“I shall not fear the darkness, for it shelters me until the light returns.”

– A bedtime prayer for children from before the Sunfall. A prayer for everyone afterwards.

I hadn’t sent Zeph off to die. It was important that I hold onto that thought, because being all alone in the ruins on the outskirt of the Factorum meant it was pretty easy for unreasonable fears to start creeping into my head.

Zeph was fast. And she was smart. She wasn’t going to tangle with the…whatever it was that was waiting for us if it made any hostile moves towards her. 

She’d saved me a bunch of times already. 

I could trust that she would come back to me.

I hadn’t ever been able to trust in that before of course. Pretty much everyone I’d ever wanted to come back hadn’t. Not through any fault of their own. Well, usually not through any fault of their own. But when they hadn’t returned it hadn’t mattered whose fault it was.

The glow I’d been emitting was barely a flicker. Sola was probably tired after all we’d been through.

Or maybe it was just me?

I curdled up against my Mini-Beast’s head and felt it crouching down as though if it made itself small enough the fears it felt wouldn’t have room to stay within it.

How was I alone if MB was with me? That wasn’t something I wanted to think about too much. MB didn’t want to think about it either. Thoughts were where all the fears inside us lived.

But thoughts were where we lived too.

I stroked the soft fur on the side of MB’s face.

“I think you got the worse end of the deal there,” I said, the world roiled and rolled in quiet argument to that claim but the joke was on it. I’d already heaved up everything that was in me. The worst the world was going to pull from me was dry heaves.

Which, to be clear, still were not fun, but I had to claim victories where I could.

Holding onto MB, I let the world settle down inside me and resumed stroking the fur I could reach.

“Okay, so it’s been pretty hard on both of us,” I mumbled, fighting to hold off the inevitability of sleep.

It hadn’t been my idea for the fragment of the beast to eat me. I wasn’t at fault or responsible for the harm it had done me. Laying against MB’s sleepy head though I was able to make my way towards understanding what I had done.

I owed the beast fragment nothing, and any harm I’d done it was entirely justified. In the end though, I’d done more than harm it. I’d harmed myself.

And I’d ended it. Not killed it. It had never been alive and so it couldn’t be killed. But it could be no more. It could end. Just like everything could end.

I wasn’t fully the Little I’d been. I was some odd admixture of Little and the beast. It was a weird sort of alchemy, a transubstantiation of my mortal life essence back into my mortal essence. For a time out of time, I’d been the beast, or at least the fragment of it. We’d been one thing able to see itself from within and without.

Trying to recall any of that felt both dangerous and impossible. With each moment the danger was fading though as the impossibility solidified. I couldn’t know what had happened when there no real time had passed to hold it in. That meant my mind couldn’t wrap itself around something too vast for it to contain, because that moment, that state, wasn’t real.

But that didn’t stop me from knowing it had happened.

I’d said it was weird, right?

The truth is there’s a lot of weird things in the world though. This one had been weirder than, well, all of them put together, but I was able to feel what my path forward could be. All I had to do was just not care about the weirdness.

I’d run into a fragment of the world killer, something beyond my comprehension had happened, and I was left more aware of things outside the purely physical that I had been.

Oh, and I was also a Mini-Beast.

Super easy to work with. It didn’t make sense because it didn’t have to make sense. It was nonsense and so I could toss into a box labeled “random idiocy” and not worry about fitting it in with the rest of my life. I was capable of doing some more things that I could before. Not a big deal, right? I was hurt but I was getting better (probably? hopefully?). 

And I was also a Mini-Beast.

The box labeled “random idiocy” in my mind was hard to stop fiddling with.

How was I my Mini-Beast?

I knew it was true, and yet I was clearly me, and no one was ever going to call something as sizeable as MB “Little”.

But MB was me.

Maybe not as much as I was.

But it was me.

I sighed and opened the idiot box.

I had to think about this more.

The world tried to dissuade me, but as the moment when the beast and I had been merged together drew farther away, the pain and agony I’d suffered faded away too. 

It wasn’t the world that didn’t want me thinking about what had happened after all. My brain was simply trying to protect me from diving into unbearable torment again.

It would have been nice to listen to my brain. It wasn’t being at all unreasonable. 

But I needed to understand because Zeph was going to come back and she deserved and answer. 

And because we were going to break Sola free, and she deserved to know what MB was and what I’d become.

Maybe they’d both leave me when they knew. I wouldn’t blame them. If life had shown me anything it was that I wasn’t really the greatest person to be around and that was before I became whatever kind of aberration I’d returned as.

MB shivered at my thought, so I curled in closer.

The warmth was nice.

Were monsters ever afraid? Were they gentle? Comforting? Maybe, but it didn’t feel like ‘aberration’ or ‘monster’ covered what we were.

So what were we?

