“This is a terrible plan.” 

“Of course it is. It is the very definition of a cataclysmically bad idea. Quite literally in terms of the cataclysm part.”

“And we are going along with it why then exactly?”

“Because it will happen whether or not we do.”

“You think the others would really…no, I can’t even pretend to be so foolish as to believe the others would pause to question themselves if we refused.”

“They would not. More importantly though, if they knew we disagreed with this plan, they would ensure that we were among the first harvested to see it come to fruition.”

“And so instead of being reaped by the others, we’ll hold the scythe to the world’s throat ourselves? What poor new Lords we will make if that’s the best option we can imagine.”

“You never wanted to a be proper Lord did you? It was always your creations, these mechanicals, that have fascinated you.”

“They can be more than we are. Less fragile. Less fallible. Able to replace the pieces that don’t work with new refinements as their understanding grows. I just need to find the means to grant them a spark of true awareness.”

“Then that is your answer, your better option. You will do this for them. If this world is lost, perhaps it deserves to be since its peoples gave rise to things like us. Think of this as wiping the slate clean so that your new creations can flourish.”

“You make a compelling point, it just seems off to call it a good one. It feels as though we’re missing something important too.”

– Helgon and Dyrena, in a private meeting, prior to their ascension as Eternal Lords.

So the first thing I did after discovering that I’d apparently inspired the entire city to plot a secret rebellion against an Eternal Lord was to run off into the wastelands and abandon them.

Honestly? That was pretty much what I would have expected of myself.

So why was I feeling so out of sorts?

“Are you cold?” Zeph asked in a whisper.

We were only a few hours out from Mount Gloria, picking a path through the empty, quiet wastes which lay beyond the light and warmth the city had to offer.

The road we followed was a broken, shattered mess. I climbed up a four feet high ledge where part of road had been crushed down only to find another ten foot high ledge a few paces beyond that.

Here and there, the remnants of life remained. Trees which had been dead since the Sun Fall.  Clusters of skeletons here and there, probably from people who’d tried to eek out their survival outside the fringes of the city. And shadows. Everywhere there were shadows, darker and deeper than any the city had to offer.

In theory, I could have chased those away. Sola’s glow was still with me, but I’d been bundled up tight by Lucky and her people to make sure we wouldn’t be spotted as we fled the city. We were probably far enough away that I could have taken a glove off or something to illuminate our path, but Zeph had a curious little lozenge shaped device which shone from one side with a deep green light. It didn’t provide the best visibility, but a lifetime of living on the meagerest sparks of light had left me used to navigating under similar conditions.

“I’m fine,” I said, scrambling up the rough face of the ledge.

“You’re shivering,” Zeph said, placing a hand on my shoulder to stop me before I tackled descending to the next bit of the broken landscape.

“I’m not cold,” I said, which was completely true. Between the clothes I was bundled in and the remnants of Sola’s power that still flowed through me, I wasn’t feeling any physical discomfort. 

It was also a complete lie though. 

I was so, so cold. Despite the warmth I was wrapped in, fear had every inch of me clutched in its icy grip. The wastelands did more than scare me. They were death, death that had happened and death that was going to happen. 

I’d known what they were since I was old enough to ask the question “why don’t we just leave”. I’d known that my world was a dead one and that the tiny pocket of life I lived in was an aberration on a vast, lifeless rock. Hearing something though, and experiencing it? I hadn’t been ready for how different those two things were.

Everywhere around me I saw how the old world had failed. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. There were still ruins. Buildings that had stood for uncounted years. Vehicles which lay abandoned. All sorts of signs that people had once lived and thrived here. 

All sorts of signs that the refuge of places like Mount Gloria hadn’t been anywhere near enough. That despite the plentiful light and heat and water and air, nothing they’d done had been enough to save them. 

Nothing I could do would be enough to save them.

I tried to tell myself I was talking about the ancients. The people I couldn’t have been responsible for. The people whose loss had already salted the earth we walked on. I tried to tell myself that, but believing it was something else.

“I would give us more light but we are not on safe ground yet,” Zeph said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever stood on safe ground,” I said.

“This is less safe than most.”

“Why? We’re alone out here, aren’t we?”

“I wish that were true,” Zeph said. “We have not been alone since we left the city though.”

I’d say my ears perked up at that and I started listening intently for pursuers or things waiting in ambush, but my ears had been perked up since Lucky appeared unexpectedly to whisk us away, and I’d been listening for danger at every moment I’ve been conscious for since birth as far as I know.

“The creatures which pursue us have no tangible forms,” Zeph said, which was reassuring. “Unless they take ours.” Which was not.

“What are they?” I asked, noticing that she hadn’t called them ‘ghosts’.

“Shattered spirits. When the gods were destroyed the spiritual plane was impacted as well, and as the world fell many of its spirits fell with it.”

“And they’re still a danger after all this time?”

“They’ve become more dangerous as time has gone on,” Zeph said, growing still as she spoke. “The fragments of malicious spirits no longer know how to direct their malice, and the harmonious spirits have lost everything they were meant to be in harmony with.”

