“Will not all this construction draw attention to our plans?”

“It shall draw attention to us, which is all the better to disguise the plans we have laid.”

“But you are turning your city into a fortress. One does not build those unless one anticipates a being on the receiving end of a war.”

“And yet, these fortresses shall serve to prevent war.”

“Fortresses?”

“Mine is far from the only one. So far as I know, all of the others have been constructing such defenses. Surely you’ve begun similar preparations?”

“Why would I? There will be none left to defend ourselves from.”

“What we plan, for the gods, for the world, it will not be clean. Do not presume that the world will be left without perils simply because it will be ours.”

“So are we to be prisoners in these refuges of our own making?”

“Even the gods are limited to existing within their own domains. Better the safety of a refuge we control absolutely than an eternity cut short through the whims of chaotic peril.”

– High Accessors Helgon and Vaingloth inspecting the newly erected walls of Mt Gloria two  seasons before the Sunfall.

I was being carried again. I’d been carried a lot in my life. Not always literally, but it happened often enough when people were impatient, or when I was simply too weak or small to escape a situation on my own. Some of those times I’d agreed with being carried. Some of them had even saved my life. Despite the roaring inferno of mystical fire that I had devoured, and the intoxicating rush of knowing I was more powerful in that moment than everyone I’d ever known put together, I was still rather happy to be carried.

Because I was weak and small still.

And that was just the best!

We were well outside Mt. Gloria’s walls in the blink that it took Vaingloth to understand what I’d done.

Poor, pathetic, Little me. Only a total loser would find me to be even an annoyance, and an actual threat? Impossible. Simply impossible.

The Central Fire Portal building exploded, unable to contain his rage and fear.

“I don’t think he expected this,” Zeph said, her words somehow not ripped away by the deafening winds that screamed past us.

“How could he have,” I asked from the safety of her arms. “I’m so harmless after all. If a tiny thing like me can take a third of his power from him, just imagine what the other Neoterics will be able to do to him.”

“I still don’t like that part of this plan,” Zeph said, leaping over a trio of hills that were in our path. “This is going to stir up all of them, and we don’t have a plan for dealing with that.”

“Unfortunately, I do,” I said. All of my plan had come back to me but I was still revising bits of it as I went. Never a really good idea, but then nothing I’d done since stabbing the patroller really even approached ‘good idea’ status. “That part’s all on me though.”

I had several constraints my plans. The biggest one, of course, was to free Sola. So long as Vaingloth was alive that was going to require his cooperation to break the bindings he’d cast. I’d put in a lot of work to make sure cooperation was the last thing he’d ever offer me though, which left the alternative I really wanted.

“You? You’re going to take on the nine Neoterics all on your own?”

“Well, there’ll be eight of them then,” I said. There was an outcome to all this that was all for me. Could we have redeemed Vaingloth somehow? Turned his phenomenal talent and power to nurturing his people rather than literally burning them up for personal power? Anything was possible. The more important question though was did I want to, and I’d never been unsure as the answer to that one.

“I thought the plan was to lead Vaingloth away from his stronghold and then cutoff the other two portals to leave him weak enough for the others to take apart?”

“That was one of the plans, yes,” I said, and nudged her to change course towards a mountain on the horizon.

From the distance behind us, light bloomed and began racing closer with a terrible inevitability.

Vaingloth was using his own power, and he was not being careful with it anymore.

I winced at that.

My vengeance had definitely cost people their lives. There was no chance Vaingloth’s exit from the city had been gentle enough not to crush buildings and vaporize those who’d been caught in his path.

If I regretted anything, it was them. The people who’d been caught up in this through no fault of their own. They didn’t deserve what had happened to them. It wasn’t fair.

I’d learn their names in time. It wouldn’t do anything for them. Nor would my regrets. I wasn’t going to forget them though. That would be an insult. I’d chosen a path which had led to their destruction and that wasn’t something I’d ever be able to fully set right.

I hoped at best I could make a world that the people they cared for would find some comfort in.

“I can’t let you destroy yourself,” Zeph said, as her steps accelerated still further. “Not again.”

I could feel Vaingloth’s rage stabbing out towards us, but for all his power, he was no match in terms of pure speed to one of Sola’s Fox Winds. Of course, he didn’t have to be. The world was only so big. We were going to run out of places to run to long before he ran out of rage to push him into following us.

“I’m not going to destroy myself or endanger Sola,” I said. “All of this? You have no idea how much of it is for me. Screw going out in a blaze of glory. That’s Vaingloth’s job. Mine is to have the last laugh.”

