“You’re picking the people you’ll carry forward into our new world? Whatever for?”

“Because they’ll need to be survivors.”

“Nonsense. They’ll survive because we decide they’ll be spare.”

“And if one of us decides some of them are inconvenient?”

“Why would we want any inconvenient people? Get rid of them and let the remainder make more. It’s what these people are best at isn’t it?”

“We’ll be losing quite a bit of what people are good at.”

“And our world will be better off for it. All we need are numbers. The more we can control the better, certainly, but without us? Without us they will do nothing but come to the end they’ve been so happily racing towards for centuries now.”

“I still say you haven’t won that argument. And in any event, what does it matter what I do with my protectorate? We will all be sovereign over our own domains, won’t we?”

“Of course, of course. Just see that your ‘survivors’ don’t infect any of my populace with any heretical ideas. Just because we can put down uprising does not mean I wish to waste my energy or resources doing so.”

“Yes. Far be it from any of us to interfere with one another’s workings.”

– High Accessors Vaingloth and Dyrena at Dyrena’s Festival of Many Beauties before the slate of one thousand winners was announced where more than half the winners hadn’t even been contestants.

I wasn’t glowing anymore. I was hiding again. It felt natural and right and comfortable.

And I hated it.

Holding Sola’s power inside wasn’t that tricky anymore. Fulgrox is a much better teacher than he’ll admit, to the point where even Xalaria wasn’t openly critical of my abilities as a novice junior acolyte wanna-be priestess.  His praise and her concealed rather than open disdain weren’t what left my skin itching though.

It was Vaingloth.

He was searching for me. He knew I was inside his city, and he had a host of stolen divine powers to reveal me and then remove me, often with less than a heartbeat between the two.

That should have made hiding the second most wonderful feeling in the world, with only ‘running away’ being a superior choice.

It wasn’t time to run though.

And I didn’t want to.

The argument that I hadn’t really reintegrated myself as ‘Little’ would have been supported by that feeling pretty well, except for one sharp counterpoint.

Vaingloth had me back into a corner, a corner the size of the entire world. With nowhere left to run, I tend to do things like ‘grab a patroller’s knife and stab him forty or so times’.

Stabbing Vaingloth wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

Which meant I wasn’t going to be that nice to him.

And people were going to be hurt because of it.

If I was a better person, maybe I could have found a better answer. If I was a better person, maybe I would have cared to try.

Instead, I was happy to be a monster. 

Mostly because the more I focused on that, the less afraid I had to admit to being.

“Things have changed a bit since you left,” Lucky said.

It was still hard keeping up with her – damn her long legs – but the days we’d spent walking back from the Factorum had been enough for my body to regain the strength that I’d lost and then some. Sure, I’d eaten far more than my fair share of Helgon’s ridiculously good food, but I had no regrets on that regard.

Okay, maybe one regret. Zeph had very kindly indulged in only small portions of the food and she definitely deserved far more than that. Going back to the Factorum for more food would have been the obvious answer, but I knew what the right payback for her was.

I had to free Sola. 

That would make Zeph happier than anything or everything else in the world.

Which was apparently something quite a few people agreed with her on.

We stepped around a corner and onto a walkway which spiraled down the outside wall of a cavern filled with a hundred or more people. 

Our arrival was noticed immediately, but it wasn’t until Zeph came into view that people understood we were more than just Lucky and her friends returning from a simple errand.

The gasps of joy and muffled excitement shifted to quieting concern as MB entered the cave at the rear of our party.

MB, sensing just as well as I would have, that it was the object of far too much attention, sat down, brushed it’s face with one paw and let out a questioning meow in my direction.

I sent an unconcerned shrug back. We weren’t in danger from the people here, and my hope that they’d be welcoming of some monsters willing to fight on their side against the monster who ruled Mt Gloria seemed to be confirmed by the shrugs I saw in the crowd.

“How did you get all these people together?” I asked. Impressed with the small army Lucky had assembled.

“Didn’t have to do anything really,” she said. “They all found us. Or most of them did. We spread the word a bit after you left.”

“I’m impressed. I didn’t think there were this many people who’d be willing to risk becoming Kindling like this.” Given the number of people I’d seen sell out everyone around them in order to avoid being thrown into a fire portal, I had to wonder if half the people present weren’t planning to turn traitor. Lucky didn’t seem to be worried about that all though.

“Oh, this isn’t all of us,” she said. “Not by a long shot.”

“Wait, how many have joined you?” Zeph asked. I wasn’t in danger of collapsing between one step and the next anymore, but it was still nice to have her close by to catch me if I was wrong about that.

“No idea,” Lucky said. “I know there’s at least ten groups this size, but we only have contacts with about half of them. I’d  guess there’s probably as many more than we haven’t heard about because they’ve been smart enough to not draw attention to themselves.”

