“What I don’t get is why we’re here? The Thicket Wall’s impregnable. Nothing’s ever gotten through it and nothing’s ever going to. So what’s the point of having us here, keeping a watch out? I mean we can’t even look over the wall. If something was coming, we wouldn’t know until it busted through the wall and then what are we supposed to do?”

“You want us to have to look at what’s on the other side of the wall?”

“No, I mean, well, maybe? There’s just a big pile of nothing out there right?”

“Nothing living. That’s not the same thing as nothing at all. There are things out there you never want to see. Things that can burrow into your brain just by looking at you.”

“Where’d you hear that? How would anyone know?”

“Remember Cursus? He told me. Said he was on duty one day and the top of the wall needed to be inspected, so they hauled him and another guy named Falfo up to the top. Cursus said he took a peek over the top, but Falfo? Falfo just looked out bold as you please. Cursus said he went all quiet when he saw the lights.”

“What lights?”

“The lights of the things eyes. It had to be. Anyways Falfo and Cursus come down and the next day Falfo is out sick. No one knew what was wrong with him, and they didn’t have long to figure it out because the next day he was dead.”

“Dead from what? From some lights?”

“From the things out there. They got into him. Made him impure.”

“What about Cursus. You said he peeked too.”

“Yeah. He got transferred after Falfo died. I heard he got killed down in the root tunnels by one of the critters they fight, but one of the guys down there said the creature who got him singled Cursus out like the creature knew he was going to be there.”

“All that from a peek?”

“Yeah, what can you do? It’s a dangerous world out there.”

– Wall Guards Garl and Faneyen unknowingly propagating carefully planted falsehoods on the night when Jilya first left the Garden.

Theia told me the story of “Little Hands Can Do Great Things” and I was forced to accept that either I had gone insane, or the world had. It was easier to accept that I was the one who’d snapped, but the more I listened, the more I was forced to believe that the world had simply lost all sense and rationality.

“She killed one of the architects of the Sunfall? And she’s a Ratkin? And they’re not extinct? And she BROUGHT THE SUN BACK!?”

Oddly, it wasn’t the last one that was giving me the most trouble. I was hung up on the idea that one of the extinct peoples, the ones too impure to survive into the world the ‘Holy Tree’ preserved for all the good Sylvans, had somehow been around this whole time.

You have noticed Theia though, Draconia said, just to me, because she is a kind and benevolent god and willing to refrain from pointing out how cataclysmically stupid I was being.

To be fair though, my problem with the existence of Ratkins, and apparently a wide variety of other species surviving was how it made so much more sense than the alternative I and everyone I knew had just accepted for my whole life.

We were ‘pure’? We were ‘special’? Seriously? That was all it took? Didn’t anyone else ever question how convenient that was? Didn’t anyone ever wonder why, if we were so ‘special’ and ‘pure’ and ‘sheltered by the Holy Tree’s grace’, there was so much misery in everyone’s lives?

I’d lived in fear for years for my own special reasons, but it had made me notice how many other people were afraid too. That hadn’t helped me at all of course. I’d assumed that if ‘good’ and ‘pure’ people needed to be that fearful of their negligible trespasses then my own had to demand an even vaster amount of terror.

Why had no one ever asked who was really benefitting from a doctrine that kept all of us terrified of being judged and found wanting?

Why had I never asked that?

Does it matter that you didn’t ask the question before, or does it matter that you’re asking it now?

“The stuff Little did, she didn’t do along,” Theia said. “I’ve met some of the people who were there, the ones who helped her, other Blessed, like us.”

“Like you, you mean? Or are there other Sylvan out there too?” I don’t know why that was important. Somehow the idea that Theia was unique, a miracle of grace made flesh, seemed easier to believe than a world that could hold two women like her, much less a whole population of Theias.

“Yeah. Lots. Well, lots for the kind of cities we have now,” Theia said.

Once your people numbered in the hundreds of millions, Umbrielle said. There remain less than a one percent of that.

That’s was their plan, Draconia said. Each of the High Accessors who betrayed us took domain over a population of their choice. Sasarai always loved the idea of ‘harmony through racial purity’, and with our stolen power, he was able to make it a reality.

“I’ve always wondered why they didn’t save more though?” Theia said. “Not out of the goodness of their hearts or anything, but wouldn’t more worshippers mean more grace and more divine power for them?”

Only if they could lay claim to it all. It the population under their control became larger than they could maintain their dominance over, the grace they’d stolen could easily leak away and empower others, Umbrielle said.

You two and the others like you are proof of that, Draconia said. Our domains lie quiet, for the most part. As fragments of what we once were, we do not and cannot call on them as once we did, but they are still out there, as battered and diminished by the attacks of the Beast as we are, but so long as reality holds, they remain ready to receive the prayers you make merely by living. Those prayers call our domains, call us, back from the edge of oblivion we are always sliding towards. They are our anchor to this world and that which drives us onwards, and the stronger they become they more active they are.

