“But should we succeed, what world will we create.”

“A better one.”

“Better for who? Not for those who had made this one, surely.”

“When we succeed, they will be no more. We cannot have a better world with them in it.”

“And what of the others, the ones they’ve favored? Those gifted with wealth and power who have done nothing to earn it.”

“You believe people will forgive them for that?”

“I don’t imagine they will, but do we embrace their destruction as well?”

“What other possible option is there?”

– High Accessors Helgon and Vaingloth during early discussions of the fate of the gods and the High Clergy who would not be part of their revolution.

My arrival back at Mt. Gloria was met with fire and screaming and the scent of death. Zeph was the one who told me about the fires, but I was able to pick out the screams and the scents on my own. 

I wished I could say I was surprised, but everything I’d read in all the lost histories had said people tended not to behave terribly well after escaping oppression. Not to mention the part where not everyone who was part of the fight against oppression was around when the oppressors were no more.

The people of Mt. Gloria surprised me though. It turns out the “wealthy elites” that I figured the rest of the population would tear apart the moment Vaingloth was removed, some of them had been the first to join the rebellion against him.

Others were still fighting for what they had of course. People are still people, even with actual divine inspiration guiding them, so stupidity and greed were going to dominate at least some portion of any populace.

A fair portion of Mt. Gloria’s “upper class” though had lived on exactly the same pins and needles as the rest of us. Did they have more light and heat, and better food? Yeah, right up until the point where Vaingloth or one of his inner circle decided they’d stepped out of line, or an example needed to be set for the others, or they simply got bored and needed a prettier fly to torment than the bugs who lived in the lower city.

The fires, as it turned out, weren’t from the upper city being set on fire by my people. With the Fire Portal gone, the city had been plunged into darkness and cold. The upper city was burning and the lower city was burning because people had picked the buildings they liked the least and set them ablaze so they they wouldn’t all freeze to death in the dark.

Were people unhappy that they’re houses were turning to ash? They probably would have been if anyone had burned their own houses, but the lower city had plenty of abandoned buildings and the upper city had that yummy, yummy castle that Vaingloth had built just for himself. 

The castle had a lot of stone for its defenses, but given how much rarer wood was than it had been in the pre-Sunfall world, of course the petty little tyrant had insisted that as much as possible to be used for his personal accommodations.

That explained the screaming I’d heard too. See it turns out that when you spend a few centuries sending the children of a population off to die leading pointless fighting underwater, or to rot from within so that fresh air can be piped in constantly, or, you know, just burning them as fuel for really no good reason, yeah, people don’t enjoy that do much, and they’ll cheer rather loudly when they break away from your control.

I had to get a lot closer to one of the gatherings to make out that the screaming was more celebratory than anguished, though I also noticed it sounded more than a bit crazed too.

Probably because no one knew Vaingloth wasn’t coming back.

This wasn’t a wild victory celebration of freedom.

This was a people who’d been pushed so far past the breaking point that when a crack formed in the wall of authority Vaingloth had erected and his power faltered, they seized the chance no one believed was even real, because even a moment of relief was worth it.

Not that everyone got to experience that relief though.

Vaingloth’s patrollers and inquisitors hadn’t gone down gently. They hadn’t laid down their arms and surrendered because the fate Vaingloth would have visited on them for doing so would have been so much worse than death.

But they’d escaped too I guess. 

And taken a lot of people with them.

Which explained the scent of death, and the anguish which lay under the celebration.

“We should tell them what you’ve done,” Zeph said. “They’re safe at last.”

“They’re not and we should definitely not,” I said. I did not need the headache that came with people either praising or blaming me for Vaingloth’s death.

“What do you mean? Why aren’t they safe?” she asked.

“Because of the other Neoterics. They’re going to be frightened for a good while, but fear doesn’t last forever. They’re too hungry. Eventually one or more of them will come here to claim it as their own.” I’d known that was going to be a problem too but, unlike with Vaingloth, I didn’t know the other Neoterics enough to even begin to guess how we could deal with them.

Well, okay, I knew one option we could try, but ‘go talk to Helgon’ was pretty weak as far as plans went. I mean it wasn’t like he’d be able to deal with them, so any advice he could give was suspect at best.

Of course, I had Zelaria and Kilkat to work with too. 

In fact, it was probably better to say they had me to work with.

I’d had a useful role to play in Vaingloth’s demise largely thanks to the cheap shot Sola and I had gotten in when we burned out his eyes. The other Neoterics would have no particular vendetta against me, so inciting them into a proper mindless rage wasn’t in the cards.

Which was great! It meant dealing with them wasn’t going to be my problem!

Except for the part where when they came to Mt Gloria all together, I’d get squashed like a bug the same as everyone else in the city would.

So…I could move to the Factorum right? Let Mt. Gloria get squished and hang out with a ghost for the rest of my days.

