“And if the people we choose to bring along into our new world as less then appreciative?”

“What would their alternative be?”

“Rebellion. Some will choose to fight us. However foolhardy, however doomed they might be, some will choose to rise against us.”

“Good. Let them. In fact we should encourage it. Let us orchestrate a full uprising. When we crush it, we can make the fates of all those who stood against us serve as a lesson to the rest for a thousand, thousand years.”

“And which of our cities shall we inspire this rebellion in?”

“Well, not mine certainly.”

– High Accessors Hanshel and Vaingloth devising a scheme which never came to fruition.

No one believed me. I mean, I couldn’t blame them. I only half believed myself. When you plan to take down the next-best-thing to a god that the world has left in it, your base odds of success are somewhere in the realm of ‘you’ve at least picked an amusing method of annihilation to embrace’ and, if you’re plan is really good, might rise as high as ‘well, at least it’ll be quick.”

The funny thing was, it was definitely going to need to be quick. Given enough time Vaingloth was going to find me, that was an absolute given. Maybe if I’d been the Blessed of Secrets I could have built on the blessing with my natural skills and instincts to hide away forever. Sola though? Shockingly the God of the Sun is not particularly good at ‘hiding’.

Really makes one question why she picked me, doesn’t it?

Really also makes one question why I picked her.

I had answers to neither of those questions.

But I had a guess.

I think we needed balance. Both of us.

I mean there was also the point that, at the time, neither of us had anything approaching a better option, and I absolutely don’t believe ‘destiny’ or ‘fate’ brought us together.

If there ever was a grand ‘fate’ which guided the world, the beast definitely ate it. 

We don’t live in a world that is controlled and even ordered by a divine will.

We live in the world that we’ve made. 

Sure, some of us have a lot more say in making the world than the rest, but it’s still us. From the Neoteric Lords, down through their wealthy sycophants, even unto a puny Ratkin girl eeking out however meager of a life that she could. If there’d been a mystical, magical, godly force planning everything that had happened, then it was sufficiently chaotic as to be indistinguishable from random chance shaped by the consequences of our choices anyways.

Also, the beast had been thorough, and a Fate god would have been one of the first ones up on the menu.

I didn’t need to believe in fate or destiny though.

And I wasn’t marching to meet my doom.

I was marching to meet Vaingloth’s doom.

“We are going to lose people,” Lucky said as she walked (and I jogged) down a tunnel filled with dust, stale air, and the haunted shadows of those who’d clawed it from the stone and earth.

“Yeah.” Was I supposed to lie? Tell her and the others that a ‘divine hand would shield them from harm’? It’d be nice to make believe that we’d be safe, to pretend that my actions weren’t going to have terrible consequences, but I couldn’t do it. Not and be able to live with myself afterwards.

If I had all the power in the world, could I have been that divine shield? Sure. Except for the people who didn’t deserve it, right? The world would be better off without all the evil folk who infested it. I wouldn’t even have had to swat them down. I could have just protected the good ones and let the bad ones die out.

Just like the Neoterics.

To be fair, the Neoterics had been even less reasonable than that, but give me enough power and I’d turn into a pretty fair approximation of one. Give me almost enough power, so I still had to fight and contend with them, but could do so on an even footing and I’d likely be even worse since I’d have so much to lose and the lure of perfect safety if I could simply expunge them rest of them from the world.

“Be a lot easier to convince people if we knew how we were supposed to win,” Lucky said.

That would have been a great line from someone planning to betray me.

She wasn’t though.

She was just scared.

Which, sure, she still had one or more functional brain cells so complete and abject terror was absolutely the correct emotional response to the situation.

“It wouldn’t,” Xalaria said.

Not who I had been expecting to defend how I was handling things, but given that she’d agreed to the plan in the abstract back in the Factorum, I suppose I had more of her support than I’d been admitting to myself.

“She’s right,” Smiles said. “This isn’t something we can make people believe is a good idea. We all know what it means.”

“And we all know it has to be like this,” Oolgo said.

“Does it?” Zeph asked.

She wasn’t asking about the plan. She wasn’t even asking about the costs we would pay. She was asking if we needed to face Vaingloth at all.

Which was fair.

She had a crucial role to play. If she failed, we were all going to die in the most horrible manner that a multi-century old monster could imagine. 

Far worse than that though, from Zeph’s perspective, was what was going to happen to Sola if I fell into Vaingloth’s clutches.

“Do you think she’d want us to do literally anything else?” I asked.

Zeph fell silent for a moment and then chuckled.

“Yeah. She’d want us to let her handle all of it on her own.”

The Sun God was used to being a solo act? Gee, how incredibly unsurprising.

Suppose I can’t fault you for wanting to be the brightest star on the stage, oh most dramatic one. It wasn’t a prayer, sort of far from one since most prayers don’t involve teasing one’s deity, but I offered it to Sola anyways.

She didn’t answer.

But I was pretty sure she wanted to.

“Are you sure we can’t go with you?” Lucky asked. “If this is going to be our last stand, it’d be nice to at least make sure you can get wherever you’re trying to go.”

“We’re needed elsewhere,” Xalaria said.

“And this is not our last stand,” I said. “It’s our first one.”

