“Never have I heard so absurd a suggestion.”

“I tell you, the birds are changing. They are becoming something sinister. Something that watches us.”

“Birds watching us? Why next you’ll tell me that fish are evolving so that they can swim. What do you suppose birds do all day?”

“Normally, I would say hunt for food. These however seem to be inclined to hunt for us.”

“And what attacks have these Sinister Hunting Birds made on the good people of our enclave?”

“None. Yes. That is the most sinister thing about them.”

“Oh please, now you’re just being idiotic. It’s sinister that the birds who are watching us are not attacking us as well? Against what sort of rational world are we to measure a statement such as that.”

“I am trying to explain that! I am trying to tell you what I have seen, what others have seen. If you would just look at this report here. I have collected accounts from over a half dozen people who can corroborate my findings.”

“Read that report? I doubt I could lift it. And why should I? I can disprove your brainless theory myself with hardly any effort at all.”

“We need to leave here. Now.”

“Why? Because two birds should happen to alight on the bird feeder in the courtyard?”

“Those are not birds.”

“I assure you they are. See; beaks, wings, talons. Clearly a bird. Unless perhaps I am mistaken and cats have changed attributes with avians? And look, there is not a menacing or sinister twist about them.”

“Yes. They are at the bird feeder, but do you not see; they are not feeding. Why did they fly to feeder if all they wish to do is watch us. Why are they drinking no water nor consuming any seeds?”

“Likely because they’re wondering at the ninny who is staring back at them. Come now, I will settle this once and for all.”

“No! No don’t walk up to them!”

– The last words of Brothers Bonren and Galtos

I wanted to smite Sasarai. 

That shouldn’t have been my reaction. I was supposed to be afraid of him because of the frankly ridiculous power the Neoterics wielded. Even with Draconia’s blessing I could feel how outmatched I was by all the raw power Sasarai had accumulated over the centuries. If that wasn’t enough to overwhelm me, they I should have been quivering from the instilled terror of a life grown and raised under teachings that placed ‘The First Tenderer’ as the closest emissary to god there could ever be.

I wasn’t afraid though.

I wanted to smite him. He had so earned it.

Some of my resistance to the fear his presence was supposed to instill in me came from Draconia. She was ready to burn the world to ash if that’s what it took to incinerate Sasarai. Her rage might have been powerful enough to do it too, but fortunately her nature was stronger than her anger and as a Guardian before anything else, she would not act to destroy the world.

I could though.

So what held me back?

Mostly that Sasarai wasn’t actually in the palace with us.

“I hate you,” I said. The words held no special weight and carried no deadly fire. So I offered an explanation to go with them. “You know how I was raised. You know how we are taught. Devotion to the Holy Tree. Devotion to you. Obedience. Joyful servitude. And love. Love most of all. For you, for the tree, for our beautiful Garden home, but mostly just for you. You conditioned us to love you above all others. All that work. My whole life. A whole society built so that we could convince you that you weren’t just a scared little, worthless man. And in the end? The moment I learned what you really are, I hated you. And somewhere inside, you know that I’m right to, just like you know what every other Sylvan in the Garden will feel when they see how weak and pathetic you truly are.”

I was surprised I’d gotten to say my peace. That I’d been marching up to him, step by step with each word may have held the others back, but it was the surprise I saw hiding in his eyes which truly bought me the time I needed.

“Look up,” he said, confidence and victory oozing around each syllable.

“At what?” I asked, letting a deadly smile crack my lips open. 

He was distant and whatever summoning spell he’d invoked apparently didn’t allow him to sense through his creatures eyes. Thinking about it, that was smart. His projection was less than a shadow. I doubt the other Neoterics could possibly have sensed it. If he’d been inhabiting a flight of death-dealing birds however, his presence would have been far more noticeable.

The downside to being smart, in this case, was that lacking any presence in the Death Bird’s he’d summoned to descend on us, he didn’t have the awareness Draconia had blessed me with. Specifically the sense which allowed me to feel when the Sun decided she didn’t care to share the sky with any interlopers.

She could have burned them to ash.

It would have been a very “sun” thing to do.

But she didn’t, in part I think because the actual sun was still unfathomably far away, and in part because she caught the true peril of the ‘Death Birds’, being, you know, kind of bright.

I chuckled as that thought went through my head.

What? I’m not that old. I can be childish sometimes still.

Sasarai was, unsurprisingly, less amused. 

“Did the sun just get really bright for less than blink?” Theia asked.

“Much less than a blink,” Zeph said.

“She is very clever like that,” Meluna confirmed. “Now, what was that about not covering failure states that you were saying?”

Sasarai vanished rather than reply which was, perhaps, the worst possible thing he could have done.

From our point of view.

“He’s moving already isn’t he?” I asked, turning back to Meluna.

