“Separate populations seem like such a bother. What benefit could that possibly bring you?”

“I have explained this Dyrena.”

“High Accessor Dyrena. If you’re going to insist on titles, then you would be wise to remember mine while my patience lasts.”

“I…our titles are important when others are around.”

“Yes. Our titles are important. Especially the ones we are to claim.”

“Indeed. And that is why I will maintain multiple populations. It’s a safeguard you see.”

“Humor me and explain what it is I am meant to see, High Accessor Sasarai.”

“The population which will be restricted within the Prime Garden can be isolated from contact with the other remaining city. Without outside contact if will be the work of no more than a generation to set boundaries within their minds to ensure there are no thoughts of rebellion. With no external influences their devotion to my ‘Divine Tree’ construction will be unwavering and unshakable.”

“And the secondary population?”

“As we have agreed, contact between our cities will be valuable if properly controlled. We will each have access to miracles which will be more costly for the rest, and production capacity of goods unique to our peoples. The secondary population is meant to serve that need. The faith they hold won’t be as potent as my prime people but it will be useful enough for day-to-day tasks.”

“And should they rebel?”

“Then they will be eliminated and I will restock their number with the least useful members of the prime population.”

– High Accessors Dyrena and Sasarai engaging in a discourse which revealed to Dyrena the frailty of Sasarai’s proposed system and showed Sasarai that Dyrena needed to be the first of the Neoterics to fall.

For a place people thought was completely secure, there were an awful lot of paths out of the Garden. The big ones, the ones all Sylvans know about are the ones that run under the Thicket Wall. Those are the fiercest point of our defenses. Idiots like my brother Kam were always eager to be called up by the Draft so they’d have a chance to go and win fame and fortune fighting “the horrors” that waited “Below the Roots”.

It was true that people who were drafted didn’t always make it back and for the longest time I’d imagined the horrors which had been waiting for them down in the darkness.

With Draconia’s blessing I could sense a lot more than I ever had before though, and what lay “beneath the roots”? It wasn’t alien to the Garden. All I felt below us was Sasarai’s power, the same as what permeated the air around us and the sky above.

Whatever monsters my people fought down there, the First Tender knew about them and held dominion over them the same as he did for everyone in the Garden.

So that route was closed to us.

And the Thicket Wall was, as far as I knew, as impenetrable as I’d been told it was.

So what did that leave?

“Okay. You’re turn to hold on,” I said to Theia, after recovering from the our through the shadows. 

She’d managed to carry me back from the Silent Archive to a perch on one of “Holy” Mazana’s limbs that was blocked from view by a dense curtain of leaves. The leaves had turned out to be exactly what I’d needed. An inheritance I’d been felt entirely justified in claiming after all the prayers and devotion I’d offered to the false god the First Tender had inflicted on us.

Except for one small problem, the perch Theia had brought us too would be have been wonderful to hide away in and spend a week or more talking about all the things I still didn’t understand.

Unfortunately, the tree started moving.

“What’s that?” Theia asked, her senses almost certainly picking up the shifts in divine power the accompanied the trees surge into mobility.

“That’s our sign to leave,” I said. Running away had been scary. Right up until that moment. As an unimaginably large reservoir of grace began to swirl in the tree, I couldn’t imagine anything I wanted to do more than flee.

Theia agreed. Without a single word of disagreement, she took two steps towards and pulled herself close to me.

This was how we’d traveled through the shadows, but in this case we didn’t try to leave the Garden via the shadow paths. Sasarai knew them too and had closed them the moment he noticed the divine fragments were missing. Umbrielle had been sure he would and we’d all sense the moment she’d been proven correct.

Which was why I’d wanted the leaves.

They carried the same grace as “Holy Mazana” did but they were mine now. 

Holding Theia close in my arms, I took the step I’d dreaded for so long.

My last step in the Garden.

The perch she’d found was a high one, so we had plenty of time to fall.

Wind whistled past us but it was drowned out.

Around me a beast of talons and teeth, scales and wings roared as I gave myself into Draconia’s keeping.

Where we’d plunged downwards, the rush of air turned, catching in the wings I’d known for so long were waiting for me.

I was a Devout Daughter no more.

I was an Aspirant of the Holy Tree no more.

I was a Sylvan no more.

The creature I’d become was horrifying and I couldn’t have been happier.

Fire burned through my veins.

It filled my lungs like the sweetest of air.

The attack came with no warning, and held no mercy. I had offended little Sasarai beyond reasons.

But he’d offended us far more.

The distance between Draconia and I shrank to the width of a leaf.

We would not fall.

Little Sasarai had his little tricks and power aplenty to back them up.

But we knew Tricksters.

And we knew some tricks ourselves.

The blast of power from the Overrated Shrub slammed into the leaves we carried in our fist.

