“I’m supposed to be fearless. This was my plan after all. So why am I here talking to no one but myself?”

“Well if I start answer myself will that be a good sign or a bad one?”

“I’m not sure. I can feel them dying. The deathless gods. Our shepherds and our guardians. Falling one by one whether they can fight the beast we summoned or not. So much power being lost, so much being gained.”

“The others must be reveling in this.”

“Or maybe they’re terrified too. The beast we summoned is stronger than I’d ever led them to believe it would be. And the gods are losing so quickly.”

“Is it too late? My message to Night should have already reached her. I know she’ll act on it, and I know she’ll succeed, but could I still back out?”

“Pass away with the world? Take the painless path out? Leave behind the people you promised to save? No. It’s not too late for that. Not yet.”

“Would that be preferable to sharing a world with the monsters who discovered the forbidden rituals once again?”

“I’ve given them so much power. Terrified? No, they’re drunk on their new found divinities. Each one scrambling to claim their share of the lost fragments which are falling from the heavens above.”

“Well, perhaps not all of them. Helgon has his part to play and I’m sure he’s hard at work, just as he always is. I’ll have to see when he notices the surfeit of grace overwhelming his senses and tease him about that later.”

“…”

“It is so tempting to call out for forgiveness, but who is there to offer it? And in what world could I ask for it? Not this one certainly.”

“Oh ‘but what choice did I have’ and ‘if not this time the rituals where discovered then when’ and ‘how else can armageddon itself be unmade’? I have such pretty excuses, such unassailable reasons for my conduct, and yet…”

“And yet, I did this. I broke this world. I have emptied the oceans and filled them with the blood of the innocent and the tears of the divine. And there will be no reckoning called against me.”

“Except for the one I call against myself.”

“It’s going to take the others so long to consolidate their power. And longer still to feel secure enough in their new holdings and their understanding of the new world.”

“Is it fair that they will destroy me first of all? Not for them certainly.”

“I’ll have to wait for that distant day of reckoning though for my real work to begin.”

– Dyrena the First Neoteric Lord, alone and indulging in the remorse she could never again let herself feel as the Sun fell.

I could have landed anywhere. The world was changing beneath me and there was so much of it to see, and so many who would want to know what had become of me.

There was someone I needed to see though.

One of the world’s newest gods.

“I don’t know where she is. She went poof in a flash of light that blinded me. Me! Right through Night’s cloak!” Theia said. 

She was searching around the temple where I’d confronted Sasarai but looked up in time to see me descending.

I tried to call out a greeting to her but my vocal cords were brand new, and I wasn’t used to using them in their current configuration, so what I intended as a “Hi!” came out as a far deeper roar than I’d planned for.

“Jyla?” Theia said, confusion radiating from the tips of her ears to the end of her tail.

I held up a clawed hand in a gesture that I hoped would be reassuring and spent a moment clearing my new throat and making to do the “sound out words” thing.

“S-o-rry. St-ill getti-ng used to t-his,” I managed to say.

“What in the…? Where did you go? What happened?” She seemed to tiny but I knew that was a trick of perspective, given what I’d become.

“I…I don’t know where to start?” There were words that vaguely described what I’d been through, but conveying the true scale and sensation of it? If those existed I didn’t know them.

“How about with all this…” she gestured towards all of me. “When did you get this big?”

This was the girl who’d ridden on my back when I’d transformed into a dragon using Draconia’s power, which was probably how she’d recognized me in general. The problem was I was just a tiny bit bigger than I’d been then.

Like big enough that I could have encircled the Garden and still peered over the Thorn Wall.

Which was growing inconvenient.

So I did something about it.

I remember as a kid, trying to squeeze myself down into a tiny ball. I had goofy ideas like anyone else, but on reflection a desire to be overlooked was something of a running theme in my life, even when it was uncomfortable.

In this case, I wasn’t interested in hiding anymore, at least not from Theia, but squeezing myself down from the city-sized dragon which felt truly like my natural form into a more convenient person-sized body was a bit of a challenge.

I’d been thinking to return to the Sylvan size and shape that I’d known for years, but, well, I didn’t want to.

It wasn’t right.

The closest I felt like going towards it, the form that felt the closest to ‘also right’ was a bit taller with a similar geometry to what I’d had before, but with my lovely lovely scales still in place. 

Thank you Diyas! I said thinking that I was still drawing on her domain.

This is all you my lovely, the God of Healing responded before withdrawing. She left me with the impression that, while she was more than a little pleased with what I’d done, she did have a lot of others things going on which demanded her attention.

“I thought this might make it a bit easier for us to talk,” I said.

Or we could have spoke like this, Theia said with a roll of her eyes.

Because, right, we both still have divine bonds.

Though mine were…I wasn’t sure.

