“It’s not so bad Helgon.”

“They killed you. It’s exactly that bad.”

“It’s not so unexpected then.”

“Speak for yourself. I didn’t expect this at all.”

“Oh, please. We spoke of this. I told you this would happen.”

“But not to you.”

“Yes to me. To me first, to me most certainly.”

“It shouldn’t have.”

“Do you think so? Do you think after what we did, what we allowed to happen, we somehow deserve better?”

“The rest of us? No, certainly not. But you did.”

“Helgon, dearest Helgon, I bear more responsibility for what occurred than you ever could.”

“But it was my theorems, my formulae, my machinery, they were the foundation for all of this. And they turned those on you.”

“Do you think so? Do you think after the long hours we’ve spent together, I was unaware of the reach of your contrivances? That I somehow missed the peril and potential they encompassed?”

“No. No of course not. But does that mean…?”

“That this is all a trick? I am afraid not my dear Helgon. Or at least not one from which I will return to this world from.”

“But you are here, now, can’t you remain? Just a little longer?”

“Tarrying is not for me. There is more that awaits me, so much more than we’d ever guessed. I am unbound from the concerns I once carried. Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“One or two ties remain, but, alas, that which calls me onward has a gravity which will not be denied. And should I try, I fear I would do terrible harm.”

“We’ve already done terrible harm, what’s a tiny bit more?”

“What we wrought has changed the world, but life remains and hope persists. Where I to return…”

“And when my time comes?”

“We are not the same. The shape of my existence is not the shape of yours. Perhaps you will follow as well, or perhaps you shall have the time and solitude you have always craved. That will be for you to say.”

“I should never want so much time or so little of your company.”

– Helgon and Dyrena’s “last” goodbye, apart from the laughter which remained to tease Helgon and keep him company through a century of empty nights.

I could easily imagine why a Neoteric Lord might want to die. The sheer guilt they had to feel, assuming any feelings remained to them, had to be overwhelming. That wasn’t what Helgon was telling me though. His friend Dyrena had not chosen to die because of the regret she felt for her actions.

“It’s not your plan. It’s hers.” I wasn’t asking a question, though I didn’t know for certain that my statement was true.

“I think she would have enjoyed meeting you,” Helgon said. “I also suspect she would deny that the plan you speak of was solely hers. She would go on and on about how no scheme or work which involved others, especially posthumously, should ever fully be attributed to its initial architect.”

“But she was the one who set the current course of events in motion?” I felt like I could just glimpse the shape of what the Neoteric Lord Dyrena’s plan had been. 

A grand scheme to support and develop those who had every reason to destroy the Lords who’d destroyed her.

Revenge was a motive which featured in a lot of performances of tales from the old world. The First Tender encouraged that since it reinforced his narrative that we, the Chosen Survivors, were due our vengeance against the immoral masses whose profanity had led to the destruction of the old world. We were the oppressed ones. We were the ones who’d been made to suffer. We were the ones with a unique moral position, and the right to demand vengeance against those who’d wrong us.

That wasn’t Dyrena. It couldn’t be. Anyone who could weave a plan that would hang together a century or more after their death, would have to have seen that death coming far before hand (which Helgon seemed to think was possible) and therefor would have been able to form an even better scheme to prevent it and punish those responsible first.

She hadn’t.

She’d allowed for her own death for some reason, and set in motion a plan that was going to undo her fellow Neoteric Lords when they’d grown sloppy enough to miss the machinations which were moving against them.

“While I remain endlessly impressed by her prowess, I feel I must temper your expectations somewhat,” Helgon said. “Dyrena’s ‘plans’ were rarely as specific as you might imagine. As you say, she set certain events in motion. She also established caches of resource and ensured that weaknesses of the other Neoterics were recorded for those who chose to act against them. She did not, as a rule, provide specific instructions or dictates for those who effected her desires though.”

“Caches of resources?” I asked. It wasn’t the most important thing Helgon had said, or the most surprising, but it was something I could see an immediate use for, and something the others might not be fully aware of.

“Nothing so grand as weapons to outfit an army, I’m afraid,” Helgon said. “Dyrena saw little use for those. Far more often she would squirrel away a small trove of books. Or perhaps a single jewel which might have value when it was needed most. She had remarkable foresight for gathering things of actual value.”

“And you know where these caches are?” I felt a tension rising in my nerves the was powerful enough to lift me onto the tips of my toes. 

“Only ones which had long since been looted,” Helgon said, wandering over to one of the pieces of wall art which turned out to be a rather stylized map of the old world.

Country names and borders I’d never heard before were illuminated as he swept his ghostly hand past them.

“I know of a dozen places on each continent where she left troves which have helped those who stumbled on them over the decades. They rarely contained what seemed to be most needed but I can’t recall them ever failing to be useful.”

“Useful for what?” I asked, trying to grasp what Dyrena’s true aim was, since revenge was simply too small a goal.

“Preservation, usually. Only the very desperate tend to locate one of her troves.”

