“Where the god abandoned us, we shall forge our own bright and shining star through sacrifice and unity to illuminate this world that all may see the greatness we bring in the coming days and weeks!”

– Vaingloth the Eternal’s promises at the founding ceremony of Mount Gloria.

I was a god. Or we were. Really Sola was. But she was a part of me, so I was stuck being one too.

Divinity sucks.

“Does it hurt?” Sola asked. I couldn’t see her as a separate person anymore, but her voice was still distinctly her own.

I mean it sounded exactly like mine, but she had a presence the size of a mountain and I very much did not.

“No,” I lied. 

Which was pointless. She was a part of me. She knew immediately when I was lying, but a lie is sometimes a choice more than a statement of fact, and for the time being, carrying the divine essence of sun did not hurt.

“I need to be smaller,” Sola said. “You’re right that we shouldn’t be glowing like this. I’m just too big though. I’m spilling over I think, but I don’t know how to throw away any more of myself.”

“What do you mean ‘throw yourself away’?” I asked.

“Before, I was a lot more than I am now. I remember being torn apart though. There’s something out there. You saw it I think. In my old home. I escaped by tearing this part of me away so I wouldn’t be eaten.”

“How do you…?” I started to ask and then reconsidered the question. It was godly nonsense. They were different than people like me. Different rules applied to them, so, sure why couldn’t they rip themselves into bits and then live on in those bits. “Don’t worry about it.”

“They’ll find us though. They’ll find you.”

“Not if we stay down here.”

“But the garden isn’t safe.”

“Which is why we’re leaving,” I said and scurried over to the gap in to roots I’d entered through. 

I tried to draw them back closed to hide the passage. The effort worked better than I could have hoped. Not only did the roots shifts to block the entrance, they grew even thicker, obscuring the gap completely.

With the glow that was radiating from me, I could see more of the passage I’d fallen into more clearly than before. The rocks still looked fractured and disturbingly likely to come crashing down, but they remained solid as I crept past them, working deeper into a maze of cracks and crevices which suggested a massive force had broken the land at some point in the not terribly distant past.

“We’re not going to be safe here for long, but if we can keep moving, we’ll be a bit safer until we can figure out where we need to go.”

I said that like I had a plan. I did not. I had instincts and intuitions and neither of those scored high in the reliability department.

But I was god now, right? So why was I running. Why not just smite my pursuers with the power of the sun?

I’m not terrible smart sometimes, but I’m not a total bonehead either.

Sure. Sola was a god. Or part of a god.

She’s also been captured and held for at least long enough to make a garden stuffed full of near extinct fruits and vegetables. Had she been powerful enough to smite her captors, they would likely be a burnt ashen stain on the ground long ago.

So, no, I was not interested in testing the fragment of godly might I carried against Vaingloth the Eternal, Neoteric Lord and Savior of Those Who Live Under His Blessed Light.

Which was how I found the flooded cul-de-sac.

The fracture I’d been following had split several times and it had taken me about a hour to reach the end of the path. I hadn’t been following any particular strategy but the trickles of water had led me to a widened area where a pool had formed.

The water smelled clean and cool, then when I dipped a finger in I didn’t feel a chill at all.

“That’s me,” Sola said. “We’re sustained by own our light.”

“So I won’t be cold anymore?” I asked, trying to imagine what that would be like. I could sleep anywhere! Anytime!

“Only if you want to be,” Sola said. “No hunger either. Rest and sleep will be good for you still, but if you need to, we can go a lot longer without any of that than you’re used to. The same with breathing.”

“Wait, I don’t need to breathe anymore?” That was far more than I’d imagined was possible, despite that fact that I was magically glowing in a very impossible manner already.

“If you need to go without, we won’t need to, but it’s not something you want to do too much.”

“What happens if I do it too much?”

“You’ll become more like me. You’re still almost entirely an Incarnate, but a little bit of you is less solid than it was. If all of you shifts towards what I am, then we’d lose our grasp on this world. You could become too divine to be a physical part of the world anymore.”

“So, a ghost then?”

“Not even as substantial as a ghost,” Sola said. “Think of it more like becoming an idea in place of being a person.”

“You seem a lot more like a person than an idea.”

“That’s because you opened your heart to me and let me in,” Sola said. “Before you came into the garden, I had no one. The only thing I could touch in the world was the life in the garden. I nourished it and it held me safe, but I couldn’t be more than what the fruits knew I was.”

“How did plants keep you safe? Or hold you at all?” I asked, trying to fathom how something as vast as I could sense Sola to be could have been trapped by an acre of fruit an vegetables.