“I’ve heard this one before,” Theia said, “so before they get too confusing. They don’t mean active in the ‘has plans’ or ‘talks to you’ sense. They mean it like the wind blowing. More energy in the air, the harder the wind blows. It doesn’t have a plan, it just becomes more of a present force in the world.”

“And that leads to people becoming Blessed?” I could follow what they were saying but what it all meant was a bit beyond me still.

It’s one of the requirements, Draconia said. Without grace to empower us, we may represent our domains but we’re powerless to act for them or make use of them. After the Sunfall, I could have called on those close to my domain and Blessed them, but it would have been a blessing in name only. I had nothing to share with them.

“But you’ve recovered since then?” I couldn’t imagine any Sylvan worshipping any of the old gods, or any of the old gods being particularly interested in what any living Sylvan’s might have to offer.

Yes. Sasarai, the First Tender, saw to that. Draconia did not seem pleased with that. As insensate lumps we were doubtless more convenient and manipulable, but also far too disconnected from our domains to provide him any benefit.

And there’s always the danger of a god in that situation dying, Umbrielle said, though her tone was more unconcerned than I’d have expected.

“I thought the gods were immortal?” I asked.

Most did up until the coming of the Beast, Draconia said. Then it became very fashionable to believe we had all died, but had that been the case the world would have died as well and then been renewed as well when we were reborn.

Divine immortality is more a matter of categorization, Umbrielle said. The personas we wear can reach an end, for many different reasons, but unless reality is rewritten to exclude us, our divinity will rise again as the need for us grows.

Our faces are usually different, and the collection of domains we manage can change but nothing is forgotten. There was more to it than that. Draconia was summarizing for my benefit but it was enough for me to understand that we needed to take the kind of action that might get us all killed.

“You said you could only hide a couple of the fragments?” I asked, looking at Theia, who I was pretty sure could read my intent clearly.

Two at best. One would be far safer, Umbrielle said.

“And none would be the safest of all,” Theia said. “But we’re not here to be safe, are we?”

“No. We’re not,” I said and rose up to pull one of the glittering stars from the wall.

Touching the vessel of a god should have been a profound experience. The divinity of the coursing river Breakwater in the palm of my hand. I knew whose prison I held just from the touch but that was all. I felt no connection with Ullos, the god of the river, and wasn’t charged with any holy spark from the contact between us. His prison held him too fast, even while it was within my hand.

Even while it was mine.

A connection formed at last. I hadn’t claimed the god as my own. I’d claimed the jeweled fragment which held him in a sort of dread slumber. It was a treasure beyond measure in my broken world and I had claimed it.

I could have freed Ullos then. Shattered the prison and released him into the world. Unprotected. Without nourishment. The First Tender had done that with more than a few divine fragments. Ones too small to be of any use to him. Ones he could delight in watching die because he’d laid enough claim to their domains that he didn’t need to fear their reawakening.

Or I could have been kinder. I could have called on Ullos’ power, I could have claimed them all and called on all their powers. I’d been blessed by Draconia but none of the fragments would have refused to lend me aid if we my cause was the destruction of the First Tender.

I am not a good Sylvan and that was more tempting than I can ever admit to anyone, but its not what I did.

What I did was simpler. I claimed them. I added them to my hoard. Mine to hold, mine to guard, mine to carry onto a brighter day.

I plucked two more off the walls, Janlee Goddess of the Western Winds and Hoblos, God of Tended Fires. They were mine as well and in the back of my mind I felt as much as heard Draconia chuckling.

This is not wise, Umbrielle said. Sasarai will notice this.

Yes he will. Draconia wasn’t afraid. She was eager.

You are not recovered enough yet for a war with him.

You’re right. I’m not. I may never be. That was a disturbing though. It didn’t dissuade me from pulling two more fragments from the walls though.

Then why would you risk all that you are? This isn’t the time for rash action. Yes, he took something from you. I know it wasn’t in you to tolerate that, but you have had centuries to learn.

Do you want to know what those centuries taught me, what I learned down all the long years I waited in my prison as a slave and a puppet to the whims of the person who destroyed us all? Would you like to explore the depths of what those years showed me?

Survival. Those years had to have taught you how to survive.

Yes. They taught me what I could survive. And they showed me what it cost others to survive as well. You did us all the greatest of services, but you didn’t have to endure what we have endured, and do you know what we required to endure through the centuries you speak of?

“Hope,” I said. We were not going to abandon any of the divine fragments. They were ours and the hope they’d carried would be denied no longer.