“Treasure house? Why would I need a house for my treasure? I intend to fill my entire city with my treasures!”

“While we shall, of course, be preserving all of things which are dear to us, surely Helgon you must agree that some treasures will be  of a quality superior to all others.”

“Nonsense Sasarai. Any invention, any treatise, any idea whatsoever may lead me to new found wonders and understanding. I can no more prioritize my experiments than a father could choose a favorite child.”

“And should someone wish to steal away one of your children? How will you defend your precious things then if you make no arrangement for their defenses?”

“I feel that one of us is not entirely clear on the aims of our endeavor. It is my understanding that with the transfer of grace away from the conceptual maniforms which we nominally are bound to and serve beneath, we shall be gaining control of a concentration of force which will place us atop the peak of this world’s reality.”

“Yes. We shall be the gods of the new world.”

“Then I fail to see why that alone would not be sufficient protection from petty burglary?”

“Is the power of the gods sufficient to dissuade us from our current course?”

“No. Though to be fair, we are quite likely to fail spectacularly.”

“You’ve been listening to Dyrena too much.”

“She’s remarkably insightful. I don’t know why people have difficulty seeing that.”

“Oh. We don’t. We know exactly how dangerous Dyrena can be.”

“Indeed. It’s one of the few things that gives me hope our scheme will only backfire catastrophically.”

“I will never understand you Helgon.”

“Oh, I’m quite easy to understand Sasarai. I simply don’t see the point is setting up an incredibly well guarded vault, burying it under the repository of my power, filling it with stolen god bits, and then hoping everyone will simply forget its there and never bother me. Let anyone come for what is mine I say. The damn stuff is dangerous enough when I try to handle it, if they can survive, I might learn something. That let’s me not worry at all about the stories people might tell of a secret stash of wonders.”

– High Accessor’s Helgon and Sasarai’s disagreement which lead to the subsequent murder of the Silent Archives construction crew in an effort to prevent stories of its existence from spreading.

So, we were dead. I’d known that was what would happen the moment I tossed my old life aside. Learning that the only hope the First Tender had to survive was to kill us though, brought into sharp focus the fact that the accumulated power of several gods was about to be brought to bear on ending my life.

“It’s not all that bad,” Helgon said. “Take it from someone who’s dead, it’s an interesting sort of existence in its own way.”

“No offense, but I don’t think the rest of us get to be whatever is it you are,” Theia said.

“Of course not. You’ll be whoever it is you are without the burdens of the life you have now. No one else could be me. That’d be absurd. Who would I be then?”

“I think what she means is that when normal people die, they’re just gone. No one gets to linger on like you seem to be able to.” I don’t know what I was translating an idea that everyone probably already understood. Maybe because it felt good to reach for whatever shreds of clarity I could.

“Do…do you think your “normal people’?” Helgon asked.

“Blessed don’t hang around either,” Theia said. “We’re not immortal.”

“Of course not, you can’t be, that would defeat the whole purpose of the blessing.” Helgon was looking back and forth between the two of us, with side glances at the other Blessed as though we were children who no one had ever given even the most basic of doctrinal education.

“Before we get into that, we need to form our plans,” Xalaria said. “Sasarai will be already be moving against us. It won’t take him long to find the rail line or to follow it to us. Helgon, how defensible is your citadel.”

“Not at all,” Helgon said. “Please note as a reference that my fellow Neoterics had no trouble in waging their assault on me when they decided it was time to reduce our number by one more.”

“I’m not speaking about holding out against the eight remaining Neoterics. I’m only concerned about Sasarai and the forces he can send at us,” Xalarai said.

“Oh, you needn’t worry about him,” Helgon said. “Not at the moment at least.”

“You believe he will hesitate? About something this critical to his continued existence?” Xalaria asked, her expression shouting how idiotic a course of action that would be.

“Sasarai does not know who he’s dealing with, but he’ll be able to imagine a great deal,” Helgon said. “He’ll know for example that it had to be a Blessed of Night who stole his divine fragments – kudos on that young lady,” he nodded towards Theia, who shook her head.

“Wasn’t me. I couldn’t have taken more than two of them without drawing attention before I got out of the city,” she said, gesturing over to me.

“Yes. That’s what earns you the kudos,” Helgon said. “You see, your presence there will have left traces Sasarai can detect. He’ll know a Blessed of Night was there in his silly little vault. But he will also know the limits of what a Blessed of Night can do. For you to abscond with all of his fragments you would need to be old. Older than he is in point of fact.”

“Blessed don’t live that long, do they?” Theia asked.

“If they were normal people they certainly couldn’t.” The sparkle in Helgon’s ghostly eyes had to be simple mirth, not some hidden knowledge. “That all on its own will give Sasarai pause. A Blessed of Night that old is impossible. We would have sensed someone like that’s presence. Any of the Neoterics would be sure of that. Or rather we would be sure if it was the Blessed of anyone except for Night. With what Night has done for this world, our understanding of her capabilities has been, shall we say broadened.”