“How do we avoid any of that?” It didn’t make sense to run when you didn’t know where or when to run after all.

“We don’t let them understand what you carry. If they could grasp that they would be compelled to come to you.”

“And then they’d eat me?”

“Unlikely. The power you carry should place you beyond their direct influence.”

“But indirectly?”

“A fragment of river couldn’t drown you, but it could turn a cliff face into a mudslide. Or a piece of a flora spirit might cause spores to burst forth with life, including one’s you’d inhaled.”

“Neither of those sounds pleasant. Let’s avoid that.”

Oddly, but giving me something immediate and graphically unpleasant to worry about, Zeph had done me a favor. My concerns for the people we’d left behind didn’t drift away but at least took a backseat to the more pressing concerns for my own hide.

See! Being selfish is great, right! Right?

We kept moving in silence after that, with Zeph occasionally turning us down unexpected paths. I wanted to ask how she knew where we were going. Nothing about being an attendant of the Sun seemed like it would include understanding land-based navigation or being able to pace yourself to a sustainable speed for a tiny Ratkin girl.

I’d asked before we left if Zeph was going to carry me again – it would certainly have been quicker – but there are apparently things out in the wasteland which are faster than she was and moving at her full speed tended to attract them just as quickly.

So we marched slowly.

And rested.

And marched more.

And slept.

And marched again.

Over and over, passing through the lightless tomb of a world where every breath and every step we took was an intrusion and a violation. I thought I would get used to it, but the farther we traveled the more isolated I felt. And the more I began to understand the scope of the Sun Fall. 

I’d called forth a miracle against Vaingloth. Maybe the biggest miracle the world had seen since the Sun Fall, and it was so tiny and insignificant compared to an hour of walking through the wasteland. 

We were in danger every moment we traveled. Zeph hadn’t needed to tell me that, I could sense the things that were moving around us. Most of them were lost. Mad and no longer a part of the world as it was but rather a part of some infinitely distorted version of what it might have been and what it might be.

That we moved through their presence at all was due as much to the divine blessings we carried at the stealth that kept those blessings from being tested too strongly. On some level I think the spirit fragments knew that to touch either of us would bring back the memories of what they’d once been and I couldn’t imagine anything more unbearable to the things they had become.

For anyone else, the trip would have been a harrowing nightmare but for us it all passed uneventfully. 

Because, unlike me, Zeph actually knew what she was doing.

Which was unfair. She loved Sola, and I was benefiting from that, stealing the love that rightfully belonged to the god who I couldn’t even talk to anymore. Not the most reasonable of thoughts on my part I suppose but it was hard to feel that it wasn’t true, and whatever the case was, I needed Zeph’s help far too much to even begin vocalizing my concerns to her.

“I need you to do something for me,” Zeph whispered as we came to a giant sunken stadium.

I nodded in reply, not trusting myself to be quiet enough even though I was possibly making less noise than she was.

“Do you see the gap in the wall on the far side over there?”

I did, and nodded again in acknowledgement.

“I’m going to head down onto the playfield. I want you to creep around the upper edge here and get to that gap. Then run. The Factorum is about two miles along a road which is still mostly intact. I need you to make it to the gates of the city. They’ll be open. Once you’re inside, you won’t be pursued any further.”

“And you? Why aren’t we sneaking out of here together?” I asked. I wasn’t panicked by the idea, but that was only because it was ridiculous.

“There is something here that wasn’t before. Something that’s been waiting for us.”

“Fine. Let it wait. We’ll go around it.”

“It’s too late for that. I’m sorry. I knew the fragments were following us. I didn’t know they had surrounded us. This is my fault.” 

Said the woman who had guided us safely through the wasteland for day and days, right up to the doorstep of where we needed to be.

“Then we deal with them, or figure out how to sneak out of the trap they have us in,” I said.

“I have figured it out,” Zeph said. “I can make sure it won’t notice you while it deals with me.”

“What is ‘it’?” I asked. I did not try to perceive ‘it’ or search for ‘it’. Something about how Zeph was speaking told me that ‘it’ was something I didn’t want to have any connection to at all.

“More than a spirit fragment. And worse. Much worse.”

“And you can get in their, distract it, and then get away?” I asked, wondering only whether she was going to lie to me or not.

Instead, she was silent. Which told me everything I needed to know.

“Right. We’re not doing that then,” I said.

“You have to. She must be preserved,” Zeph’s voice rose above a whisper and I could hear the desperation in it as plainly as I felt it in my heart.

So I reached up, took her face between both of my hands and looked her straight in the eyes.

“Do you have any idea how unhappy Sola will be if she loses you?” Was it blasphemy to pretend to speak for a god? Yes. Always. Was I pretending though? I looked at the woman who loved my god more than her own life, who had saved me from Vaingloth and from the terrors of the wasteland, who had never asked for anything more than that I live, and my path was more than clear. 

It was divinely inspired.

“We’re in this together.”

And for a change, I didn’t run away.