“Most assuredly. He knows he has run out of time. The attack on the Garden is at this point both an inevitability and quite imminent,” Meluna said, sounding neither concerned nor unhappy about the prospect.

“He’s not going to rely on tricks the next time then,” I said.

“What was the trick he tried this time?” Theia asked.

“He summoned a creature that’s only supposed to exist in the root caves beneath the Holy Tree. Their touch is death, and, disturbingly, that doesn’t change after you kill them.” 

There were lots of “scary” stories told to kids about the monsters that lived beneath the roots. I’d grown up believing they were real but probably just embellishments on the truth. The moment the Death Birds had appeared in the skies about though, I’d known exactly how real they were.

“So, it we’d shot them all down?” Theia asked.

“Then whatever they fell on would have died. And any who came across them. And anything that was near them. Had Sola burned them up the results would have been far worse though,” Meluna said.

“Because the dust…” Theia said, working out the ramifications of Meluna’s words.

“Is fatal too.” Was I surprised that Sasarai had tried to kill an entire city with a casual display of his power? No, how could I be? Was I angry? Again, no, but that was due having already reached the limit of my ability to hate anyone.

“So Sola did what exactly?” Theia asked.

“What you see as the sun, is only a portal to draw it’s light and heat to us across the veil Night has cast over the world,” Zeph said. “She simply widened it for a sufficiently brief moment that we wouldn’t suffer an ill effect, and then kept the Death Birds on the other side of it.”

“So they’re, what, floating beyond the veil now?” Theia asked.

“By now I imagine their frozen and orbiting Sola’s main body. They’ll fall in eventually,” Zeph said.

“But that won’t hurt her, right?” I probably didn’t need to be worried, but losing the sun seemed like a particularly terrible idea at this point.

“If the birds could gift her with death, they would simply be adding a domain to her portfolio,” Zeph said. “There is the matter of scale to consider however, and, as a point of reference, our entire world could fall into Sola’s body and she would struggle to notice unless she was paying very careful attention. So no additional domains for her I’m afraid.”

“Can you imagine how insufferable your mistress would be if she held both life and death?” Meluna asked. “Better to let the Beast win.”

“And does Night share your assessment?” Zeph asked, mild curiosity disguising what I thought had to be an insult of some kind.

“Our deities must occasionally trust in our judgment when theirs are lacking,” Meluna said.

“So was it you or Night who arranged for Sasarai to arrive just then?” I asked.

Meluna turned to me with a smile for that.

“You imagine I control the Neoterics?” It wasn’t a safe or simple question, and I felt Theia involuntarily take a half step away from me.

“I don’t imagine anything of the sort,” I said, trying and failing to match her tone. “It does occur to me though that Night, of all the gods, would have been the most adept at keeping our conversation private and preventing Sasarai from knowing where we are, if the desire had been there.”

“But that is the thing about desire, isn’t it? Our desires may prove the undoing of achieving themselves all too easily.” Meluna may not have been intending to be as opaque as it seemed from her answer. For all I could tell, she could have simply been out of practice at explaining things simply.

Fortunately, Theia was there to act as a translator for me.

“The problem with cloaking someone is that if someone else is looking for them and fails to find them, they’ll know something important is happening and may, from timing, or location, or previous circumstances, be able to make a solid guess as to where and why the cloaked person is where they are.”

“So, we’re still being watched by Sasarai then I take it?” I asked, seeing the warning that was hidden in their message.

“Watched by, listened to, probably scented for as well knowing the weird things the Neoterics get up to,” Theia said.

“So if I were to go into great and specific detail about how the ‘Holy Tree’ is going to burn to the ground around him and then we’re going to choke him to death with it’s ashes?”

“He would know that you are taunting him and rest easy in the knowledge that there is no practical method you could use to accomplish that,” Theia said with a nod, as though that was the point I’d been trying to make.

“And if I remind him that he’s never going to get back what I have claimed? That I would gleefully die just to spite him like that. Especially since it means that the other Neoterics will obliterate him?”

“He would know the truth of that as well.” 

“Bear in mind that he knows all of that already,” Meluna said. “Sasarai has many failings, a lack of imagination certainly among them, but while he was far from the brightest, or the most talented of the Neoterics, he was capable of taking ideas from those who were his betters and adapting them to his own use.” Meluna spoke as though she was talking only to me, but I don’t think it was lost on anyone who her audience really was.

“Do you think he knows that the other Neoterics are listening in as well?” I asked.

“Almost certainly. He’s dim, but even he’s not that oblivious,” Meluna said.

“So if I were to offer to meet with him at a spot of my choosing, would he understand that it was trap?”

“I fail to see how he could miss such a thing.”

“But at this point, would he have any option but to come for me anyways?”

“Oh, my dear girl, none of them would be able to risk leaving you alone.”