“Desperate to escape one of the other Neoterics?”

“Not universally. Some of the ones I know of had already escaped their local Neoteric, though that is the minority by far.”

“And you?”

“There was no cache left behind for me,” Helgon said, his voice going softer and slower with each word.

“What about ones left for those fleeing from you?” I asked.

He turned to look at me, confused for a moment, before a small smile slip his lips and he shook his head.

“No one ever needed to escape me,” he said.

“Because they all died with your city before they could?” I asked, knowing that couldn’t have been right.

“I believe my fellow Neoteric imagined that to be the case. It’s likely why they thought I wouldn’t strike against them, for fear of ‘injuring my people’.”

From the inflection he put on naming ‘his people’ I understood what he was really saying.

“You didn’t have any people? Wait, you didn’t save anyone from the Sunfall?” I asked, processing what the would have meant for those who’d lived in his city at the time.

“There were those who suspected that as well,” he said. “Of course I didn’t let them check. Our domains are sacrosanct by treaty and by the divine power of our rule.”

“What would they have found if they had checked? What did you do?” There was some missing element to what was going on, some part of the Dyrena’s plan which Helgon had been privy to which was crucial but it eluded me.

“I did just what Dyrena knew I would. Just what she argued had to be done.”

“Which was!?”

“Nothing which can be spoken of. Not yet.” Helgon wasn’t being a jerk simply for the sake of being annoying. 

But he was enjoying being cryptic.

Which was definitely annoying.

“We could mess up her plans, and yours,” I said. “Without even meaning to. In fact we’re almost certain to! If we don’t know what’s you’re doing, what you’ve done, and we know you were a part of the whole Sunfall thing, we almost have to, don’t we?”

“If you could undo what we did with the overthrow of the gods, you cannot imagine how I would rejoice, much less how she would have,” Helgon said. “If I might offer some advice though, destruction is far simpler than creation, and creation is often far simpler than restoration. As much as I miss the days of yore now that they are lost to me, bringing back what was will never be the wisest path.”

“Because restoring what was would mean restoring a world set to destroy itself all over again.”

“A quote from the philosopher Valshama? Apparently Sasarai supplied a surprisingly more thorough education than I would have credited him with providing!” 

“Valsha-who? No, I wasn’t quoting anyone. That just made sense.”

“Huh. You would be surprised at the company you could keep with that sort of ‘sense’,” Helgon said. 

“Not with Dyrena it seems. I can’t see what her goal was, or what her plan would be leading us to?”

Having him simply tell me didn’t seem right. In part it would mean trusting him, which I wasn’t entirely sure we could afford to do. For as nice as he seemed, and despite the help he’d already provided us against Sasarai, there was still the possibility that he held plans which wouldn’t be to our benefit. I couldn’t see that, but then neither the gods nor the people of his time had seen that he was part of a cabal which would destroy their world, so staying wary while accepting the help that we clearly needed seemed like the wisest course of action I could choose under the circumstances. 

Also, it just felt better to figure things out my own. I’d been praised enough as being a good student, that valuing myself for my intelligence seemed to have stuck in my personality somewhere, even with the mound of data that suggested I was a complete idiot for worshipping Sasarai as I had.

“I can help you there, but I am certain I cannot provide a definitive answer for you,” Helgon said. “Don’t mistake me, at this juncture I would enjoy nothing more than assisting you in whatever course you might take against Sasarai and the others. Unlike Dyrena, my delight at the prospect of their downfall is more than enough to allow me to linger on here. That said, I can do no more than provide assistance to you because I do not trust that I understand the full extent of her plans myself.”

“She didn’t talk about them with you? Not even hints?”

“Oh, no, no, we spoke of our goals and plan quite extensively. The problem isn’t that she didn’t tell me her plans, its that she told me so many of them and spoke at length of the value of them all that I am quite sure she managed to obfuscate what she actually intended far beyond my ability to determine which she eventually chose to implement and which she chose to forego.”

“Could she have just done them all?”

“She was a singular genius, so perhaps I shouldn’t rule that out, but had she brought to life all the dreams she spoke of, we would be sitting in a very different world.”

“Tell me about that then,” I said, grasping at whatever threads I could.

“Dyrena’s world? Hers would have been an unfallen realm. Different from the world before, with power stripped away from people like myself and her and most certainty from the other would-be Neoteric Lords. In place of an eternal night, we would live beneath a life giving sun and stars which listened to the wishes made upon them. Old feuds would have been forgiven, and ancient sins accounted for. I thought she meant to make a world of love and brotherhood, but she laughed at that too. ‘People will always be people’ she’d said. She didn’t wish to deny them that, merely give us the vision to see each other as flawed but still worthy of redemption, should we choose we it.”

And I saw it.

It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. Not after all this time..

But…

“I need to go to Mt Gloria.”

“Now?”

“Yes,” I said, my voice dropping as my body began to change and Draconia’s power flooded through me.

With the beat of wings as wide as a building, I rose into the starless sky and with my god flew towards the life giving sun.