I lay there, against my nice warm Mini-Beast and I just listened. The world was cold and dark and silent, but it spoke to me anyways. Wrapped in warm fur, I closed my eyes let my senses reach outwards, all the way to ends of my fingers and the tips of my toes.

I was me.

I’d come back to my own body, and my own mind. I’d brought a piece, or several pieces, of something else back with me. Those pieces gave me new perspectives, and showed me things I couldn’t have known before, but they weren’t part of ‘who’ I was, only ‘what’ I was. Even the scattered memories of the beast fragment I somehow held onto were like books written onto the parchment of my mind. All my flaws, all of my dubious cleverness, all the memories that tortured me and all the ones that sustained me though? They were all still there too. 

I’d been afraid of the dreams that waited for me, and they weren’t going to pleasant, but they were going to be mine, reflections of what I’d been through, fears given a form and face perhaps, but more likely just a jumble of impressions and half imagined scenes as my mind continued working on my reassembling all of the pieces of me into something as close to a workable person as it usually managed to get.

I needed sleep. There wasn’t time for that, but I needed to let myself rest and recover. 

And I needed to forgive myself.

What I’d done I’d done for the right reasons. That didn’t mean it hadn’t been miserable, but it did mean that if I was faced with the same choice, I hoped I’d be brave enough to make the same decision even knowing what it would lead to.

So.

That was me.

Or most of me.

There were things I didn’t understand about myself, for all that I was aware of more about the world and myself than I ever had been. 

But it was enough. And not knowing what was going on it my own head? Pretty typical really. I chuckled at the notion that of all the things I’d brought back, that might have been the most ‘me’ aspect of them all.

What about MB though?

I dug my hands into its fur, and drew in its scent, filling my head and lung with the familiarity of it all.

Something had happened when we were merged. In ending, the beast had begun as something new.

But it wasn’t anything before that. It was an absence. Or a memory drained of the essence of what it had been. Mostly. Whatever little bits of what it had once been that remained weren’t enough to make it something in my world though. There wasn’t any connection or pattern it could follow to make create itself from.

So it used what we had instead.

As we disentangled, I became myself again and it became me too. Not at all how I was, or even how I might have been. It became something that was informed by who I was, but built from the pieces and perspectives of the beast fragment.

It was me if I’d lived it’s life. We were separate, but what MB had become was closer than a sister or even a twin would have been. It couldn’t hold more of the memories of what we’d been when we were mingled together than I could but without memories of its own, what it could remember was…well, mostly me.

Making itself into something solid and real was a wonder beyond description. It was literally a miracle even the gods hadn’t been able to work. There were limits to how much even a miracle could do though, and so while it had my memories, and I was the template for its existence, it couldn’t fully work with them. 

Speech was beyond it, but it could understand me. Others too probably, but its perspective was still its own. It could read situations like I could, but our reactions weren’t necessarily going to be same.

So it was me, but the me who wasn’t quite so Little anymore?

I shifted and ran my hands along the edge of its downy soft ear.

Was that the answer I was going to give Zeph? Or Sola? Were they going to understand? Would they trust it? Would they trust me?

I hadn’t been willing to let the beast hurt Zeph, could I let her harm MB?

No.

I felt a flame flare up within me.

I was sick and tired of the Kindling Bargain. Sacrificing something good so something else could survive was not what was worth striving for. 

We could be better than that.

I could be better than that.

Zeph woke me by calling name.

She was standing a good twenty feet away. Well outside MB’s reach with claws or teeth.

“He’s ready for us,” she said, a wariness in her words and posture that wasn’t wholly derived from seeing me.

But it was in part.

And I needed to fix that.

“Thanks,” I said, sitting up and stretching.

I was so weak.

And I needed so much more sleep.

That’s not always an option though.

“Before we go though, you asked some questions and I owe you some answers.”

“You’ve given me answers.”

“I gave you reassurances. I owe you more than that.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“I owe you the truth, and the chance to make your own decisions on where we go from here.”

“The Neoteric wants to meet us.”

I laughed at that, knowing the Neoteric was listening and could hear us clearly.

“There are nine Neoteric Lords left in the world, plus the one waiting at the heart of the Factorum. There is precisely one of you. I do not value you ten times more than a Neoteric Lord. I value you ten thousand time more than one of them. I have nothing to say to the one waiting for us, until I’ve answered everything you want to ask me. And if you want me to go on alone, if you don’t feel safe with me, I’ll still wish you the gentlest of roads and will send Sola to you the moment I manage to free her.”

“Going onwards alone would be foolish indeed.” The woman who spoke those words had skin as black as the night my glow was illuminating and hair darker still. Even that though didn’t explain how she’d stepped out from a shadow that was no more than fifteen feet from me, especially since with all my new awareness I hadn’t been even slightly aware she was there. “But then your not really alone at all are you?”