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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did we know that?

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

Kalkit.

The Blessed of Secrets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was I letting rage guide me? 

No. Of course not.

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

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

Rage is kind of stupid like that.

I wasn’t going to hit Sasarai.

I was going too destroy him.

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

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

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

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

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

Sasarai arrived less than a breath later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just like all of the other Neoterics would expect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, no, of course not.”

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course. Flaws. How obvious.”

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

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

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

“Undo the latch.”

“Oh but the latch is coated with poison.”

“Have a minion open it.”

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

“Use more.”

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

“I see where this is going.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that what Helgon said?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Am I?” Little asked.

“Well, I’m talking to someone.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m glad you killed him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wait, you’re blind?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No others though?”

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

“He didn’t.”

“How could you know that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In this future, lead with that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pet was not the right word.

Whatever was beside her was nothing like a pet.

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

Or that should ever exist in the world.

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

But Little was petting it.

And it was…

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

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

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

And then she paused.

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

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

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

For some reason that made me laugh.

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

We’ve worked together often, Sola said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was when she’d  summoned her own darkness.

It hadn’t spilled out of her companion.

It had come from her.

The ‘Sun Queen’.

Who was something else entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draconia? I asked and got no response.

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

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

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

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

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

“Helgon?”

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

“The first one they killed?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That Dyrena is still alive?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Which makes her…”

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

“You’re wasting your time with prayers? Now!?”

“I am not.”

“You’re kneeling in front of an altar to the God of the Night with your eyes closed and sacred words on your lips. If that’s not prayer, then please explain what you imagine you’re doing, Meluna?”

“Not wasting my time. Nor is it strictly accurate to say I am praying.”

“The world is burning Meluna. There is a monster eating the sun and the people are watching a host of gods losing the fight against it.”

“I am quite aware of that.”

“Your prayers will not be enough to sustain them. We’ve received word from Twin River Junction, the town rallied behind Lacsandros and, when he fell, the town burned.”

“They didn’t burn. It was much worse than that.”

“Then why are you praying? Do you want to burn as well when Night falls too?”

“I have no interest either burning or suffering the fate which befell those in Twin Rivers.”

“Then stop praying.”
“I have. Quite a while ago.”

“Then get up, it’s time for us to leave.”

“And go where?”

“The other Common Accessors and I are going to lead our families to the new temple site in Helsguard. It hadn’t been sanctified yet, so there should be no godly influence there.”

“Are you of the belief that the gods exist only in their temples Kulon?”

“Of course not, but their temples are were the fires started.”

“They weren’t fires. And they won’t be constrained by any temple or town. Once the End of All Things finishes devouring sun, it will devour everything else as well. All of the town, all of the seas, all of the mountains. Nothing will be left. Not even the memory of us.”

“You would have us abandon all hope then?”

“No. There is still hope, it’s just a slim and unpleasant sort of hope.”

“Then you are praying to find a better path we may follow?”

“I am not praying. I am searching.”

“For what?”

“For the strength to follow that bitter hope to a day when the sun will shine again.”

– Blessed of the Night Meluna being interrupted while receiving her blessing during the Sunfall

Theia’s response to what might be the most important question I’d asked in my entire life was to turn and look at me quizzically.

“Sorry to break it to you, but this whole ‘Blessed’ thing doesn’t come with a salary, just benefits,” she said.

“What?” I asked, sounding just as confused as I felt.

“I don’t work for anybody. Not even Umbrielle. We’re more partners.” She was teasing me, and I was a moment away from strangling her into giving me the answer I needed.

That was not going to produce the results I needed though.

Also the odds that I could catch her were low even if I was being generous with comparing my skills to hers.

So I took a long, slow breath before resuming.

“When you chose to search the garden for divine fragments, was that your idea.” Always best to start with verifying assumptions.

“Sure.”

I could see she knew what I was asking and was choosing to torment me anyways.

“So you decided to hop into the Garden and loot the place one day, just because?”

“I mean it wasn’t exactly like that.”

“She was the one who chose to go, though there was a great deal of discussion before hand,” Zeph said, apparently tiring of Theia’s attempt at playing stupid.

“Thank you. And who was it who initiated those discussion, if I might ask?”

