“Though the gods have failed us, and allowed our world to be cast into darkness and desolation, through our great efforts we stand at the cusp of reclaiming the glorious day that is ours by right. The sacrifice and toil required will fade away under the glorious light the world will soon know.”

– Vaingloth the Eternal, on the 25th anniversary of the founding of Mount Gloria.

I didn’t need to breathe. 

But I very much still wanted to.

That it had been my idea to essentially drown myself in a pool which had no guarantee of being connected to any other waterways did not make the experience any more enjoyable. It was only the fact that the alternative was coming face-to-face with a pissed off Neoteric Lord that kept me moving forward. The water could only kill me, Vaingloth occasionally got ‘creative’ with his punishments.

Walking down into the pool wasn’t entirely terrible either. While my lungs were berating my brain with requests to do their job, Sola’s support allowed me to mostly ignore that and focus instead on where we were going. I was so used to operating in the dimmest of lighting conditions that the illumination Sola’s essence was providing made the eerie underwater world even stranger though.

What I’d thought was a relatively small pool opened up into a vast, flooded cavern. I stood at the edge of it, where the pool had long ago broken through the wall of the fissure, and felt like I was about to fall into an endless abyss. 

Except of course I wasn’t falling. I couldn’t. I was marvelously light and buoyant. Too buoyant into fact. To move downwards I released the breath I’d been holding. I didn’t need the air since Sola was sheltering me and without it I could swim freely.

No. Not swim. I could fly.

I’d never learned how to swim, That was something for the Lords of the City. Water was too precious to spoil by putting bodies in it, and heat was too scarce to risk the deathly chill anything but a specialized pool would carry.

By all rights, the plunge I’d taken should have killed me even apart from the problems with breathing it presented. The water close to Sola’s chamber had been heated by her presence. The pool I’d run to was much farther away though and was sitting at a much more typical not-technically-instantly-lethal-temperature-but-close-enough, like most other water I’d run across.

Except for me, it was mild and pleasant. Because Sola didn’t want us to freeze.

Sola also didn’t want us to get caught, so where my random flailings couldn’t have been described as proper swimming by even the kindest observer, they did propel us onwards.

Grace came surprisingly quickly too. Without any need to panic, I was able to feel the flow of the water and what worked to move us through it. Sola gave my limbs extra strength but the water still moved best when I cut through it with long, clean strokes. Long, clean strokes which sent me down into the fathomless abyss because unless Vaingloth came looking for us personally, and decided to jump into a random hole and go for a little swim, there was no chance anyone else was going to follow us.

I make statements like that and then everytime I shudder waiting for the world to smack me for being arrogant enough to think that I knew anything at all. In this case however, I was right. It helped a little that Sola’s absence hadn’t quite been discovered at that point, or that when it was, no one would even begin to imagine that someone like me had been the one to steal her away, but my reasoning was still sound, and I stand by it.

The abyss wasn’t quite as endless as I at first imagined it to be either. It was still vast and filled with more water than I’d ever seen in my life. 

Which was strange.

Where the fire portals brought heat and light into the world and had to be feed with Kindling disturbingly often, there were also water portals which were needed to supply the fresh water the city required. The water portals didn’t demand sacrifices like the fire portals did – not simple, direct ones anyways. Instead they required constant vigilance and warfare to keep open since the creatures which lived beyond the portals had a habit of seeing the things on our side of the portal as free snackies. Being recruited for the water legions was a great method of rising above the lot in life me and people like me had, with the one, tiny, caveat that it was an even better method of rising above life in general and becoming the free snackies the water domain creatures were looking for.

If the fire portals were kept open by burning Kindling, then the water portals fed on the blood of the legions who fought within them. That wasn’t the official story but I’d never met anyone who was under the impression that things worked otherwise. Even that didn’t stop the legion from finding the recruits it needed though. From the people who signed up because whatever money they made before dying would keep their families going for a bit longer, to the ones who ‘signed up’ with a blade held at their throats. The legion needed bodies and whatever it took, it got them, and in exchange they won a small trickle of clean water to make life in the city possible. The thought of how many lives would have been required to fill a cave of this scale was horrifying on a level I’d never considered before.

“There should be fish here,” Sola said, her voice audible only to me in the cavern of water.

“They’d freeze wouldn’t they?” I asked. The fish I knew would be lost in a place like this. No tank walls, no air bubbled in, no warmth, no food. The fragile little things were clearly meant for some very specific conditions, as witness by the how many of them turned up dead and floating each day and had to be tossed onto the processing lines immediately before their bits ruined the meatslaw base that a lot of other foods were made from.

