“Though our world be burnt and humbled, we remain. We who may still walk in the light. We who have been glorified by the holiest of holies! We the Chosen and the Pure! Children of this new Garden. Where once I was your High Accessor, now I am simply one of you. The first to tend to our guardian, Holy Mazana. The first to offer succor and guidance in the name of the one divinity who did not abandon us. Who did not fail. Who did not betray both duty and responsibility when the night came crashing down around us, and in whose radiant goodness we shall surely dwell for all the days to come so long as our hearts remain pure and true and filled with love for the Divine Tree.”

– From the first speech of the High Accessor Sasarai as he donned the mantle of First Tender

Just hearing some words shouldn’t have chilled my soul. Even words spoken by the gods shouldn’t have conveyed the enormity of horror that Draconia and Umbrielle naming the architect of their destruction had.

“Who…who…what…?” I stammered out the words trying to form a meaningful question and failing as images of a dark beyond the sky, a hunger insatiable even if it consumed everything, and malice beyond rage swallowed my thoughts.

“Are you okay?” Theia asked, reaching over from where she was sitting guide me down to a more stable position on the floor beside her.

I shared perhaps a bit too much there, Draconia said.

“Maybe don’t then?” Theia said in slow, deliberate syllables.

It’s too late. She’s seen our adversary. Umbrielle’s regret did not fill me with hope that the violent heaving I felt was going to get better.

“Yeah, so have I, but it wasn’t this bad. What did you do to her?” Theia sounding angry on my behalf was nice if not particularly helpful.

What I shared with you was akin to an artist’s sketch, Umbrielle said. I believe Draconia was caught up in a memory.

“Yeah. That thing. It’s. It’s Not Mine.” Words are just puffs of air? Little vibrations we make which have no weight and less force. They can’t change anything.

The ideas they carry on the other hand though.

I felt the horror Draconia had known, and far worse than that, the attention of the Beast, burrowing into my soul but with those words I cast it out. The Beast had no place in my life. No place in my reality. It was not something would ever be a part of me, or something that I would never let take anything that was mine.

I felt scales forming over me again as I reached deep into Draconia’s blessing.

The fire was there. The power was there. She was there.

But she’d failed.

That was what she wanted to me to see.

Even with all her power, in its purest, most unfettered form, she’d failed.

She wasn’t a refuge for me from the Beast.

She couldn’t protect me.

If gods could weep, this was what it felt like. To be defined by something, to be given ultimate responsibility and unlimited authority, and to still not be enough. To watch a world being shattered and broken and know that you were supposed to be its great defender and were helpless to save anyone.

I sat with that in silence for I don’t know how long.

You can’t defend me, I said at last, speaking only to Draconia.

Not from that, not even were I made fully whole again, she said, her words calm but her voice holding the sorrow of centuries.

Then maybe it’s my job to protect you, I said.

It was ludicrous. Idiotic. 

And true.

I’d stumbled my way into the words, but when I spoke them to her, I knew they were the truth.

Was I more powerful than a god? No. Could I strike down the Beast that still lurked out beyond the curtain of night which had enveloped the world? No. 

But I had cast it out.

In naming the End of All Things to me, and sharing her memory of it, Draconia had done more than show me her own destruction, I’d glimpsed the Beast, not just as it was then, but as it had become.

And it had glimpsed me as well.

I’d been afraid my whole life.

I’d lived in terror for so long of being ‘thrown over the Thicket Wall’, of being impure, of being destroyed for what I was.

And the Beast wanted me to know fear? Hah. Too late! Far too late.

Fear was my oldest friend. And if the Beast thought it was going to use fear to take my new friends away from me? The ones who were accepting me as I was?

Then we were going to have words, the Beast and I.

I welcome your resolve, but that is not a fight which any of us wish. Night has given us respite, and we are still in dire need of more.

“You feeling a bit better?” Theia asked. At some point she’d moved to sit opposite me and had, I think, been watching my blank eyed expression for at least a few minutes.

“I think so,” I said, shaking my head clear. “Thanks. Tell me more though, what is this place, really?” 

You’d think asking for more information after what the answer to my last question had done to me was the last thing I’d want but, nope, I was hungrier than ever to understand the truths behind all the lies I’d been told.

Theia paused for a moment, having, I guessed, a private conversation with Umbrielle before nodding and turning back to me.

“It’s a prison,” she said. “See all those lights? They’re all fragments of gods, like Draconia is.”

“And Umbrielle?” I asked.

I am a small piece of my full self, but Night remains. Umbrielle spoken delicately, though the delicacy was more for Draconia’s benefit than mine.

