope at best. That he was willing to make a special case for me, seemed less impractical however. “What about made up names for him? Does it matter if we’re thinking about him or is it the actual words he’s listening for?”

“There’s no guarantee of protection from him, but other names are less likely to attract his attention.”

“Okay, well then, Melty Boy bound Sola up too. I think it was the same spell he used on me, but I can’t tell where the strands are?”

“Melty Boy?”

“I wanted to set him on fire but I had to settle for just melting him a bit.”

“Ah, that would explain why he struck out at you. Normally he would have tried a recruitment strategy.”

“That would have been a colossal waste of time. I will never work for that ass.”

“Others have said that and been convinced. He has many strings he can pull.”

“Wish I could hang him up from them,” I said. Killing the people had been a sin. Killing something like Vaingloth, who should have died ages ago, would be doing the world favor.

“You’re not alone in that either. Though in decades of trying, I don’t know if any have had as much success as you have. And, you really don’t know me? My name is Zeph.” She looked hopeful but all I could offer her was a shrug.

“I wish I did, but Sola’s silent.”

“He must have used a different spell on her then. One not bound to him, probably to isolate her. Otherwise the spell on her would have unraveled too when I freed you.”

She spent a moment paused in thought and I gave her the time she needed.

“I think we need to get you to someone who can break one of his bindings,” she said.

“There’s someone in the city who’s more powerful than he is?” I couldn’t picture it but I also couldn’t have pictured running into a god while fleeing from the murder of a patroller, so my imagination clearly had some significant limits.

“No. Not in the city and not more powerful, but possibly able to break the spell you speak of.”

“There’s someone out in the wastes? I thought the only thing out there were ghosts and monsters?”

“There are as many or more ghosts and monsters inside the city as outside.”

I hated the city, I hated the people in charge of it, and I hated a pretty fair number of the people who lived in it, but the thought of leaving the city still terrified me. I knew the reports of the wastelands were probably overblown. Vaingloth’s people always made things seem worse than they were, and he had every reason to keep people fearful and huddled inside the walls where he could control them.

But there was some truth to the fact that there were terrors outside the walls.

Under the circumstances though, taking my chances with the terrors probably was the better option. 

With my life officially that messed up, my thoughts were drawn back to the other lives I’d disrupted. The ones who deserved for me to do something to fix the damage I’d done to them. Assuming that was even possible.

“One thing, you freed me, but what about the rest of the people at Lucky’s? I’m guessing you couldn’t rescue them too?”

“No. I couldn’t. I’d hoped that by drawing you away, it would draw Melty Boy’s attention from them too.”

“Do we know if that worked?”

“He is searching for you and since he hasn’t found you he may not have taken any action against them. If we try to circle back there though, one of his sentries will be waiting for us.”

“And I’d be doing them even more harm. Yeah. It’s a terrible idea.” And there was the anger at myself that I’d been expecting.

“You haven’t done them any harm.”

“Not directly, but my actions set this all in motion.”

“Then before judging yourself, perhaps you need to watch for how it all plays out. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have the time to take a wait and see approach. “

“Are we in danger here?” I asked with more than idle interest.

“Not yet, but it looms over us. He will find this place, there are only so many places we can hide within the city. Where we need to go is the Factorum. He won’t, and I think can’t, follow us there.”

I’d heard of the Factorum. Lots of people had. It was a city, or it had been one before it lost its Lord. Since then it had stood somewhere impossibly far off in the darkness, with no Fire Portal or any other portal, and no people. Just a silent mausoleum to one of the few Neoteric Lords who’s reign hadn’t been eternal at all.

“Do not think that because our Divine Lord does not stand before you that he is not with you. Do not think that because he does not lift the burdens from your shoulders, your troubles are unknown. And do not think that because you have escaped his judgment for the moment, he will not render justice unto you.”

– Proclamation read each day to the city’s children at their Standard Learning Centers.

When we healed Mumora, Sola had borrowed a miracle from another domain. That had been tricky and wasn’t something she couldn’t necessarily repeat. Burning though? Burning was a part of her and, when she needed to express Divine Wrath, was so natural as to barely be considered miraculous at all.

The miracle, if there was one, lay more in Vaingloth’s survival. Neither Sola nor I had been under the delusion that we would be capable of incinerating the Lord Eternal of Mount Gloria. The light that reduced the Inquisitor and patrollers to dust wasn’t like any I had ever conceived of. It was so bright it shown through the souls of everyone present. Even Vaingloth.

