“The role of the High Accessors is to guide the faith the grand congregations collect and make of it a pure and harmonious offering to the gods. Through their hands flow the hopes and dreams of the mortal world and so let them be always mindful of the weight of their responsibility and the absolute need for humility and dedication to serving others their role requires.”

– The first of the official mandates of the High Order of the Divine.

“I’m not saying that we abrogate our authority or misplace the trust which has been given to us. Far from it. The trust we hold is sacred, and it’s requisite that we do everything we can to ensure that the faith delivered to the divine is of the purest, highest quality. In that capacity, we must shift through what we are given and hold back anything which could be deemed unworthy. There will be shortfalls certainly, so we must implements all available means to drive higher year over year performance among the truly faithful. Let us make this a world for the best among us!”

– High Accessor Vaingloth, addressing the other eleven High Accessors, years prior to the Sun Fall, setting the plot in motion which would eventually lead to the Sun Fall.

Here’s the thing about divine inspiration; it’s functionally indistinguishable from going completely bonkers. On the upside though, it felt a lot better than drowning in despair or anxiety!

I had no idea what was waiting for us in the stadium except that it was ‘worse than the spirit fragments which had herded us into its clutches. Given that the spirit fragments were capable of things like ‘drowning us in a river of dust that used to be a beloved stream’ and ‘trampling us beneath hooves of stone which hold the memory of the animals which once walked up on them’, the idea of something being worse than that seemed oddly laughable. Once something could unquestionably kill you, it’s not like being killed even more thoroughly was really a cause for concern.

I took a step forward to confront whatever it was regardless of all that though, my own words having filled me with an anxiety killing mania.

Zeph, wisely, grabbed me before I could follow through on that impulse.

“No.” It was less of a command and more a plea. “What can you do? She’s still lost to you isn’t she? And this is beyond her, even if she’s won free!”

“What? I mean, yeah, Sola’s still bound up, but what do you mean this beyond her?”

“What is waiting for us in there isn’t something that can fought. It shouldn’t be this close to the Factorum, but if anywhere is safe, it can only be there.” Zeph’s gaze was darting all around us and I could feel the spirit fragments drawing in closer.

“If we can’t go in there and face that thing, then we bust out of the trap it has us in, but I’m not busting out alone.” It was oddly refreshing to be one hundred percent certain of something for change.

“It will chase us and we can’t outrun it.”

“Why? How? You’re the fastest thing in this world. How could it possibly catch you?” I probably wasn’t right about her speed, but I also had a hard to imagining anything left in this wrecked and failing world that could work as perfectly as she did.

“Because its caught me before!” Terror. Not concern. Not anger. Just sheer terror in Zeph’s voice.

“Explain.” I needed to know. I needed to understand what I was going to fight against. Because I was going to fight. Even Zeph’s terror didn’t dent the belief that had risen in me.

“There’s no time!” Zeph said and tried to move away.

She’d grabbed hold of me though, and that can go both ways.

“What. Is. Down. There.” My voice sounded alien in my ears, and my words hit Zeph with enough force to root her in place.

“A fragment,” she said, looking away.

“Of which god?” I asked, trying to understand why one fragment would be worse than another, and why one of the gods would be so dangerous to us. No matter how bad their portfolio was, they were in the same boat as we were in a sense.

“Not a fragment of a god,” Zeph said. “A fragment of the beast.”

And I understood.

Because, yeah, that was worse.

A lot worse.

“When the beast came, the gods fought back. She fought back most and longest of all, and the beast did not emerge from those battles unscathed. Just as the gods shattered themselves to survive, so did the beast. She would have incinerated it a dozen times over but the pieces She burned? It cast them aside.”

“Then this piece has been beaten already,” I said. “It can be beaten again.”

Of course it had lost to the full and unbridled power of the God of the Sun, where Sola was a tiny little spark whose most impressive feat so far was lighting up a city for a few seconds. So my assertion wasn’t standing on the mostest solidest of foundations.

Whatever.

“Anyways, you survived being caught by it before, obviously, we can just do that again,” I said trying to rally her to even attempting to work with me on this.

“I didn’t,” Zeph said. “I didn’t survive. My spirit? It didn’t find me until this life because the last time I faced a fragment of the beast, it tore me apart. I tried to fight and it overpowered me. I tried to run and it caught me. I tried to survive and I failed. And I cannot let that happen to you. To her.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

Not right away.

Except to imagine what that had to have been like. 

And how difficult it had to be to face something like that again.

“Do you believe in Sola?” I asked, my voice far quieter than I’d intended it to be.

“This isn’t about that,” Zeph said.

