“We will not be able to control the thing which we summon.”

“That is rather the point. It would go quite badly for us if we could after all.”

“Because then the gods would be able to pressure us to undo what we’ve done?.”

“Because then the gods would obliterate us and take from our remains any secrets we might possess which would allow them to survive.”

“And what is to prevent them from obliterating us first, out of the hope that we might contain an answer for them, or simply obliterating us on general principal?”

“There will be a fraught moment or two I’m sure. The more power they use however, the more our summon will be able to find and feast upon them.”

“Should we need to use the power we will steal from them, our summon will have no hesitation in feasting on us as well.”

“And that is why we have each been collecting as much grace of our own as we can. Consider, we do not need to defeat either the gods or the summon. We simply need to be hard enough to destroy that they destroy each other instead.”

“And if either of them remains?”

“If a god survives our endeavor, if will not be a problem for any of us for very long. If our summon survives it will not be a problem for anyone in the world for very long.”

“You seem eager to embrace your destruction should it come to that.”

“Not in the slightest. What I will embrace is the undeniable proof of my, I mean of course ‘our’, superiority which the new world will stand as a monument too. If there was no risk of failure, anyone could do this. It is only for us, that the risk of failure is in truth no risk at all.”

– High Accessors Dyrena and Vaingloth, finalizing the theoretical spellwork for summoning the Beast of All Endings.

Convincing Zeph to hurl me to my doom was surprisingly more difficult than I’d expected it to be. Given how annoying a lot of people find me, I’d almost wondered if she would have chucked me into the Abyss gleefully. There were plenty of people who’d have been happy to do the job, just, unfortunately, none quite as exceptional as she was.

“No. No, this is wrong. You can’t survive this,” she said instead and came to a complete stop at the edge of the chasm. 

Up close, I got to see that it did indeed look to be endless. I’d absorbed so much power that I was glowing brighter than all of Mt Gloria put together and my light couldn’t even illuminate the walls past a little bit much less any possible bottom which might or might not still exist.

That wasn’t my main problem though. Far more pressing was the fact that Vaingloth was coming in too fast for us to have a debate over my idea, so I pulled out the last, best card I had for convincing Zeph.

“This will free Sola,” I said. “It’s the only thing that will.” I wasn’t lying and that was what saved (probably not an accurate term to be fair) me.

Fox Winds, it turns out, can growl. 

And when they reach a decision, they tend to act on it without what you might call anything even vaguely like a delay, at least based on the sample size of one I had access to.

One moment I was securely held in her arms and the next I was out into the middle of the vast chasm, falling into a darkness that even the light I burned with was increasingly smothered by.

I was definitely going to die.

If I hit the bottom that was.

Or, if there was a bottom. 

The thing in the chasm? The biggest fragment of the beast left in the world? As I dropped towards its maw, I felt a tendril of its form brush past me and I saw how it had swallowed the ocean.

Compared to the beast itself, the fragment was tiny, an unnoticeably insignificant spec of emptiness, larger to be sure than the fragment I’d touched before, but still less than a footnote in the book of destruction which was the Beast of All Endings. 

Despite being so small though, it was larger than the world itself. It’s body, to the extent that it had anything that could be mistaken for a physical form, existed in dimensions outside any of the ones I could perceive.

Or, to be accurate, any of the ones I used to be able to perceive.

The part of me that wasn’t Little, and never had been, was all too familiar with those empty, screaming, desolate reaches. There were memories my skin bore and held away from from mind, memories of the eternity I’d spend dissolving into nothingness within the beast fragment which had devoured me. Could I draw on those memories? No. They both weren’t real and were something far greater than reality. My Little mind was not built to fathom the endless depths and null space the beast inhabited.

But I could wrap my feelings around the magnitude and nihility of the thing below me. 

I could understand what I was falling into not through reason and words but through metaphor and the emotional wounds which echoed between us.

None of that gave me a sharp sense of whether there was a bottom I might ever reach or if the beast had consumed not only the ocean but the idea behind the physical structure of the world where it landed.  It was as likely that I was falling down to crash on ancient rocks as it was that I was falling into the absence of space and time and physical reality itself.

The further I fell, the more those probabilities shifted away from reality and rock holding firm and more towards the sense of an endless wound, a void in the planet where the fabric of creation should have held firm. It was something that couldn’t be perceived because it wasn’t there, or rather the “there” it should have been was a “there” anymore.