He tried to protect himself, but Sola’s power wasn’t scoped within mortal limitations. His power was worldly and real. Built up from before the Sun Fall, and rich with stolen divine might the gods had shed as they were torn to pieces by the beast that destroyed them. For all that though, he was still mortal and so very far from being ‘Eternal’.

I think it was Vaingloth’s stolen divine power that drove Sola’s rage, even more than her captivity had.

I wanted him dead for burning up my family, and friends, and because he was a miserable ass. He portrayed himself as a compassionate leader who was working oh so hard to help everyone, all the while making sure that his power base was as secure as it could possible be, and toying with the rest of us for nothing more than his own amusement.

Sola wanted him more than dead, and through me she could at last act.

I need to be clear though. It wasn’t all her. She didn’t take control of me. The sin we performed in that moment was real and I was as much or more a part of it than she was. It was her power and her choice, but it was my acceptance and my desire for it which allowed her miracle to flow into the world.

When it hit, Sola’s miracle lit the world. 

I’d been afraid of giving myself way by glowing but in that moment, there was so much light that shadows which had covered the city since before my grandparents were born were chased away.

It was so much light that it went past blinding and into a realm where it revealed a shining light within us all.

And I don’t mean ‘everyone in the melee’ or ‘everyone on the block’. I mean everyone in the city.

And then we squeezed.

Sola and I.

Faster than thought, we took the light from the city and focused it down into the bodies of our enemies. The patrollers didn’t even have time to glow. They were simply gone, and in their passing, I was struck speechless.

I called what we did a sin because there was no other term for it. We saved ourselves. We saved everyone who fought with us. We denied people who were bent on evil aims the ability to execute their cruel agendas.

But what we did was a sin.

As the souls of the patrollers were torn away from their lives, I felt each and every one of them. Through Sola’s eyes, I looked over the grand sweep of their lives.

Were they bad people? They had done evil. Reveled in it at times even. Were there reasons for what they’d done? Had they been protecting people? Had they done good while they drew breath? I didn’t want to see any of that, but to Sola’s eyes everything was laid bare.

I saw the regrets they carried – the ones which had made no difference, and the ones who had stayed their hands. I saw the hurts that had been done to them, the ones which filled them with rage oh so similar to my own and the ones they’d been asking for. I saw their fears, and their hopes, the love they carried, and all the broken paths which had prevented them from learning how to do better than they had.

I didn’t forgive them. I understood them, but I did not forgive. With all the power I wielded, I was not merciful.

I told myself that I couldn’t be, but it was a lie.

There were so many things I could have done in place of what I did. If all I wanted was to defend myself, I could have left them alive, left them with a chance to choose better actions. I could have made them safe, taken from them everything that would have let them hurt anyone again, but at least left them able to learn and grow.

Instead I condemned them and Sola joined me.

The Inquisitor had done the worse things of all of them and was the farthest gone, wrapped in his mania which turned every horrid practice he undertook into a holy offering. He would have been the hardest to disarm, but only to the extent that its harder to snap two matchsticks than one.

Sola burned him, both for the things he had done, the lives he’d ruined, but also to get to Vaingloth.

Vaingloth had only exposed so much of himself, so we could only hurt him to a limited extent.

But he was watching us.

So we invaded his eyes.

We reached out and placed a a fire bright as creation into each of his eyes and then added more, and still more.

He was too far away for me to hear his screams, but they rang loud and clear in my ears anyways. 

I wanted to listen to that song forever. To be lulled to sleep and softly woken by the mad, agonized screams Vaingloth couldn’t contain. I wanted to know that everytime the agony faded and he thought it was over, that was only the prelude to it crashing back even stronger than ever before.

I wanted that, but it was not to be. For all that he was mortal and Sola was a god, Sola’s vessel was me and I was weak and imperfect. My rage didn’t make me strong at all, it just focused me and substituted for the courage I’ve always lacked.

When Vaingloth cut the link the remaining fire we were sending into him had nowhere to go beside the Inquisitor and he withstood no more than half a blink of it before his body was reduced to a concept rather than anything which retained a physical reality.

For a moment, as the last motes of the light dwindled away, there was silence.

For a moment afterward there was too.

All across the city.

For the first time in living memory, a miracle had touched everyone’s life. It had been too big and too undeniable for any to claim it was anything other than what it was.

I’d wanted to stay secret and hidden, but I should have known that the truth of the gods returning wasn’t a secret someone as small as me could keep. Sola was too big, and too important.

The Killing Word hit before the silence faded.

