“Damn it. Sasarai developed better vault wards? Sasarai? You have to be lying.”

“I wish I was Vaingloth, but he asked me for a review yesterday and I had to give him a 4.0 rating.”

“No. You don’t give 4.0 ratings, Dyrena. The highest you’ve ever given was a 3.6 and that vault was specifically impossible to open, by anyone, ever.”

“That was what cost is the .4 points it lost. As a means of securing something that one was unparalleled, until now, it simply lost points for practicality.”

“And yet you expect me to believe that Sasarai, the Sasarai whom we have both known for years, that Sasarai, somehow managed to build a flawless vault.”

“Oh, no, of course not.”

“Thank you.”

“A rating of 4.0 doesn’t mean flawless. A flawless vault would be useless.”

“I likely should have studied more in this area as I feel the most terrible of headaches coming on, but still I must ask; What?”

“We’ve known how to build a flawless vault for aeons now. Sadly the only material a flawless vault could be constructed from would be the essence of a god, and the only place it could reside would be in the god’s domain. I trust you can see why, under our present circumstances, that would be both impractical and ill-advised.”

“Yes. If flawless is not an option for us though what distinguishes Sasarai’s technique?”

“Sasarai took a novel approach after reading a few of the fundamental papers I directed him towards. He filled the vault with flaws.”

“Of course. Flaws. How obvious.”

“They are, and that’s what makes them so clever. Tell me, if you saw a door that was secured with a bar which you wanted to get through, what would you do?”

“I presume you are looking for ‘lift the bar’.”

“Indeed. And when you discovered that there was a latch holding the bar in place?”

“Undo the latch.”

“Oh but the latch is coated with poison.”

“Have a minion open it.”

“Your minion has died, but the latch is unmoved.”

“Use more.”

“They all die, with no movement of the latch.”

“I see where this is going.”

“Exactly. The wards on Sasarai’s vault are nothing but an endless fractal of such issues. Every flaw leads into deeper problems and traps.”

“And how would one ever be sure that one of the flaws wasn’t real?”

“That’s what earns Sasarain’s invention its 4.0; You never can. An attacker can be trapped endlessly in searching for a means into the vault.”

– Dyrena providing assistance to the other soon-to-be Neoteric Lords on the design of the chambers where they would house their divine fragments.

Revealing the existence of a second full fledged god in the world had seemed fairly perilous. In theory doing so anywhere the End of All Things could see or hear us was the worst of all possible ideas, but Little turned out to be right; we were simply too insignificant for the Beast to notice us at all.

“Meluna knows already, doesn’t she?” Little asked.

“I’d have to guess it would be pretty hard for Night to have missed the presence of the only other god our world probably has.”

“And she’s never mentioned anything because if she did…” Little trailed off with an air of disliking what came next so much that she couldn’t voice it.

“The Neoterics would definitely try to move against her.” I said, choosing clarity even if it was horrible.

“What could they really do to her though?” Little asked the question as much to herself as to me it sounded like.

“I don’t know. I mean there’s the obvious option of revealing her presence to that thing.” We were shrouded in endless darkness but I was sure Little caught me pointing outwards towards where the Beast lay.

“I don’t think any of them are that apocalyptic. They were prepared for the last one and it still turned out a lot worse than they’d thought it would.”

“Is that what Helgon said?”

“You know, I haven’t had a chance to ask him about it. No, we found some of Vaingloth’s personal journals and I had Zeph read them to me. He was ridiculously conceited, even in his private writings, but the entries from just after the Sunfall showed pretty clearly that they were all well out of their depth.”

“What went wrong? I mean, aside from the obvious.”

“The world was supposed to be a lot more preserved. They each had plans for their own City-States that would have been the scale of a small country, but the Beast was a lot stronger than they’d understood. If Night hadn’t stepped in just as she had, the divine realm would have fallen and then the physical realm with it. Even with all their stolen power, the Neoterics would have been free floating dust the same as the rest of us.”

“And none of them knew that? How did they miscalculate so much if they managed to get everything else to work?” I asked and in response a sneaking suspicion crept into my heart.

“According to Vaingloth’s notes, the Beast which answered their summons was an order of magnitude larger than their projections, but those projections were known to be based on incomplete information.”

I had to shake my head, even if it wasn’t visible to anyone and did nothing to change the darkness which had swallowed my vision.

“I can’t believe they went ahead with. I mean, I can’t believe anything would be greedy enough to destroy the gods, and I hate that Sasarai was right about that, even if he was speaking from personal experience, but how could they take a risk like that?”

“They wanted the prize so much they convinced themselves that the signs they could see pointing towards their victory had to be true,” Little said and I could hear the shrug she wrapped her words in. “And, hey, they weren’t completely wrong, they did wind up being victorious after all.”

“Some more than others I’m guessing…” I said as the idea which had occurred to me took root.

