“They say that the true strength of a person lies in the friends they hold dear and who will support them in their hour of need. Do we have any of those Dyrena?”

“Why we have each other do we not my dear Helgon? All twelves of us, united in common purpose, daring to dream the undreamable that we may have our heart’s desires, and destined to rule over the world as a council of wise and harmonious elders to lead the people into a brighter tomorrow.”

“While that is an answer, I feel as though I need to restate my question.”

– High Accessor’s Helgon and Dyrena refusing to acknowledge that they’ve both acknowledged that they’re doomed.

What was worse than the devil you knew? The devil you didn’t. I’d heard that saying as a kid but though it was irrelevant. All the devils were dead after all.

Then I learned what the First Tender was.

As the “train” hurtled through (hopefully) barren tunnels and brought me ever closer to a devil I’d never heard of the day before, I found I was oddly free of panic. Largely I think that was because the devil I didn’t know had arranged to get me away from the the devil who knew me all too well.

“Are we far away enough that we can talk freely?” Fulgrox asked. He was seated next to me since he needed a bit more than one seat and I needed a bit less.

“Yes, though Helgon can hear us,” Kalkit said.

“I can speak with you as well, if you like?” a ghostly person appeared in the aisle between the seats we’d chosen.

I assumed they were using a simple projection spell like the First Tender used on holy days when he needed to speak to all of the assemblies at once. The more I looked at him though the more the expanded senses Draconia blessed me with told me that, no, he wasn’t a projection, he was literally a ghost.

“Take a seat,” Xalaria said. “This will save us from having this conversation twice.”

“I’ve never found that I’m able to have the same conversation twice,” Helgon said. “Especially not with new people. Hello my dear, you must be one of Sasaria’s special people?”

“That’s what he always told us, but he also said we were the only people left in the world, so I’m not sure how special we really were to him,” I said. I don’t know why I wanted to dispel the notion that I was anything important. Maybe it was just that I didn’t want to be anyone important because of my connection to a hateful jerk like Sasarai “the First Tender”.

“If you weren’t before, you are now,” Xalaria said. “You know what you carry already do you not?”

“Not what, who,” I said. Demon or no, Draconia had never been a ‘what’ to me.

“Yes, a good bond there, and an old one too,” Helgon said, eyeing me with a dissecting gaze. “How ever did you escape the notice of my old…well calling him a friend would be a stretch, we never liked each other much at all as I recall, let’s say coworker, yes how did you escape my old coworker Sasarai’s notice as long as you did? I thought he was at least vaguely observant. Most of the others were.”

“Wait, what do you mean ‘escaped his notice’? Didn’t you gain your blessing today?” Fulgrox asked.

“In a sense, I supposed I did?” I certainly hadn’t treated my relationship with Draconia as a blessing the whole rest of the time we’d been together.

Perhaps not, but you kept the both of us safe, do you’ll notice I’m not complaining.

“Which is it.” Xalaria didn’t strike me as the sort of who appreciated ambiguity, even when it was more accurate than the simple response her question demanded.

“Jilya had her blessing when I found her,” Theia said, taking the burden of answering and explaining off my shoulders. “People seem to be pretty locked down there though from what I saw, so I don’t think she had any cause to use it before I showed up and messed up her day.”

Freed me more like it. I didn’t share that with anyone but Theia caught me eye and gave a small nod of understanding.

“And how did you come by that blessing?” Helgon asked. “I expect Sasarai was guarding his fragments rather tightly.”

“He’d hidden them in a shrine deep below his tree,” Theia said. “Jilya knew how to get there.”

“I stumbled into it when I was a kid,” I said. “There was a small maintenance tunnel that went to it that had been sealed off. But the seals were, uh, kind of weak. And I was curious.”

“So you, what? Wandered into the most important room in a Neoterics entire domain and spirited one of his legendarily rare divine fragments away without him noticing?” It wasn’t that Xalaria didn’t believe me, it was that when she put it like that even I found my story a little lacking.

She had a little help, Draconia said. And she didn’t spirit me away.

“But if she didn’t have your fragment, then how…?” Fulgrox tried to ask.

How did she use my gifts? Easily. She didn’t, Draconia’s answer seemed to make even less sense to them than mine had.

“But, how?” Fulgrox asked. “Being Blessed isn’t a thing you can just turn off.”

“You can’t,” Kalkit said. “But there are means to hide it.”

“Really?” Helgon drew the word out into at least three syllables. “Oh, oh that’s just perfect.”

It was weird to see a ghost convulsing with laughter and I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

“What am I missing here?” Theia asked.

“I believe our friend is amused by the fact that the theology Sasarai inflicted on Jilya was directly responsible for his inability to detect what she had done,” Kalkit said.