“We were throwing around a lot of ideas,” Theia said simultaneously with Zeph saying, “The Chosen of Night.”

I smiled and nodded my thanks to Zeph. She was a delight to deal with. Especially since she seemed willing to annoy Theia in my stead.

My delight faded as I thought through her words though.

“Wait…the Chosen of Night? Isn’t that you?” I asked, turning back to Theia.

“Nah, Zeph’s talking about my boss,” Theia said.

“I thought this wasn’t a job. How do you have a boss?” I asked, more confused than I’d been since I started asking questions.

“It’s not a job, but trust me, when you meet Meluna, you’ll understand.”

“Meluna is the Blessed of Night, Theia here is the Blessed of Night’s Shadows,” Zeph said.

Why there was a distinction between those two things or separate gods to cover those domains seemed bizarre to me.

Gods with especially large or fundamental portfolios would often have aspects which were more focused on specific elements of their domains, Draconia said just for me. I had several before the fall, though they’re lost to me now.

So were they like servants then?

Not at all. They were pieces of myself. Not so powerful, at the time, as I was, but more easily able to act on their pieces of the domains which I held sway over.

So Umbrielle is…?

She is Night, but the part of Night focused on the shadows night brings. Night had many other aspects, many of which I quite enjoyed the company of.

Many but not all?

Night’s Haven for Thieves aspect and I had a fairly intense professional rivalry, and Night’s Dark Hours of Despair I found difficult to interact with. 

But they were all Night? I mean it sounds like you had different relationship with different parts of the same person?

I did, except for the part where we weren’t ‘people’ as you think of them. In our previous states were were far more vast and far less defined than we are presently. It would be closer to say that water and fire have different relationships when a kettle is put on to boil compared to when the water is used to douse the fire’s flames.

“Draconia filling you in on things?” Theia asked and I saw I’d been standing there chatting away inside my head for a few moments longer than I’d intended to.

“Yeah. Where is Meluna now though?” I asked. “We need to talk to Little, but I think Meluna will be the one to have the answers we need.”

“Oh. Good luck with that,” Zeph said. “You get answers from Meluna under precisely one circumstances.”

“When I feel you need to received them,” said the lady who stepped out of a pale shadow inside the palace.

I turned to look at her and could feel…nothing?

Don’t worry, she’s here, Draconia said. That’s an old trick of Night’s.

“So does that mean I’ll be getting my answers, or are you here to make sure no one gets them?” I asked.

I hadn’t been afraid of the dark since I was a little kid, but something told me I had good cause to be wary of this woman.

“That very much depends,” Meluna said, drifting more than walking towards my right side as though she needed to appraise me from various angles.

“She has a part in this,” Zeph said. “A part you engineered for her.”

“Engineered? Engineers do work. I did nothing of the sort,” Meluna said.

“But you are why I’m here, aren’t you? Without you, I was destined to die in the Garden.”

“We have no destinies. Not anymore.”

“Maybe not, but none of this has been random. I’m here through my own choices, but those choices could never have happened without the support you sent to me.”

“I’m support now?” Theia sounded rightfully offended.

“What? You don’t think you helped me with stuff I could never have handled on my own? I didn’t say you were only support, just that without your help I could never have escaped the Garden. I would probably never even have questioned Sasarai’s teachings enough to try.”

“And now you are questioning everything it seems?” Meluna faded into another shadow before reappearing on my other side.

“Oddly, I have fewer questions now than I did before. One of them which has jumped to the top of the list though is, do you really want me sharing what I know?”

“And what proof would you have to share in support of your suppositions?”

“Does that matter? Once I ask them questions, the rest will begin searching for the answers no matter what proof I can or can’t offer.”

“Well it seems you have me quite boxed in then, don’t you? I suppose after the centuries of hiding I must now reveal all that I know, because someone at last asked politely? Obliquely? How would you characterize your request?”

She faded away as she asked and I knew she was behind me when she reappeared.

“I would say that if I am asking for something no one has asked for before, it is because I am still dancing to the tune you laid down for me.”

“You give me too much credit, I have never played any instruments. Not well at least.”

“What is it you wanted to ask her? Something about Dyrena?” Theia asked.

“I should hope not,” Meluna said. “That is a particularly dangerous name to conjure by. There are seven Lords on this world who would most unhappy to hear that aught of her remains.”