“He’s going to be paralyzed,” I said, knowing the fear that had to be creeping through the First Tenders heart.

“Yes. Exactly. Imagine discovering after centuries of being secure in your omnipotence that there was someone you couldn’t see and couldn’t predict who finally decided to move against you.”

“That will make him unpredictable. He may lash out in any direction,” Xalaria said.

“No,” I said, daring to contradict the God of Battle only because I felt like I’d spent a lifetime understanding where Sasarai was in that moment. “He can’t lash out at all. The other Neoterics? Remember? He’s in the worst possible state right now because he still has hold of everything he ever wanted but one wrong move and he’ll lose it all. He needs to keep things exactly as they are, any slip up and over the wall he’ll go.”

“Over the wall?” Fulgrox asked.

“Sorry, personal metaphor,” I said. “If he lets on what’s happened, or even hints at it too much, the other Neoterics annihilate him.  If he leaves the Garden, that would be screaming something was wrong. If he sends a troops out, that screams it too. He needs to at us without using any of his power to do so.”

“Not us,” Theia said. “You. I mean, sure he definitely wants to kill me too, but you’re the one who has all his fragments. If I get captured it’s no big deal to anyone but me. If you get captured though…”

“If Jilya is captured and she can be made to tell him where the fragments are, then all of this will be for nothing,” Xalaria said.

“That’s something I’m not sure I follow,” Fulgrox said. “You said you took all the divine fragments, but where did you hide them? I mean, you were still in Sasarai’s domain then right? What’s to stop him from just finding their hiding spot and writing you off  as something to deal with later?”

“They’re not in the Garden anymore,” I said. “They’re in me. They’re mine.”

“So, you swallowed them?” Folgrox asked.

I couldn’t fault him. I’d claimed them and tucked them away into my hoard as an almost reflexive action, with very little conscious awareness of how I was doing what I was, only that I needed to do it and so it happened.

“Not swallowed,” Helgon said. “They’re stored, I believe, in Jilya’s conceptual realm.”

“Her…what?” Fulgrox asked.

“It would take eleven years of coursework to properly explain, or perhaps only six in your case, since you seem to have solid grasp of several fundamentals already. The simple, and inaccurate, explanation is that the conceptual plane the gods formerly resided on is not an external dimension to the world. Within each of us, there is a conceptual realm.”

“Like a mindscape?” Theia asked.

“Yes, and absolutely no.” As an instructor Helgon was about as useful as many of the ones I’d studied under so I did what I always did; shrugged and kept listening. “The conceptual realm isn’t our thoughts and daydreams. Those are a separate thing. Think of it more like the projection of who and what you are into a dimension of information. That’s more or less backward from what’s happening, but as I said, this is the simple version.”

“And this conceptual space is somewhere real or just imaginary?” Xalaria ask, revealing that she was as lost as I was.

“Yes,” Helgon answered, which I would have punched him for, but, you know, ghost.

“I think the important thing is that Sasarai can’t just cut her open and pull the fragments out, right?” Fulgrox asked.

“Exactly. In fact, cutting her open would rather ruin his chances of his ever getting them back at all.” Helgon seemed delighted that Fulgrox had followed his explanation.

“What would happen if he cut her open anyways?” Theia asked.

“I expect she would die,” Helgon said.

“And the fragments?” Xalaria asked, apparently unconcerned by that prospect.

“They would drift through the remains of her conceptual space I imagine. In time, when someone synchronized enough with either who Jilya had been or was ripe to receive a blessing the divine fragments would return to the world through them.”

“And Sasarai would never be able to predict when or to whom that would happen, would he?” Xalarai asked.

“You’re not killing Jilya,” Theia said. She was joking. Mostly. I think.

“Of course not,” Xalarai said. “But it’s an option she will want to be aware of.”

“Thanks, but I’ve spent a lot of effort surviving this long. I don’t think I want to hand Sasarai that particular victory over me, even if it would be a hollow one for him.”

“Even distasteful options are valuable to be aware of,” Xalaria said. “There are fates far worse than death, and circumstances where victory may already be lost but actions yet remain to us.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, planning to keep it in my mind as far away as conceivably possible from any plans I was going to put together.

“It sounds like we have some time to work out what we’re going to do then?” Theia said.

“We don’t,”  Kalkit said. “There are assassins on the train. They’ll be here in twenty seconds.”

We all stared at Kalkit.

Xalarai was on her feet first, followed almost instantly by Theia.

I, on the other hand, reacted with the stunned, motionless silence that I’d spent years practicing.

Don’t worry. We’re going to be fine.

That was too little to go on for me to relax, except when your god explicitly tells you that you’ll be okay, it turns out to be a lot easier to relax than I’d expected. I even let a little smile play across my lips as I felt Draconia’s power flowing into my limbs.

I’d never been much of a fighter.

That was not true of her though.