“And, oh it’s so much better than that,” Helgon said, recovering partially from his laughter. “She never would have been able to truly rescue the divine fragments if she hadn’t formed so long standing a bond with her god. Sasarai not only precipitated his own downfall, his grand little ‘perfect society’ made a perfect incubator for it as well.”

“That’s a stroke of good fortune for us all then,” Xalaria said before a puzzled look crossed her face. “Wait, divine fragments? You left other Blessed behind?”

“Nope. Not a one,” Theia said.

“Then what…?” Xalaria looked from Theia to me and back to Theia.

“You should be the one to tell them,” Theia said with a small wave of her hand towards me.

“I’m curious how the ghost knows?” I said, disturbed by the idea that my hoard might not be as hidden as I’d thought it was.

“Deduction, nothing more,” Helgon said. “When you know someone as long as I’ve known Sasarai, you can tell a lot about their life by the little things they do.”

“Little things like?” I asked, sensing the understatement in what Helgon was saying.

“He’s throwing a festival. Quite a big one. Fireworks, light shows, quite the pageant.” Helgon wore a delighted smile but for a moment I couldn’t understand any of what he was saying.

What did the First Tender have to celebrate?

Why wasn’t he raging?

I’d stolen a huge amount of power from him, he should have been livid beyond words.

If I was him I would have…

Oh.

I would have hidden everything that had happened.

I would have done my utmost to make sure no one could guess that anything meaningful had changed at all.

I would have been so afraid that the people around me would destroy me the moment they senses my weakness that I would have projected as much normalcy as I possible could have.

I had hidden everything, I had kept people from guessing the changes in me, and I’d projected perfect normalcy. I had to laugh too. At last I had proof that I was the Child of the Garden than I had always wished to be, and of course it came after I understood what a terrible fate that was.

“You understand! So delightful!” Helgon said.

“Understand what?” Fulgrox asked.

“He’s hiding,” I said. “He’s desperately scared and so he’s hiding what happened behind as much pomp and ceremony as he can throw at it.”

“I’m pretty sure he can have whatever parades and parties he want and no one is going to forget that they saw a dragon set their precious tree on fire,” Theia said.

“They won’t forget. But they will believe. Whatever story he comes up with. No matter how ridiculous it is. All he has to do is feed them something to explain what they saw and that will become the only truth they can live with.” The anger I felt at that wasn’t new. I’d stuff it down so many times, told myself that it was ‘the evil of my doubt chewing away at the virtue of my faith’, and I’d believed it, or forced myself to believe it no matter how painfully it had twisted my sense of who I was.

“That seems like an awful lot of worry for losing a divine fragment, even a powerful one,” Fulgrox said. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just not make a big deal out of it?”

“Hard not to make a big deal out of everyone seeing their living god-tree go up in flames,” Theia said.

“She’s right,” Xalaria said. “For the Neoterics, especially at this juncture, even the appearance of weakness is something they have to guard against. They’ve been telling themselves that Vaingloth was a fool and that he wasn’t beaten but rather got himself killed. They’re all afraid to move on Mount Gloria because they suspect it’s been trapped by one of the others, or that Vaingloth might be less dead than it seems. Even the loss of a single divine fragment would be enough to tip Sasarai’s position into dangerous territory.”

I looked over at Theia, who was suppressing a gleeful little smile. She nodded at me to fill them in.

“And what sort of territory, just as a hypothetical exercise, would the loss of all of the divine fragments that he’d collected mean?” I asked.

No one in the train car made the mistake of thinking I was asking a hypothetical question. None of them seemed to be able to accept that for a moment however.

Except for Kalkit, who was studiously grooming himself and seemingly unconcerned with the conversation’s direction.

“The loss of several divine fragments would place Sasarai in a position where he could be certain the other Neoterics would come for him,” Xalaria said slowly. “The loss of all of his divine fragments would remove any cause he had for constraint whatsoever. Please tell us how many fragments he retains.”

“None. Not a single one.” I’d been concerned that he could have hidden some of them elsewhere, or perhaps had a few on his person when we raided the Shrine, but as I’d claimed them, I’d learned to feel their presence clearly.

Sasarai had no divine fragments left under his control at all.

He was still fantastically dangerous of course. The divine fragments were a key to power, but they were not powerful in and of themselves. Not for someone like Sasaria who they never would have chosen to grant their blessings to.

Sasarai had all the divine force he’d stolen and all the grace his worshipful people had generated for generations all safely locked up in the Holy Tree. He was far from helpless.

But he was still afraid of the other Neoterics, which, in turn, left me terrified of what they were capable of doing.

“He should be moving to destroy us immediately,” Xalaria said. “With all the forces he can command.”

“That’s not what he’s doing,” Kalkit said. “And he’s right. It wouldn’t save him. He only has one hope. He has to make sure none of the other Neoterics find out the truth. Not until he can kill us all.”