“I needed something in this world to cling to,” Sola said. “Something to keep me here and not out there, where the thing that destroyed me is. The plants couldn’t ‘believe in me’ like you can but there was a relationship between us. I was able to give them a part of myself, enough to hang on here and work miracles that reinforced our bond.”

“Miracles? For plants?”

“I brought them back,” Sola said. “They began as dead and lifeless seeds, but I was able to bring them the life which had been stolen from them.”

“You can raise the dead?” People were never specific about what the dead gods had been able to do or why they mattered. Whatever stories there were about them had been mostly forgotten I think once people saw that they couldn’t do anything for us. After all, who needed the gods a bunch of dead people used to worship when every city had a Neoteric Lord who served basically the same function?

“No, and yes, and its complicated and messy. That power wasn’t part of my domain. I held sway over neither growing nor reaping, neither harvest nor planting. I know that, but I also know that there is no one who holds those domains, and no one to stop me from claiming them. Not fully anyways.”

“What do you mean ‘not fully’?” I asked feeling like there was something more important there than the gods have a bunch of different jobs and the ability to sub in for one another if someone was out sick for the day.

“I was once the Sun. Or a part of the Sun. The old me had many domains to bear, Light, Knowledge, the breaking of darkness, and the giving of life. I remember those, and I’m sure there were others. The thing is, all the others? They’re not a part of me anymore. I can act through them and any of the other unclaimed domains, but I am not the one who bears those burdens.”

“Who does then?”

“For many of them? No one,” Sola said and I felt a heartbreaking loneliness of her words. There was loss within her that felt both agonizingly familiar and vastly alien. “There are pieces of me out there with no one to carry them. There are pieces of all of us, the others like me, scattered across our world and and the domains of most sit unclaimed and without anyone to nurture or care for them.”

“Most but not all? Does that mean there are other people out there like you and me?” I had to know because any other god bearers, or whatever I was, were either going to be my best possible allies or my worst conceivable enemies.

“I don’t know,” Sola said. “I can feel some of the domains that I was once tied to, but not all of them. It could be that the missing ones are still recovering, or that they’ve been truly forgotten, or that something else has taken them.”

“The beast that ate you? Could it still have some of them?” 

Asking questions I don’t actually want the answer to is a shockingly stupid mistake I’ve made a lot in my life, and it seems to be one I am simply incapable of learning from. If the god eating monster still had the other parts of Sola, then it would have a piece of her in its gullet and, by extension, a piece of me too. Me, who couldn’t even fight a patroller fairly, and had absolutely no hope against a Neoteric Lord, or even one of their minions. My only hope against the god eater was that I was literally beneath it’s notice. I was so small, it was incapable of perceiving my existence. It could perceive Sola just fine though and if it sniffed her out, I would amount to a single grain of salt on the snack it would make of her.

“If it did, it would have taken my place,” Sola said. “I don’t feel anything carrying the burdens I and the others carried. No grace flows through any of the domains I can feel, not now anyways.”

“Okay, so it ate you but it didn’t get your power? Or your position or whatever?”

“We were more than the power and authority,” Sola said. “We were wellsprings of grace, we were imagination and potential given form. We took the dedication and love of our worshippers and rewove the threads of fate, untangling snarls, guiding the right effects to the causes which we wished to produce them. When we were devoured, all that was lost. The dedication given to us, the love, and hope, and faith, all of those were torn from us. The world you were born into grinds onwards because the people of it are stubborn, and that stubbornness is the only tool they have to push past atrocity and nightmare.”

“I don’t know how well we’re doing with that. Most people just ignore what they don’t want to see.”

“They don’t understand how to do anything else. Or why they need to.”

“That’s me most days. No idea why any of this is worth it.”

“And yet you rescued me.”

“It felt like the right thing to do. And you weren’t asking me to. You didn’t want me to get hurt.”

“I still don’t.”

“I haven’t met a lot of people like that. I don’t think I can afford to let any that I do go.”

In the dark, I felt a mighty tremor rumble through the ground.

Which was interesting, both because the rocks didn’t come crashing down on me and because the glow around me had faded away while Sola and I had been talking.

I also felt more centered, and about as well rested as I had on my ten best days combined.

“My jailer has noticed I am missing,” Sola said.

“Yeah. I think we need to get farther away. Feeling kind of worried he’s going to level Mount Gloria looking for us.”

“We’ll need to backtrack. I can sharpen your memory if that would help?”

“I’ve got a different idea. Let’s go where they won’t think to follow and may not be able to even if it does occur to them.”

And with that I walked into the water and stopped breathing as Sola’s glow began to shine from me once more.