“I thought you were going to make your lab presentable for the gathering Helgon?”

“My dear Dyrena, what part of what you see is not perfectly presentable for our esteemed colleagues?”

“The part where there are no tables, no seating, and little room to stand yet somehow plenty of room for piles of whatever these scraps and gadgets are.”

“Oh. Is that what to you meant? I see.”

“And what, pray tell, did you think I was referring to when you offered to host a gathering to discuss your modifications to our grand design?”

“Well, I assumed people might object to the constructs which could, potentially, if the proper safety protocols were not followed, and if their internal constraints failed, slay everyone in the room. So I tidied those up. As you can see.”

“Tied up where?”

“Into the other room.”

“That room? The one with the unlocked door? The unlocked door constructed of, if I am not mistaken, decorative pine wood?”

“Err, yes. Do you think I should lock it?”

“I don’t know. Is that a construct I see wandering out of the room as we speak?”

“Yes. Yes it is. Um, perhaps we should leave and reschedule the meeting. We can discuss preserving the god’s essences some other time I think.”

– High Accessors Dyrena and Helgon shortly before the loss of Research Lab 13 discussing a meeting which was never rescheduled.

My first thought in reaction to learning that a god still existed was outrage. Should it have been a surprise since I was already carrying a god around with me? Yes. Yes it was entirely reasonable to find out that Night still existed. 

Why?  Because Sola wasn’t the god she’d been. 

Sola was wonderful but she was a tiny fragment of the divinity she had once been a part of. That wasn’t what Night was. Night was her entire self. Or close to it at least. 

I tried to reach out to Sola, tried to get a sense of her thoughts or even her feelings on discovering that her sister still existed. Had Sola known? It was secret worth keeping from everyone and everything. Or Sola as shocked as I was? Was she angry at her sister from hiding away from her, or drunk with joy that Night was still here, and not lost as all the rest had been?

I reached out but I just couldn’t tell.

I was going to murder the hell out of Vaingloth for his damned bindings.

I mean, probably not really. If I tried to fight him again there wasn’t going to be another surprise Zeph to save me, so in all likely I would just die horribly. 

Didn’t stop me from wanting to melt more than his eyes though.

“Can you move?” Zeph asked.

“Under my own power?” I asked. “Uh, I’ve probably got a good five or ten steps in me now. Maybe twenty if I push it.”

“Will that…that thing, object if I pick you up?” Zeph asked, clearly leery of getting within chomping range despite the fact that MB was out like a snuffed candle.

“MB? Doubt it. If anything it may want to be carried too,” I said, giving my furry backrest an encouraging scritch.

“I don’t think I can carry it,” Zeph said, alerting me that I wasn’t being clear with when I was actually answering her questions and when I was joking. 

It wasn’t my fault. I was tired.

“That’ll be fine,” I said. “It’ll keep up on its own.”

“It’s not going to stay here?” Zeph could have looked more worried but I’m not sure how her face would have managed to show it.

“It’s been alone for a long time,” I said and the whisper of a memory tickled my mind. Aeons stacking on top of aeons. Time so long that worlds form, cool, blossom with life and then die, returning to dust to start the the cycle over and over again. Time filled with emptiness. And hunger. And loneliness. “It’s with me now and I’m not leaving it.”

“You said it was you? But you call ‘it’, not she, and ‘MB’ not ‘Little’?”

“I know. That’s weird right?”

Zeph gave a stressed little bark of a laugh in response.

“No. Not at all,” she said, reminding me that, yes, she did have a sense of humor too.

“MB is more a description than a name. Mini-Beast doesn’t encompass enough of what it’s become to act as a real name, and I like MB better since it doesn’t link it as strongly to what it was. It’s not the beast anymore, so the less the beast is referenced the better.”

“It told you that?”

“Oh, not at all. It’s not so much on the ‘speaking’ end of things yet. I just like how MB sounds. If it wants another name, I’m trusting it’ll nudge me, or give me some sign, but so far it seems find with it.”

“And it’s an ‘it’? Not a person?”

“It’s a person, but, in this case, it’s still working out what that means. If it had copied more from me and recast its self to actually look like me, I’d probably go with ‘she’ because it would have made more of a choice in that direction. As a big fluffy four legged thing though, I think it’s leaving its options open while it discovers what its become and what it wants to be going forward. Again though, it’s not  telling me that with words or anything, so this could all be product of my obviously broken brain, but I don’t know, it feels right? If that makes sense.”

Zeph regarded me for a moment and I contemplated trying to get up but decided against moving under my own power as a bad idea for the time being.

“There’s not much about this that makes sense, but I am supposed to be a Fox Wind and miracles shouldn’t be that surprising.”

“I get why this one might be a little extra challenging. I think if there were miracles like this a few centuries ago, we’d be living in a very different world.”

“It feels like we’re living in a very different world,” Zeph said. “I…can I pet it?”