“Sasarai’s not precisely a threat anymore is he?” I asked, somewhat concerned that the count of Neoterics had dropped to seven without him. 

Not that I wanted the count to be anything greater than zero, but from what I gathered there was some number below which the remaining Neoterics would simply make a mad dash for the remaining power and war like the world had never known would break out to finish up what the Beast had started long ago.

“The First Tender is the second most dangerous of threats at the moment. He has more reason for unreasonable actions than all of the rest put together.” Meluna was creeping up behind me and I couldn’t feel a thing. Draconia’s enhancements of my senses did nothing for me. I wasn’t even sensing a general air of danger, despite the fact that I knew I could be a single breath away from Meluna deciding to end me to ensure Dyrena’s plans weren’t disrupted.

“And what is the most dangerous threat we face?” I asked, wondering if she would claim the title for herself.

“We are not yet rid of the End of All Things,” Meluna said from a few inches behind me. “Until that is gone, nothing else will come close to being the most dangerous of threats.”

“I’m not sure Sasarai has the power to claim second place. You know what I did already, don’t you?” I said, listening to her creep backwards.

“I should like to hear the tale in your own words,” Meluna said.

I nodded and launched into a sketch of the events we’d been through, trying to note each point with gratitude where Theia either saved me or gave me something new to ponder.

Predictably at this point, Meluna caught a case of the irrepressible giggles when I got to the part about taking the divine fragments. 

“My apologies,” she said. “There are the thing we hope for, and things we imagine might occur, but then there are the delights of things going catastrophically wrong for our enemies and it is challenging to remain unmoved on those occasions.”

“Wasn’t that the reason you sent Theia in to find me though?” I asked, my elaborate theory seeming more rickety with each chuckle that escaped Meluna’s lips.

“You were a contingency, a much hoped for contingency,” Meluna said. “Had I been aware of the actuality of your existence rather than simply the possibility of it, I would have insisted on including myself in the party which ventured into Sasarai’s abode.”

“Then, wait, how did you know to have all of the help that we needed waiting for us?” I asked, growing more concerned with each moment.

“As I said, contingencies. No single plan ever survives its initial implementation. The value of a plan is in the failure states it identifies and creates mitigations for.”

“Such a shame you weren’t able to account for all failure states you might encounter,” Sasarai said as the sky filled with Death Birds.

“Do you really think these defenses will protect you, Helgon?”

“I should think they would be a considerable deterrent at the least. Why? Do you see a flaw in them Dyrena? Something I should improve?”

“Everything has flaws, even the gods as it turned out.”

“Well then I shall address them. That is what we do after all, isn’t it? Learn, innovate, improve and create a better world tomorrow than we have today.”

“That is what you do my dear Helgon. I would believe you to be unique in that regards, but then you’re not without the same blood on your hands as the rest of us are you?”

“I wouldn’t say our hands are clean, but we have, I believe, somewhat less bloody hands than the rest of our number.”

“And we live because the rest are unaware of that fact, or of what we truly did with those we selected for our portion of the culled population.”

“Less bloody however is not the same as clean, is it?”

“No. No it is not.”

“Will you tell me the flaws you see in my defenses then? Or would it be more fitting and just to leave my fate to whatever outcome the others may devise?”

“Just? Oh, how beautiful it would be if there was a single erg of justice left in this world, but we made sure the Heavenly Court was among the earliest to fall, didn’t we?”

“I distinctly recall you advancing the claim that the Heavenly Court being devoid of true justice was a moral cornerstone to the course we chose.”

“Yes. After we corrupted them, well, not all of us. That was mostly the twins, but yes, by the time our great scheme began to become real, there was real corruption it served to undo. Along with almost all the good things in the world too.”

“Only almost all. You after all are still here, and you have always been the best of us.”

“No, Helgon. Of all our cabal, I am by far the worst.”

– Helgon and Dyrena coming to terms with the destiny they had chosen

Helgon smiled and there was a sense of relief? Amusement? Wistful nostalgia? Trusting that I could read the expressions of a NeotericLord  properly, and a dead one at that, was probably unwise but I felt comfortable landing on something like ‘generally positive’.

