“We can’t go in there, the ghosts will eat us!”

“Better the ghosts than the things that have been tracking us through the wastes.”

“But those things can follow us in here too!”

“Nah. They won’t come in here. The ghosts would eat them if they did.”

– A band of outcasts on finding the ruins of the Factorum

With no ability to change direction in mid-air, we plummeted downward, right into the spikes atop one of the buildings at the outskirts of the Factorum’s research district.

That should have been a problem

Spikes have this thing they do where they can punch large holes in places that really want to remain unperforated.

No one had informed MB of that however.

Gentle as a breeze, it landed on the tip of the spikes and bounced onward no differently than when it had leapt from solid ground.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? I have no idea, but I can definitively say that one MB is perfectly capable of doing so.

I released my death grip on MB’s fur as it came rest outside the one building with light spilling from its windows.

Did the dead need candles to see too?

No. It turns out that this particular dead guy was simply being hospitable.

“Ah. Guests,” a tall, translucent man said from the imposing doorway to the research lab. Yeah, somehow despite the obvious fact that he was a ghost, it was the door which struck me as imposing. I don’t have a thing for architecture or anything, it was just a really impressive door. “I must now chase you off. Boo. Blrgh! Begone mortals before your souls are consumed and your eyes are pickled in brine! Hmm, oh, well, that didn’t work.”

The complete lack of effort he put into being properly menacing spoke to something but I had no idea what it could be.

He turned with a shrug and walked inside, leaving the impressive door open for us to follow.

The thing was at least an arm’s length thick. It had amazing carvings that seemed to have been organically grown by the stone.

It was also a god.

No.

I blinked and tried to work out what I was seeing.

I’d acquired amazing powers of perception. Understanding anything they were showing me however? That was a work in progress.

Zeph and MB moved to follow the ghost, but I paused for a step to work out what, exactly, I was seeing.

The door wasn’t a god. It was however strong enough to hold off a serious amount of divine smiting.

I peered deeper, expecting find a fragment of a god lodged into it somewhere, but it was free of anything like that. At least as far as I could see. 

What I was able to make out was the raw divine power the door was imbued with. The decorations were more than aesthetic too. They were prayers. Prayers that were trapping stolen power and turning it into a shield.

The last place in the world I should go was inside a research lab that was shielded by divine power, but given that I was planning to talk to a Neoteric Lord in the state I was in, I couldn’t really be accused of making anything like “good” decisions.

“Sorry, I got distracted,” Zeph said, appearing at my side and offering me her arm for support.

I took it.

I’m not proud.

Or at least not proud enough to reject help when my were legs feeling like they were going to buckle any second.

“The door’s not…”

“I know. It’s supposed to be consecrated to the god of war, but it’s more than that.” From how Zeph spoke, I had the strong sense that she hadn’t been consciously aware of that until her most recent time seeing the door.

That MB didn’t care could have been reassuring, but I had no idea what its perspective on divine energy was like since that I don’t think I’d had much to contribute there. Maybe it though of the research lab like it was made of tasty food? Probably not but the thought amused me enough that I walked in without paying the sacred structure much more mind.

“Oh no. Intruders. Invaders. Whatever shall I do?” the ghost said, putting his hand to his forehead like he was going to faint. “Offer you some tea perhaps?” 

He gestured to a table that was otherwise cluttered with books but had a small area pushed clear for a tray with tea cups and a pitcher on it.

Was taking food from the dead a good idea? No. Was taking food from a Neoteric Lord an even worse idea? Yes. Was taking food from a dead Neoteric Lord who had, for reasons unknown, set out seven servings of frankly wonderful smelling tea the worst possible idea one could have? I neither knew, nor cared. Not when the tea came with the chance to collapse into a big, puffy chair which had probably been holding the pile of books that was scattered around it.

MB wuffed and sat down beside me, knocking over a teetering stack of books in the process. A stray thought wandered through my mind that if he damaged them, maybe we’d have to take them away. Following that came the question of just how many of the books I could steal before it would be noticed. I figured a safe estimate was somewhere in the triple digits given how many there were and how little attention had been given to their layout, but the last time I’d stolen something from a Neoteric Lord had led to some noticeable consequences, so I reigned in my larcenous tendencies as best I could.

“You wanted to talk to us?” I asked after taking the offered cup of tea with a nod.

“Not especially,” the ghost said.

“Helgon,” Zeph said, a note of warning in her voice.

“I’m a ghost my dear, I have no wants or needs.”

“You’re awfully solid for a ghost,” I said, indicating the carafe of tea he was holding.

“It’s an improvement,” Helgon said. “Previously I was merely awful.”

“Helgon,” Zeph repeated, the warning in her tone growing clearer.

“What? It is as you surmised. I was a monster and now I am but the shade of a monster.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be the dead shade of a monster?” I asked, sensing as I did the dense currents of energy that still ran through him.

In some senses he was more alive than anyone in the room. Heck, in some senses, he was more alive than everyone in Mt. Gloria put together, excepting only Vaingloth.

“I am. Quite dead. Have been for longer than you’ve been alive in fact,” Helgon said, putting the tea down and taking the seat opposite me. Apart from Zeph there was no one to fill the other five chairs, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if Helgon had set this room up a hundred years ago and never bothered altering the layout when he had ‘guests’ over.

“I’ve seen people die. You’re not dead. You’re something else.” I was tired. And I don’t banter all that well at the best of times. 

“As are you,” Helgon said, taking a sip from his tea.

“Is that what you wanted to talk about?” I asked. “What I am? You already heard my explanation didn’t you?”

“Yes. Certainly an incorrect one, though any sort of correct explanation would fail to explain your presence here. Either of your presences.”

“What explanation do you have then? Incorrect or whatever?”

“None. You are a new thing under our sunless sky. Quite terrifying in fact.”

“You don’t seem particularly terrified.” Some people were a jovial mask to hide their fears. Some get real quiet. Helgon was neither of those people. And he wasn’t at all afraid from what I could tell.

“Again. Dead. Not much for me to worry about now, is there?”

“You can’t get, I don’t know, deader?”

“Why my dear! Are you threatening me, or making an offer?” His eyes lit up with the sort of delight that I would normally walk immediately away from. Walking was not exactly an enjoyable prospect at the moment however, so I settled for glaring at him.

“Is that what you want Helgon? I thought you were content with you ‘meager existence’?” Zeph asked.

“If Blessed Little can offer a more permanent state of demise to one such as I, I would find the option endless intriguing,” Helgon said.

“Let me guess, you’d commission nine murders from her?” It wasn’t hard to see who the targets would be given that there were nine remaining Neoteric Lords and they were afraid of Helgon enough to not mess with him despite the fact that they’d already killed him.

“Ten,” Helgon said. “If this world is ever to be renewed, all the monster should be swept from board I believe.”

“I’d need to take myself out too for that to be the case,” I said, feeling a wave of weariness wash over me.

“Don’t be silly,” Helgon said. “You say you killed a man? I and the other killed a world, and not for survival as you did, but for our own greed and ambition. You are no monster Blessed Little. You have simply been placed in monstrous situations and been offered monstrous choices as a result.”

“You say that, but you’re not exactly acting like a monster now. What do you want?”

“Almost nothing and practically everything,” Helgon said. “Not the answer you wished to hear, I’m sure, but truth at least, which I’ve been told is a rarity for my kind.”

“Why don’t you expound on the ‘almost nothing’ then,” I said. “Practically everything sounds like it would take too long to go through.”

“As you wish,” Helgon said and rose from his chair to begin pacing around the room. “What do you know of the Sunfall?”

“Not much. The beast showed up, the gods fought it, they lost, the Neoterics opened the portals to save the nine, or I guess it was twelve at first, cities.” I’d learned and worked out a bit more than that but I wanted to see where he would go with what I gave him.

“Very good. Everything wrong, just as it should be.” He picked up a book, discarded it, pickup another, placed it gently back where it was, and finally conjured a book from thin air that he seemed to be satisfied with.

“Here,” he said. “You don’t need to read it now. I’ll summarize. You may want to refer to it later for additional details however. I always find myself looking for the notes I forgot to write down, whereas the ones I have in written form never seem to leave my mind at all.”

I took the book which weighed about half what I did and let it fall on my lap. In a pinch it would make a decent shield against pretty much anyone I thought.

“To offer some corrections; first, the Plunderer did not simply show up, it was, as you surmised, summoned. The process was lengthy, and required a phenomenal outlay of effort, planning, and the slow and deliberate corruption of not only the processes we safeguarded and those were were intended to shepherd, but even the gods themselves. It was in many sense the grandest endeavor in all of history, the most sublime, and the most doomed even before it was a spark in any of our minds.”

“Why?” I couldn’t help myself even if it was a stupid question.

“We had too much,” Helgon said, his gaze growing distant. “We High Accessors. We were the intermediaries to the gods themselves. Through us the faith of the world flowed into the divine coffers. We were exalted above all other mortals.”

“And that wasn’t enough.”

“It never could be. We had so much, what else could we do but hunger for more?”

