“And should we come to disagree about locations in the wastelands? What then?”

“Monlock, why would anyone care about something in the wastelands?”

“ Why I don’t known Vaingloth, perhaps because there will be resources sitting unclaimed which any one of us might take a fancy to. We’ve agreed that with our cities, we will have absolute authority, but the disposition of the lands outside our claimed realms is, to be charitable, unclear.”

“Are you suggesting that Vaingloth is attempting to leave open to possibility of a land rush Monlock?”

“I am suggesting nothing of the sort Dyrena. I am asserting that there is an oversight in the divisions of authority we have thus far agreed upon.”

“There are likely innumerable such questions which will arise, that is what the creation of the Speaking Stones is intended to address.”

“Umm, Vaingloth, you do recall that I have mentioned the problems we’ve run into with the implementation of the Speaking Stones, do you not? I presented them that at the start of the session, and I know we didn’t have time for a full explanation of the aetheric conductivity gaps that Monlock’s defensive ward algorithms will present, but I could go into that now if we need. I have copies of the reports printed out for everyone!”

“No, Helgon, we are all aware of the challenges you’ve spoken of, just as we are aware that you have said those challenges can be overcome.”

“Well, yes, it’s the timing which is problematic you see. I’m sure a solution exists to make the wards and the speaking stones coexist, but it may take more time than we have before the rest of our plans need to put into motion.”

“In this future, lead with that.”

“It’s in the reports. I thought you’d all read them?”

“Of course dear Helgon. We all read all of your reports. Some of us simply have poorer recall than others.”

“Yes. Of course. For now perhaps we can simply declare the wastelands under the authority of no one. Excursions through them must be allowed of course, but harvesting, collection, or refinement of materials, aetheric energies, or spiritual patterns will be forbidden until we can reconvene and work out a fair an equitable division of the resources the wastelands hold.”

– The High Accessors developing a plan for dominion of the world which all agreed to and none obeyed.

I was swallowed in darkness absolute. I’d asked for it. Out loud and clearly. I’d broadcast the fact that I was going to be doing some secret that Neoterics wouldn’t be able to spy on. I’d thought I was being clever, but, as it turns out, I hadn’t been quite clever enough.

“I know this can be a bit unnerving,” Little said. “Trust me it is much, much worse for the Neoterics.”

“This is more than just darkness, isn’t it?” I asked, giving up on trying to see my hand in front of my face and struggling to even feel my hand.

“It is. This is what the Beast brought to our world. I think Night’s spells can block the Neoterics, she’s still a full and unsundered god after all, and even at the height of their powers none of the Neoterics went directly against the gods. On the other hand they have had about two centuries of gaining power and learning how to use it, and for something like this they’re going to be willing to get creative.”

“Can we get back from this? I feel like we’re not even sitting together in the room they took us to anymore?”

Without explaining anything else for the Neoterics to pick up, I had asked to meet up with Little like we’d originally planned. I’d also asked Meluna to give the two of us some privacy, knowing that her god Night could cloak us if she chose, and that remaining every Neoteric in the world was scrying us and would have to wonder what plan Little and I had concocted. 

It hadn’t take us long to find Little, she was the center of a bustle of, as it turned out, very mundane action. From what I gathered, there were two mostly unused buildings that a local group wanted to refurbish into temples. Little had been called in not as ‘The Sun Queen’ (apparently that wasn’t an actual title however much it made sense to me) but as someone who could speak to the god fragments in question to get their input on the designs the locals had come up with. Little herself seemed to have some input as well, being familiar with the sewer system which ran under the buildings, and offered some suggestions based on her purely mortal perspective.

And it was easy to think of her as purely mortal. Seeing her interacting with people, she was almost the polar opposite of Sasarai. She talked over no one, demanded no specific attention, and far from insisting that they give her opinions any special weight, called on people for their counter opinions with phrases like “but’s that’s probably a terrible idea, Lucky, what did I miss there?”

The people around her seemed too used to that for it to have been a staged play for anyone’s benefit, so forgetting that the Ratkin girl I’d come to see was anything other than a normal person had been easy.

Right up until the door closed on the windowless room we’d been given.

Little hadn’t done anything special. She hadn’t pulled out a menacing voice, or suddenly changed posture or glowed violently. She had just reached up and skitched the ear of her….

Pet was not the right word.

Whatever was beside her was nothing like a pet.

It was nothing like anything that had ever existed in the world.

Or that should ever exist in the world.

Draconia had gifted me with senses beyond the mortal realm, and they were all screaming at me to RUN.

But Little was petting it.

And it was…

Not purring. Whatever it was doing, that was not purring.

But it did sound happy, and nothing in my divine senses suggested that it was an entity capable of things like ‘happiness’ or ‘feeling anything at all’.

I don’t know what that is, Draconia said.

And then she paused.

I could feel her drawing back. Turning her regard on the pair before us. And coming up blank.

I don’t know what SHE is, Draconia said.

She’s mine, and you can’t have her, Sola said.

For some reason that made me laugh.

You two have met before I see, I said, speaking to the two gods.

We’ve worked together often, Sola said.

And I have never claimed something of yours, Draconia said, still unsettled.

“I wonder if there are any divine fragments I’ll run into who don’t react like that?” Little asked aloud to no one in particular.