They’re yours now, and yours alone. You don’t need to borrow them from me anymore, Draconia said. Still close to me. Still a part of me, even if she didn’t have to be.

“What does that mean?” Theia asked, tilting her head to inspect me from a different angle. “What are you now?”

The short answer is whatever she wants to be, Draconia said.

In the past we would have called her a Sentinel, one of Draconia’s personal retinue, Umbrielle said.

“Oh. Like Zeph is with Sola?” Theia asked.

The same sort of association, but with different duties and responsibilities, Draconia said. That title is not one Jyla needs to claim however. I am not what I was, and she has the chance to become something entirely new.

“I feel like I’m already something entirely new,” I said. I felt light and strong and connected. So very connected. It was like the whole world was still pulsing through me. “Though becoming your Sentinel doesn’t sound bad either.”

Let’s leave any decisions about that until you’ve had a chance to discover a bit more about what you are now. Draconia was trying to be reasonable but I thought I could feel her hope that I’d chose to stick with her.

And, yeah, obviously I was going to.

But she was right too. Rushing into decisions when I was very definitely still off kilter wasn’t a wise move.

“Does anyone know what’s happened with the other Neoterics?” I asked, that being a rather important question since I was pretty sure I could not handle another seven repositories like the Holy Tree spilling their power out into the world.

“We’ll have to check with Xalaria, she was coordinating the groups we had in place. It definitely felt like your idea worked on some of them though,” Theia said.

Out of curiosity, when did you discover the secret to the Neoteric’s vaults? Umbrielle asked.

“Well, there’s when I discovered it and when I realized I’d discovered it,” I said. “The answer to the first is a long time ago. It was how I got in the first time.”

“I thought you said there was a secret tunnel that led you into it?” Theia said.

“There was. But that was a spot that had literal divinity level protections cast on it. Anyone else could have stumbled on that tunnel, and probably did, over the years, but I don’t think they would have been able to see it. I’m wondering if even Sasarai would have been able to see it.”

“But it appeared for you because of Draconia?” Theia said, repeating my earlier words when I’d explained my plan.

“Right. From talking with Helgon and just thinking about how Dyrena had to have set the defenses up, the vaults had to allow the owners in or, being divine defenses, they would have been impossible for anyone to breech. Since I was pretty sure neither Sasarai nor any of the other Neoterics would have wanted to seal away their divine fragments so that they themselves couldn’t use them, there had to be an opening in the defenses for people with things inside the vaults to get in and claim them.”

And since you were one I would give my Blessing to, you held a claim on my fragment, Draconia said.

“Hence, it was just Sasarai’s vault. It was mine too.” I was delighted to hear that I was still close enough to Draconia’s domain that declarations like that still seemed to carry a bit of divine weight behind them.

“And once you worked that out, figuring out who we should send to each of the vaults was easy because Draconia’s the God of Guardians? But shouldn’t the vaults have hidden their contents from even divine influences?” Theia said.

“They did from every other god,” I said, unreasonably proud of Draconia in that moment, “but people forget that she’s not just the God of Guardians.”

Guardians and Treasures, Umbrielle said. You didn’t have to overcome the vaults, you knew which fragments were in each vault because they were all being hoarded as treasures by the Neoterics.

To be fair, it wasn’t until Jyla accepted my Blessing that I regained even that much awareness of the world at large. 

“And without Kalkit’s secret network, we won’t have been able to find people who could carry the Blessings of the gods in the different vaults, so any attempt to free them would have been doomed from the start.”

Not that things went off without a hitch, Draconia said. I know some of the vaults remain locked down, with noone claiming a Blessing from the trapped divinities within, and there’s the small matter of the world almost ending.

“I’m sorry, what?” Theia asked.

“I sort of underestimated how much power Sasarai had built up in the Holy Tree. When I claimed it, that all became mine. Very briefly.”

“That was when you vanished in the flash of light I take it?”

“Probably? I was terribly aware of the world for a while there. Fortunately a lot of gods were freed and there are a lot of new Blessed out there now.”

“So you gave the power to them?”

“Not exactly? They held me disperse it, but none of us could carry that much. Not without, well, did I die there?”

Technically no, but practically, sort of, Umbrielle said. Your mortal existence was fundamentally altered and partially erased. As you are still standing here however, and your soul is mostly intact, you are arguably still alive and never truly died.

“That sounds like you are splitting the finest of hairs there,” Theia said.

“I’m just happy with how that particular split turned out. Under any other circumstance, it should have gone the other way.”

Funny that, eh?

Thank you Dyrena, I said to absolutely no one at all.

I definitely didn’t hear a little chuckle in the silence of my mind. Just a stray bit of imagination I’m sure. Even though it sounded like a voice I’d never heard before.

“Now, before we go, I’d like to pay a quick visit to the newest god in the world. Have you seen where Sasarai got off to?”