“When this goes wrong, not if, but when, we will be left with a hunger which cannot be sustained.”

“Not if we manage to transcend our current forms, my dear Dyrena.”

“You call me dear but we both know you would be the first to turn your knives on me if given the chance, my dear Helgon.”

“All the more reason for you to assist me with my endeavors! When, not if, I succeed, our mechanical forms will need fear no blade or spell, and, as you are quite dear to me, I would of course have you join me in such an ascended state.”

“We will hold the power of the gods and you still believe your contraptions and gadgets will represent a material change in our being?”

“The material is exactly the thing. We are made of what, the base clay of the earth? There is no hope bodies such as these can endure. We are stifled by these poor raiments of flesh.”

“My poor Helgon. With the divine power coursing through our veins, we will be limited by nothing at all. And when we fall, the depths we plunge to shall be unlimited as well.”

– High Accessors Dyrena and Helgon a few days before the Sunfall, sharing their dreams with one another.

So what do you do with a Destroyer of Worlds after you’ve infected it with the idea of how pathetic it is? That’s a great question. I have no idea. Ask me the same thing about what you do with a tiny fleck of a Destroyer of Worlds though and the answer is apparently ‘bring it home with you’.

Listen. I know. I am deeply aware of how that sounds. I am painfully conscious of exactly how bad an idea that is. I’d spent a forgotten eternity being ripped cell from cell as a demonstration of how literally cataclysmically dangerous the Mini-Beast was.

So I know. And I knew then. But I did it anyways.

How? Shockingly it was a lot simpler than you might imagine. All I had to do was ask it. 

Why? Because while it didn’t seem to be able to speak, it was perfectly able to understand me. Why didn’t it kill me? I did mention it can’t speak right? I mean I could ask it but I think the answer ultimately boils down to ‘it didn’t want to’. Oh, why did I want to bring it back.

No reason.

Shut up.

I did not feel sorry for it.

It broke my world!

It killed Zeph. Sorta.

I did not feel sorry for it.

It was kinda funny coming back through. I should probably say that’s why I did it. I mean the look on Zeph’s face was beyond priceless. Yeah. We’ll go with that. I did it to prank Zeph.

“What…Little…what?” Blaming Zeph for being at a loss for words would be about ten shades more evil than I’m capable of being. 

“Uh, hi there. You doing okay?” I asked, not being all that great with words myself. Behind me, the Mini-Beast loomed over me, more than twice my heart and four times my width. I couldn’t see it but I could feel wariness radiating off it like heat from a bonfire. 

I could also sense the fragmented spirits who’d been herding us into the beast’s maw. Or, more than sense them. I was connected to them.

Which made sense.

I mean, I’d destroyed them.

The world reeled around me.

“Little! What happened!” Zeph was holding me in her arms and I hadn’t hit the rocky ground thanks to her quick reflexes.

That was nice.

“Oh. Nothing,” I said. I mean, it wasn’t exactly a lie. I just didn’t finish the thought since ‘nothing I’m even vaguely capable of explaining’ was far too many words for me to manage.

The Mini-Beast snuffed at me. It knew how I was doing, mostly. 

I mean, it was me, wasn’t it?

The world spun again and the last rations I’d eaten a few billion eternities ago threatened to make a return appearance.

Strangely, that was exactly what I needed.

Puking is never what I would call ‘fun’. It is, however, a deeply physical reaction. Nothing really connects you to your body like your body being deeply upset about something and my stomach had decided that enough was most definitely enough.

To my credit, I managed to turn my head so that I hit neither Zeph nor my Mini-Beast.

I think the Mini-Beast appreciated that more than Zeph did.

She was, understandably, a little concerned for me, especially since the colors of what came up matched neither the colors of what we’d eaten, nor any color which should be present inside a Ratkin’s body.

“Oh, right. I bit it,” I said and waved a hand towards the Mini-Beast in apology.

It’s fur was so soft. I don’t know why that surprised me.

“You…what?” Poor Zeph. I couldn’t find a spot to begin explaining the thing I did know and I was sure even when I did, everything I said was going to raise more questions than there were answers.

“Just…a minute,” Three words was pretty eloquent for me at that point, and it left me with enough strength to try to force down the rest of the unhappiness my stomach was objecting to.

My stomach was stronger, and apparently smarter, than the rest of me. It won the argument I was having with it twice more before it settled into a grumbling sort of contempt for every other part of me and most especially the idiotic brain that had gotten the rest into our current mess. Sadly, along with the last few weeks of rations it seemed to have ejected, it had also thrown out the last vestiges of strength my body had clung onto.

I didn’t pass out of course. That would have been merciful. No, the rest of my body joined in the stomach’s protest and made sure that I remained entirely conscious of just how miserable I’d made us all.

“Sorry,” I said, more to Zeph than myself, but I did harbor a faint hope that my various organs might be appeased by the gesture.

They were not.