“I don’t know,” Sola said. “My memories of the world-as-it-was are scattered and disconnected. I can’t recall who held dominion over fishes, or if there were separate domains for the fishes of the salt and fishes of the fresh. I just remember that there were fishes. More types than anyone ever counted.”

I stopped swim-flying for a moment and sat with the ripple of loss which swept through her.

“They say there’s not much left of the old world, but it was always hard to imagine how much more there could be than just more people and more cities and more Lords,” I said, trying to guess how a space like this could be filled with anything but the fish I knew.

Maybe bigger ones? And smaller ones? The bigger ones wouldn’t have been preserved because they were too much trouble to fit in the tank we have and the smaller ones wouldn’t have been worth the effort to process. So probably there were fish of different sizes. From Sola’s words though I had the sense of the diversity went far beyond just size.

“Could they be brought back?” I asked. “If we found the others like you? The ones who were supposed to take care of the fish?”

“I don’t know. I remember shining on the fish in the seas and the fish in the lakes and streams, but I never knew them,” Sola said, still lost chasing a memory. “I think…I think what’s lost is lost. I don’t think even the one who bore the domain of the seas could restore them. I think instead they might make new ones. Ones to the fit the world as it is rather than the world as it was.”

“Is there anything that would fit the world as it is?” I asked. “Is there even still a point to this place at all?”

“That’s for you to say. I am of this world, but your choices are the one that make it,” Sola said.

“I don’t think my choices matter all that much. Or at least they didn’t before I met you. Now they mostly matter because if I make a wrong one I’ll get us both killed.”

“You choose to be in this world. You fight and struggle to stay here.”

“Is being afraid of dying that much of a choice though?”

“It’s enough of one,” Sola said. “And it leads to so many others.”

“So what choices should I make from here then? I was thinking we’d see if we could find any other places to come up and then hide from there but beyond that I’ve got no idea what to do next.”

I could be honest with her more than I was with myself because I wasn’t going to scare the wits out of her by facing the fact that previously zero things I’d done in the last several hours had any sort of thought put into them.

“Survival is reasonable goal,” Sola said. “It’s what I chose long ago and its made me I’m what I am.”

The words were in my voice, which was growing to sound natural, but they bothered me because they were my words too. I was a ‘survivor’ in the sense that I’d scurried away from everything that was going to kill me. So far at least. I knew that could change in an instant

“What if…,” I started to ask and then reconsidered it. “Are you happy with what you are now? With what putting survival first made you into?”

“That’s two questions with many different answers,” Sola said. “Am I happy to be here? Yes. The state I’m in is a miserable one, and my limitations are all but unbearable, but I am bearing them, and I am still here despite them.”

“Do you even have a choice about that though?”

“Of course. I could hurl myself back against the thing that devoured me. My domain would return. Something would be born in time to fill the place where I stand too. But it wouldn’t be me. I could throw aside all the problems I see before me and let them be someone else’s issues to deal with.”

“But you don’t.”

“Nor do you.”

“I don’t do anything to fix the problems though. I can’t.”

“If you can’t, then simply choosing to survive until you can, or until you can be a part of fixing them, is still doing something.”

She wasn’t supposed to be the one cheering me up. I was fine after all. She was the one who’d lost more than the entirety of my existence.

So why was I feeling better as we talked?

I shook my head.

I was not going to think about how long it had been since I’d had anyone to talk to. 

It definitely wasn’t that.

Cool thing about floating in an underground abyss? It was impossible to claim someone was crying.

“We could just stay here forever couldn’t we?” I asked as I started swimming again.

“Not forever. There is no forever. I think that’s what the old me learned. But, yes, we could stay here. If that was what you wanted.”

“Never hungry, never cold, and no one able to find us or hurt us? I’m not going to lie, it sounds pretty good.”

“But not good enough?” Sola asked as I kept swimming and saw the abyss’s floor come into view.

“It might be great for me, but you need more,” I said.

“I am for all intents and purposes a new creation, but I can feel the ages I once existed through. We could spend the whole span of your life here and I would still be better off than trapped in the garden as I was.”

“Maybe, but more people need you than just me, and Vaingloth would probably find us here eventually. We need to keep moving.”

“Are we running from or running too something?”

“For now? We’re just running,” I lied.

I was too small and too unimportant, even as a god bearer to change the world.

I was also too stupid not to try.