“I’m supposed to be dead.”

“We could send you back if you like.”

“I was supposed to be Kindling.”

“You still could be.”

“I don’t understand. The Lord’s will is absolute.”

“That’s certainly what he wants you to believe. A few of us have chosen to disagree with that however.”

“But how?”

“No one is all powerful. Not even the gods as it turned out, and your little Neoteric Lord there is a pale and pathetic reflection of what they once were.”

“Okay, but if you’re rebels he would have hunted you down already.”

“He’s certainly been trying but let me fill you in on a little secret. No tyrant in history has even been able to suppress all dissent. You can’t hate everyone and not be hated back after all.”

– from a diary titled “The Testament of Those Who Refuse to Bow”, written within the first decade post-Sunfall.

 There was a welcoming committee waiting for us when we got back to Mount Gloria. I’d expected that. Hell I’d gone to a fair bit of trouble to ensure there would be one. Which is why I was surprised when it turned out that there were in fact two welcomes waiting for us.

The one I’d expected was arrayed atop the walls to the city. It wasn’t the best place to deploy troops, but Vaingloth had plenty of disposable and generally useless minions to work with so spending a few to ensure he had the earliest possible warning of our arrival was a reasonable use of resources.

Why didn’t he simply venture out and confront us in the wastelands? He couldn’t. I don’t mean he was physically incapable of leaving the city. He’d left the city at least three times that I knew of after all, but I was hardly another Neoteric Lord who required his personal touch to dispose of. Or, really, I wasn’t another Neoteric Lord with a bounty of divine power he could look forward to laying claim to. To personally venture forth and expose himself to the perils of the wastelands for someone like me would be to elevate me to a vastly greater rank of importance than even my proponents probably believed I deserved. 

He could have dispatched his troops but then what if I snuck in and found him without an army to back him up? Sure, he’d soundly beaten me the last time we met and had every reason to believe another confrontation would end just as badly for me as the first one had, but what if it didn’t? 

I’d been to the Factorum. Vaingloth wasn’t stupid, he could work out where I was returning from by direction and duration of the trip. Helgon had offered his hospitality, which Vaingloth wouldn’t have been surprised by, but the fact that I’d rejected that hospitality and chosen to return? That had to raise some dire questions. Ones like ‘what did that little rat learn out there?’ and ‘she fought that hard to stay alive, she’s not coming back here to die, but how does she plan to survive?”

I’d been worried when we left that Lucky had sold me out, but even if all of the people I knew had told Vaingloth everything they knew about me in an effort to save their own skins (which I hoped had happened if any of them had been caught), there would have been nothing in any of their stories which could have explained why I was coming back.

So was the person approaching not me then? That was far more likely than the reality. With Helgon in the mix it was impossible to rule out that I’d been replaced with something else. More than a few of the machines that had decorated Helgon’s lab were formed in the shape of torsos and heads and such. Would it have been that out of character for him to send an automata to work some mischief on Vaingloth? 

Well, yeah, it would have been. I’d talked with Helgon for a few hours and even with that brief an exposure I could tell that he had zero interest in provoking the surviving Neoterics when  he could be happily puttering about in his lab instead. I don’t think it was even that he was afraid of them. I think he just didn’t care that he was dead and found the other Neoterics to be a hassle to deal with.

But Vaingloth couldn’t count on that. Someone in his position had to always assume that if there was anywhere else near his level of power and influence that they would try to destroy him sooner or later.

Which, to be fair, I’m sure the other Neoterics were planning to do.

But me? A tiny, insignificant ratkin? He couldn’t acknowledge that he was afraid of me. That would tell the other Neoterics that he had grown weak enough that someone like me could be a threat. 

And they would happily devour him the moment they believed that.

Was that my plan? It would have been a reasonable one except for the part where I had no interest in handing the other Neoterics Vaingloth’s stored power.

That they might be incapable of taking him out was also a bit of a problem. He did know them after all and had to have some serious contingency plans in place in case they moved against him before he eliminated one or more of them.

So. No army’s beyond the gate. No going beyond the walls himself. Posting plenty of guards at the borders though? When the city was up in arms and going through one its periodic ‘unruly phases’? No one would bat an eye at that.

The wealthy of the city were probably making bets as to how quickly the whole situation would blow over and how much extra fuel for the fire portal they would reap from the “deviants” who were caught.

All of that was so obvious that I hadn’t needed to explain my reasoning for longer than five minutes and I’d had the others, and even Helgon, onboard with that part of my plan. 

The second welcoming committee though? That I had no foreseen, and, frankly, it made no sense.

“Could I interest you in a lovely tunnel into the city?” Lucky’s voice was barely more than a whisper but we all stopped dead in our tracks when we heard it.