“I thought you were going to make your lab presentable for the gathering Helgon?”

“My dear Dyrena, what part of what you see is not perfectly presentable for our esteemed colleagues?”

“The part where there are no tables, no seating, and little room to stand yet somehow plenty of room for piles of whatever these scraps and gadgets are.”

“Oh. Is that what to you meant? I see.”

“And what, pray tell, did you think I was referring to when you offered to host a gathering to discuss your modifications to our grand design?”

“Well, I assumed people might object to the constructs which could, potentially, if the proper safety protocols were not followed, and if their internal constraints failed, slay everyone in the room. So I tidied those up. As you can see.”

“Tied up where?”

“Into the other room.”

“That room? The one with the unlocked door? The unlocked door constructed of, if I am not mistaken, decorative pine wood?”

“Err, yes. Do you think I should lock it?”

“I don’t know. Is that a construct I see wandering out of the room as we speak?”

“Yes. Yes it is. Um, perhaps we should leave and reschedule the meeting. We can discuss preserving the god’s essences some other time I think.”

– High Accessors Dyrena and Helgon shortly before the loss of Research Lab 13 discussing a meeting which was never rescheduled.

My first thought in reaction to learning that a god still existed was outrage. Should it have been a surprise since I was already carrying a god around with me? Yes. Yes it was entirely reasonable to find out that Night still existed. 

Why?  Because Sola wasn’t the god she’d been. 

Sola was wonderful but she was a tiny fragment of the divinity she had once been a part of. That wasn’t what Night was. Night was her entire self. Or close to it at least. 

I tried to reach out to Sola, tried to get a sense of her thoughts or even her feelings on discovering that her sister still existed. Had Sola known? It was secret worth keeping from everyone and everything. Or Sola as shocked as I was? Was she angry at her sister from hiding away from her, or drunk with joy that Night was still here, and not lost as all the rest had been?

I reached out but I just couldn’t tell.

I was going to murder the hell out of Vaingloth for his damned bindings.

I mean, probably not really. If I tried to fight him again there wasn’t going to be another surprise Zeph to save me, so in all likely I would just die horribly. 

Didn’t stop me from wanting to melt more than his eyes though.

“Can you move?” Zeph asked.

“Under my own power?” I asked. “Uh, I’ve probably got a good five or ten steps in me now. Maybe twenty if I push it.”

“Will that…that thing, object if I pick you up?” Zeph asked, clearly leery of getting within chomping range despite the fact that MB was out like a snuffed candle.

“MB? Doubt it. If anything it may want to be carried too,” I said, giving my furry backrest an encouraging scritch.

“I don’t think I can carry it,” Zeph said, alerting me that I wasn’t being clear with when I was actually answering her questions and when I was joking. 

It wasn’t my fault. I was tired.

“That’ll be fine,” I said. “It’ll keep up on its own.”

“It’s not going to stay here?” Zeph could have looked more worried but I’m not sure how her face would have managed to show it.

“It’s been alone for a long time,” I said and the whisper of a memory tickled my mind. Aeons stacking on top of aeons. Time so long that worlds form, cool, blossom with life and then die, returning to dust to start the the cycle over and over again. Time filled with emptiness. And hunger. And loneliness. “It’s with me now and I’m not leaving it.”

“You said it was you? But you call ‘it’, not she, and ‘MB’ not ‘Little’?”

“I know. That’s weird right?”

Zeph gave a stressed little bark of a laugh in response.

“No. Not at all,” she said, reminding me that, yes, she did have a sense of humor too.

“MB is more a description than a name. Mini-Beast doesn’t encompass enough of what it’s become to act as a real name, and I like MB better since it doesn’t link it as strongly to what it was. It’s not the beast anymore, so the less the beast is referenced the better.”

“It told you that?”

“Oh, not at all. It’s not so much on the ‘speaking’ end of things yet. I just like how MB sounds. If it wants another name, I’m trusting it’ll nudge me, or give me some sign, but so far it seems find with it.”

“And it’s an ‘it’? Not a person?”

“It’s a person, but, in this case, it’s still working out what that means. If it had copied more from me and recast its self to actually look like me, I’d probably go with ‘she’ because it would have made more of a choice in that direction. As a big fluffy four legged thing though, I think it’s leaving its options open while it discovers what its become and what it wants to be going forward. Again though, it’s not  telling me that with words or anything, so this could all be product of my obviously broken brain, but I don’t know, it feels right? If that makes sense.”

Zeph regarded me for a moment and I contemplated trying to get up but decided against moving under my own power as a bad idea for the time being.

“There’s not much about this that makes sense, but I am supposed to be a Fox Wind and miracles shouldn’t be that surprising.”

“I get why this one might be a little extra challenging. I think if there were miracles like this a few centuries ago, we’d be living in a very different world.”

“It feels like we’re living in a very different world,” Zeph said. “I…can I pet it?”

It was a simple request, but I could see how profoundly it proved Zeph’s first statement. Her hesitancy in approaching MB wasn’t because it was weird, and scary, and different. None of these things helped, but Zeph had a chasm of memory to cross in accepting MB’s existence. 

She’d kept her voice calm and even but her body language screamed of the trauma she’d suffered when a beast fragment had torn her apart. Praise be to my own capacity for forgetting that the time I’d spent being destroyed by the beat fragment was mercifully fading faster than I could recall it, but that wasn’t the case for her. From her posture to the shiver in her fur, I could see how the memory of how her previous life had ended was crystal clear to her.

And yet, the world was different now.

“Definitely,” I said. “Right around the back of the ears seems to be a spot it really loves.”

She stepped forward and dropped to one knee on the other side of MB’s head from me. Her first touch was tentative, but when MB shifted into it, I saw Zeph relax too. She continued for a few moments before rising and stepping back, drawing a sad little wuffle from MB in the process.

“If you don’t mind being carried, we should probably continue on,” Zeph said. “Helgon said it was important that you and he speak.”

“And since he’s been watching all of this we might as well be able to ask him questions too,” I said.

“That and he said there are some others you should meet as well.”

“Others?” The world was dead, and the Factorum had no portal given how there wasn’t anyone to, you know, feed to them. So who else could there be? Zeph’s shrug offered no clues.

The thought of ‘other Neoteric Lords waiting for us’ gave me a brief moment of panic but that was dispelled just as quickly by the fact that I could sense the remaining Neoterics and none of them were anywhere near here.

Also, this ‘Helgon’ had to have good reason to hate his peers since they’d been the ones who’d murdered him.

As much as you can murder a Neoteric Lord I guess.

Could he have gone crazy? Sure. That was a possibility, but if he was talking about the ghosts of his people or something, it would seem a little crazy given that he was something like a ghost himself.

There was only one path to getting any answers though and that ran right into the heart of the Factorum.

“If you don’t mind lugging me further, I’m good with taking it easy for a little while longer,” I said, nodding towards our destination.

“Not much lugging needed,” Zeph said. “After all you kinda Little.”

“Hah,” I said rolling my eyes at the weight joke, but then I smiled, catching her full meaning. 

I was kinda Little.

And kinda not.

But mostly Little still.

I don’t know why, but that warmed my heart a bit.

Which was weird.

I’d never liked being Little, either in the sense of being small like I was or in simply being who I was.

So when had that changed?

Maybe when I’d had the choice not to come back being me?

Or had it been earlier?

A stray though flitted through my mind and I caught myself wondering how Lucky was doing? It didn’t feel like Vaingloth was rampaging through Mt Gloria, so that was probably a good sign for her and the others I’d inadvertently converted to Sola’s worship? I hoped anyways. Sola needed the worshippers. And I could use some friends who weren’t pitched into the Kindling fires for a change.

“You ready to go?” Zeph asked.

“As much I can be,” I said.

“Will MB be able to keep up?” she asked.

I nuzzled in close to MB’s ear and whispered, “Time to go, unless you want to sleep a bit more and catch up later.”

MB was never going to have problem finding me, but if we were going to be separated, it would be MB’s choice, anything else, at least this early, would be cruel.

For as much as I was expecting MB to stretch, yawn, and go back to sleep (since that’s what I would have done). It surprised me by bounding up to full wakefulness and standing on its feet.

That, unfortunately, left me without my comfy backrest, but Zeph was quick enough to snag me before my head hit the ground.

“Okay. We’re not heading to the palace, I checked there first. Turns out Helgon likes his labs better. We’re heading to number 13,” Zeph said.

MB responded with a huff and a nod.

Then it cast its head backwards and to the side?

When I didn’t get what it was trying to express it did it again.

I still didn’t get it.

What? I said I was tired, didn’t I?

One annoyed growl-grumble and another double gesture with its head and Zeph, bless her infinite perceptiveness got what MB was ‘saying’.

“You want us to get on your back?” she asked, like that was the most obvious and reasonable thing for us to do.

MB chuffed agreeably and nodded.

“Okay,” Zeph said with a shrug, having been replaced by some strange doppelganger in the fraction of a second I’d glanced over to MB.

