“We have endured hardship and suffering because the gods were too weak, but where they failed us, our strength will be our salvation. Through sacrifice and toil will a new day bathed in holy light soon be born.”

– Vaingloth the Eternal at the 100th anniversary of the founding of Mount Gloria.

I’d been lucky. It felt weird. I wasn’t used to it. Most of the ‘luck’ I’d ever run into, I’d made for myself. I suppose in a sense the same was true with finding another outlet from the big watery cave I’d fled into. 

As I was searching around towards the bottom of it, the idea that it might simply be a big pocket of water and that I’d wind up backtracking far enough to walk into Vaingloth’s waiting clutches occurred to me more than once. I knew precisely nothing about cave diving, or mining, or how to explore underwater and, unsurprisingly, Sola wasn’t terribly familiar with any of those things either. Together though? Together we managed not to suck.

I guessed that if the water was pooling up in the room I entered from then there was probably some outlet that let the water leave at about the rate it was coming in. I don’t know if that was at all guaranteed, and I was able to easily imagine that the outlets might be a bunch of tiny little cracks rather than nice big tunnels I’d be able to swim through. Since I had nothing to lose by searching though, I swam down to bottom and got to work.

One thing I did know about water, was that being under a lot of it made for a lot of pressure. People who had to retrieve things that fell into the reserve cisterns always complained about feeling like their ears were going to burst. The watery abyss cave was a lot deeper than any of the cisterns were though and I didn’t notice any problems with pressure at all. Apparently having a god backing you up – even if she wasn’t a god who had anything to do with water – was a pretty handy thing.

It took some searching at the bottom of the cave but that was where my skills came in handy. There were plenty of passages out but finding them involved searching the walls since it wasn’t easy to see the gaps, given how rough and twisty the walls became. There were plenty gaps that seemed like passages but most only ran a little bit inwards. The ones we were looking for were the ones which connected to somewhere else.

“Somewhere else” turned out to be another, smaller, abyssal cave, and then a third narrow cave/tunnel which lead mostly upwards and wasn’t fully flooded.

“We must be back up to where we were in the other room,” I said as we came out of the water. I was still glowing so it was easy to see no one was around, the tunnel was only about three feet wide and it ran upward past the point where Sola’s light could reach.

“This is a better hiding place than the grotto was, do you want to stop here?” Sola asked.

I did. Curling up in a tunnel for a decade until people forgot about me seemed like a brilliant plan.

Except Vaingloth wasn’t going to forget. And I had no idea what sort of techniques he might have to find us. Sola was many things but ‘subtle’ didn’t seem to be high on the list, so banking on the Eternal Neoteric Lord being unable to locate her seemed unwise.

As much as I hated the idea, I had a sinking feeling that the safest place was going to be the one which took advantage of my greatest strength; that nearly everyone overlooks me. 

Ratkin aren’t large in general. We can be as tall as dwarves, but we’re about a quarter of a dwarf’s mass and maybe a tenth as dangerous. That I’m fairly small even for an adult Ratkin means I’d get mistaken for a child by people from other species a lot, and that’s when they notice me in the first place.

Where they tend to overlook me the most though is when I’m in the company of other Ratkin. It’s less that there’s strength in numbers for us, and more that when there’s a few Ratkin around, people tend to call on whoever’s the biggest one they can see and assume that’s ‘our leader’.

Because of course we must have leaders right?

As if a ‘leader’ would be able to do anything for us.

If there’s something that would entice one of us – like the offer work for the day, or food in general – that’s really all that’s needed to ‘lead us’ anywhere. Beyond that we tend to follow our own paths.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I guess most Ratkin don’t run away as good as I do, and some of them do seem to have more solid friend-groups than I’ve ever had outside of daydreams. 

You’d think we’d have pretty tight knit families, and I used to wonder if we did once upon a time. With Ratkin being considered exceptionally viable sources for Kindling though, our families don’t stay together very well. 

In a sense that was good news for me though.

Creeping up from the underground tunnels, I focused on breathing normally and feeling the rough tunnel walls under my hands. Bits of the tunnel broken off here and there, showering me with enough dirt to undo the otherwise lovely bath I’d had swimming through the sunken caverns. That was good too.

The dirt and grime helped me look like I normally do. A spotlessly clean Ratkin would have been enough of an oddity to attract attention from almost anyone, and attention was the last thing I needed. A muddy disguise wasn’t an amazing one, but it fit me well.

Even more importantly than acting as a disguise though, climbing up, and getting dirty, and breathing like the absolutely normal girl I was reconnected me with the ‘solid’ parts of me that Sola had talked about.