“You’ve run into others?” I asked, hoping that she might already know the answer to the question I’d originally come here to ask.

“Yep. I think you’ve met some of them. Xalaria was going to find you right?”

“She was, and she did, but before we talk anymore, it might be good if we had a bit of privacy before I let you know what I’m planning,” I said. My plans were far less important than the other things I wanted to talk to her about but any bit of misdirection might be the one to trip up the people listening in.

Fortunately one of the people listening in was Meluna and from the corners of the room, shadows rose to wrap us in a bubble of darkness that only a small candle flame in Little’s palm illuminated at all.

“We should be safe from prying eyes now,” Little had said before adding, “Can I ask you to trust me though?”

Given what I could sense of her, that was a difficult question to answer, or it should have been.

“Happy to,” I said, slightly exaggerating my feelings perhaps, but willing to back up the claim with two justifications. First, the danger I sensed conflicted too strongly with the behavior I’d observed. Just because our instincts say something is bad, doesn’t mean it is. Sometimes our instincts were simply missing the full picture, and other times they were misformed thanks to the society we grew up in.

The other justification was even simpler to explain; if I was right about what I was sensing, then my chance of escaping the room was zero. Not small. Zero. So I really had nothing to lose by trusting her.

That was when she’d  summoned her own darkness.

It hadn’t spilled out of her companion.

It had come from her.

The ‘Sun Queen’.

Who was something else entirely.

“We’re not in the room anymore,” Little said from somewhere in the darkness. “Technically I think we’re not in the world at all anymore, so no worry about any prying eyes except for those.”

I couldn’t see her gesture, but her intent reached me and I looked upwards, beyond the cover of night, to see the End of All Things watching us.

“Before you panic,” Little said, as a wave of terror crashed down on me, “We’re much too tiny to be noticed, and there’s some peril for the Beast if it does.”

“P-p-peril?” I asked. My thoughts had fallen apart, my questions were forgotten, but I was able to form a complete word, which was a feat unrivaled in the history of the world, or so I felt.

“A bit of it changed, if it lets itself notice us, it would notice that first, and, well, existence is a complicated thing for it.”

“Oh good,” I said, madness spiraling my thoughts into a cacophony that only grim humor seemed to be able to escape from. “Glad it’s not just us that has a problem with existing then.”

“Yeah, I know this is a bit much, I had a hunch that we really needed to have some privacy though, and no one but us is going to hear what we say here.”

And when she meant no one, that, apparently, included our gods.

Draconia? I asked and got no response.

“You haven’t lost her!” Little was quick to reassure me, somehow sensing the new distress that shot through me. “Like I said, this space is outside of ‘what is’. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but we’re safe here.”

I breathed. I could still do that it seemed, but I knew I wasn’t breathing air, which was odd.

“Well, you did ask me to trust you, so I think I need to say thank you, because you’re right, what I need to ask you is worth all this.”

“You want to know how to take out a Neoteric, don’t you?” Little asked.

“Oddly, no,” I said. “That I actually do have a plan for, what I need to ask you is about is one who already was ‘taken out’?”

“Helgon?”

“Comparing notes on him might be a good idea too, but I’m thinking more about Dyrena.”

“The first one they killed?”

“Yeah. Did you know she was aware that would happen?”

“Helgon has mentioned that she was the wisest of them all, but he made it sound like the others tricked them both. From what he said, she put up a hell of a fight, almost as destructive as his was, when they came for her.”

“Did he mention whether he came to her aid?”

“Huh, you know, I don’t think he did?”

“But he was definitely in love with her right?”

“Oh, absolutely. Like I could tell he was the first time he mentioned her name and I’m the definition of clueless about that kind of thing.”

“Of the four ‘dead’ Neoterics, isn’t it interesting that only two of them obliterated their own holdings and people when they fell?”

“Well, Vaingloth didn’t have a chance to nuke Mt. Gloria. I tried to make extra sure of that, but you’re right. I take it you have some idea as to why?”

“I have a lot of ideas, most of which aren’t anything more than wild guesses at this point, but one of them I feel pretty sure of.”

“That Dyrena is still alive?”

“No. She’s definitely dead, the other Neoterics wouldn’t have missed something like that, but I don’t think ‘dead’ means the same thing to her as it would for us.”

“Helgon kind of gives that away, but he’s claimed she left the world, and him, behind.”

“Maybe she did. Or maybe she’s become something more.”

“More than the ghost of a Neoteric like Helgon? What, like a…” and I heard her pause.

“They had so much divine energy to work with, and for as much as the Neoterics call themselves gods, what’s the one thing they refused to give up?”

“Their solidity. They’re too present on the mortal plane to ever fill the role of a true god.”

“Dyrena though? The one who gave up her mortal existence first?”

“Wouldn’t have anything holding her back. And there wouldn’t have been any gods there to contest her taking their place,” Little said, the idea sounding like it was blowing her mind as much as it had mine. “But what would her domain be?”

“She had as many divine fragments as the rest of them, and I think she maneuvered things so that fragments which fell into the wastelands wouldn’t have been scooped up,” I said.

“Which makes her…”

“The Guardian of the Gods,” I said and in the distance I heard light, musical laughter.