Vaingloth wasn’t dead, and he was far from defenseless.

I felt my blood freeze and my heart burst. All strength left me and the abyss yawned around me.

I would have fallen then except for one tiny detail.

I wasn’t alone.

My blood rebelled against the cold with a warmth that could never be quenched (Thank you Sola). My heart, which had broken so many times before, held strong, bolstered by a fire that roared inside it (Thank you again Sola!). And my strength, which had never been much to begin with, was drawn away like water leaking down a drain, only to be refilled by the ocean of my communion with Sola.

Vaingloth wasn’t finished though. He’d been at the “smashing problems with magic” game for a long time and, as it turned out, this wasn’t the first time he’d had to deal with a god being mad at him.

The threads of spellcraft that followed the Killing Word, showed that the deadly attack had been a feint. Oh, it definitely would have killed me. The best feints were perfectly viable attacks if they weren’t responded to after all. Mostly though it had been intended as a distraction. In keeping me alive through the Killing Word, Sola had been focused on our connection and missed the attack Vaingloth directed against her.

I felt like that was a forgivable mistake since Vaingloth wasn’t anywhere near powerful to hurt Sola. Entrapping someone is not the same as harming them however. I felt his spellcraft wrapping around us like threads of spider silk.

Unbreakable spider silk.

I was able to move my body but my connection to Sola began to drown in shadows as thread after thread was layered down between us.

I felt Sola moving against it, but she hesitated.

I can’t smite this without hurting you, she said in a whisper as her voice and presence became distant and faint.

Go ahead! I said. I can take it!

I had no idea whether I could or not, but I also knew that it Vaingloth could spit a Killing Word across the space between us once then he could almost certainly do it a second time just as easily.

It was too late though.

Sola was gone.

Or? Not gone. She was still with me. I knew she was. I couldn’t feel her, or hear her, or sense any scrap of her power, but who needed any of that? She was a god.

No.

She was MY god.

I looked around the street at the people who were just coming around from their awe-inspired trances. I was glowing like a star thanks to all of the Divine Wrath I’d channeled, so there was no chance I’d be able to hide anymore.

Except…

The threads that had cut me off from Sola? Yeah, they weren’t just metaphysical in nature. I’d been able to move freely for a moment, but in place of a second Killing Word, Vaingloth had turned the spell he’d woven against Sola to include me.

Or rather to include smothering me.

Glowing wasn’t a problem, largely because I wound up cocooned and drowning in very real threads of pure spellcraft.

And I wasn’t alone.

The last thing I saw before the spell working closed over my head was Vaingloth being thorough and covering everyone else who was present with a flood of spell threads.

He wasn’t going to leave any of us alive.

He couldn’t.

We’d seen him for what he was.

In the light of Sola’s wrath, his soul had been revealed just like the rest of ours had been.

It’s one thing to reject a Neoteric Lord’s claims of supremacy out of anger, or spite, or simply a refusal to accept that the work could be that screwed up that someone like Vaingloth would be the best person to be in charge. That belief is easy to come to but frail in the face of even the simplest demonstrations of a Lord’s power.

What Sola’s light had shown us was what Vaingloth really was. A petty, and very mortal man. One who was desperate for power and had done unthinkable things to acquire and maintain it. However great the power he’d stolen made him though, nothing was ever going to change that at his core, and for all his accomplishments, Vaingloth was a pathetic, hateful coward.

As final thoughts went, I wasn’t happy with them.

I’d run out of options and struck back. I’d killed a few people who the world might have been better off without. I’d blinded and hurt the Lord of all Mount Gloria and shown him how very much he was hated. I should have felt better about that. Like I’d at least done one thing that mattered.

It wasn’t enough though.

Hurting people wasn’t what I was here for.

I’d run away all my life because I didn’t want to hurt people. 

I hated it.

I wanted to help them. At least the ones who helped me. And maybe the ones who needed help but didn’t think there was anyone who would listen.

Maybe because no one had ever been there for me, and that felt wrong.

Darkness closed over me, and silence, both shepherding me to the grave.

And then I was moving.

Carried by strong arms which were holding me tight as we slipped past the wind itself.

“Darkness breeds perversion, and the light brings purity. We will bask in his Holy Radiance and be forever pure, all as one, and one to light the path for all. You, who have fallen to criminality and vice. You who have fled from the embrace of the light. You who have sinned against our Eternal Lord and against your fellow man. We do not cast you out. We do not damn you to darkness. Always, the light will welcome and receive. Always will you be held within the fold. And on this day, will your sins be forgiven, your darkness washed away, and your place in the Holy Light secured, now and forevermore.”