“What happened? And what is that?”

“It’s my Mini-Beast,” I said. “We talked.”

I felt like cheering. Five words and they all made sense. I was on a roll!

“That’s not…where…what happened?” I could see the confusion in Zeph’s eyes. She was able to perceive things I couldn’t. Or hadn’t been able to? Part of what was making me so ill was sensory overload.

My poor Mini-Beast. I reached out my hand to it again knowing that it was having things thousand times worse than I was. I was perceiving a bit more than I had before. It, on the other hand, had in some senses never perceived more than itself. 

“I…did something?” I was still assembling the memories of what I’d done so that was the best I could manage then or for quite a while afterwards. “Got a bit mixed up? Blended? Dissolved into? Something like that with the, uh, thing.”

My Mini-Beast wasn’t the thing that had attacked us, the fragment of the Beast. It had been, but what we’d done to each other had left us both changed, it more than me. Which made sense. There was a lot more of it to change than there was of me?

I knew that wasn’t right, so I didn’t try to share the thought with Zeph.

Was it that there’d been less of the Beast than there’d been of me? That felt right. Deeply right. But it made even less sense than the alternative. I hadn’t survived because I was big and mighty enough to wrestle the Beast into submission. I’d survived because I wasn’t mighty, because I was small and normal, and…and because I was real.

And the Beast hadn’t been. 

Not here. 

It wasn’t part of this cosmos and I was.

Clearly that hadn’t stopped it from killing the gods, so it was real in some rather important senses, but so was I?

I drew in a deep and centering breath. Air, real air, filled my lungs. Lungs which need it, because of a thousand complicated processes life required here.

I felt an trickle of strength flow back into my limbs. It was delightful. The kind of delight that only real, livingf things, experience. I tried to shift in Zeph’s arms and discovered that a trickle of strength was nowhere near the same as enough strength to rise on my own.

So I relaxed.

“Sorry,” I said again, but feeling a little more clarity with each breath. “I’m okay. You were right. We couldn’t fight or run from the thing that was waiting for us.”

“Yes, but what happened. It grabbed you up and then turned inwards and imploded. It was like the darkness vomited you out the moment it ate you and then it was that…thing?”

“I talked to it,” I said. “Sort of. It was the kind of conversation that didn’t involve what you would call words so much, and it lasted, uh, I think several forevers?”

“You were only gone from an instant. Less. I didn’t even have time to jump in after you.” Zeph’s voice carried a trace of guilt that she absolutely did not deserve to feel.

“Sola’s grace was working overtime that you didn’t I think,” I said, hoping that invoking our shared goddess would make my point particularly compelling. “It wasn’t…it wasn’t good in there. And I don’t know how things would have turned out if there’d been three of us getting mixed together like that.”

“What do you mean ‘mixed together’?” Zeph’s concern took on a new tone. Which was fine. If she was concerned about what I’d become, she could stand in line right behind me.

“Sola’s still with me,” I said, a fact I was relying on to hold back the terror at what being mingled with the beast could mean. “She wouldn’t let me be destroyed. And I wouldn’t let her be hurt either. I don’t think when the gods fought the beast they had that. I mean, I’m not much of a defender, but what we are, you and me, and I guess every other mortal, solid being, that matters. We’re not vulnerable to things that can change ideas or destroy concepts. Burn up the idea of who are and we’re still here, too stupid to not just remake the idea. Sola was able to prevent the more literal sort of ‘burning up’ since it’s not like a god can be injured by the sort of thing that can kill us.”

“And that’s what let you defeat the beast and turn it into…what is this thing?”

The Mini-Beast had settled onto its haunches and was watching us with careful eyes, its ears swiveling at odd intervals as though listening to things all around us.

“We didn’t defeat it. Like you said, we couldn’t fight it. And I didn’t turn anyone into anything. It chose to become that, I think after it sort of absorbed what I was.”

“It does not look like you. It does not look anything like you.”

“It’s fuzzy,” I said, feeling protective of my Mini-Beast. As though it couldn’t still tear both of us to pieces faster than I could blink.

“You barely have hair on your head, I’m closer to how fuzzy it is than you are.” Zeph’s objections were reasonable but they stirred a giggle inside me anyways.

“I am not bald!” I objected out of principal. I’d known some quite handsome people who were bald. Just because I kept my hair a little above shoulder length though did not mean I was one of them.

Zeph sighed.

“Why isn’t it killing us?” she asked. “Or is it going to the moment I put you down?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think it wants that anymore. It was lost. And broken. I think it just doesn’t want to be alone anymore.” I didn’t add ‘like me’, but there was likely more truth in that than I wanted to admit.

Zeph scowled at how ridiculous that sounded and she was right to. The thought that the Beast, Slayer of Gods, Destroyer of the World, could be lonely and want some friends was objectively ridiculous. 

As was the slobbery lick it gave Zeph across the entire side of her head in confirmation of my words.