We were still somewhere near-ish to a mile from the city. Far enough that they couldn’t make out of a lot of detail about us, I hoped, but close enough that we could have navigated by the light the city gave off.

“Who is that,” Xalaria whispered. She wasn’t holding any weapons but from her posture and the rising aura of divinity around her I could tell that was an instant away from changing.

“A friend,” I said, not bothering to whisper. What? The people on the walls were going to hear me? 

Good.

Let Vaingloth be aware that I was coming into the city and he couldn’t be sure where.

I loved that idea.

“Can we afford to disappear now?” Zeph asked.

“I think disappearing now is a miracle I may need to thank Sola for,” I said and hopped into the pit.

Not, possibly, the brightest of moves, but Lucky didn’t exactly have a hard time catching me either.

There are benefits to being Little.

I grinned at the though. No one else would appreciate the joke, and for a change I wasn’t entirely joking when I thought that.

The others followed me down into the darkness without question. I don’t think it was that they’d developed a deep and abiding trust in me. I think it momentum. We’d come this far, walking towards one of the worst foes the world had to offer. If we’d been inclined to stop, we could have easily just stayed at the Factorum.

Well, okay, that’s not exactly true. I was more than inclined to stop. I very much still wanted to run away. That I wasn’t doing so was largely because I knew I didn’t have that option and if I was going to be hunted down and murdered by Vaingloth’s assassins, I at least wanted to die at a time that was convenient for me, not him.

“You found some new friends?” Lucky said, looking more than a little surprised that I had four people with me rather than one.

“It was more than they found me,” I said. “Turns out they’re not fond of Melty Boy either.”

While I wanted Vaingloth to know I was back in a general sense, I switched back to uncommon euphemisms for him because I didn’t want him to know exactly where I was for as long as possible.

“You’ve been organizing the resistance,” Xalaria said, staring at Lucky with a gaze that seemed to be slicing her up and assigning a numerical battle value to each component she could divide Lucky into.

“We’re not that organized,” Lucky said. “Not yet anyways.”

“Really? How did you know to dig a tunnel out to where I was going to be? Or even better how did you know I was even going to back?”

Before she could answer, MB hopped down into the tunnel as the last one in.

MB’s size is basically ‘yes’. It’s big, but exactly how big is a little flexible. I hadn’t been too worried about it fitting into the tunnel, but once it was there, filling the whole corridor, Lucky and the few people she’d brought with her began to look a bit dismayed.

“And that?” Lucky asked, hedging away from me and MB. “What’s that?”

“Call it MB,” I said. “This is a friend. It also wanted to do horrible things to Melty Boy, so don’t worry. You’ve got monsters on your side now too!”

That really shouldn’t have been reassuring, but I don’t think Lucky understood that I was including myself in the count of ‘monsters’. Explaining everything to her wasn’t something that we had time for and I’m not sure I could have presented any of it in a believable fashion for someone who had never been touched by the divine like my traveling companions had.

“Can it follow us?” Lucky asked and then amended. “Can it fit through these tunnels? We couldn’t make any of them all that wide.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said, certain that MB would either fit or would make sure the tunnel let it fit. “I still don’t understand how you managed to make a tunnel this long though, and right where we needed it?”

“We didn’t make most of this,” Lucky said and began leading us back towards the city. “People have been making these for a long time. We just chose where it broke up to the surface.”

“Which just somehow happened to be where I was? This wasn’t meant for me was it?”

“It was meant for her,” Lucky said. In exactly the same manner that Zeph did when referring to Sola.

“Understandable. How did you pick where to break up? I mean your positioning was wonderful. I can’t imagine anyone could predict we’d disappear this far out from the city.”

“We didn’t. Predict where you were going to be that is,” Lucky said. “We’ve got tunnels all over the place. There are at least a hundred paths we can use to get in and out of the city.”

I toppled a bit and touched the wall.

That was a mistake. 

Of sorts.

The wall wasn’t natural stone. It had been worked by a Ratkin’s hands.

A century ago. He’d been tired and scared and angry, but he’d scrapped away at the stone I was touching, carving what little bit he could with makeshift tools and the remnants of his strength.

And he hadn’t been alone.

I’d walked back thinking I was coming to Mount Gloria to strike against Vaingloth the Neoteric Lord. I’d thought that my fellow Blessed would lend me there support but that it would be up to me to enact my plan. That I’d started things and it would fall on me alone to finish them.

I’d been wrong.

I wasn’t alone. I never had been. There were so many people who had fought back in so many ways. Who were still fighting back.

I put my hand fully against the wall and felt the echo of not one soul, but hundreds. They were gone, but the dreams they had for the future carried on.

They’re effort, our efforts, the good that we could do, it wouldn’t be in vain.