“Seriously?” I asked, as Zeph, swung herself and me into a seating position on MB’s back.

“Is this going to be safe?” I asked. I’d seen how fast Zeph could run, and if MB could even vaguely keep pace with her…

MB could do more than keep pace with her.

MB could also fly.

I learned that as the ground suddenly dropped away far, far below us.

Or.

No.

MB could not fly.

MB could leap. 

Could leap very high in fact, so high that the ruins were were approaching at a spine chilling velocity seemed like a disastrous place to land.

Except, of course, it wasn’t like MB could change course in mid-air. Not even to avoid a roof that was covered in spikes!

“And tell us, Aspirant Helgon, why do you seek admission to the Clergy of Yauka the Clear Seeing?”

“Because I’m flawed.”

“See, he profanes our halls! To claim faith in the Clear Seeing arises from a defect of character? He has learned nothing from his time in the Novitiate!”

“Your pardon Learned Father, but I made not such claim. My faith in Blessed Yauka comes not from a certainty that I know his will, but rather a certainty that I must improve myself in order to understand that will at all.  I am a flawed creature. I have always known that. What I would set myself to is to refine the base clay of my own being into something ever more worthy. That is my calling and the deepest expression of faith in our Blessed Patron and Eternal Lord I am capable of performing. I cannot see what it is I must become, but the Clear Seeing God’s catechism tells us that we can be better than we are, and so I am called to my belief.”

– An forgotten record from the archives of the Clergy of Yauka denoted with markings for an aspirant who was not likely to advance within the Order

A woman had appeared near me. She was an enemy. A clever, stealthy, incredibly dangerous enemy. 

Thankfully, she didn’t seem to be my enemy.

“My apologies, am I interrupting?” she asked, sliding around the edge area lit by the glow radiating from me.

“Yeah,” I said, not bothering with either tact or wit. It hadn’t been the kind of day that left me with all that many functional brain cells and I wasn’t going to waste the few I had on playing games where I didn’t understand the rules or the stakes. “You knew that though, so what’s up?”

“What’s up? Hmm, I don’t think you’re at all what he imagines you to be,” she said.

Zeph was watching our new visitor with the sort of still silence that didn’t so much promise a blinding and unexpected response at any moment but left the door open should Zeph be so inclined.

“By ‘he’ you mean the Neoteric whose also watching us at the moment?” I wasn’t really guessing there, so I threw a feeble little wave in the general direction of the Lord of the Factorum.

“Clever though,” she said.

“I can hear you, uh, whoever you are?” That I was still flopped bonelessly against MB was not, perhaps, the strongest position to be negotiating from, but it wasn’t like I had an erg of strength available to rise to a stronger position.

“Meluna, you may call me Meluna if I may have your name?”

Zeph shifted before I could speak.

“You may not,” she said.

“You remember more than most I see, Fox Wind,” Meluna said, sketching Zeph a perfunctory bow.

“Do I?” Zeph asked. “I don’t recall the Night being tricksy. That was once the domain of the Wildings.”

Meluna’s eyes opened in something that could have been surprise, delight, or both.

“You do remember! Oh, there are so many questions I would have for you, but one does rise above the others unfortunately.”

“Do I know better than to treat with Wildings? Yes, yes I do.” Zeph said.

“Wise, but not the question I must have the answer to,” Meluna said. “And, if it should reassure you, I am no Wilding. They were held high in my mistresses regard, but while I may borrow their unique bits of wisdom, I am and will ever be a faithful acolyte of my Lady of the Darkest Hours.”

I was aware of a great deal more than I had been before getting munched up by the beast fragment but Proper Nouns and Titles were not included in the beast’s expansion of my consciousness. Probably because it had never known, nor cared, for the names of who, what, or where it devoured.

MB was following the exchange any better than I was, but it was tired too and was, I think, relying on me to determine if the odd lady before us was a threat or not.

She definitely was. My new senses were explicitly clear about that, if not particularly clear on why at first. Her banter told me that defusing her danger was going to be easier by talking to her though, and that seemed to be enough for MB.

“You carry a fragment of Night?” Zeph asked.

“Not for a long, long time,” Meluna said.

That I could make a little bit of sense of. Sort of. If Meluna had once carried a fragment of Night, then she was like me, a God Bearer, or she had been? It seemed weird to think of a god soul leaving someone and that person still holding onto the god’s power as one of their acolytes.

And Meluna was definitely holding onto a surprising amount of godly power. With the hint that she was aligned with a god, or a part of one, it was easy to work out that it was divine energy I was sensing in her. The part that didn’t fit was how she could be holding so much of her gods power if she’d given the fragment of them she’d found away?

“Should you be talking to us?” I asked, without really putting enough thought into the question. “I mean, if you’re worried about me, you’re kind of giving the game away by being here aren’t you?”

I didn’t particularly want her to take a stab at killing me. I was feeling fairly awful still but not that awful. Reflecting on what I’d heard for just a moment longer though had brought a really terrible idea to me and, if I was right, I was honestly be kind of surprised the stabbing hadn’t started already.

“Oh? Should I be worried about you?” the most worried woman of all time who didn’t look worried in the slightest asked.

“If I say ‘no’ are you going to be able to believe me even a little bit?” I asked. If our situations were reversed, I knew I would have started stabbing long ago, but Meluna seemed a bit more level headed than I was.

“Probably not I suppose,” Meluna said with a sad little pout. “If she says I don’t need to worry on the other hand?”

We both looked over at Zeph, but I turned back to Meluna before Zeph could answer.

“You probably could have just let us talk then, couldn’t you?” I asked, still trying to puzzle out what Meluna’s angle was.

“And eavesdrop on you? I could never be so rude,” said the woman who clearly loved nothing better.

“I’d forgotten what dealing with Night’s acolytes was like,” Zeph said. “Wish I hadn’t remembered.”

“The question, I’m afraid, stands. Can you speak for this one?” Meluna said, a more serious air settling over her as her postured straightened and I got a sense of how very tall she was.

“No,” I said. “It’s not fair.”

“Life rarely is,” Meluna said.

“So we shouldn’t be?” I might have been a bit irate there.

“It’s okay,” Zeph said, forced into the role of peacemaker, which had not been my intention.

“It’s really not,” I said. “I get why Night might be concerned about me. Hell I get why you might be concerned about me. You’re obviously right to be at least a bit worried, I mean I think I did something new and new can be scary. I’m not exactly going anywhere at the moment though, so rushing to decide how worried to be doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.”

“I see why Sun likes this one,” Meluna said. “So simple. So direct.”

“You can sense her in Little still?” Zeph asked, an unexpected note of relief in her voice.

“You can’t? Isn’t the glow a bit of a giveaway?” Meluna asked.

“Little has felt like her since we met,” Zeph said.

I winced. If I ‘smelled’ (for lack of a better term) like Sola naturally, I could see how Zeph couldn’t have been sure if I had Sola with me still.

“Hey, I don’t suppose Night can do something about the bindings Vaingloth hit her with?”

Yeah, I’d used his actual name. Meluna wasn’t going to recognize ‘Melty boy’ as a reference, and I still hadn’t forgive him for anything.

“Before I know who you really are? No, I don’t think we’ll complicate the situation like that just yet.”

“You did hear Zeph right? She used my name at least a couple times already,” I said.

“That’s not what she was asking for at first,” Zeph said. “She wanted to take your name from you.”

“Meaning?”

“It would have been as insurance, nothing more,” Meluna said. “I could have given it back.”

Zeph gave her the sort of glare that told me ‘could have’ was very different from ‘would have’.

“And with my name you could have…?”

“Controlled you, in case you proved quarrelsome,” Meluna said.

“Or killed you,” Zeph said.

“If you had proven to be more than quarrelsome,” Meluna said without a hint of guilt or shame.

“Ah. Thank you then Zeph. I’ve had quite enough of people being able to kill me just because they decided they didn’t like me.”

“Oh, it’s not like that at all,” Meluna said. “I confess I’m quite taken with you. You do however seem to be made up of equal parts god and beast however, which presents, as you observed, a worrisome set of possibilities.”

“I’m not worried about her,” Zeph said. “Not anymore.”

“But you were?” Meluna asked.

“Of course she was,” I said. “She saw me get eaten by something that destroys everything it devours and then I popped out a moment later.”

“With a monster in tow,” Meluna said, nodding towards MB who’d decided the conversation was boring and that catching some sleep while it could was the wiser course of action.

It was completely right about that and I really wished I could partake of its wisdom, but getting stabbed in my sleep probably wouldn’t agree with me all that much, so I kept talking.

“We’re both monsters,” I said.

“Yes, but that’s part of my role as acolyte,” Meluna said.

“No. You’re whatever you are. I mean MB and me, we’re both monsters. We’re both Little, and we’re both something else.”

“The beast?” Zeph asked, concerned but not scared unless I was ready her body language all wrong.

“Not anymore,” I said. “The fragment of the beast that was here had changed in the time since it was split off. Not much, but it was enough for it to find an end to what it was so it could become something else. Me, sort of.”

“Why call yourself a monster then?” Zeph asked.