“That’s too large an organization to keep secret. How haven’t you been found yet?” Xalaria asked as we descended to the group floor.

“They’re not secret,” Kalkit said after tasting the air a few times.

“Not from the Patrollers. They know good and well that we’re out here. They are trying to downplay our numbers to keep the rich people calm, but it’s not really working.”

“You’re a trap then,” Xalaria said. “Bait left out by our enemy to lure us in.”

“We’re thinking more that you’re the bait to lure them in,” Lucky said.

Which was not the answer I’d been expecting. The people around us, despite having the numbers to be a small army where clearly not a fighting force.

Most were grouped in small clusters. Some were just talking, like people everywhere do, while others were listening to people reading from books of different shapes and size, while still others were mixing together food rations into ‘Hungry Packs’.

I hated ‘Hungry Packs’. The whole idea was to take the worst of the rations and ruin a bunch of at least barely edible ones by mixing them together. If you were hungry enough, they were worth eating as an alternative to dying, but just barely.

I didn’t have to even glance over at Xalaria to ask if people who were subsisting on Hungry Packs were ready to fight off Vaingloth’s elite forces. Between the children who were running around and the elderly people who were either being tended to or tending people themselves, I was pretty sure a single Inquisitor armed with a stick and a couple of rocks could wipe the place out on their own.

“You cannot stand against a Neoteric Lord,” Xalaria said. “Or is that the point?”

Meaning, had all these people grown sufficiently fed up with Vaingloth’s tyranny that they were looking at death as simply an escape?

They weren’t.

I looked at MB who’d plopped down and immediately been descended on by a pack of a dozen children of almost as many different species. They were poking and petting MB with the sort of careless curiosity that would have made them delicious snacks if MB wasn’t, you know, me.

These weren’t kids who were looking to escape their miserable lives. They probably wanted better ones, or at least tolerable ones, but they weren’t interested in checking out just yet.

No one in the cavern was.

I noticed that a moment before I noticed something far more interesting.

I wasn’t glowing.

But I could still see them. Which was pretty usual. People don’t normally stumble around in the pitch dark. When the lights go off we go to sleep. Everyone was up and about though because the cavern was filled with the usual pale and dim lighting that had characterized everyday of ever since the Sunfall.

But this lighting wasn’t flickering flame light.

It was steady

And soft.

And golden.

“Sola?” I could feel her. Not inside, or not just inside, but in the room. Her gentle warmth and little sparks of her abundant radiance. “Oh. Oooooh.”

She…I didn’t even have words for the thought I was trying to form.

She was still trapped in me, bound up in chains that I was more than willing to murder to break.

But she was here too.

Because that’s how gods worked.

What I’d done in fighting Vaingloth hadn’t just reminded the city of Sola’s existence. It had brought her into their lives.

These people weren’t rebelling against Vaingloth. They were fighting for her!

“Figured you’d notice,” Lucky said. “Took ya a while though.”

“Shut up.” It was easier than hugging her.

I went up to one of the groups who was listening to someone reading from a book. The nearest guy, a Satyr, moved over a bit and offered me a spot to sit within the circle.

He didn’t recognize because why would anyone know or care what a ratkin girl looked like, but they were all still willing to accept me into their circle.

A circle which was listening to one of the most heretical of all possible things; a book on philosophy written before the Sunfall.

Xalaria and Fulgrox were more interested in discussing strategy or whatever with Lucky, and Kalkit had more or less disappeared the moment we came into the cavern. Zeph though took a seat on the group beside me as the book’s reader resumed from the passage where he’d left off.

Apart from MB, who seemed to be a welcome relief for the adults as a distraction for the kids, the rest of use didn’t draw much attention and it was soon clear why as a steady stream of people of all shapes and sizes arrived and left without any particular fanfare.

“And so we turn to the question of divine infallibility,” the speaker, Harshant, an older Catkin gentleman read. “We take the dictates of our deities as our gospel, as wisdom granted from a source of deeper and wider perception than any we may possess. Yet, it is a wisdom which must always be questioned. Even though we walk as children and talk as children, is in questioning that we may grow to the understanding which will mark us as the adults they bid us to be. Though some may claim otherwise, the High Assessors ability to interpret the will of the gods is not meant to be the end of reason and investigation but rather the beginning, with the High Assessors themselves no more than a stepping stone we must all, in time, walk beyond.”

He put down the book into his lap and looked at his small audience.

“So are we supposed to question things? Is it dangerous? And what does this section mean now, since we don’t have any High Assessors left anymore?”

“We do though,” a chunky Ratkin lady said. “We’ve got Little. She’s out there somewhere, but she’s a High Assessor if ever there was one.”

I became painfully aware of everyone in the room who knew my name and sent the loudest, unvoiced prayer I could to Sola that each and every one of them would keep their big mouths shut.