“We are, I am sad to say, far beyond the end of my plans. They were somewhat interrupted by…” He gestured to all of himself.

“Pardon me for saying this but being dead doesn’t seem to be a bad look for you.”

“Thank you. Unlike ‘aging gracefully’, I suppose I can rely on staying like this for the meaningful future.”

“For the future to be meaningful, wouldn’t you need to be a part of it?” I asked. I could feel Draconia restraining herself in the back of my head. 

I knew she and Umbrielle had spoken privately and there seemed to be some agreement between them concerning Helgon. I wasn’t be urged towards his immediate destruction, assuming I even could destroy a ghost, but neither was there precisely forgiveness in Draconia’s heart. 

That didn’t surprise me. Some things weren’t really forgivable. 

Helgon did appear to be useful though and, given the circumstances before us, we needed as many ‘useful’ allies as we could get.

“I thought that for quite a while. The only future that mattered was one that I created and could continue tinkering on. As a motivation towards immortality may I offer my opinion on how foolish that is. We all represent the futures of those who came before us, and our own futures are best entrusted to those who will have their own questions they seek answers to. Our job, I believe now, if perhaps a bit too late, is to seek the best answers we can find for those who follow to build upon.”

“So there’ll come a time when you’re not even a ghost, or is this an immortality you can no longer reject?”

“The shackles that bind me here are of my own creation, forged from myself to entrap myself. I believe there will come a day when they fall away, a time when I too can journey onwards, and yet I can’t help but remain tightly clasped to this existence, however sparse it may be.”

“Why?” It was too simple a question, but I felt like I needed to understand the ally I was going to use as a lever to move the heavens with.

“Why? Why indeed. I asked that question once too, and the answer I received was laughter I hear even now. I, unlike a particularly cruel person I know, will provide a better response though; I remain because I am not yet done, to leave now would require laying down the hopes and dreams of far more than myself, and after all I’ve done, I am not yet ready to fail them.”

“So I was right? You do have a plan then?” I knew we were advancing along someone’s agenda because my continued existence was possible only because others had been in place to help me at too many junctures.

“I had a plan. A brilliant, glorious plan with the chance to learn so very much about my fellow Neoterics and the true reality of this new world and the divine elements within it. I can show you the secret vaults I have which are filled with notes and contingencies and double blind trials.”

“But all of that ended when you died?”

“Death has a knack for doing that it seems. It was quite poetic in a sense. I’d been part of cutting off so many lives as they were right in the middle of the plans for their lives. There was no justice left in the world, I had been told, but even without the Heavenly Court, there is still poetry it seems.”

“Is that why you let them kill you?” I asked.

“Let them? Oh no. I was certain we were going to kill Vaingloth. He was, in some senses, the most dangerous of us all. Had the others possessed an ounce of sense, they would have enacted Sasarai’s proposed plot against Vaingloth rather than betraying me and casting me down. Or forcing me to cast myself down I suppose. Pride compels me to point out that none of the rest managed to assault me.”

“Then why are you like this?”

“Oh, when it became more than clear that they had me trapped and were going to divide my holdings, which included things like my internal organs, between them I chose to deny them their prize. And their physical forms, though of course they’d come prepared for that so atomizing their bodies was nothing more than temporary inconvenience. I do harbor a hope that it at least stung badly though.”

“And the people of your city? What happened to them?”

“Most assume they were killed in the blast. It was a fairly substantial detonation after all, and the city was left without any power or enchantments for a quite a while afterwards.”

“Most assume?”

“Yes, and you should too.”

“I spent my life assuming a lot of things. I regret all but a few of them now.”

“Once the current crisis with Sasarai is resolved, ask me again. I might have a more satisfying answer for you then. To address an earlier supposition you held though, you are not wrong to assume that there is a plan in play. There are in fact several plans, each of we Neoterics had at least a dozen or so, but there is one which I believe binds and curtails them all.”

“Not Sasarai’s?” I asked, completely unable to believe that the monster who held my people’s souls in chains of lies they’d been fed since birth could be the true master of the world.

That drew a guffaw from Helgon.

“Sasarai? Oh my no. Even the thought…have you ever met him? He is not…one might charitably describe him as possessing a limited imagination. Most of the society he put together he stole from earlier philosophers. No, Sasarai’s plans are so mundane and uninspired that had he not turned to others for help, his precious Garden would have collapsed inside of one generation, or possible within the first few days of its existence.”