Night, the God of Night that is, she was the cleverest of us, Draconia said, waving aside Umbrielle’s offered delicacy with her tone.

Far from that, Umbrielle said, the Twins of Invention and Investigation would roast us both if they heard you say that.

If they were present to hear my words, then I would accept theirs, Draconia said. As they are not, and as your greater self is the one who saved us, I stand by that claim.

“I’m not clear on what happened to you, the gods I mean? Are there ones that were destroyed and others that weren’t?” That seemed like the most reasonable interpretation of what they were saying but with something like the Beast in play I didn’t think ‘reasonable’ was necessarily the right tool to work with.

You’ve seen what we fought, Draconia said. There were no gods who were spared, none of us who didn’t struggle against it. We all rose, and all but one of us fell. What fell were fragments though, tiny pieces of what we once were after the Beast devoured so much of what we had been.

“What does that mean though? You’re still gods aren’t you?”

We are. I am. The miracles which once flowed through us? The stewardship of our domains? Those are lost. This is our world no longer. It is held by those who usurped our role. The masters of this broken place.

They style themselves ‘Neoteric Lords’, Umbrielle said. And they are they ones who called the Beast here.

“Why? Why would…” But I didn’t need to finish asking that question. Not when the First Tender had been there my whole life. This was the world he wanted. The one where he was in control of everything, and all obeyed his will. “But, wait, you said ‘they’? There are others like the First Tender?”

“Yeah. Lots of them,” Theia said. “Used to be, what, twelve, and now they’re down to eight, right?”

“Eight? Eight people like the First Tender? Do they all call themselves the ‘First’ Tender? Are there eight other ‘divine trees’ too?” 

The thought of there being eight times as many people in thrall to an abomination like the First Tender was nauseating but that was in line with how the rest of the day was going, so no real surprise there.

“Nope. Each one has their own weird little thing going on. No other trees either. That seems to be Sasarai’s idea of a good time,” Theia said.

“How do the other people survive then? You said there were broken spirits and worse out in the wastelands right?”

“There are. People can deal with them though. Usually. It’s dangerous but not like the Neoterics are. The things in the wasteland stay there because if the Neoterics catch them, getting stuffed into a place like this is about the best thing that can happen to them.”

“Why even have a place like this though?” I looked around and for how horrible it was, I couldn’t help but see the beauty in it too. “If the gods are just fragments, why bother keeping them locked up?”

Through us they can access our domains more easily, Draconia said. With this many fragments, the First Tender is as close to a true god as anything as solid as a mortal can become. 

He even has the grace from his people’s worship to power him, both those within and beyond your Thicket Wall.

“But, we, they, don’t worship the First Tender. All our worship was supposed to be directed to the Holy Tree?”

There is only so much grace any one mortal can hold. Your people are right to call Sasarai’s overgrown shrub divine, but not at all in the sense they mean it, Umbrielle said. The tree was grown from the bodies of the fallen and the faith they once carried. Its is a vessel for grace which the First Tender can draw from at will, without needing to risk attracting the Beast’s attention by shining so brightly that the I can’t conceal him.

“Wait, yeah, why is she concealing him? I get that hiding us was the only thing that could save us, but why save them?” I asked.

“She didn’t have a choice. If the Beast sees anyone here, it’s going to come back and eat everyone,” Theia said. “Yeah, I asked that too. It kind of sucks.”

“There’s got to be something we can do about him, him and all the others though, isn’t there?” Burn the Holy Tree down seemed like a great start, but the problems that would cause were obvious enough even I knew it was a terrible idea.

“Well, the plan had been to sneak in here, find a divine fragment or two and spirit them away so that we could look for someone who the fragments would Bless. If we just so happened to frame one of the other Neoteric for the loss, right after a Neoteric had just died, then maybe we’d get them fighting each other and we’d get the total down to seven or six or so.”

“I like the idea of them fighting each other but what do you mean one of them just died?” I had a hard time picturing someone like the First Tender, who was, as far as I knew, functionally immortal, ever dying, and if it had been recent then something was changing.

“Remember how I said there were eight Neoterics? Yeah, up until a little while ago there’d been nine of them. The first three, twelve though ten we’ll call them, those all got killed off by the others. Either the rest got smart at that point or the first three were just the unpopular ones, because the nine stayed nine for a long time.”

“And then one of them got on the other’s bad side?” 

“Nope. One of them pissed off the wrong mouse.”

I stared at Theia. 

“A mouse?”

“Well, okay, a Ratkin. She, uh, she’s kind of special,” Theia said.

She is the Blessed of Sola, God of the Sun, the first of us to rise and the last of us to fall.

“And we kind of owe her the world.”