Our leaves.

Our power.

But still a part of the silly shrub.

And Holy Mazana, Guardian of the Garden, Deity of the Sylvans, and Last Light in the Broken World, the thing I’d spent my entire life striving to worship with all my heart despite the doubts that assailed me?

It burned.

My roar became a terrible, terrible gale of laughter.

Silly little Sasarai. Always so easily overconfident.

The poor little fool had been so enraged that he’d held nothing back. His blast had been thrown directly from the Holy Tree within no thought or concern for defense.

Who could attack him after all?

He’d felled the gods.

He’d held us captive for decades.

He was so sure nothing could touch him and hadn’t we come like timid thieves in the night?

He’d forgotten.

The Night wasn’t his ally.

All the power he’d cast at us?

He’d never guessed he was casting at his precious little shrub.

The screams from below were instantaneous.

My roar had roused everyone who was out and the shadow I cast as I soared above them had sewn confusing. The sight of the tree erupting in flames though?

Existential Horror.

The Garden lost its mind.

Belief which had stood for lifetimes was drowned in terror and I felt the shock of it explode through the currents of Sasarai’s power which permeated everything around us.

And that bought us the window we needed.

The fire in me called to burn down the Thicket Wall too. It was an abomination strangling the souls of every Sylvan entrapped within it but they weren’t mine.

Not yet.

Also, for all the damage our trick had done, it was only enough for a moment’s reprieve, and that moment called for flight, far and fast.

With Theia clinging to the me, I gained altitude and moment both, slicing through the air with a borrowed mastery of the skies eagerly given from one of the fragments in my hoard. For   so many years, I’d mistaken the winds that carried us were a gift from Mazana, but as I called on the “blessing” the Holy Tree had “given” me, I could feel the truth at last.

The Holy Tree gave us nothing.

My proficiency with the winds, and with healing magics? Those were my own gifts. Ones I’d given to tree because I’d been told that everything good I possessed I owed to the parasite god Sasarai had us enslaved to.

I didn’t have the strength or the time to burn down the Thicket Wall but my rage and need for vengeance was answered by a far vaster need from Draconia and as we sailed above the wall, fire streamed from our jaw reduce the nearest part of the wall to ash and setting the impenetrable vegetation beyond that aflame with pure orange fires.

And beyond the flames?

With new eyes, I at last saw what I’d feared since I first met Draconia, the emptiness beyond the Thicket Wall. The desolation I was bound for. The doom of my life.

But of course it wasn’t empty at all.

Below the wall, ten thousand sparks lit the night, revealing the metropolis which sprawled below the mountain Sasarai’s tree stood at the summit of.

And on the horizon? A distant but clear glow and warmth.

There was no way I could feel the warmth of the sun which lay beyond the horizon from where I was, but it was warm and comforting nonetheless. The Desolation and the Emptiness I’d always be threatened with did exist, but far away there was proof that the world wasn’t lost, that somehow the broken had been mended.

“There,” Theia shouted over the wind. “Put us down there. We can hide in the city with the other Blessed.”

Is that wise? I asked, speaking as Draconia and Umbrielle did since I wasn’t used to forming words with my maw yet and Draconia and I were linked so closely together that I wasn’t actually quite sure where I ended and she began anymore.

“If we fly into the wastelands now he’ll be able to keep track of us. We’ll be the only divine things out there.”

Not the only, Umbrielle said. But we will be recognizable.

Aren’t we inviting calamity on the lower city if we hide there?

Not if we don’t stay there long, Umbrielle said. You felt the crack too didn’t you?

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt anything more satisfying.

I feel like I should take offense at that, Umbrielle’s tone was mocking, which seemed odd given the seriousness of the situation before us, but served to remind me that she and Draconia had a different perspective on even something as the single most dramatic point in my life to date.

If we survive this, perhaps I will give you a century or two to try to upstage that moment, Draconia’s offer was also in jest. Mostly. There were undercurrents of real desire though to though and I had to wonder what exactly their history might have entailed.

That was a something to pursue another time though and since everyone else seemed to be in agreement, I descended towards the courtyard Theia had pointed me at, shrinking and changing back to my normal form fast enough that no one seemed to notice our arrival.

“I can’t believe you got us out there!” Theia said and kissed me.

It wasn’t a passionate thing. Or a romantic thing. She was simply that excited to still be alive.

I was excited too.

My knees for example had finished their transformation from dragon form through their normal Sylvan nature and continued on straight to jello.

“We lived!” I agreed. “We lived! We lived” I’d flopped down onto the ground and found myself staring at my hands, which were shaking from the waves of disbelief that poured over me.

“You did more than live,” a woman of organic and mechanical parts said. “You won.”

Which, coming from the God of Battle was rather heartening to hear.