No one had sensed this beast fragment because it was, in a sense, not within the chasm at all. Where it was, where it truly was, was a question without an answer. It’s location was an error in the fabric of creation, a point which couldn’t be referenced anymore, and it was as much that error as it was anything else.

That is what I was falling into, and would fall into forever.

Except that someone caught me.

Just like I’d known they would.

Being caught by Vaingloth was an inevitability. I’d known that from the start. And I’d known what he was going to do to me when he finally had me in his clutches.

With one hand as the anvil and the other as a hammer striking with the stolen speed of a god, he crushed me to a fine paste.

Or that’s what he tried to do.

Smearing me into a single cell thick blob of goop wouldn’t have stopped him from hurting me. He had plenty of stolen divine energy to bring me back to life again and again. His only problem was that to splatter me properly, splatter me so I wouldn’t be able to form a coherent thought and hurt him again, he needed to put some real effort into his hammer blow.

I had plenty of stolen magic of my own to defend myself with after all.

He very definitely needed to overcome that, and any resiliency that Sola could still lend me.

Also, he was angry enough to split the world in half if that was what it took to be rid of me.

Getting him that angry had been so critically important that I laughed when I saw his power building for the last punch I was ever likely to take.

He could totally overpower me. Even with the stolen fire. Even with the Heart of the Portal. Even with Sola’s backing. He was a Neoteric Lord, a Lord of the New World, and he had spent centuries building his power up from when he’s only had enough to overthrow the gods themselves.

He could smite me, fix his eyes, and crush all dissent in Mt Gloria and consider it nothing more than a particularly irritating afternoon.

Except his blow never landed.

Someone was still hungry you see.

As I fell into the starless abyss, the beast fragment had touched me, but that meant I’d touched it too.

This beast fragment didn’t know me, but I knew it. I knew its pain, and I knew what it thought it wanted.

And then Vaingloth caught me and it saw what I’d brought it.

A treat.

Vaingloth was powerful beyond all reason.

He claimed to be Eternal.

But so had the three Neoterics who’d already died.

True Helgon’s ghost remained behind, and that had been a critical foundation of my plan because he had none of the power he’d once possessed. That had proven that for as vast as they were, the Neoterics were still finite beings.

Which was something Vaingloth had forgotten in his rage. 

Something the beast fragment was all too willing to remind of him.

It caught his descending blow, not to save me, but because the power blazing from Vaingloth’s city-sized fist was something it couldn’t ignore.

I watched as Vaingloth’s expression, written on a face as large as an entire precinct in Mt Gloria, twisted from blinding rage to a horrified understanding of what he’d done.

And then the beast began to eat him.

Having been consumed by a beast fragment, I had a keen appreciation of what Vaingloth was experiencing in those first few moment. When I was devoured it had been so bad that I was physically incapable of remembering it fully, but the parts I could recall? Oh, those brought me so much comfort as I watched Vaingloth rear away missing not only the eyes I’d burned out but the hand which he’d planned to splat me with.

Had he fled at that exact instant he might have escaped. It’s not likely. The beast drank and ocean and burrowed a hole through the concept of space, it wasn’t really big on things like ‘limits’ but maybe Vaingloth could have worked something out. Gotten the beast to chase it to some other Neoterics city and let it eat the other Neoteric instead. That might have worked.

“Not looking so Eternal there, I’m kinda disappointed. Guess you weren’t the smart one after all.” There was no chance my words reached him over the roar of the beast. There was also no chance he missed them. 

And that was all it took.

The fear that might have saved him, that might have given him the speed and direction he needed, for just an instant, a fraction of a second was eclipsed by a fresh wave of unbridled rage.

He knew I’d planned this.

He knew I’d done this to him.

And he knew I was laughing at him and always, always would be.

That was it. That was the moment he’d had. The one sliver of time he could have escaped and I made sure he missed it.

The beast did the rest.

Into the burning sockets of his missing eyes.

Past his scream of rage and down his throat.

Straight through his chest, or whatever it was he’d turned it into.

The beast stabbed Vaingloth in his everything and then crashed over us.

I didn’t want to see what came next, and I definitely didn’t want to be a part of it, but I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t call Zeph to save me and I couldn’t call on Sola’s power, even as Vaingloth’s approaching death shredded the bindings on her at last.

I couldn’t because I had to make sure he was gone.

I had to bear witness, so that not even his ghost would have a place in the world that was to come.