It was a simple request, but I could see how profoundly it proved Zeph’s first statement. Her hesitancy in approaching MB wasn’t because it was weird, and scary, and different. None of these things helped, but Zeph had a chasm of memory to cross in accepting MB’s existence. 

She’d kept her voice calm and even but her body language screamed of the trauma she’d suffered when a beast fragment had torn her apart. Praise be to my own capacity for forgetting that the time I’d spent being destroyed by the beat fragment was mercifully fading faster than I could recall it, but that wasn’t the case for her. From her posture to the shiver in her fur, I could see how the memory of how her previous life had ended was crystal clear to her.

And yet, the world was different now.

“Definitely,” I said. “Right around the back of the ears seems to be a spot it really loves.”

She stepped forward and dropped to one knee on the other side of MB’s head from me. Her first touch was tentative, but when MB shifted into it, I saw Zeph relax too. She continued for a few moments before rising and stepping back, drawing a sad little wuffle from MB in the process.

“If you don’t mind being carried, we should probably continue on,” Zeph said. “Helgon said it was important that you and he speak.”

“And since he’s been watching all of this we might as well be able to ask him questions too,” I said.

“That and he said there are some others you should meet as well.”

“Others?” The world was dead, and the Factorum had no portal given how there wasn’t anyone to, you know, feed to them. So who else could there be? Zeph’s shrug offered no clues.

The thought of ‘other Neoteric Lords waiting for us’ gave me a brief moment of panic but that was dispelled just as quickly by the fact that I could sense the remaining Neoterics and none of them were anywhere near here.

Also, this ‘Helgon’ had to have good reason to hate his peers since they’d been the ones who’d murdered him.

As much as you can murder a Neoteric Lord I guess.

Could he have gone crazy? Sure. That was a possibility, but if he was talking about the ghosts of his people or something, it would seem a little crazy given that he was something like a ghost himself.

There was only one path to getting any answers though and that ran right into the heart of the Factorum.

“If you don’t mind lugging me further, I’m good with taking it easy for a little while longer,” I said, nodding towards our destination.

“Not much lugging needed,” Zeph said. “After all you kinda Little.”

“Hah,” I said rolling my eyes at the weight joke, but then I smiled, catching her full meaning. 

I was kinda Little.

And kinda not.

But mostly Little still.

I don’t know why, but that warmed my heart a bit.

Which was weird.

I’d never liked being Little, either in the sense of being small like I was or in simply being who I was.

So when had that changed?

Maybe when I’d had the choice not to come back being me?

Or had it been earlier?

A stray though flitted through my mind and I caught myself wondering how Lucky was doing? It didn’t feel like Vaingloth was rampaging through Mt Gloria, so that was probably a good sign for her and the others I’d inadvertently converted to Sola’s worship? I hoped anyways. Sola needed the worshippers. And I could use some friends who weren’t pitched into the Kindling fires for a change.

“You ready to go?” Zeph asked.

“As much I can be,” I said.

“Will MB be able to keep up?” she asked.

I nuzzled in close to MB’s ear and whispered, “Time to go, unless you want to sleep a bit more and catch up later.”

MB was never going to have problem finding me, but if we were going to be separated, it would be MB’s choice, anything else, at least this early, would be cruel.

For as much as I was expecting MB to stretch, yawn, and go back to sleep (since that’s what I would have done). It surprised me by bounding up to full wakefulness and standing on its feet.

That, unfortunately, left me without my comfy backrest, but Zeph was quick enough to snag me before my head hit the ground.

“Okay. We’re not heading to the palace, I checked there first. Turns out Helgon likes his labs better. We’re heading to number 13,” Zeph said.

MB responded with a huff and a nod.

Then it cast its head backwards and to the side?

When I didn’t get what it was trying to express it did it again.

I still didn’t get it.

What? I said I was tired, didn’t I?

One annoyed growl-grumble and another double gesture with its head and Zeph, bless her infinite perceptiveness got what MB was ‘saying’.

“You want us to get on your back?” she asked, like that was the most obvious and reasonable thing for us to do.

MB chuffed agreeably and nodded.

“Okay,” Zeph said with a shrug, having been replaced by some strange doppelganger in the fraction of a second I’d glanced over to MB.

“Seriously?” I asked, as Zeph, swung herself and me into a seating position on MB’s back.

“Is this going to be safe?” I asked. I’d seen how fast Zeph could run, and if MB could even vaguely keep pace with her…

MB could do more than keep pace with her.

MB could also fly.

I learned that as the ground suddenly dropped away far, far below us.

Or.

No.

MB could not fly.

MB could leap. 

Could leap very high in fact, so high that the ruins were were approaching at a spine chilling velocity seemed like a disastrous place to land.

Except, of course, it wasn’t like MB could change course in mid-air. Not even to avoid a roof that was covered in spikes!