“What do you think it will be like?”

“Terrible.”

“Not all the deaths. I mean the Transcendence.”

“I know. That’s what I was referring.”

“You think it will destroy us? But the others have been so careful with their calculations?”

“I don’t think anyone has run the sort of calculations that you have Helgon. I’m not sure any of them are capable of doing so.”

“You are.”

“No. I have my own techniques, but you’ve put together calculations that produce results which surprised even me.”

“I haven’t always been right.”

“No one ever is.”

“Why do you think the Transcendence will be terrible then? From what I can see we should remain in control of our faculties throughout the deification process, and past that we’ll each have the power to correct any issues that remain from our mortal lives.”

“That’s what will be terrible.”

“Please Dyrena, you know I am not as clever as you.”

“As Novices we are taught that the meaning of our lives comes from what we bring to world. It’s a good foundation, though not a complete one. The truth is that there is no inherent meaning to life. Meaning is something which is created and we are the ones, all of us, from Highest Accessor to the lowest of the Outcast. We all decide, from the choices available to us, what is important enough to spend our lives on.”

“And you think that with divine power at our fingertips and unlimited life there will be nothing we could choose to spend our time on which will matter to us in the end?”

“Not at all. An unlimited life could be turned towards fulfilling ends quite easily. We could undertake projects which would require centuries to come to fruition, plant seeds to nurture society until all stand on the divine stage with us, even should that take a thousand thousand years.”

“But we won’t.”

“We are the only ones who would even want to, and that won’t be our fates.”

– Helgon and Dyrena accepting a thing they know they can’t change.

I couldn’t change anything about the world, but everything was changing through me. Even with so many new Blessed, the power of the Holy Tree was difficult to channel.

When I’d said I was burning, that had been both literally and spiritually true. My body, my old one, hadn’t been capable of holding even the first drop of grace from the Holy Tree. Draconia had stepped in there, both to help channel the power and to grant my physical form a measure of divine resiliency. 

Unfortunately, as only a fragment of her former self, Draconia did have her limits, and bearing the full force of the Holy Tree was well beyond them.

My original plan, for what it’s worth, had been to claim the tree and then turn its power against itself. I’d really thought “burn the tree and choke Sasarai to death with its ashes” would come close to some form of justice for what he’d done.

It wasn’t an obviously terrible idea either. I’d had a lot of training in safely calling on the Holy Tree’s power. With some divine assistance on my side, drawing on that power without a specially prepared ritual should have been fine.

I’d just made one little mistake.

When I claimed the Holy Tree as mine, I didn’t need to ‘draw’ on its power like I had in my classes. The tree was mine, its power was mine, and there was no carefully constructed barrier protecting either of us from the other.

In the end though, with the help of Blessed and Gods, a lot of things I’d never expected happened. 

First, I survived. Which was delightful. Continued existence was a wonderful treat. It hadn’t been guaranteed, was unlikely and not required, but well worth the trouble.

Second, the Holy Tree did, in fact, burn. 

And then it exploded.

The ashes I’d hoped to cram down Sasarai’s throat until he died rose until they hit the edge of Night and swirled from there covering an area hundreds of miles in radius.

And from those ashes, life arose.

The Garden was the first to see the new life which carried the wisps of the Holy Tree’s stored grace. It wasn’t a single great tree but a forest of living, speaking trees infused with voices of those who’d been lost in the roots below the Holy Tree.

The thorns which ringed the Garden burned with the Holy Tree, collapsing in on themselves in some sections and remaining as jagged deterrents  in others. 

From the divine perspective I enjoyed during the process I could feel exactly how unhappy the Sylvans of the Garden were. There were people who buried their fear under so thick a blanket of hate that even godly eyes had a hard time seeing what was inside them.

But there were others too. 

And a surprising amount of them.

People who hadn’t been happy with how things were, or who had questions, or who were as curious as they were afraid.

More than a few of those found their connections to the freed divine fragments. 

There were going to be problems there. Long, difficult problems. Too many people had been snared in Sasarai’s cult for too long. Too many had invested too much of themselves into their unquestioning beliefs to ever be able to accept that their world was changing.

Would it have been simpler to direct some of the divine power that was flowing through me into smiting the ones who would only hate or cling to the worship of ‘the First Tender’?

No.

It would have been simple to do it. I had so much power flowing through me that almost any act of destruction would have been trivial to enact. Destroying a person is never trivial though.

If they were going to be problems later, then those were problems we’d solve, not through destruction but by the much harder process of creating something new and better.

 New and better was something I was definitely going to need to, since the old me was definitely a bit less embodied than was typically required to be considered ‘alive’.