That seemed a little harsh. I mean, I hated Sasarai, but the Garden had been my home and it wasn’t exactly falling apart. Life within it was a paradise so long as you acted and thought just as Sasarai wanted, and were willing to sacrifice yourself to his root monsters, or to act as scrying vessels for him, or whatever other use his whims might have dictated.

Hmm.

Thinking about it like that I did have to question how we all managed to be as stable as Sylvan society was? I couldn’t have been the only one who felt like I was both worthless and being crushed by the weight of expectations to be perfect, could I? Why hadn’t anyone else lost faith like I had?

Oh.

Right.

I’d had a god to back me up when I finally cracked.

If Kam had lost faith in the Holy Tree and its Tenders, he would have been drafted, and then eliminated.

How many other traps like that were built into the Garden? How many had I simply never noticed because they didn’t apply to me?

Being ‘thrown over the wall’ had always been my personal terror, but the more I reflected on it, the more I saw other means by which those whose faith was ‘insufficient’ were either ‘corrected’ or, more often, ‘eliminated’. It was disgusting but somehow the fact that those ‘safety valves’ were needed so infrequently was even more nauseating .

The Garden should have been rebelling from the day it was founded, but people had been terrified then and no one was willing to question their saviors words, or no one who had questioned had survived doing so.

And so we’d learned not to. Was something wrong? Well then it had to wrong with us, it couldn’t be the powerful who were wrong. They were divine. They were holy. They were the people we had to listen to, the people who had the right to judge us.

The room was getting noticeably warmer, so I fought back my emotions. I had a growing concern over what I might do the next time I saw Sasarai given how it seemed like every stray thought I had concerning him or the Garden was enough to incite murderous rage in my heart.

Or maybe the murderous rage was always there. Hell, maybe it had been there in the first place. I’d thrown more than few tantrums as a kid, and some of them still seemed pretty reasonable.

And once again I had to leash my emotions before I turned Helgon’s nice bedroom and all the books in it to ash.

That Draconia wasn’t any part of that rage was both comforting and a bit frightening. If my anger was that dangerous what was it going to be like when we found something she really hated?

“Thank you for sparing my collection,” Helgon said. He’d been observing my struggles quietly, for which I was grateful. “As I was saying, Sasarai’s plans are nothing to be concerned about outside of his Garden. He may be more inclined towards violence than usual, but his capacity for mayhem is but a fraction of what it was thanks to your actions…and thanks, I suspect to my dearest Dyrena.”

“Dyrena?” I asked, trying to picture who might have been dear to one of the Neoterics.

“She was the best of us, though she would hate me for saying so. She is largely responsible for this world still being here. And she was the first of us to fall.”

“You loved her?”

“Oh, desperately, which, perhaps, is something I should have told her. Or not. The idea that she wouldn’t have known something like that is laughable.”

“What happened to her? You said she was the first to fall?”

“They killed her. Just like she’d planned for them to.”

“It is strictly agreed therefor that there will be no empowering of Blessed following our Ascension.”

“If we must, Vaingloth, but I still feel that there is a great deal we learn with a few test cases, not to mention the value empowered assistants could bring to our endeavors.”

“Yes, Helgon, that is quite the point. With a cadre of Blessed followers one of us might conceive of an endeavor to eliminate one or more of the others.”

“That is not at all the problem Dyrena. Of course we can have faith in one another. If we lacked that this endeavor would be doomed to failure before we’d reached this stage. No, the issue we must avert, the one which prevents us from allowing any Blessed to arise is the danger of reconstitution.”

“All experimentation to date indicates that even the possibility of one fragment retaining the power to draw in its other, missing remnants is borderline at best.”

“What we are doing is unprecedented Helgon. Your experiments cannot illuminate this future for us, and there is tremendous peril.”

“Is there though, Vaingloth? With the power my people will provide me, and the fragments I’ll have collected no single gods, or more likely the broken fragments of one, would be able to stand against me, and I must assume the same would be true of you as well.”

“It is not a reborn god we must concern ourself with. Remember that which we summon and banish will be capable of returning should too large of a presence emerge within the Divine Realm. Even if a reborn god could not stand against us, its need for vengeance could do unto us what we are about to do unto them.”

– High Accessors Vaingloth, Dyrena, Helgon, and Sasarai lying to each other about long term plans none of them would ever get to enact.

Nobody wanted my brother. I wasn’t supposed to be gleeful about that. Only a bad person, and a horrible sister, would be happy that a whole constellation of god fragments had looked at my brother and said ‘nope, not interested’. 

And it really wasn’t fair. He was the only family I had left. And I did treasure him.

I mean I literally treasured him.

He was part of my hoard. If anyone tried to take him from me (aside from Kam himself deciding to leave because I was horrible) I would destroy them. Not injure. Not reprimand. Not hesitate at all. It might have been Draconia’s influence, or maybe just another facet of my horrible personality, but I didn’t have enough precious things to take any chances with the one person who’d stayed with me.

But I was still fighting back a smile at being the only Blessed in the family.

“It might be because you still stink,” Theia said.

Which was certainly unkind, and I couldn’t blame Kam for taking offense.

“That’s not true! I cleansed and anointed twice today! And I washed off all the blood and stuff I got on me from the train. Tell her Jilya! Tell her I don’t stink!”

I could have been cruel there, and it was tempting, because, again, I’m horrible, but I was pretty sure I knew what Theia was actually saying, and I did owe Kam a lot.

“Not that kind of stink. It’s the grace the First Tender took from us, and our connection to the big shrub,” I said, hearing Draconia’s words in my voice, though in this case I was the only one speaking them.

“Big shrub?” Kam asked looking as confused as I had the first time someone had profaned ‘Holy Mazana’s’ name before me.

“The Divine Tree, our not-actually ‘Holy Mazana’, it’s only divine because it has a lot of stolen grace bound up in it and it’s about as far from ‘holy’ as something could be.” It felt weird to say that so freely. How long had it been since I’d had literally burned out my own tongue before uttering even a single word of discontent with ‘Our Great Protector’? Two days? Maybe? I shook my head. It had been a lot longer than that. I’d been paying lip service to beliefs my heart had rejected years ago. I’d been hiding from everyone but no one more than myself. It was still hard though. I still waited to see Kam’s response, a flinch lurking under my skin at the condemnation that I expected to come leaping out.

“Oh, I get it. We’ve been in the Garden, so it’s like the First Tender has us marked?” Kam said, a smile of understanding beaming from him.

“Yeah. Those fragments can all smell him all over you,” Theia said. “It’s not their favorite thing.”

“Pff, yeah, I can see why. So how do I scrub that off? Is there like an anti-Garden bath I can take or something?”

Seriously? This was my brother? How?

“It’ll fade in time, I think, especially if you don’t use any gifts Sasarai gave you,” Theia said.

“He didn’t give us anything.” That was so painfully clear me. I’d credited him with the gifts I’d give to him when they were mine. Mine.

“Yeah, but he did teach you how to use them,” Theia said. “Or probably just people who worked for him, but the effects the same.”

“Wait, do I still stink then?” I was certain I was more offended by the notion than Kam was, and I didn’t try to hide it.

“It is so tempting to tell you that you do,” Theia said, mischief sparkling in her eyes, “But you have had a rough day, and you did save all those people, so, no, you don’t smell like Sasarai’s blasphemy any longer. I honestly can’t tell what you smell like. Maybe what Sylvans are supposed to smell like? Or maybe that’s Draconia mixed with Diyas and a hint of Polsguls? You’re not doing anything at the moment, so it’s hard to tell.”

“Wait, if we smell bad because of the First Tender, how did she ever get Blessed in the first place?” Kam asked, showing more interest in things that weren’t himself than I was used to from him.

“No idea,” Theia said. “I’d guess Draconia wasn’t in a position to all that picky?”

It was far more than that, Draconia said, speaking to both of Theia and I. If Jilya hadn’t held my domain in her heart, I couldn’t have so much as whispered to her. She was the only one who visited us besides our captor in almost two centuries but it would have meant nothing if she wasn’t who she chose to be.

Which suggested the hand of some guiding force I was not entirely comfortable contemplating. I’d been under the control and guidance of a ‘higher power’ I’d believed in with all 

“Or one of the other divine fragments could have reached out to bless her, right?” Theia said.

No. She is mine. Draconia’s wasn’t answering Theia’s question. She was making me feel better, and I appreciated it. I’d lost my family, my home, and my ‘Great Protector’ because those had all been lies. In their place I’d found the things I could put my faith in, and that was a treasure beyond price.

“It weird only hearing part of the conversation,” Kam said. “I’m jealous.”

“You don’t sound jealous,” Theia said. “In fact you’re taking this a lot better than you should be.”

“I don’t know, a little while ago, I had a knife to my throat, and mom and dad did too. I kind of figured out the sort of guy the First Tender was when he said they were going to bleed me out slowly and make our parents watch, so they’d put on a good performance when it came time to talk to Jilya.”

I knew I’d rescued my family, but I hadn’t understand what I’d rescued them from, or the damage Sasarai had done in the short time he’d had them in his clutches.

“You wanted to be drafted though. You wanted to fight for the Tree,” I said, anger doing a temporarily passable job of holding back a fresh round of tears.

“Well, yeah, but I guess that was kind of stupid too. I mean I just wanted the good life that came from it. And to be looked up to. And, you know, to protect people. That seemed like a good thing too.”

“Yeah. Yeah it did,” I said. 

How many Sylvans had been feed to the roots fighting the monsters Sasarai controlled? 

The temperature in the room started to rise and it wasn’t Draconia’s fire that was doing it.

It was mine.

Our world was built on corpses and sustained by the creation of new corpses, and it didn’t have to be like that. 

We could be better.

We wanted to be better.

But that didn’t serve the small number of people who’d decided they were the only ones who mattered and the rest of us existed as currency to be spent on whatever they desired. 

“You said, the others were debating what to do next?” I asked Theia.

“I’m not sure it even counts as a debate, but, yeah they’re trying to come up with something.”

“Good. I think I can settle that debate.”

“Are her eyes on fire?” Kam asked.

I dimmed that down. I was going to be speaking to both Blessed and Gods. Best not to start off on too contentious a foot.

“Aww, you shouldn’t have told her,” Theia said. “I wanted to see where she was going with that.”

“Oh, you will,” I said. “I think they’re all missing something. Before we talk to the other Blessed though, I need to talk to Helgon. Alone.”

“Are you sure?” Kam asked. “I said I wasn’t going to leave you alone.”

“You’re not,” I said. “Believe me. You…”

I hugged him. 

My stupid brother.

MY stupid brother.

“I can’t tell you what it means that you stayed, you butt.”

“Hey, you need me, I’m here,” the butt said, and I knew he would be. 

Even if he stunk, even if I couldn’t offer him anything beside being his sister and having his back like he had mine. I had him because he had me. Maybe we hadn’t had a choice about being born into the same family, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t make a choice to be in one that was more than the inertia of being together and some meaningless blood history.

“Yeah. Me too,” I said. “Go with Theia to the lab though. See what you think of the arguments the other Blessed are making. You won’t be able to hear their gods, but they can tell you what the gods are saying.”

“One question though, are they really gods? I mean the First Tender never claimed to be, and Holy Mazana is just a big reservoir right? So are these things really gods or are they just pretending too?”

“We’re not pretending, but we are no longer the gods we once were. We are fragments, and it is only through people like your sister that we can act on this plane and connect to others anymore,” Draconia said, speaking with my voice. She hadn’t asked in words, but I had consented when I felt her intention.

“Share with me what you talk about with Helgon will you?” Theia said.

“Maybe,” I said. “Depends what bribes you’re ready to offer.”

“Oh. We’re at the bribery stage now are we?”

“I do like treasure,” I said.

Theia rolled her eyes at that but I saw the smile hiding at the edges of her mouth.

She took Kam away and I turned to find Helgon waiting behind me with his hands folded together, patiently allowing me to explain why I’d summoned him.

“You were part of the cabal that destroyed the old world, correct?” It was a simple question and one which held less malice than I’d expected. Maybe because he was already dead, though that clearly didn’t seem like a sufficient payment for his crimes.

“I was.”

“And you had a plan to destroy the rest of the cabal.”

“I did.”

“Then simply tell me this; which step in your plans is this?”