“I melted a Neoteric Lord’s eyes,” I said. “And I murdered someone the day before that. Before I met Sola. It was that or be tossed into the fire as Kindling, so I’m not apologizing for it. The patroller got what he deserved, but I’m not kidding myself either. MB’s a monster because I kind of infected it with who I was. So if I’m not so great, it’s probably burdened by that too.”

“You are either the worst ambush predator I have ever known or the very best,” Meluna said.

“Do I say thanks to that?” I asked, turning to Zeph.

“Hard to tell.”

“I don’t think it matters what you say as I believe I have my answer, odd though it may be,” Meluna said, watching me intently nonetheless.

“You trust her then?” Zeph asked.

“Not even slightly,” Meluna said. “But Night has taken no offense at her.”

“Just to be clear…” I started to ask.

“Yes,” Meluna said. “And no, of course not, how silly, that would be impossible, and ridiculous, and this conversation never happened. You’ve clearly been dreaming this whole…time.”

And with her last word, she faded back into the darkness.

But I understand her first yes.

There was still a god in our world.

Night had survived.

“I shall not fear the darkness, for it shelters me until the light returns.”

– A bedtime prayer for children from before the Sunfall. A prayer for everyone afterwards.

I hadn’t sent Zeph off to die. It was important that I hold onto that thought, because being all alone in the ruins on the outskirt of the Factorum meant it was pretty easy for unreasonable fears to start creeping into my head.

Zeph was fast. And she was smart. She wasn’t going to tangle with the…whatever it was that was waiting for us if it made any hostile moves towards her. 

She’d saved me a bunch of times already. 

I could trust that she would come back to me.

I hadn’t ever been able to trust in that before of course. Pretty much everyone I’d ever wanted to come back hadn’t. Not through any fault of their own. Well, usually not through any fault of their own. But when they hadn’t returned it hadn’t mattered whose fault it was.

The glow I’d been emitting was barely a flicker. Sola was probably tired after all we’d been through.

Or maybe it was just me?

I curdled up against my Mini-Beast’s head and felt it crouching down as though if it made itself small enough the fears it felt wouldn’t have room to stay within it.

How was I alone if MB was with me? That wasn’t something I wanted to think about too much. MB didn’t want to think about it either. Thoughts were where all the fears inside us lived.

But thoughts were where we lived too.

I stroked the soft fur on the side of MB’s face.

“I think you got the worse end of the deal there,” I said, the world roiled and rolled in quiet argument to that claim but the joke was on it. I’d already heaved up everything that was in me. The worst the world was going to pull from me was dry heaves.

Which, to be clear, still were not fun, but I had to claim victories where I could.

Holding onto MB, I let the world settle down inside me and resumed stroking the fur I could reach.

“Okay, so it’s been pretty hard on both of us,” I mumbled, fighting to hold off the inevitability of sleep.

It hadn’t been my idea for the fragment of the beast to eat me. I wasn’t at fault or responsible for the harm it had done me. Laying against MB’s sleepy head though I was able to make my way towards understanding what I had done.

I owed the beast fragment nothing, and any harm I’d done it was entirely justified. In the end though, I’d done more than harm it. I’d harmed myself.

And I’d ended it. Not killed it. It had never been alive and so it couldn’t be killed. But it could be no more. It could end. Just like everything could end.

I wasn’t fully the Little I’d been. I was some odd admixture of Little and the beast. It was a weird sort of alchemy, a transubstantiation of my mortal life essence back into my mortal essence. For a time out of time, I’d been the beast, or at least the fragment of it. We’d been one thing able to see itself from within and without.

Trying to recall any of that felt both dangerous and impossible. With each moment the danger was fading though as the impossibility solidified. I couldn’t know what had happened when there no real time had passed to hold it in. That meant my mind couldn’t wrap itself around something too vast for it to contain, because that moment, that state, wasn’t real.

But that didn’t stop me from knowing it had happened.

I’d said it was weird, right?

The truth is there’s a lot of weird things in the world though. This one had been weirder than, well, all of them put together, but I was able to feel what my path forward could be. All I had to do was just not care about the weirdness.

I’d run into a fragment of the world killer, something beyond my comprehension had happened, and I was left more aware of things outside the purely physical that I had been.

Oh, and I was also a Mini-Beast.

Super easy to work with. It didn’t make sense because it didn’t have to make sense. It was nonsense and so I could toss into a box labeled “random idiocy” and not worry about fitting it in with the rest of my life. I was capable of doing some more things that I could before. Not a big deal, right? I was hurt but I was getting better (probably? hopefully?). 

And I was also a Mini-Beast.

The box labeled “random idiocy” in my mind was hard to stop fiddling with.

How was I my Mini-Beast?

I knew it was true, and yet I was clearly me, and no one was ever going to call something as sizeable as MB “Little”.

But MB was me.

Maybe not as much as I was.

But it was me.

I sighed and opened the idiot box.

I had to think about this more.

The world tried to dissuade me, but as the moment when the beast and I had been merged together drew farther away, the pain and agony I’d suffered faded away too. 

It wasn’t the world that didn’t want me thinking about what had happened after all. My brain was simply trying to protect me from diving into unbearable torment again.

It would have been nice to listen to my brain. It wasn’t being at all unreasonable. 

But I needed to understand because Zeph was going to come back and she deserved and answer. 

And because we were going to break Sola free, and she deserved to know what MB was and what I’d become.

Maybe they’d both leave me when they knew. I wouldn’t blame them. If life had shown me anything it was that I wasn’t really the greatest person to be around and that was before I became whatever kind of aberration I’d returned as.

MB shivered at my thought, so I curled in closer.

The warmth was nice.

Were monsters ever afraid? Were they gentle? Comforting? Maybe, but it didn’t feel like ‘aberration’ or ‘monster’ covered what we were.

So what were we?

I lay there, against my nice warm Mini-Beast and I just listened. The world was cold and dark and silent, but it spoke to me anyways. Wrapped in warm fur, I closed my eyes let my senses reach outwards, all the way to ends of my fingers and the tips of my toes.

I was me.

I’d come back to my own body, and my own mind. I’d brought a piece, or several pieces, of something else back with me. Those pieces gave me new perspectives, and showed me things I couldn’t have known before, but they weren’t part of ‘who’ I was, only ‘what’ I was. Even the scattered memories of the beast fragment I somehow held onto were like books written onto the parchment of my mind. All my flaws, all of my dubious cleverness, all the memories that tortured me and all the ones that sustained me though? They were all still there too. 

I’d been afraid of the dreams that waited for me, and they weren’t going to pleasant, but they were going to be mine, reflections of what I’d been through, fears given a form and face perhaps, but more likely just a jumble of impressions and half imagined scenes as my mind continued working on my reassembling all of the pieces of me into something as close to a workable person as it usually managed to get.

I needed sleep. There wasn’t time for that, but I needed to let myself rest and recover. 

And I needed to forgive myself.

What I’d done I’d done for the right reasons. That didn’t mean it hadn’t been miserable, but it did mean that if I was faced with the same choice, I hoped I’d be brave enough to make the same decision even knowing what it would lead to.

So.

That was me.

Or most of me.

There were things I didn’t understand about myself, for all that I was aware of more about the world and myself than I ever had been. 

But it was enough. And not knowing what was going on it my own head? Pretty typical really. I chuckled at the notion that of all the things I’d brought back, that might have been the most ‘me’ aspect of them all.

What about MB though?

I dug my hands into its fur, and drew in its scent, filling my head and lung with the familiarity of it all.

Something had happened when we were merged. In ending, the beast had begun as something new.

But it wasn’t anything before that. It was an absence. Or a memory drained of the essence of what it had been. Mostly. Whatever little bits of what it had once been that remained weren’t enough to make it something in my world though. There wasn’t any connection or pattern it could follow to make create itself from.

So it used what we had instead.

As we disentangled, I became myself again and it became me too. Not at all how I was, or even how I might have been. It became something that was informed by who I was, but built from the pieces and perspectives of the beast fragment.

It was me if I’d lived it’s life. We were separate, but what MB had become was closer than a sister or even a twin would have been. It couldn’t hold more of the memories of what we’d been when we were mingled together than I could but without memories of its own, what it could remember was…well, mostly me.

Making itself into something solid and real was a wonder beyond description. It was literally a miracle even the gods hadn’t been able to work. There were limits to how much even a miracle could do though, and so while it had my memories, and I was the template for its existence, it couldn’t fully work with them. 

Speech was beyond it, but it could understand me. Others too probably, but its perspective was still its own. It could read situations like I could, but our reactions weren’t necessarily going to be same.

So it was me, but the me who wasn’t quite so Little anymore?

I shifted and ran my hands along the edge of its downy soft ear.

Was that the answer I was going to give Zeph? Or Sola? Were they going to understand? Would they trust it? Would they trust me?

I hadn’t been willing to let the beast hurt Zeph, could I let her harm MB?

No.

I felt a flame flare up within me.