We could both feel the fragment of the beast rising from the stadium’s floor.

It was tired of waiting and if we weren’t coming to it, it was more than willing to come to us.

“Do you believe in her,” I asked again.

I wasn’t running.

And Zeph wasn’t going to die here.

Not alone at any rate.

“You can’t do this, we can’t do it. Go. Now. There’s still time to save…”

But there wasn’t.

I turned as burning eyes and gnashing teeth the size of a building rose up and lit the sky with lights my mortal eyes couldn’t perceive.

“Don’t run,” I said. “We’re done running.”

I couldn’t talk to Sola, but she was with me. I had no proof of that, but I believed.

Zeph tried to put herself in front of me. Maybe she thought if she bought me one more second I would come to my sense. That was not going to happen though.

“Can’t fight, not going to run, so let’s talk,” I said stepping around Zeph and staring directly into the eyes of the beast fragment.

It, unsurprisingly, was not much of a talker.

The moment it saw me, some flicker of recognition ran through it and it crashed forward.

Being eaten by a building? Yeah, not fun.

The beast tore into me and I felt…I felt nothing?

I was lost inside it, twisting and turning inside out, but my body? It didn’t change at all. It wasn’t being injured.

Because Sola wouldn’t let it be.

My spirit and mind weren’t quite as protected, but even they survived the onslaught, at least initially.

Outside, the world was coming apart as the beast struggled to find a path through me to Sola’s essence.

Wait.

What?

How did I know that?

Hunger. How could I not know the beast’s hunger? I was surrounded by it. I was inside it. I was a part of it. How could I not know it?

Because I was Little. Because I was a stupidly normal Ratkin woman. Because I was not a god devouring beast, and if I existed, as fragile and pathetic as I was, then there was no possible chance that the world was unraveling. One tiny rumble of the earth was all it took to kill me. My survival indicated that the world I was a part of was doing just fine.

I was far too small and feeble to contend with cosmic powers and I took refuge in that.

“Solid!” I heard a whisper from the far side of the universe reach me. “You are solid!”

And I was. I always had been. Solid enough to burn as Kindling. Solid enough not to be able to escape unless I found spaces that fit me. Solid enough that every blow I’d ever taken had brought tears and pain and misery.

Gods though? Gods are so many things, but they’re not mortal.

And they’re not solid.

They’re not made of the stuff of this world.

My world.

They are ideas, and powers. They are faith and dreams and the laws of creation.

But I am creation.

Sola wasn’t just protecting me.

I was protecting her.

And neither of us where going to let this thing harm anyone else.

The beast, however, disagreed with that assessment.

Even though it was a tiny crumb of its true self, I was smaller still, and too small for it to gnash on properly. Improper gnashing was still dangerous though and I felt the pressure of its hatred and hunger crash down all around me.

It loathed me.

It loathed Sola.

We had an existence. We had memories and experience and dreams. We had the power to recall the past and the power to shape the future.

And it wanted all of that.

It’s rage at god and mortal for holding back what it desired, for not surrendering everything it craved no matter the cost to us was immeasurable. Even just as a fragment of the true beast, the yawning pit of avarice within it dropped off into infinity.

Sola wanted to burn it. To rid the world of at least this tiny bit of the beast. It wouldn’t be much of a victory, but any victory over her foe was one to be cherished.

“Don’t,” I said, speaking to my friend, since commanding a god was the sort of hubris that deserved to pressage someone’s downfall. “It wants your power. It wants to consume anything it can from us.”

We couldn’t fight it. As satisfying as it had been to burn out Vaingloth’s eyes, the same sort of retribution was impossible against the beast. It wasn’t…

It wasn’t real?

My mind sort of shattered trying to absorb that concept.

It had to be real. It was eating me. I’d seen it with my own eyes, and the darkness I was being tossed and turned around it was lit with the streaks of fire which burned in colors no mortal eyes could capture.

But that wasn’t how fire worked.

Fire burned and even if some of the light couldn’t be seen – thank you Sola for gifting me the understanding of that – it was still present, just shifted to a color my eyes weren’t adapted to perceive.

This fire though emitted a light which was not part of the same spectrum at all.

Because it wasn’t light from this world.

I was on the verge of internalizing a lot more than my sanity could handle, and trying to see anymore than I had was absolutely not going to be safe at all

But it might save Zeph.

And it might save Sola.

And if it didn’t save me? If it didn’t save me, then I was at least going to go out for the right reasons, for my reasons.

Clinging tightly to my sense of both the real world around me and how tiny a part of it I was, I opened my eyes and opened my thoughts and opened my heart.

And I saw, and understood, and felt it all.

And it was far, far too much.