“Have you seen the light?”

“Yeah, everybody did. It was kind of hard to miss.”

“Ugh, obviously I’m not talking about that. I mean the light everyone carries around.”

“Like candles? Sure, I’ve seen those.”

“Grrr. Not that kind of light. Here, look at that guy, what do you see?”

“He’s a dwarf. Looks kinda old I guess? Probably worked on a pipecrew today from how he’s dressed?”

“What’s he doing?”

“Walking with some guy? Or, no, he’s walking with a kid. A bugbear kid? Oh, wait, he’s helping him. Looks like the kid hurt his knee of something? Weird, a Dwarf helping a Bugbear, right? They must know each other. Or. Huh.”

“Yeah. Shouldn’t really be introducing themselves to each other if they’d ever met before, should they? What about her?”

“The old Goblin lady? She just…wait she’s serving food here? Where did she get…and why is she sharing it?”

“What about the people who are eating?”

“They…they’re arguing?”

“Arguing, but are they fighting?”

“No. This is weird. Why are they happy?”

“Because we’ve got each other. That’s what I mean by the light we carry. It’s that same feeling we got when we saw Sola for that moment there.”

“What feeling? I didn’t feel anything.”

“For just a moment, just a flash, didn’t it seem like the world maybe wasn’t made for us to be miserable? That maybe there’s some good things in it too, and when you looked around, you could see, just for a little bit maybe, that those good things were all of us, no matter how different we were? There’s something worth loving in everybody.”

– Hiin and Maygar, co-leaders of one of the rebellious groups in Mt Gloria the day they finally decided to step up.

Could I have had fame and adoration by simply introducing myself? Yes. Easily. Had I ever imagined being respected rather than overlooked? Of course, many times. Was being important rather than ‘too Little’ something I’d wished for every once in a while? I’d be lying if I said otherwise. Did that mean I had even the smallest, tiniest interest in any of that coming true as I sat in the philosophy circle?

Oh.

Hell.

No.

I would seriously rather be devoured by the beast again than face that.

Also, it would probably get everyone in the cavern killed.

So I did what I do best. I shut up and I stayed relatively but not perfectly still (perfectly still is for predators in ambush mode and people get justifiably uneasy about predators and ambushes). Predictably, that let the conversation continue on without my input or anyone paying particular attention to me.

What was amazing to me about that wasn’t that they overlooked me, or the ideas they’d seemed to develop about me (Brave? Fearless? Kind-hearted? Me?? Yeah, no), but how even when they were vigorously disagreeing with one another, there was a harmony between them.

It was like they could trust each other, like their ideas were important, but they all understood that the ideas weren’t more important than the real people around them. When the Ratkin lady who thought I was a new High Accessor talked about how people told her everything that was wrong with her was because of her weight, the others listened! And believed her!

Maybe that doesn’t sound rare or unusual, but in a city where food was always rationed, anyone who was overweight at all tended to be seen as a thief or worse, it definitely was. The truth though was that some people were just heavy, regardless of what they ate. And they were burned up or sent beyond the other portals just as often as the rest of us, maybe even more so.

The whole discourse between them went like that and was completely foreign to me. I expected people to leap out of their chairs and come to blows when instead they were evaluating what each other were saying and trying to understand not only what other people’s arguments were but why other people’s perspectives were what they were. Hell, most of them were even talking through figuring out what their own perspectives were.

I even started doing it!

Talking I mean.

It would have looked weird to stay silent, and I had plenty of experience too. I didn’t bring up any of the things I’d been going through lately of course, since that would have been an immediate giveaway for who I was, but as boring and mundane as my life had been, it was different enough from the others in the circle that I was able to speak about things they’d never experienced, or had experienced from a different angle.

As surprised as I was with myself  to be doing that, I was absolutely shocked when Zeph joined in too!

“I don’t think the gods laid traps for us in their scriptures,” she said. “I think we did that all on our own.”

“But what we just read contradicted itself within the same paragraph,” Harshant, still in the seat of main lecturer, said. “If it was from someone who did have direct contact with the divine and was speaking for them, why would it do that?”

“A few possibilities,” Zeph said. “First, it’s always possible for two contradictory things to both be true. Usually that means perspective matters in how they’re evaluated, or each represents a piece of something with multiple properties so while both points are ‘true’, they may be present to differing degrees and at differing times. They may also point to a third, or broader state. ‘Without light, we cannot see’ and ‘By the light we are blinded’ can both true as an example.”

“Sounds like what happens when you try to wrestle with a new idea that’s really big,” I said. “If the writer was having trouble wrapping her head around what the god was telling her then maybe ‘kindness in all things’ and ‘cast to their ruin those who would prey upon misfortune and strife’ are angles on a bigger idea that neither one can fully encompass.”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever had an idea that big,” Genuine, the Ratkin lady who had extolled my imagined, High Accessor-adjacent virtues said.

“I feel like we’re hearing ones like that from this book,” I said, carefully avoiding the various mind blowing experiences I could have cited as proof of my claim.

“If you’re full up on big ideas then, how about we get you some food?” Lucky asked, stepping up to stand behind Zeph and I.

I wasn’t hungry. We’d, or I’d, gobbled up the last of Helgon’s food back in the wasteland before we set after resting. Also, I didn’t technically need to eat, and certainly was not going to rush off to a meal of ‘Hungry Packets’. That wasn’t what Lucky was suggesting though. Lucky was smart and was giving me an easy out from the group without alerting them to who I was.

So I took it.

There was plenty of space to eat in the cave, but Lucky lead us out one of the passageways, down and around a long, winding and branching tunnel to another, much smaller  cleft in the rock.

The one was not lit by the combined faith of the people who gathered there. Someone had stolen a lantern and the oil needed to run it. The light seemed garish by comparison to the soft luminance we’d been enjoying but it did make it easy to see the group that had been assembled. Xalaria, Fulgrox, and Kalkit were there, the Crowkin once again perched on Fulgrox’s shoulder for a better view of the map on the tap in front of them. On the other side of the table, Lucky took a seat beside Smiles, the overly brave Ratkin I’d met last time I’d dropped in on Lucky, and Goptrop Oolgo, the Bugbear foreman who’d saved me by buying the fraction of a second Zep had needed to snag me out of the big melee with Vaingloth.

“The city is in very different shape than when we left it last,” Xalaria said. She pointed to the map which had several pins with different colored heads pushed into it.

“Different good or different bad?” I asked, unable to make any sense of what the pins might mean.

“Different unknown,” Fulgrox said. “We’ve been trying to work out what that will mean for your plan.”

“Which you have not told them about?” I asked, hope standing on eggshells within me.

“Your secret is safe still,” Kalkit said, which answered the question I was most concerned with.

I was trying to avoid anyone beyond the Blessed in the room and Zeph being aware of my plan was for what I felt was a particularly critical reason; anything spoken of in the city was something Vaingloth could possibly hear. 

My original discussion with my companions had been in Helgon’s sanctuary. Letting him hear it was a risk, but given that he’d be able to confirm some of the suspicions my plan was built on, and since he had no reason to want anything but misery for Vaingloth, he felt pretty safe to include in those who were ‘in the know’.

Lucky, and anyone who was stuck within Vaingloth’s sphere of influence, however could all too easily let slip clues to what I was going to do, and for there to be any chance of success, I had to keep a lot of things secret.

Generally, that’s the sign of a bad plan. If you make it a requirement that no one knows what you’re doing, then you are guaranteed to run into something horrible when it turns out that someone has discovered what you’re up to.

In Vaingloth’s case, he not only had an incredibly wide array of tools for discovering things, he was also more than capable of putting defenses in place that I couldn’t overcome.

But first he needed to know that those defenses were required.

“These are the areas that we think are the safest,” Lucky said, indicating a precious few spots on the map which had green pins stuck into them.

“So the areas with the red pins?” I asked, surprised at their distribution.

“Those are the areas he’s been reinforcing the most,” Smiles said. “We’re keeping track of those since we figured it meant something important is being hidden there.”

“Yes. A trap. Or several,” Xalaria said. “Just as we are bait for you, our enemy is seeking to bait you into striking here.”

She indicated a building in the High Quarter which was marked as “Staging Warehouse #3”. 

“But that’s not where the biggest or the smallest concentration of his forces are,” Oolgo said, pointing to two other spots.

“He knows you won’t move against those,” Xalaria said. “Or he’s not worried about the people who are foolish enough to try. At this location,” she pointed to the one with the highest troop concentration, “he will have deployed his most sophisticated surveillance measures. He expects an attack there based on stealth as you try to determine what is being so heavily guarded and neutralize it before it can be brought to bear on you.”

“Which was exactly what we had been discussing before you arrived,” Lucky said, shaking her head. 

I’d thought Xalaria had no skill at tactics or strategy. Listening to her though I think it was more the case that she simply didn’t like to bother with either of them. As a Blessed of Battle though she was clearly adept at them regardless of her preferences.

“At this building, you will find a mix of elite forces and a direct line to his attention should the unthinkable happen and one of us appear there,” Xalaria said, meaning one of the Blessed.

“Yes. Certainly ‘unthinkable’ by anyone.” Zeph didn’t fully voice her sentiment and her eye roll was more audible than visible but it drew a scowl from Xalaria nonetheless.

“As I was saying, an assault here will be met with overwhelming defenses focused on your capture. The goal will be to acquire as many potential prisoners as possible, both to derive information from as well as for other purposes.”

I didn’t need to ask what those ‘other purposes’ might be. Vaingloth was creative in showing his displeasure and I had to imagine that noone who was captured would suffer or die in exactly the same manner as anyone else.

“Then our options are what? We give up on fighting back?” Oolgo asked, the surly edge in his voice the same anger we all felt at the weakness we found in ourselves.

“Nope,” I said, cutting in before Xalaria could offer a sensible plan. “You’re going to attack them all.”

“You mean both the strongest and the weakest spots?” Smiles asked.

“No. I mean all of them. Every red pin on this map. Every orange one. Every blue one. This city is yours and we’re taking it back.”

“What about, you know, him?” Lucky asked, pointing at the gold pin in the castle.

“He’s mine. You take the city. I’ll deal with the monster at it’s center.”