Zeph’s pace slackened for a moment as we rounded the lower slopes of the mountain.

“You really believe that don’t you?” she asked, navigating through a forest of twisted, claw-like trees.

The spirits which had twisted the trees and generally planned to use them as tools to rip apart themselves and anything else they could get their branches on were busy running as fast as they could out of our path, largely because I’d asked them to.

There wasn’t much else I was able to ask them to do, even from the limit set of things they were still capable of, but it at least got through out of Vaingloth’s path.

“I wouldn’t have asked you to help me like this if I didn’t plan to walk away from it,” I said. “Dying would have been a whole lot easier and safer for everyone else.”

“But…” Zeph started to say but that was when Vaingloth got serious about catching us. 

He couldn’t match Zeph’s speed, but he also didn’t need to let little things like a mountain slow him down either.

The last time I’d seen him, he was wearing his ‘mostly human’ form. Barring the flames that had been continually consuming his ever-regenerating eyes (really a mistake on his part investing his magic in those), he’d looked like he had before his ascension. What burst from the mountain however was nothing but a ball of terror with too many arms, and too many mouths wrapped around it.

Incinerating all of the various bits of Vaingloth which surged around us felt incredibly tempting. The only problem was, he still had all of those contingency spells in place and was more than ready to absorb the fire I’d taken from him. In fact, and this was only partially a guess, he was also ready to absorb the Heart of the Fire Portal, which was impressive since he had to have spun that spell up while he was chasing us. 

To be fair, the loss of heart of the portal was probably the one thing which really threatened to cripple him in the long term. I think my plan would have worked just based on the insults I’d dealt him, but stealing the gate had made his pursuit a certainty.

As his fingers swelled to the size of buildings and began to blot out of the horizon in front of us, I wondered for an instant whether it might be possible to overwhelm his contingencies and burn a path to freedom, but it would be a bad bet. Vaingloth had underestimated me. I was not about to underestimate the guy who’d overthrown the gods. If he had a spell setup for something, betting on anything short of a god taking it down was too obviously a losing play even for me to try.

Instead, I went with a winning one.

I was holding onto the fire I’d stolen, but in stealing it I’d changed it too. In Vaingloth’s hands, it had been the fire of his office, a measure of how complete his domination was. In my hands, it was a badge of how I’d outsmarted him right up until I let it go.

Giving it back to him was out of the question, and simply casting it off would have been worse than useless. 

So I gave it to Sola.

Some of it.

I needed almost all of it, but there was definitely enough for an offering to my distant and silent god.

My distant and silent god who nonetheless blessed the sacrifice I made to her and allowed me to pass it on to one of her court.

Lighting Zeph on fire had not previously been a part of my plan.

Sharing Sola’s flame with her however was not exactly something she was opposed to.

The world became nothing but a blur.

Zeph only slowed down because we were suddenly out of sight, beyond the horizon from Vaingloth and we didn’t want to lose him.

“This is…!” Zeph’s excitement was so intense I could feel her chest vibrating with it.

“A gift from a god who loves you dearly,” I said. “There’s not far to go now either.” I pointed towards where a chasm lay waiting for us. Once it had been the deepest reach of an ocean. Dark and impenetrable. In the wake of the Sunfall, it became the home to something far worse than crushing pressure and creatures which could never walk on land.

“I’m staying with you when we get there,” Zeph said.

“You can’t. This is something I have to do alone, no one else can help with this.” I wished I’d broached this part of my plan with Xalaria. She could have confirmed that it had to be me.

Or she might have killed me where I stood for even suggesting the idea. Since I wasn’t exactly sure which reaction she would have chosen, I’d kept this idea to myself, but, it turns out, sometimes not trusting people can be a bad idea too.

“The other Neoterics aren’t here,” Zeph said. “There’s no one to stop Vaingloth when he catches you. And he’s going to catch you as soon as we stop.”

“I know. That’s part of the plan. I can’t….he can’t catch you too though. You have to be safe for any of this to work,” I said.

“Why? What are you doing?” 

This was the moment I’d been dreading. It was entirely possible Zeph wasn’t going to trust me either because there really was a serious risk to what I had in mind. Not so much for me as for the entire world and everyone left in it.

That would be a lot of regrets to carry, but not enough to make me hesitate.

“I need you to drop me into the abyss there.”

“You’ll die.”

“No. There’s something down there.”

“There’s not. That’s been empty since the ocean dried up.”

“Oceans don’t just dry up,” I said. “The thing that drank the ocean dry is down there and if Vaingloth wants me, he’s going to have to follow me down there and catch me before it drinks me down too.”