Perhaps I could be of service? When Sola spoke I could feel how carefully she was whispering but on the divine plane, where most of my senses were hanging out, even those whispers were thunderous.

Uh, yes, please? I said, proud of myself for still retaining the capacity to form ideas at all, much less words!

Let me lift that burden from you then. It was never meant for a mortal to carry. Her voice was gentle but it was impossible to miss her raw might and majesty.

This had been the first god to rise in battle against the End of All Things and she had been the last to fall, and standing in her presence as I had no problem believing that.

Quite willingly therefor I gave my claim over the Holy Tree’s power to her, more than confident that it would neither overwhelm her nor be misused. Sasarai had amplified the power he stolen and grown it exponentially since he founded the Garden and it was still the tiniest spark when compared to the majesty of the unbridled sun.

For my gift, I received a priceless treasure in return – I fell. Down from the divine realm, I plummeted, still burning, always burning from the divinity I’d absorbed, but becoming steadily more solid as wind whipped around me.

You know nothing will be the same again, Draconia said, her voice close and comforting.

That was kind of the point of all this, wasn’t it? I asked. The idea of the world returning to what it had been wasn’t impossible, but it would take the turning of many ages for anyone to be in the position the Neoterics had been.

I mean between us, Draconia said.

Why? I asked. Falling was so blissfully restful that I simply refused to an erg of energy on imagining anything bad.

Because neither of us are the same as we were, Draconia said.

That woke me up a bit. Don’t get me wrong, falling was still a wonderful feeling. No need to expend any effort at all, just happy drifting as I returned home. The idea that I’d broken something in Draconia though managed to send a little jolt through my system. Only a little one since she was still talking to me which meant I hadn’t screwed up too badly, but still I hated the idea that I might have hurt her at all, even if she had been in favor of the plan too.

What did I do? Can I fix it? I asked, opening eyes that I might not have had a moment earlier to see a layer clouds drifting far below me.

This isn’t something that can be fixed. It’s not something that needs to be fixed either.  Draconia said with an oddly playful tone in her voice.

What? I asked, and turned my sense inwards, looking for anything different about the connection between us.

Only to discover that it was missing.

No! What happened! What did I do! 

Panicking while in freefall? Not terribly helpful it turns out. 

Also, not entirely unexpected it seems as I felt warm, scaly arms wrap around me.

You did what none of us could have imagined, Draconia said. We knew the Neoterics had stored our stolen power, we had no idea how much they’d captured though.

But wait, Helgon must have known, why didn’t he warn us of this!

This isn’t something he could have foreseen either, Draconia said and paused before adding, Or maybe he did but didn’t want to get our hopes up.

Our hopes? But this is terrible, where are you?

With you. For as long as you wish me to be, Draconia said, not claiming me as her own but not abandoning me either.

Which for the God of Guardians and Treasures was unusual to say the least.

So why can’t we be what we were? How did I lose your Blessing?

Blessings are limited things, Draconia said and I felt like I was in class with one of my teachers again. They connect the divine with the material, the ephemeral with the solid. They are, by their nature, temporary since mortals must eventually pass away, as is their gift.

Dying doesn’t seem like much of a gift.

If often doesn’t from a mortal perspective, Draconia said and I wasn’t sure if there was sympathy in her voice or if there were things about it that she couldn’t tell me. Maybe both?

But why should that matter? I’m still…

Except I wasn’t.

I’d burned in divinity. What was ‘me’ had been taken apart, cell by cell, thought by thought, until all that remained were my hopes, my memories, and the things I held as dear to me. Even my soul felt a bit singed, and that wasn’t something I was supposed to be able to feel.

Was it?

Wait, what I am? I asked, reaching out with the divine senses Draconia had Blessed me with to search for an answer.

It came, in part, all too quickly.

I hadn’t lost those senses.

But they weren’t Draconia’s anymore.

They were mine.

Not MINE.

Just mine. Just a part of me. 

A divine part of me.

Am I…? I didn’t even want to ask. It felt sacreligious.

Draconia, still able to hear my thoughts it seemed, helped me out.

No. You’re not a god. You’re becoming more solid with even moment, reclaiming the place in the world that you deserve.

You’re welcome, Diyas said as I felt her healing domain knitting back handy things like hands and feet and ears and such. The more the sensations of the world returned the more different they felt though.

I was still falling, and the world beneath me blossomed in detail as I passed through the highest of clouds. I wasn’t afraid though as the ground loomed every closer. I wasn’t going to hit it after all.

Not when I had wings to bear me wherever I wanted to go.