I was sick and tired of the Kindling Bargain. Sacrificing something good so something else could survive was not what was worth striving for. 

We could be better than that.

I could be better than that.

Zeph woke me by calling name.

She was standing a good twenty feet away. Well outside MB’s reach with claws or teeth.

“He’s ready for us,” she said, a wariness in her words and posture that wasn’t wholly derived from seeing me.

But it was in part.

And I needed to fix that.

“Thanks,” I said, sitting up and stretching.

I was so weak.

And I needed so much more sleep.

That’s not always an option though.

“Before we go though, you asked some questions and I owe you some answers.”

“You’ve given me answers.”

“I gave you reassurances. I owe you more than that.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“I owe you the truth, and the chance to make your own decisions on where we go from here.”

“The Neoteric wants to meet us.”

I laughed at that, knowing the Neoteric was listening and could hear us clearly.

“There are nine Neoteric Lords left in the world, plus the one waiting at the heart of the Factorum. There is precisely one of you. I do not value you ten times more than a Neoteric Lord. I value you ten thousand time more than one of them. I have nothing to say to the one waiting for us, until I’ve answered everything you want to ask me. And if you want me to go on alone, if you don’t feel safe with me, I’ll still wish you the gentlest of roads and will send Sola to you the moment I manage to free her.”

“Going onwards alone would be foolish indeed.” The woman who spoke those words had skin as black as the night my glow was illuminating and hair darker still. Even that though didn’t explain how she’d stepped out from a shadow that was no more than fifteen feet from me, especially since with all my new awareness I hadn’t been even slightly aware she was there. “But then your not really alone at all are you?”

“Why am I writing what it was like when we lost the sun? Because people need to know. Yes. I am aware that we were all there, but there will be people who come after us. There have to be. This can’t be how our story ends.”

– from an unnamed diary found in the ruins of the Outer Factorum.

I could sense a lot more than I’d been able to before the beast chewed me up and get our aetheric molecules all mixed together. That didn’t make the world any brighter, easier to understand, or in any sense at all safer. It did allow me to notice a few things I’d missed before though, like, for example, the divine grace Zeph carried with herself and how close it was to turning against me.

Not that she was going to hurt me. That would have been a terrible idea for all involved and Zeph is just simply a better person than that. No, she was all of a single excuse from bolting to somewhere far beyond the horizon.

It would have been a sensible thing to do.

She’d brought me here because the Factorum held at least some the promise of shelter from the wrath of Vaingloth and the things that prowl the wastes. I could sense that she was correct on both of those accounts and why that was the case.

Me being eaten by the worst of the things in the wastes had definitely not been part of the plan. Me, in a sense, becoming one of the worst things in the waste was the plan more or less exploding into gorey bits.

And yet, she wasn’t running yet.

“Sorry about that,” I said, nudging my Mini-Beast away.

It liked her.

Maybe because I liked her?

Or maybe it had an ounce of sense and decent taste in traveling companions?

In either case though it clearly needed to learn some manners.

“We don’t lick people without their permission,” I said to the giant monstrosity that loomed over the two of us.

I was still pretty out of it I had to admit, but breathing and speaking and not seeing all of time and space while feeling the crushing emptiness of the cosmos pulling me apart for an eternity was good. Made me feel a bit more like who I was supposed to be.

I did not want to go to sleep.

The thought struck me like a hammer when I caught a glimpse of what my dreams were going to be like.

Yeah.

No sleeping.

Forever.

I forced my eye lids open despite the lead weights that had been attached to them.

“I don’t know if I’ll be up for walking much farther,” I said, the rocky ground looking like the most amazing bed I had ever seen.

“I…” Zeph looked from me to my Mini-Beast and back.

“I know how weird this is,” I said, which was sort of true. At once point while I was being digested I’d known everything. I don’t recommend it. Knowing everything is far too much and all I could retain of it was how much that sucked. Ignorance is not actually bliss, but too much awareness without the ability to filter it is definitely peak misery. 

“I…” She still thought she couldn’t outrun the beast. 

And she was sure I couldn’t.

“Could you do me a favor?” I asked. “There’s someone in the Factorum. I think. Could you go and check with them if it would be okay for us to come in. I think they need to talk to us.”

She looked at the Mini-Beast and then at the path through the stadium. I would not want to have tried to flee through a place like that. Much too open and something like the Mini-Beast wouldn’t be slowed by the ground clutter at all.

“I’ll be okay here,” I said. “And I know you can make it there and back a lot faster if you don’t have to carry me.”

“I’m not worried about carrying you,” she said.

“That’s not surprising. You’ve been carrying me since we met. But this okay. I will be here, just like I am now, when you get back.”

“And what of her?” Meaning Sola. Who was the most important one in this situation.

“She’s still not free. Melty Boy’s bindings are stupidly strong, which I suppose they would have to be or she would have shredded them a half second after he cast them. I can feel her though.”

“Will she be safe.”

“From the things in the wastes? The spirit fragments? Definitely. You can feel them running away too can’t you?”

“I can.”

Can’t imagine why the spirit fragments that herded us to the beast were suddenly trying to be as far away from me as possible? Surely they didn’t think that I held a grudge? Or that I might not be well disposed towards something that had been intent on killing me themselves if Zeph had given them half a chance? 

Probably just a silly spirit thing.

“But will she be safe from you.”

Zeph was still holding me.

She didn’t have her claws extended.

She wasn’t presenting any physical menace at all.

And she didn’t want to kill me.

But she would.

Without hesitation.

Even if it meant her own death.

And if that had been required, I would have welcomed it.

“I’m a mess,” I said. “This is nothing new. I’ve always been a mess. I’m not who I was. But that’s nothing new either. What is new is that I have people in my life now that I’d be Kindling for. Sola protected me, and I have to admit, it’s hard not to love her for that alone. But that’s a self-ish sort of love isn’t it? Like she does a miracle for me and I repay her with my love until I need another miracle? Ick, even saying that feels awful.”

Zeph’s expression made a wonderful transition from a blank and homicide-ready look through growing confusion and into the outskirts of amusement, so I kept speaking.

“So, I don’t love her for that. I mean, probably I do, but she could let me go and choose someone else, and I would still choose to love her. Because I know her. Not a lot, but you don’t have to know everything about someone to know the most important bits of them.”

“And what are her important bits?” Zeph asked, at least temporarily intrigued by my argument.

“She still believes in us. In me. Despite what a rotten person I am. She can see the things I’ve done, all the times I’ve failed and what a general disaster up I am, and she still believes in me as I am right now. Not ‘oh but Little has so much potential’. Not ‘even a runt like her can be useful or somethings’. No. None of that. She picked me with all the flaws I’ve got, not in spite of them. Did I pick up a few more flaws by being stupid enough to get myself eaten? Yeah, probably. Is she still on my side though? Is she still shining down on me no matter how much darkness there is around us? It would take a god to understand why, but, hey, look, guess what she is!”

That drew an actual smile across Zeph’s vulpine face.

“I don’t want to be a better person to be worthy of her, or because she demands it. I want to be a better person because thanks to her I can believe I could be one.”

My Mini-Beast gave a huff of agreement, which surprised both Zeph and me.

“And, this?” she asked. “It’s…it’s not what it was either?”

“I feel like I could have answered that better while I was dissolving,” I said. “If I think about that too much though, I feel like my brain is going to go right back to dissolving, so I’m going to make up my own answers for you.”

Zeph looked at me like she was checking to see if my brain had already started the whole dissolving thing and that was probably a good thing since I was still a bit too messed up to be sure.

“I think MB is something new. It’s what the beast could have been if it had become a part of our world instead of trying to consume it. Bear in mind, I’m almost certainly wrong, but it does feel like it fits here. Maybe because it’s so tiny? I mean compared to what it was. Or even what it was when we met it. Before it was chipped off? Maybe that thing couldn’t have become part of our world. Maybe it had to fight and be fought. I have this dim memory that fighting the gods was the whole reason it was brought here.”

“Brought here?” Zeph was back to being concerned in an instant.

“I am super fuzzy on this, but the beast isn’t a naturally occurring thing here, right? I mean that seems pretty obvious given, you know, everything that happened. Somewhere in the eternity I spent inside it I think I saw it being called to our world.”

A growl escaped Zeph’s lips.

It was not a natural sound for her to make and I was grateful it wasn’t aimed at me.

“The Neoterics.”

I nodded.

“Pretty much has to be doesn’t it?”

Because, who else could possibly have had enough power? Or had any interest in doing something so incredibly stupid?

Except, was it stupid?

I had no idea what Vaingloth and the rest’s positions had been in the world before the Sunfall. Presumably they’d been someone important, but I was willing to bet that powerful people were pretty much the same before and after the Sunfall. If so then the one thing an important person like Vaingloth would have wanted was to become more important.

And who’s more important than the gods?

Well, if you can arrange for the gods to get eaten by a giant monster from beyond reality? Then probably you are. 

Or at least I could see someone like Vaingloth thinking like that all too easily.

And it had clearly paid off for him.