I was about halfway up the tunnel when I noticed the glow of her power around me beginning to fade, and I had plenty left to go by the time it winked out entirely.

“I fit in you? I don’t understand how you did that?” Sola said.

“I don’t either.” No point lying to her there. “I noticed before though that the more I was just me, the more the glow dimmed down. I think if I don’t use your power, I’ll stay more myself and, I’m guessing, if we do much ‘godly’ stuff, I’m going to glow to the point where maybe I’ll burn up or something?”

“I won’t burn you up,” Sola said. “You carry me in you, and I could never wish you ill.”

“Even if I did something directly against you?”

“If you turned on me, or began to hate me, you would no longer be carrying me inside you,” Sola said. “I…I think I would still cherish you for freeing me from the garden though.”

“Was it that bad there?” I asked, remembering what a paradise the place had seemed like.

“I was trapped. I was being used, and I was blocked from being any more than what the gardener wanted me to be,” Sola said. “While I was there, so much of me drifted beyond my reach. So many parts of who and what I am were cut off from me. With you, even if you’d stayed hidden in the underwater cave, I could grow into the fullness of your life, and then beyond it.”

“Do you really want to though?” I asked. “I mean, isn’t reclaiming your missing bits going to put you on a path towards running into the thing that ate you again?”

“Yes. It will. I believe that’s why its still here. It knows that life persisted through its assault. It can feel that embers of me and the rest still remain. It knows that it in time those embers will flare up again, and again it will feast.”

“Can’t say I’m a fan of that idea. I don’t want to get eaten, and I definitely don’t think it would be good if you did either.”

“We are of one mind on that,” Sola said. “Which is why, in this lifetime or the ones which follow, I must discover the truth of the devouring beast. Everything has a weakness, and everything can die. I will not rise again until I hold whatever knowledge and weapons are needed to ensure that my next meeting with my ancient foe will be its last.”

How you could kill something that was large enough to eat the sun, the stars, and the sky itself was so far beyond me that I didn’t waste anytime thinking about it. Plus there was really only one answer I could make to that.

“I’ll help.”

Sure, my help and the help a random bug could give would be more or less identical in terms of usefulness, but I was used to only be able to make small differences.

“You already have, but I won’t say no to anything else you bring me.”

I’m not going to lie, feeling the gratitude of a god is a heady thing, even if the god in question is a tiny little fragment of who she used to be.

That little rush stayed with me as I squirmed through some tight places and finally managed to pop out into the lower sewer tunnels.

I was home! Sort of. I didn’t live in the tunnels really. Nothing did. I did however use them often enough while running away that I had a decent idea how to get back to the streets of the Low City, which I could more properly call home.

Had I been one of Vaingloth’s chosen, I would have had an actual building of my own to call home. If I was one of the Requisites, I would have at least had an apartment to wander towards. Instead though, I went looking for a Nest.

‘Nests’ had all kinds of bad reputations associated with them. No privacy and no consistent occupants. Violence and theft being the standard way of life. All the usual stuff that people thought the Kindling-bait of the world got up to or deserved.

In practice though? In practice, most Nests were pretty decent. With only a couple of candles of heat and light, it made sense to sleep in big groups. Violence happened, sure, because…well, people are people, but it wasn’t hard to see coming, and avoiding it usually wasn’t too difficult. 

Food was shared a lot more than the High City people seemed to think too. There was never as much as I would have liked, but I’d been able to get by. 

From where I finally popped back up into the Low City, I had about a fifteen minute walk to get a Nest for the rest period. I was able to tell it was time for rest largely because the beacon from the Eternal Lord’s tower had been turned to its lower setting.

Also only a few people were still wandering the streets.

Thankfully, and as was typical, none of them paid me any mind. I was a scrawny little rat girl who wasn’t carrying anything interesting beside some mud and grime. Beating me up would get my attacker some dirty knuckles and nothing else.

The nice thing about most Nests is that those qualities would also make for an easy entry pass since I clearly wasn’t the kind to start any trouble, or, if I did, it would be trivial for them to kick me out.

I’d come up pretty far from my usual haunts so I had to wander around a bit before I found the Nest’s entrance up on a second floor balcony of a pair of buildings which were largely boarded up to keep what little heat there was sealed in.

I was looking forward to a cursory couple of questions and then settling down in a nice anonymous pile of Ratkin and other bodies where I could rest and make some longer term plans.

Of course that was not to be though.

“Hey, Little, been a while,” an unfortunately familiar voice said as the door to the Nest opened.