– Executioner Three Seven reciting the Litany of the Kindling to a group of ten Bugbears who the patrollers had brought in for ‘Crimes: unspecified’.

Brawls were the kind of thing I ran from at best possible speed. Nothing good ever came out of them, unless you counted how often they wound up with the violent types getting tossed into the flames as Kindling.

I didn’t even have to look around as Oolgoo landed the first hit of the melee. I already knew where my exits were. 

Behind me there was a sewer grating. Not a good option, but a close one. Getting the grate off would take maybe ten seconds? Normally a complete mark against it, but there were enough of us here that the patrollers wouldn’t be paying attention to a little thing like me that was running away from them.

Better than the sewer though was the abandoned building across the street from where Lucky’s place was. It was a longer run but the door was missing so it would take no time at all to break line of sight and put something between me and the patrollers. Something that, critically, could block a Death Mark.

That wasn’t viable either though. The path to it was out in the open and plainly visible. If one of the patrollers did see me running for it, he might think I was going for reinforcements, and that would get me shot dead well before I could make it to the open door.

Which left a straight run away from the brawl. I’d have to get to the far end of the block before I’d find anything that could meaningfully be called cover, but it wouldn’t be hard to communicate with body language that I was not a combatant. As long as the patrollers had to contend with the rest of us, the most they would do with me was remember that a small Ratkin girl had been at the scene and had gotten away.

It would take them zero effort to tie that to the report of a Ratkin girl who murdered one of their fellow patrollers and they’d be out for me in force and with Death Marks ready to shoot first and ask questions never. A lot of small Ratkin girls would die before they decided they’d probably gotten their target, but none of them would have to be me if I was fast and clever enough.

And I could be.

They didn’t know what they were dealing with.

I could hide in places no one had ever even thought about hiding thanks to what Sola could let me do.

A straight run was perfect, and it was right there before me.

So why in all the flame scorched hells were my feet not moving?

It wasn’t Sola.

She was quiet.

And watching.

I could run.

I was really good at running.

And I had every reason to.

“Get out of here!” Lucky said, a single stride carrying her from behind me to five feet in front of me.

So, there! I even had permission to run! Someone who knew me wanted me to leave. Wanted me to live.

Because no one here was going to.

And they knew that.

Oh, the melee was decidedly in their favor. Oolgoo’s hit was only barely the first one and far from the hardest. 

The patrollers and the Inquisitor had better weapons, better training, and better armor. They were practiced at fighting, in theory, though the sort of fighting they were used to tended to involve more kicking unresisting victims as close to death as they could without rendering them ineligible to use as Kindling. That fact revealed itself in glorious splendor as they were met with a hoard of people who’d passed the breaking point. 

The patroller who’d been in the second floor was the first to fall, literally, as a group of elderly residents grabbed him from behind and hurled him to the street.

Ratkin and Kobolds can survive falls from second story balconies and human’s can too, unless they land head first. I couldn’t hear the impact over the yelling and screaming of the fray but I saw it clearly enough to imagine the the shattering crack as skull met stone. The patroller twitched a few times but I’m not sure if that was any sort of living response.

The death of one of their own would have driven the patrollers into a frenzied rage, except for the small detail that they were already in a frenzied rage and it wasn’t enough against the sheer numbers against them.

Punches and kicks had limited impact on the patrollers, but sheer weight dragged each of them off their feet a whole lot faster than they’d been expecting.

The Inquisitor was more of a problem. In part, he seemed to have a supernatural amount of strength, and in part even touching was burning the people who were trying to keep him under control.

Since physical contact wasn’t working out so well though, more than a few turned to simply hurling stones at him. His enchanted robes protected him from most of those attacks as well, but ‘most’ is not ‘all’ and getting clobbered by half a dozen stones every time he tried to speak was disrupting his spellcasting quite effectively.

All of if which made it look like we were winning.

But there wasn’t any winning this. We could make the patrollers and the Inquisitor surrender and they would be back with an army twenty times the size. We could kill them and the army would kill not only those responsible, but everyone in the precinct.

And if we could somehow stop that from happening?

If we pushed back the small army of Inquisitors and patrollers they would send against us? 

In that case, Vaingloth would show up.

Or one of his Champions.

Vaingloth had been able to imprison a god.

There wasn’t any fighting him.

I had to run.

So I did.

Into the fray.

Yeah, I know.