Sure our world was a total wreck. Apart from some dubious cheats with the portals, there was nowhere that could sustain life at all, and nearly everyone who’d once lived here was dead, and the things that remained where inimical to the existence of basically anything else.

But look at how good that was for Vaingloth! He was in control over everyone! Or everyone in Mt Gloria. The other Neoteric Lords were beyond his control, as were the people they owned.

People like the ones in the Factorum. 

The Factorum which the other Neoteric Lords had wiped out. 

Yeah, I could sense the whispers of their handiwork in the destruction around me. It wasn’t hard to believe either. The only thing that could be a threat to a Neoteric Lord in this dead world was another Neoteric Lord and they’d been slowly winnowing their own numbers down ever since they’d seized control of the world the gods.

How many of them were left?

Nine.

Why did I know that?

Because sensing that kind of thing was easy.

Not vaguely comforting, but easy.

“That’s I think why we need to talk to the person in the Factorum,” I said.

“Who are they?” Zeph asked.

“I don’t know their name, but I think they’re the Neoteric Lord who ruled here.”

“There is no Neoteric Lord here,” Zeph said. “That’s what makes this a safe place. It’s Lord died decades ago and none of the others have dared to claim it since.”

“Hmm, yeah, that feels about right. Funny thing though, I don’t think being dead means quite the same thing for them as it would for us, because there is a definitely something like a Melty Boy in there and I’m pretty sure it knows we’re here too.”

“Stay here. I’ll be right back,” Zeph said, placing me gently on the ground away from the spot where all of my meals from my entire life had been heave out.

I would have said she left like a razor slicing through the air, but I’m pretty sure her intention was to slice through the something rather more substantial. 

“When this goes wrong, not if, but when, we will be left with a hunger which cannot be sustained.”

“Not if we manage to transcend our current forms, my dear Dyrena.”

“You call me dear but we both know you would be the first to turn your knives on me if given the chance, my dear Helgon.”

“All the more reason for you to assist me with my endeavors! When, not if, I succeed, our mechanical forms will need fear no blade or spell, and, as you are quite dear to me, I would of course have you join me in such an ascended state.”

“We will hold the power of the gods and you still believe your contraptions and gadgets will represent a material change in our being?”

“The material is exactly the thing. We are made of what, the base clay of the earth? There is no hope bodies such as these can endure. We are stifled by these poor raiments of flesh.”

“My poor Helgon. With the divine power coursing through our veins, we will be limited by nothing at all. And when we fall, the depths we plunge to shall be unlimited as well.”

– High Accessors Dyrena and Helgon a few days before the Sunfall, sharing their dreams with one another.

So what do you do with a Destroyer of Worlds after you’ve infected it with the idea of how pathetic it is? That’s a great question. I have no idea. Ask me the same thing about what you do with a tiny fleck of a Destroyer of Worlds though and the answer is apparently ‘bring it home with you’.

Listen. I know. I am deeply aware of how that sounds. I am painfully conscious of exactly how bad an idea that is. I’d spent a forgotten eternity being ripped cell from cell as a demonstration of how literally cataclysmically dangerous the Mini-Beast was.

So I know. And I knew then. But I did it anyways.

How? Shockingly it was a lot simpler than you might imagine. All I had to do was ask it. 

Why? Because while it didn’t seem to be able to speak, it was perfectly able to understand me. Why didn’t it kill me? I did mention it can’t speak right? I mean I could ask it but I think the answer ultimately boils down to ‘it didn’t want to’. Oh, why did I want to bring it back.

No reason.

Shut up.

I did not feel sorry for it.

It broke my world!

It killed Zeph. Sorta.

I did not feel sorry for it.

It was kinda funny coming back through. I should probably say that’s why I did it. I mean the look on Zeph’s face was beyond priceless. Yeah. We’ll go with that. I did it to prank Zeph.

“What…Little…what?” Blaming Zeph for being at a loss for words would be about ten shades more evil than I’m capable of being. 

“Uh, hi there. You doing okay?” I asked, not being all that great with words myself. Behind me, the Mini-Beast loomed over me, more than twice my heart and four times my width. I couldn’t see it but I could feel wariness radiating off it like heat from a bonfire. 

I could also sense the fragmented spirits who’d been herding us into the beast’s maw. Or, more than sense them. I was connected to them.

Which made sense.

I mean, I’d destroyed them.

The world reeled around me.

“Little! What happened!” Zeph was holding me in her arms and I hadn’t hit the rocky ground thanks to her quick reflexes.

That was nice.

“Oh. Nothing,” I said. I mean, it wasn’t exactly a lie. I just didn’t finish the thought since ‘nothing I’m even vaguely capable of explaining’ was far too many words for me to manage.

The Mini-Beast snuffed at me. It knew how I was doing, mostly. 

I mean, it was me, wasn’t it?

The world spun again and the last rations I’d eaten a few billion eternities ago threatened to make a return appearance.

Strangely, that was exactly what I needed.

Puking is never what I would call ‘fun’. It is, however, a deeply physical reaction. Nothing really connects you to your body like your body being deeply upset about something and my stomach had decided that enough was most definitely enough.

To my credit, I managed to turn my head so that I hit neither Zeph nor my Mini-Beast.

I think the Mini-Beast appreciated that more than Zeph did.

She was, understandably, a little concerned for me, especially since the colors of what came up matched neither the colors of what we’d eaten, nor any color which should be present inside a Ratkin’s body.

“Oh, right. I bit it,” I said and waved a hand towards the Mini-Beast in apology.

It’s fur was so soft. I don’t know why that surprised me.

“You…what?” Poor Zeph. I couldn’t find a spot to begin explaining the thing I did know and I was sure even when I did, everything I said was going to raise more questions than there were answers.

“Just…a minute,” Three words was pretty eloquent for me at that point, and it left me with enough strength to try to force down the rest of the unhappiness my stomach was objecting to.

My stomach was stronger, and apparently smarter, than the rest of me. It won the argument I was having with it twice more before it settled into a grumbling sort of contempt for every other part of me and most especially the idiotic brain that had gotten the rest into our current mess. Sadly, along with the last few weeks of rations it seemed to have ejected, it had also thrown out the last vestiges of strength my body had clung onto.

I didn’t pass out of course. That would have been merciful. No, the rest of my body joined in the stomach’s protest and made sure that I remained entirely conscious of just how miserable I’d made us all.

“Sorry,” I said, more to Zeph than myself, but I did harbor a faint hope that my various organs might be appeased by the gesture.

They were not.

“What happened? And what is that?”

“It’s my Mini-Beast,” I said. “We talked.”

I felt like cheering. Five words and they all made sense. I was on a roll!

“That’s not…where…what happened?” I could see the confusion in Zeph’s eyes. She was able to perceive things I couldn’t. Or hadn’t been able to? Part of what was making me so ill was sensory overload.

My poor Mini-Beast. I reached out my hand to it again knowing that it was having things thousand times worse than I was. I was perceiving a bit more than I had before. It, on the other hand, had in some senses never perceived more than itself. 

“I…did something?” I was still assembling the memories of what I’d done so that was the best I could manage then or for quite a while afterwards. “Got a bit mixed up? Blended? Dissolved into? Something like that with the, uh, thing.”

My Mini-Beast wasn’t the thing that had attacked us, the fragment of the Beast. It had been, but what we’d done to each other had left us both changed, it more than me. Which made sense. There was a lot more of it to change than there was of me?

I knew that wasn’t right, so I didn’t try to share the thought with Zeph.

Was it that there’d been less of the Beast than there’d been of me? That felt right. Deeply right. But it made even less sense than the alternative. I hadn’t survived because I was big and mighty enough to wrestle the Beast into submission. I’d survived because I wasn’t mighty, because I was small and normal, and…and because I was real.

And the Beast hadn’t been. 

Not here. 

It wasn’t part of this cosmos and I was.

Clearly that hadn’t stopped it from killing the gods, so it was real in some rather important senses, but so was I?

I drew in a deep and centering breath. Air, real air, filled my lungs. Lungs which need it, because of a thousand complicated processes life required here.

I felt an trickle of strength flow back into my limbs. It was delightful. The kind of delight that only real, livingf things, experience. I tried to shift in Zeph’s arms and discovered that a trickle of strength was nowhere near the same as enough strength to rise on my own.

So I relaxed.

“Sorry,” I said again, but feeling a little more clarity with each breath. “I’m okay. You were right. We couldn’t fight or run from the thing that was waiting for us.”

“Yes, but what happened. It grabbed you up and then turned inwards and imploded. It was like the darkness vomited you out the moment it ate you and then it was that…thing?”

“I talked to it,” I said. “Sort of. It was the kind of conversation that didn’t involve what you would call words so much, and it lasted, uh, I think several forevers?”

“You were only gone from an instant. Less. I didn’t even have time to jump in after you.” Zeph’s voice carried a trace of guilt that she absolutely did not deserve to feel.

“Sola’s grace was working overtime that you didn’t I think,” I said, hoping that invoking our shared goddess would make my point particularly compelling. “It wasn’t…it wasn’t good in there. And I don’t know how things would have turned out if there’d been three of us getting mixed together like that.”