Honestly that would have been very ‘me’. Running away still seemed like a phenomenal strategy to me, and, I would point out, had in fact served me very well in taking down Vaingloth.

But I didn’t want to see Lucky get squished.

Oh wait, problem solved there! I wasn’t going to be seeing anything at all anymore!

A shudder ran through me and I clenched my jaw. I was done crying about my eyes (I definitely was not done, I just didn’t have time for it, any wetness on my face was due to something else).

I didn’t want Lucky to be squished, regardless of whether I could see it happen or not.

And running away to the Factorum would mean living with the spectre of that. Knowing it was coming and wondering forever if it was finally the day it would happen and if there wasn’t something that could have been done to prepare for it.

“You don’t have to fight the other Neoterics,” Sola said. “There are other people out there, other Blessed. We have so much to do here.”

“Yeah. People here need you, a lot,” I agreed. “But, if the other Blessed could have handled the rest of the Neoterics, I’m pretty sure they already would have.”

“You do have certain advantages over them,” Zeph said.

Sola had continued to speak to us both, but I could tell she was also speaking to other people as well, and, unless I missed my guess, Zeph privately too. Zeph wasn’t terribly chatty normally but there’d been a distracted air to her as she’d carried me back to Mt Gloria. Not an unhappy one, just distant, like each time I spoke I was interrupting a conversation she’d gotten lost in.

“I’m not sure it’s an advantage,” Sola said. “I’ve been trying to repair the damage she took and I can’t.”

“That’s not entirely surprising, healing is not part of your domain,” Zeph said.

“It is for one of my Blessed,” Sola said. “Or it’s supposed to be. I even tried borrowing something from Kala’s domain and it didn’t help.”

“Kala was always more focused on flora than fauna, I’m not sure Little wants to grow leaves any time soon,” Zeph said. I was holding onto the hem of her tunic so I wouldn’t get lost, but she put out a hand to steady me anyways as we came to an abrupt halt.

“Looks like you two have seen better days,” an unfamiliar voice said, probably from an Orc? An older male orc, possibly? 

I could hear a few people behind him.

“Hoping tomorrow’s going to be a bit easier,” Zeph said.

She sounded concerned, which puzzled me. If there was a problem, she could have had us out of here before the orc had finished the first ‘L’ on ‘Looks’.

“Maybe for us,” the orc said. “Not so much for them.”

What’s going on? I asked Sola. Just because I couldn’t see didn’t mean the god inside me had any issues perceiving the world around me. 

There’s a bonfire ahead and they have a squad of patrollers and a couple of inquisitors bound and gagged in front of it, Sola said.

“The Fire Portals gone,” I said, confused why they’d bother burning the patrollers. 

Sure, I could get why they’d kill them. When they’d been armed, the patrollers had been an active danger and the inquisitors were deadly, armed or not. Bound and gagged though, they’d all be a lot more helpless, but vengeance doesn’t tend to care about that.

I was definitely not going to slam the orc and his friends for being vengeful either. The hypocrisy of doing so would have slapped me senseless if I’d tried.

No, what puzzled me was why patrollers were still alive at all.

Sure, fight them. Sure, kill them if you need to.

But why waste time? They should either already be on the pyre or being locked up somewhere convenient. Leaving them out in the open was just asking fate to rescue them.

So imagine how I felt when I realized fate had done just that.

“Yeah, that’s the problem then, isn’t it?” another voice spoke up, a dwarf woman maybe? “No more fire and not that much to wood to go around. We’re going to have to scrounge for everything we can burn and when that runs out?”

“When that runs out, we freeze,” the orc said. “Everybody knows it, but if it’s that or burn when his Lordship makes it back from his walkabout, well, we’ll take what time we can get.”

“And burn the ones who put us here,” the dwarf said.

I sighed.

I hated to be holding the news I did.

I could have just shut up about it. I should have just shut up. I could just wait till the patrollers had been turned to ash and then let people know what the future held.

Except they would be burning more than just the patrollers.

The jubilation of the successful uprising was going to turn to dread soon enough. I could hear it in the orc and dwarf’s voices. 

And where would dread lead them?

Right into madness.

From what the average person in the city could see, the future held only death either by frost, starvation, or, the worst option, Vaingloth’s return.

Some people would get a jump on things and pick their own exit.

Others would lose their minds.

Others would invent whatever superstitions they could find comfort in.

And some would try to help.

Maybe a lot would try to help.

Which was why I needed to help.

My sigh turned to a curse.

A curse on myself, because I’m an idiot, and this was an obvious outcome of my plan.

“There’s not going to be any problem with finding things to burn,” I said. “In fact, we’re never going to need to burn anyone ever again.”

In proof I held out the hand I wasn’t holding onto Zeph with and produced a ball of, I’m assuming, brilliant fire.