“It’ll be the last for some people,” Oolgo said.

“Yeah. Things are going to go wrong. This plan won’t work like we think it will. But we’re not just spitting in face of a god here. We’re not fighting so that we can die for our cause. We’re fighting for the lives that are on the other side of all this.”

“We’re fighting for more that that,” Smiles said.

“Yes. We are fighting for each other,” Zeph said, which surprised me. Of all of us, she should have been the one most willing to sacrifice the city and everyone in it if it meant Sola’s freedom and safety.

Except…

Except Zeph had been beloved by Sola, and had loved her in return, and that kind of love couldn’t help but lead to some level of understanding.

Zeph knew Sola loved us all. 

And so, no, even though it was tearing her heart apart, Zeph could never had sacrificed the city in exchange for Sola because she had to know what it would have done to Sola’s heart.

“Always,” I said as we came up on a ladder which would lead us back to the surface. I turned to Lucky and the people who were going with her.  “This where we part ways though. They need you up there.”

“I don’t like it, but, you’re right, and I don’t like that even more,” Lucky said. “What happened to that kid who I took into my crew so we could win a pipe cleaning job? She wasn’t anywhere near this brave or stupid.”

“She’s still pretty stupid,” I said. “And she’s not brave at all. She does however have the best friends a girl could ask for.”

“Say a pray for us then, I’m thinking we’re going to need it.” Lucky turned to start climbing the ladder.

Before she could get fully away though, I grabbed her leg in a fierce hug.

“I said I have the best friends. I didn’t say I have a lot of them. So this better not be goodbye.”

“Okay,” she said, reaching down a long arm to pat me on the head. “We’ll make it a ‘see you later then’ kid.”

“You better.”

Tears? No. Of course not. And if there were, I wiped them away much too quickly for anyone to notice.

Zeph was kind enough to not disabuse me of that as we continued following the tunnel along branches which lead ever close to the castle.

“You do have backup ideas, do you not?” she asked a few turns later.

“A few, but you’d like them even less than this one,” I said, which had the twin virtues of being true while also vague enough that when Vaingloth heard it, he would be no less confused than he already was.

Or at least I hoped he was confused.

I had, what I felt, were some good reasons to hope that was the case though, beyond the large amount of wishful thinking that was driving me onwards.

For one thing, I was pretty sure no one had ever tried to confront him like I was set on doing. The proof of that was we didn’t have any festivals to celebrate the horrible fate he’d inflicted on the poor theoretical fool, and Vaingloth was absolutely the kind of tyrant to remind people constantly about what a bad idea opposing him was.

The other ‘proof’ of his confusion was the nonsense he was pulling with the patrollers and inquisitors in the city. If he knew what I was up to, spreading his forces around the city was the absolute last thing he would want to do.

“How did you get your furry friend to stay behind?” Kalkit asked. It was easy to forget they was with us, which I was uproariously glad to experience. If the Blessed of Secrets was able to call upon their divine power that deeply, that was final pillar of proof I needed to believe in my plan enough to keep moving forward.

My knees may have disagreed.

And my freezing fingertips.

And my guts.

Okay, most of me disagreed with the assessment that what I was doing was a good idea, but Kalkit’s presence was a strong argument in my plan’s favor.

If we were still a secret, then Vaingloth had to be positively losing his mind.

Picture you have an enemy. They’re a minor annoyance, right up until the point where they injure you worst than you have been injured since the world ended, worse than you probably even thought it was possible for you to be injured. What would you do?

Why, you’d smite them of course!

Except the sniveling wretch is whisked away before you can finish the smiting.

And then you almost find her.

Except she escapes again.

Out into the wasteland. The wasteland which is guaranteed to kill her by virtue of the fact that there’s nothing living out there at all, and all the unliving things are really interested into sharing their fate with anything they run across.

The only danger is if she heads to one of your fellow all-powerful lords. 

But she doesn’t. She heads to a dead city, with the shade of a dead lord you dealt with ages ago.

You still want to kill her. Need to really. But it would be a hassle, and, far more importantly, expose you to the machinations of your fellow lords, who would very much like to reduce their current number from nine, including you, to a much more manageable eight.

So you sit and bid your time.

Maybe you cook up some new servants. Ones who can survive the wastelands. At least long enough to kill that hated nuisance, or better yet, bring her back so you can inflict the dozens of fates worse than death that you have in mind for her.

You know it’ll be a long wait. She’s far off and well hidden and she has no reason not to keep running and hiding.

But you have time.

Centuries.

Millenia.

You’ll get her eventually.

And then a couple of weeks later, there’s a light on the horizon.

She’s coming back on her own.

Why?

Why would anyone do that.

Your city is in revolt? No it’s not. That’s a few people who’ve forgotten the lessons you’ve taught them. You have plenty of terrors you can unleash to get them back in line.

But the light’s getting brighter.

Why is the light getting bright?

Why is it getting so close!

And then it vanishes.

You can’t sense her anymore.

Where is she?

What is she doing?

What did she find?

Why does she know?

Feeling terrified yet? 

I certainly hoped Vaingloth was.

“Time to go up,” I said, feeling an unholy heat radiating through the stones above me.

The fires I’d fled my whole life were waiting for me.