“What do you mean ‘mixed together’?” Zeph’s concern took on a new tone. Which was fine. If she was concerned about what I’d become, she could stand in line right behind me.

“Sola’s still with me,” I said, a fact I was relying on to hold back the terror at what being mingled with the beast could mean. “She wouldn’t let me be destroyed. And I wouldn’t let her be hurt either. I don’t think when the gods fought the beast they had that. I mean, I’m not much of a defender, but what we are, you and me, and I guess every other mortal, solid being, that matters. We’re not vulnerable to things that can change ideas or destroy concepts. Burn up the idea of who are and we’re still here, too stupid to not just remake the idea. Sola was able to prevent the more literal sort of ‘burning up’ since it’s not like a god can be injured by the sort of thing that can kill us.”

“And that’s what let you defeat the beast and turn it into…what is this thing?”

The Mini-Beast had settled onto its haunches and was watching us with careful eyes, its ears swiveling at odd intervals as though listening to things all around us.

“We didn’t defeat it. Like you said, we couldn’t fight it. And I didn’t turn anyone into anything. It chose to become that, I think after it sort of absorbed what I was.”

“It does not look like you. It does not look anything like you.”

“It’s fuzzy,” I said, feeling protective of my Mini-Beast. As though it couldn’t still tear both of us to pieces faster than I could blink.

“You barely have hair on your head, I’m closer to how fuzzy it is than you are.” Zeph’s objections were reasonable but they stirred a giggle inside me anyways.

“I am not bald!” I objected out of principal. I’d known some quite handsome people who were bald. Just because I kept my hair a little above shoulder length though did not mean I was one of them.

Zeph sighed.

“Why isn’t it killing us?” she asked. “Or is it going to the moment I put you down?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think it wants that anymore. It was lost. And broken. I think it just doesn’t want to be alone anymore.” I didn’t add ‘like me’, but there was likely more truth in that than I wanted to admit.

Zeph scowled at how ridiculous that sounded and she was right to. The thought that the Beast, Slayer of Gods, Destroyer of the World, could be lonely and want some friends was objectively ridiculous. 

As was the slobbery lick it gave Zeph across the entire side of her head in confirmation of my words.

“This is folly on a scale undreamt of. The only reason we will not be remembered as the most foolish beings to have every walked this world is that there will be no one left to remember us at all.”

“You’re very likely correct, but, tell me, aren’t you still just too curious to pass up the chance?”

“The chance to cast down the divine? The chance to become what they are? I was curious to see how the Divine Codex ruled out such madness, but not that we stand on the precipice of annihilation and it’s clear that the Codex offers no protection against such folly? No, no I am not curious at all. I am terrified. As you should be. As all of the others should be. Why would you risk so much? What you seek cannot be worth the sacrifice.”

“I just want to know. I have to.”

– High Accessor Beildan, who was planned to be the 14th Neoteric Lord but was cast down before the Sunfall and High Accessor Helgon who cast him down.

I, occasionally, make bad decisions. They, always, have unpleasant consequences. In that sense, it wasn’t surprising that my latest bad decision, which was probably the absolute worst decision of my life, had commensurately the least pleasant consequences of any I’d experienced to date.

But that was a good thing.

By all rights, the consequences I faced for opening my body, mind, and soul to the beast that had devoured gods should have been too instantaneous to present any problem for me at all. I am, as many have observed, not large. The amount of time it would take something which can damage a god to obliterate me could also be described as not large. 

Rather than being obliterated though, I was merely melting and exploding and burning and many other conditions for which I’m pretty sure there were no words in any language for.

The key though is that I “was”. I existed. Granted that didn’t seem much better than being a “had once been” or a “was no longer”, but in hindsight at least, I’m glad that I continued existing. For as terrible as existence was in the eternity of those moments, it was still worth it to reach what was beyond them. I knew that even when I knew nothing else and, looking back, there were a bunch of time in my life when I hadn’t been able to say that when facing consequences that were far less severe. 

Probably shows how much I’ve grown as a person. I mean, not in wisdom. That’s right off the table. But, you know, in other ways. Grownup ways.

If it seems like I’m not fond of remembering those moments and that I’m talking around them, I would have to offer congratulations on accurate perceptiveness. When I say it really was not fun being mingled with the beast, I am only understating things because words, as a concept, cannot manage a proper statement of how bad it was.

The important thing to know though is that all of the cosmic miserableness eventually faded. Or maybe ‘faded’ isn’t exactly the right word? It’s probably more accurate to say that from a non-physical, fractured conceptual state each mote of my being found a path back to the rest over the course of several trillion lifetimes, and that what I’d once was retained enough resonance to stitch together something that was a vague approximation of what I was still given that time is an illusion and the point in time when the whole process began was the same as the eternity through which it persisted and the singularity of sensation where it met its final expression. Honestly though, that sounds like nonsense to me even as I try to fit the words I stole from Sola together to make sense of it. 

Where things start coming back into a frame that I am capable of describing (somewhat) is when I saw the star.

The star wasn’t Sola. I knew that right away. Which was impressive in its own right since knowing anything after your being was blown to agonized dust that stretched across the cosmos is a feat even the gods didn’t manage. Not that I’m bragging or anything. I’m sure they put up good fights. It’s no reflection on them that I put up a better one.

Yes, I know I’m going to pay for that, but since I’d already fallen to the depths of creation and then below even that, I wasn’t too worried about how much further pride might be able to knock me down. I may have mentioned the lack of wisdom thing already?

Anyways, the star.

Sola was, or had been part of, the sun. Thanks to understanding her, if even just a little bit, I knew the sun was a star like the ones I’d never seen in our empty sky. I also knew what a star was and had a borrowed memory of the blazing grandeur the night sky had once possessed. Sola’s view of it had been a bit different than mine would have been, encompassing colors and motions that were outside my ability to perceive. Even with a far more limited view though, I could tell it had been beautiful.

The star in front of me was different. For one thing it was tiny. Stars are supposed to incomparably huge, far bigger than my entire world. This one however was smaller than me. Also, it was in pain. Which I could sympathize with. 

I was pulling myself back together still at that point, regrounding the disparate bits of my soul and identity into the body which remained solid despite my foolishness. I feel its important to note though that the ‘ground’ I found myself standing on was not any part of the world I lived in, so my ‘grounding’ lacked the comfortable stability something like an avalanche might offer. The space around me wasn’t a part of my reality either. The body that I wore? Also not exactly real. What I was experiencing was more what I knew I should be experiencing and who I should be experiencing it as. I was Little and until that changed Little’s body was mine.

If that sounds like I wasn’t put together quite right, that would be correct. Reassembling myself from disparate motes of confused soul essence was not something I was even vaguely capable of. But I didn’t have to be. Sola was with me and I was with her. What I couldn’t do, she was more than capable of, and what she couldn’t be, I was more than ready to embody. 

We’d assembled me enough though that I was able to start walking towards the star. There was no road, but there didn’t need to be one. Not in that space at least.

I didn’t have a plan exactly. I wasn’t put together enough again to manage that, but I knew something was wrong there and I knew that running away was going to make it worse.

Which felt weird.

Running away was really my strong suit.

But I wasn’t going to run away this time.

And I remembered why.

Zeph.

Was she still there to be saved? Did I honestly think I could save her? Maybe? I’d been lost inside the beast from the moment it devoured me, but I thought, or hoped, that I’d held its attention by not becoming the food it wanted me to be. 

Being inside the beast had created a form of communion between us, one neither of us wanted. I’d been bombarded with perspectives and understanding and visions of things that I wasn’t equipped to handle. I’d thought at the time that if I took them in I might be able to find a path to the other side, to someplace where I could comprehend what the beast truly was and understand what we needed to do to fight it. I’d been gambling on the durability that being a real part of the world had seemed to provide me.

Had that worked? Not really. 

Had it had unforeseen consequences though? Oh, most definitely.

The creature I was reassembled, the ‘me’ that I knew, wasn’t exactly the ‘me’ that I’d been before. Which was okay. People change all the time. Whether we want to or not, everything we experience shapes us and alters who were are and who we can be. Most of the changes do not involve no longer being entirely sure which parts of you remain from your mortal life and which parts have become reflections of the beast.

To be fair to me, it wasn’t the least rational thought that, if it was going to eat me, I should bite it too. Ratkin do have pretty decent chompers so biting things that are a danger to us is a perfectly reasonable response. 

Not the correct one it turned out.

At least not if I wanted to remain exactly who I had been.

That’s not the unforeseen consequence which captured my attention though. It was the star I hadn’t foreseen, and which I was sure the beast hadn’t guessed would happen either.

Before we met, the beast was nothing more than a fragment of an entity which was lost to an endless abyss of hunger. I knew hunger, not as deeply as the beast did, so absorbing it’s hunger wasn’t revelation for me. It absorbed something from me though, and that broke it.

Because I was broken.

Not as a new thing, or the result of what the beast had done. That was simply who I was. Little, a small and broken Ratkin girl. I hadn’t thought anything about it. Everyone breaks and we all carry on. It didn’t make me special to be a shattered mess who still got up and dealt with the day before me.

The beast though didn’t understand what it had taken. It hadn’t understood that it was broken. That it had always been broken, even before it was fragmented from its larger self. 

I wasn’t exactly myself anymore after drowning in the beast, but, unbelievably, it wasn’t exactly itself anymore either.

And that was the star.

I drew close enough to step inside it and found the beast waiting for me.

It was laying down within a chamber of brilliant light, it’s body fully furred in the dark colors of ash and cinders. 

It stirred when it saw me and opened its jaws to show the terrible teeth it retained.

It didn’t speak, it hadn’t absorbed that much from me, but it did fix me with the stare of its soot dark eyes.

And then it whimpered.

It was broken. It always had been. But from me it understood what that meant. I’d shown it what it meant to be weak, to be powerless, to be Little. Quite reasonably, it hated the idea. It should have hated me too, but it didn’t.

I should have hated it right back, but I didn’t.

“You didn’t know, did you?” I asked.

Because it hadn’t.

I didn’t understand it like I did Sola, and I could barely remember anything of the time we’d been mingled together, but my brain had room for a few small revelations.

“They called you here, and you came because you’d already destroyed your home,” I said, not as condemnation, though destroying a world would have been a reasonable thing to condemn it for, but as a measure of understanding. 

Because I did understand.

The beast wasn’t real. Not in the sense that I was. It had been though. In its own reality it had been as solid and real as I was. Until it had destroyed everything there.

Why?

Because it’s reality sucked. Or so it had believed. 

Which I understood. If I could have wiped the world clean of all life, there had been plenty of times when I would have done so.

But not anymore. Not since I’d felt Sola’s love for all of us. Whatever else I believed, I knew that there were people out there worth preserving the world for. 

“The role of the High Accessors is to guide the faith the grand congregations collect and make of it a pure and harmonious offering to the gods. Through their hands flow the hopes and dreams of the mortal world and so let them be always mindful of the weight of their responsibility and the absolute need for humility and dedication to serving others their role requires.”

– The first of the official mandates of the High Order of the Divine.

“I’m not saying that we abrogate our authority or misplace the trust which has been given to us. Far from it. The trust we hold is sacred, and it’s requisite that we do everything we can to ensure that the faith delivered to the divine is of the purest, highest quality. In that capacity, we must shift through what we are given and hold back anything which could be deemed unworthy. There will be shortfalls certainly, so we must implements all available means to drive higher year over year performance among the truly faithful. Let us make this a world for the best among us!”

– High Accessor Vaingloth, addressing the other eleven High Accessors, years prior to the Sun Fall, setting the plot in motion which would eventually lead to the Sun Fall.

Here’s the thing about divine inspiration; it’s functionally indistinguishable from going completely bonkers. On the upside though, it felt a lot better than drowning in despair or anxiety!

I had no idea what was waiting for us in the stadium except that it was ‘worse than the spirit fragments which had herded us into its clutches. Given that the spirit fragments were capable of things like ‘drowning us in a river of dust that used to be a beloved stream’ and ‘trampling us beneath hooves of stone which hold the memory of the animals which once walked up on them’, the idea of something being worse than that seemed oddly laughable. Once something could unquestionably kill you, it’s not like being killed even more thoroughly was really a cause for concern.

I took a step forward to confront whatever it was regardless of all that though, my own words having filled me with an anxiety killing mania.

Zeph, wisely, grabbed me before I could follow through on that impulse.

“No.” It was less of a command and more a plea. “What can you do? She’s still lost to you isn’t she? And this is beyond her, even if she’s won free!”

“What? I mean, yeah, Sola’s still bound up, but what do you mean this beyond her?”

“What is waiting for us in there isn’t something that can fought. It shouldn’t be this close to the Factorum, but if anywhere is safe, it can only be there.” Zeph’s gaze was darting all around us and I could feel the spirit fragments drawing in closer.

“If we can’t go in there and face that thing, then we bust out of the trap it has us in, but I’m not busting out alone.” It was oddly refreshing to be one hundred percent certain of something for change.

“It will chase us and we can’t outrun it.”

“Why? How? You’re the fastest thing in this world. How could it possibly catch you?” I probably wasn’t right about her speed, but I also had a hard to imagining anything left in this wrecked and failing world that could work as perfectly as she did.

“Because its caught me before!” Terror. Not concern. Not anger. Just sheer terror in Zeph’s voice.

“Explain.” I needed to know. I needed to understand what I was going to fight against. Because I was going to fight. Even Zeph’s terror didn’t dent the belief that had risen in me.

“There’s no time!” Zeph said and tried to move away.

She’d grabbed hold of me though, and that can go both ways.

“What. Is. Down. There.” My voice sounded alien in my ears, and my words hit Zeph with enough force to root her in place.

“A fragment,” she said, looking away.

“Of which god?” I asked, trying to understand why one fragment would be worse than another, and why one of the gods would be so dangerous to us. No matter how bad their portfolio was, they were in the same boat as we were in a sense.

“Not a fragment of a god,” Zeph said. “A fragment of the beast.”

And I understood.

Because, yeah, that was worse.

A lot worse.

“When the beast came, the gods fought back. She fought back most and longest of all, and the beast did not emerge from those battles unscathed. Just as the gods shattered themselves to survive, so did the beast. She would have incinerated it a dozen times over but the pieces She burned? It cast them aside.”

“Then this piece has been beaten already,” I said. “It can be beaten again.”

Of course it had lost to the full and unbridled power of the God of the Sun, where Sola was a tiny little spark whose most impressive feat so far was lighting up a city for a few seconds. So my assertion wasn’t standing on the mostest solidest of foundations.

Whatever.

“Anyways, you survived being caught by it before, obviously, we can just do that again,” I said trying to rally her to even attempting to work with me on this.

“I didn’t,” Zeph said. “I didn’t survive. My spirit? It didn’t find me until this life because the last time I faced a fragment of the beast, it tore me apart. I tried to fight and it overpowered me. I tried to run and it caught me. I tried to survive and I failed. And I cannot let that happen to you. To her.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

Not right away.

Except to imagine what that had to have been like. 

And how difficult it had to be to face something like that again.

“Do you believe in Sola?” I asked, my voice far quieter than I’d intended it to be.

“This isn’t about that,” Zeph said.

We could both feel the fragment of the beast rising from the stadium’s floor.

It was tired of waiting and if we weren’t coming to it, it was more than willing to come to us.

“Do you believe in her,” I asked again.

I wasn’t running.

And Zeph wasn’t going to die here.

Not alone at any rate.

“You can’t do this, we can’t do it. Go. Now. There’s still time to save…”

But there wasn’t.

I turned as burning eyes and gnashing teeth the size of a building rose up and lit the sky with lights my mortal eyes couldn’t perceive.

“Don’t run,” I said. “We’re done running.”

I couldn’t talk to Sola, but she was with me. I had no proof of that, but I believed.

Zeph tried to put herself in front of me. Maybe she thought if she bought me one more second I would come to my sense. That was not going to happen though.

“Can’t fight, not going to run, so let’s talk,” I said stepping around Zeph and staring directly into the eyes of the beast fragment.

It, unsurprisingly, was not much of a talker.

The moment it saw me, some flicker of recognition ran through it and it crashed forward.

Being eaten by a building? Yeah, not fun.

The beast tore into me and I felt…I felt nothing?

I was lost inside it, twisting and turning inside out, but my body? It didn’t change at all. It wasn’t being injured.

Because Sola wouldn’t let it be.

My spirit and mind weren’t quite as protected, but even they survived the onslaught, at least initially.

Outside, the world was coming apart as the beast struggled to find a path through me to Sola’s essence.

Wait.

What?

How did I know that?

Hunger. How could I not know the beast’s hunger? I was surrounded by it. I was inside it. I was a part of it. How could I not know it?

Because I was Little. Because I was a stupidly normal Ratkin woman. Because I was not a god devouring beast, and if I existed, as fragile and pathetic as I was, then there was no possible chance that the world was unraveling. One tiny rumble of the earth was all it took to kill me. My survival indicated that the world I was a part of was doing just fine.

I was far too small and feeble to contend with cosmic powers and I took refuge in that.

“Solid!” I heard a whisper from the far side of the universe reach me. “You are solid!”

And I was. I always had been. Solid enough to burn as Kindling. Solid enough not to be able to escape unless I found spaces that fit me. Solid enough that every blow I’d ever taken had brought tears and pain and misery.

Gods though? Gods are so many things, but they’re not mortal.

And they’re not solid.

They’re not made of the stuff of this world.

My world.

They are ideas, and powers. They are faith and dreams and the laws of creation.

But I am creation.

Sola wasn’t just protecting me.

I was protecting her.

And neither of us where going to let this thing harm anyone else.

The beast, however, disagreed with that assessment.

Even though it was a tiny crumb of its true self, I was smaller still, and too small for it to gnash on properly. