“Under your holy light, we stand revealed and accepted, and through the darkness, your shepherds will guide us to your understanding and love.”

– Traditional prayer to Solus the Divine Sun.

“To your flame we give ourselves, for your glory, we burn. Your light shall scourge the wicked from the world and purify your people.”

– Neoteric chant of the crowds gathered to watch Kindling being sent off to the portal of flame.

I was looking at the sun. Directly at the sun. That was supposed to be a bad thing wasn’t it? So why was I seeing more clearly than I ever had before?

“I can go,” my sunfire twin said. “I don’t want to, but I know, or I think, being around me can be bad for people like you.”

“People like me?” 

Just the most brilliant question I know. Top work of the world’s most clever mind. In my defense, literally nothing in my life or any story I’d ever heard had prepared me for what was in front of me. I think the only reason I didn’t either go stark raving mad or, more sensibly, run until my legs gave out, was that being bathed in the light of understanding comes with a natural calming effect.

I was still nearly petrified of course. Overwhelming awe isn’t something you can just laugh off with a cynical chuckle. Or it’s not something I was able to laugh off, and I’ve had lots of practice being cynical, so I presume that’s a general rather than personal truth.

“Incarnates. Ones who are part of the world’s solidity.”

“I’m what now?” I’m not stupid. Really. What was in front of me was impossible though, and my brain had a lot of reorganize to fit in the belief that was I seeing could even adjacent to real.

“I’m sorry. I’m not what I was. I should be able to just show you all this and have what I want you to know just appear in your mind. I’m supposed to be able to do that, but I can’t.”

“It’s okay. We can just…why don’t we start over?” I suggested. The blazing copy of me was powerful beyond my imagining. That was easy enough to see that it penetrated the confusion that was swirling around in my head. What came with it though was a sense of how vulnerable the other me was, and that made the least sense of anything up to that point. “You can call me ‘Little’, that’s what everyone else does.”

I sat down and invited the other me to do the same.

“But that’s not your name?” she said, sitting down exactly as I had.

“It’s part of it, and the rest is ridiculous,” I said. “What’s your name though?”

“I don’t have one. Not any more.”

“What happened?” It seemed like both a nicer question than ‘what are you’ as well as being one that wouldn’t be as terrifying to hear the answer to.

“I don’t know. I think something stole me.”

“You were kidnapped?”

“No. Maybe eaten would be closer? I know I’m not what I was. Things are missing. I’m…maybe smaller is the right term? It’s confusing and it sucks, because I’m supposed to know all this stuff. I can feel it. But instead I’m just…just broken and trapped here.”

I don’t know if her frustration and resentment struck a chord in me because she was speaking in my voice, or because her emotions were too close to my own most days. 

“What do you mean ‘trapped’?” I asked, looking around for the walls of a cage that had to be wrapping around us. Not a single bar was visible, but I still had the sense that my double was telling the truth.

“I’m not an Incarnate like you are. I don’t have a place in the solid world like you do. I don’t think I’m supposed to be here at all.”

“Where should you be?”

“Somewhere without the weight of this place. Somewhere I can be everything I am, even the parts that contradict each other.”

“Can you get there? If you could get out of here you mean?” By which I was also asking if she’d be able to take me there since it sounded a lot better than anywhere I’d ever been.

“No. It’s not safe there. I don’t remember much about it, but wherever my home was, it’s death to go back there.”

“That makes two of us then,” I said and started thinking for the first time since I’d been grabbed, what my future was going to look like.

The patrollers did not tolerate even small acts of rebellion, and stabbing one of them as much as I had was more than a small act. They were going to be hunting me until the day I died, and they were going to put considerable resources into making sure that day came real soon.

Which left me where?

Could I hide in tunnels forever? I wouldn’t have thought so because of the whole issue with starving to death, but the garden around us still had plenty of food. I could live a long time on just what was around me, and the plants could always grow more.

Except, I couldn’t stay in the garden either, because gardens had gardeners and the gardener of this place was going to want to kill me even more than the patrollers did.

The food here was someone’s secret, someone who was not into sharing priceless treasures like this. My sunfire double made things even worse. If the food was priceless, then her worth was incalculable.

A shiver ran threw me despite the warmth of my twin.

A priceless garden that was home to a being of unimaginable power (even if she was hurt and broken)? There was one person in the whole city and one person only who could be the owner.

“We need to get out of here,” I said. 

If I didn’t take her, it was possible I might be able to hide in a deep enough hole to live out whatever days it might take for starvation to do me in. Surviving together seemed laughably unlikely, but since my death was pretty much assured in either case, I wanted to at least be able to live with myself until it came.

“I can’t leave unless you’re willing to carry me,” my twin said.