One of the patrollers had managed to pull his Death Mark from his belt though. I don’t know who he was aiming it at. I’d like to say Lucky, or Smiles, of Mumora. Or anyone I should care about. The reality was though that I didn’t know who he was trying to take out before the mob crushed him, except that it wasn’t me.

It wasn’t me, but it should have been. That might have saved him from me biting his wrist hard enough to break bone.

I’m not strong enough to wrestle things out of the hands of any patroller really, except if said hand is no longer functional and producing blinding amounts of pain.

Which gave me a Death Mark.

People holding Death Mark’s are a priority kill target. 

But I didn’t throw it away.

Through Sola I could feel the power in it.

It wasn’t divine, but it should have been

This…this is wrong. This should be a Sacred Relic but no part of Death’s dominion is here. This is an idol to a lie. Sola was freaked out. I was freaked out to be holding a Death Mark, but Sola was freaked out by something far more profound.

I don’t think this one is special, I told her, looking it over quickly to see if there was anything about that seemed custom or unique.

The creator of this has fashioned a replica of the Divinity of Death, Sola said. They’ve created the shell of a false god to steal the power of Death without bearing any of the responsibility of Death’s divine realm.

That made sense on a surface level, but I could tell there was an awful lot more to unpack from Sola’s words than ‘somebody set themselves up as the new god of death and is being a loser about it.’

“Stop!” Lucky’s voice was loud enough to carry over the sound of the melee and held enough authority that people listened to her.

“You will all die for this sin,” the Inquisitor said, his arms pinned to the ground by a dozen or so people with heavy boots stepping on them. Can’t burn flesh through a good thick layer of leather.

“This city is better served if it does not lose a Inquisitor and any more patrollers today,” Lucky said. “This was a misfortune. Nothing more. Let it pass and you will see or hear of none of us again.”

“You will not escape judgment so lightly.” For a guy who was pinned face down on the ground, the Inquisitor didn’t seem to be able to see how precarious his personal position had become. 

Or maybe he could.

Would Vaingloth let an Inquisitor live who’d been defeated by the masses and then bowed his head to their whims?

“Our home is gone,” Lucky said. “We know you’ll be back to burn it down, but we will not be here by then. Let that be enough to slake your vengeance.”

“What about Ferrow?” one of the patroller’s screamed. Not the one whose hand I’d broken. “You killed him!”

“He fell. It was an accident. An accident that will keep the rest of you alive. Or he was pushed. Do you want that to be the story you believe? Do you want us to have to act as though one of us has murdered a patroller?”

I probably should have felt a twinge of guilt at that.

I didn’t, but I probably should have.

“Fine. He slipped.” The patroller was not happy but even the dimmest of bulbs are sometimes bright enough to see when there was only one option which led to him taking more than a four or five more breaths.

“Good. Then we can all walk away from here,” Lucky said. “You’ll chase us. We know that. Consider that another part of your vengeance, or do you not know what it’s like having to live outside the light?”

The patrollers grunted, which wasn’t quite an acceptance of Lucky’s argument but it wasn’t a denial of it either.

“No.”

I didn’t want to hear that word.

Not from the Inquisitor.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t from the Inquisitor.

The words came out of his mouth, but he wasn’t the one speaking them.

The people who were holding the Inquisitor collapsed, felled in an instant by a wordless spell.

Abomination. Sola was absolutely certain of that.

“No. There will be no negotiations. Not today,” Vaingloth the Eternal said, rising in the body of the Inquisitor to stand with an aura of dread might which drove everyone to their knees.

Abomination. Sola was not supposed to be a cold god, and I noted that all too clearly.

I hadn’t been overwhelmed by Vaingloth’s power.

I could still run.

Sola would protect me.

Instead, I saw that Vaingloth was right and I rose to stand.

He didn’t see me.

Didn’t notice or care, that I stood when everyone else was being shattered under the weight of his power manifested.

Vaingloth was right though.

There would be no negotiations today.

ABOMINATION.

Vaingloth’s power was overwhelming. He held more force that the entire mass of Mount Gloria, gathered over centuries.

But only so much of it was given to the Inquisitor. Only so much was he willing to risk on this trivial skirmish.

There was only so much protection his offered the Inquisitor and against Sola, it was far from enough.

I didn’t speak a word. I didn’t make a gesture. I didn’t give him any warning at all.

I simple incinerated them.

The Inquisitor, the patrollers, and every trace of Vaingloth I could reach to send the rage and hate that had built up since the day of my birth.