“Oh I wish I’d been able to tell Vaingloth about that,” Little said. “He would have been incandescent with rage.”

“Is there any chance he’s still around? I mean, if Dyrena and Helgon kept existing after their ‘deaths’, could the other two be out there waiting to jump on us at some point too?”

“I can only speak for Vaingloth, but no, he’s not out there anymore. He’s gone.”

“What happened to him?” Just because I had a plan for how to deal with Sasarai didn’t mean it was a good one, or that someone who’d already taken out a Neoteric might not have a better idea.

“There are fragments of the Beast still lurking in the world, the same as there are fragments of the gods,” Little said. “I found a big one and dragged him into it.”

“That…you mean you threw him into it, right?”

“Nope. Though I suppose ‘lured’ might be more accurate. He was immensely powerful. Even with Zeph racing me away from him, he almost caught us, broke through mountain to catch up. It was maybe not the best idea I’d ever had, but he was so mad at me that when I leapt into the Beast Fragment, he followed.”

It should have been a relief that her plan sounded far more insane than mine. Sadly it was not, largely because her plan had worked and mine was still pretty uncertain.

“That sounds like a fatal mistake, but I can’t help but notice you’re still here, so…?” I didn’t want to point out the obvious but I kind of had to under the circumstances.

“Am I?” Little asked.

“Well, I’m talking to someone.”

“True, and there is a part of me that’s still Little. Even before I lured Vaingloth into the Beast Fragment though, I’d become something else too.”

“I think we sensed that, Draconia and I, and you said the other Blessed could too?”

“It’s hard not to notice when you have senses like ours,” Little said and I could feel the distance it had brought into her life.

“They didn’t throw you over the wall though!” I said, trying to be reassuring.

“They didn’t what?” she asked, as confused as she should rightfully be.

“Ah, sorry, it’s a Garden thing. The unfaithful and undesirable are supposedly thrown over the wall to die in the wasteland outside, except of course what’s outside the wall is the town that supports all the people inside the wall, and the wastelands aren’t at all what Sasarai made them out to be.”

“Vaingloth just burned people to death. Or send them to drown past the Water portal, or turn into vegetation past the Air Portal. He was really great like that.”

“I’m glad you killed him.”

“Oh it was a lot worse than killing him, and, yeah, I still don’t regret it. Except that I can’t torment him a bit more. Especially with the Dyrena stuff. When the Beast got to him though he wasn’t quite able to work with it like I had so he got consumed the same as all the god fragments that don’t exist anymore.”

“That’s kind of the other thing I wanted to talk to you about,” I said, remembering my original reason for seeking her out.

“You want to pitch Sasarai into a Beast Fragment too?”

“No, or yes, that would be great, but I probably wouldn’t survive it either would I?”

“No one has. Me included. And trust me, I’m aware of how weird that sounds, but the person I was is not who or what I am now. I’m more of a negotiation at this point, and maybe a choice. That’s what let me get away with what I did to Vaingloth and even so I didn’t get off without paying for it.”

“You don’t sound like you’ve got any regrets about that either though?” I asked, wondering what the price was for being certain a Neoteric was dead and if it was one I would hesitate for even a second to pay as well.

“Most days, no, it was definitely worth it. It would be nice to be able to see again though but, eh, Sola makes up for a lot of that,” Little said with a resigned air.

“Wait, you’re blind?”

“Mostly. I can make out some things thanks to Sola but things like ‘reading books’, otherwise know as my favorite activity ever, are a bit beyond me.”

“But, wait, can’t Sola just heal your eyes?” I knew how fierce Draconia was about protecting and how much she’d spend to keep me healthy, I couldn’t imagine Sola was any different.

“My eyes are fine, for certain values of fine. When I brought myself back together though the second time, my vision wasn’t something I was able to bring back. Or maybe I brought back too much of the Beast’s essence with me? I don’t know, but given how lucky I am to be here at all still, it’s not the kind of thing I want to experiment with all that much. Things could have turned out much worse. And they still could if I tried it again.”

“You don’t need to though, right? Mt Gloria is safe for now?” Not that ‘safety’ was anything like a permanent state anywhere in our world.

“For now. It’s part of what’s held the other Neoterics back I think. I doubt I could take out all of them, at least not without inviting the Beast to dine on all of us. If dealing with the Beast isn’t what you wanted to talk to me about though, what had you had in mind?”

“I wanted to ask if you’d found Vaingloth’s divine fragments yet?”

“I found Sola, obviously, but she was alone, acting as a light source for his personal garden.”

“No others though?”

“We looked but it seemed like he hadn’t kept them. We figured he’d traded away the ones he didn’t keep on himself to the Lords beyond the portals for their favors.”

“He didn’t.”

“How could you know that?”

“Because giving up power isn’t something any of them would do, and I know how Sasarai hid his.”