“That shouldn’t be hard, you look pretty light.” I shot her a stupid smile to go with the joke and congratulated my brain for coming up with the remark when it was worked, not a half hour too late.

“I might hurt you though,” my twin said, apparently her sense of humor being one of the things she’d lost.

I laughed for her.

“You won’t be the first,” I said. “And at least this time I get a choice in the matter.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I think if you cast me out, it’ll destroy me again and I’ll have to start all over.”

“Staying here is going to destroy you too though, isn’t it?” I asked.

“No. This isn’t death. It’s not life either though. I’m locked in here, stuck in stasis. I’ll never be anymore than I am now. It keeps me safe.”

“Keeps you safe from other people, or keeps them safe from you?”

“Both. But I’m not meant to be safe. And I don’t think the people who want to be safe from me should be either.”

“Sounds like an excellent reason to get you out of here. Unless I’m one of the ones who shouldn’t be safe from you?”

“I’m a danger to you, but not like the others. If you carry me out of here, I’ll become a part of you and you a part of me. I won’t burn you up, but I think you’ll change and I know change is hard for Incarnates.”

“When you say ‘incarnate’ do you mean I’m something special, or is that what everyone, all the Ratkins and Avians and Dwarves and whatnot are?”

‘You’re the first incarnate I’ve spoken to who didn’t want to consume me in their own manner, and you welcomed me into your heart the moment we met, so, yes, you are special, to me at least, but I imagine far beyond that too. That’s not what makes you an incarnate though. Incarnates are formed from the stuff of the solid world. You have bones and blood and your existence is a set and defined thing. All the peoples you mentioned, everyone you’ve ever met I would think, are incarnates too. And so is the whole world that you know.”

“And you’re something more.”

“Something else. I think that was a mistake I made before. We, there were others like me, thought we were something above you. We had vision and wisdom and power. Or we thought we did. With what I am now, I have to really question that though.”

Her regrets united with my paranoia and very reasonable guilt to get me back on my feet.

“Let’s go,” I said. “If this is a mistake, then whatever. I’ve made a lot of them, so at least I’ll be in familiar territory.”

I held out my hand to help her up.

“If you’re sure?” she asked.

I nodded in reply and took the hand she held out for me.

And that was the end of me.

I burned.

Every whisker, ever hair, every last little bit of me transubstantiated from matter to pure energy, bypassing gas and plasma entirely. 

I saw the world. All of it. Not as it was, not as a dark and ravaged shell with unnatural tick-cities clinging to its body, burning away what little life remained on it. The world I saw was just as empty and dark, but it was the darkness of slumber and the emptiness of a sea of possibilities waiting to spring to life with the dawn.

In the shadows beyond the sky, something unspeakably fearsome lay. Something with teeth that could rend apart time and claws that could shred even the inviolate concepts the world rested upon.

Down on the solid world, in a realm too fixed and limited for me to do more than pass over like a breeze, there was a body. A tool. That belonged to me. 

The unspeakable beast was too vast to trouble the body. She was too small, and too real, for it to even notice. It could destroy her whole world, would destroy her whole world, but something was keeping it at bay. Something eternal.

Something that couldn’t protect me though.

I was too bright. Too big. The great target the beast had sought.

I couldn’t defend myself, I tried that and failed, but that was before I’d become who I was in that moment, and if there was one thing the me of that moment was good at, it was running away, so that’s what I did.

Right back into my body.

I’d burned and it had been rapturous, but I didn’t need to be whatever it was I’d briefly become. We didn’t need that. We needed to be what I was.

A normal, solid, and most importantly, real Ratkin girl.

Pouring everything we were into the tiny package of my incarnated body seemed impossible when we tried it though. We were bigger than the world. Even the mountains were tiny specs to us. I knew my body though. It was home too, one I’d made bit by bit over all the years I’d been alive. We could hide there. We could be safe, if not from the other tiny little bits of the world, at least from the unspeakable beast.

We reached down from celestial heights and laid a single finger on my own brow which drew us hungrily back in.

I woke up with the sense of having touched an immense, unfolding eternity and found myself alone.

Or rather, my sunfire twin wasn’t standing in front of me anymore.

“We should leave,” she said from somewhere behind my eyes.

Her words were wise.

But I was glowing.

“This is going to be a problem,” I said, trying to imagine how we’d hide from anyone if we brought the brilliance of divine light into every shadow that offered us shelter.

“There’s too much of me here,” Sola said.

How did I know her name was Sola? How could I not know that?

The part of my mind that was still fully me jerked back at that thought. And all of the others which hadn’t been in me before. I knew things no Incarnate had ever known. I couldn’t hold on to any of them, but they were there. Perspectives and insights, facts and histories, fragments of an awareness that extended to the borders of the cosmos and the ends of time.

“What are we?” I asked, and felt my heart plummet as the answer rose all too plainly into my mind.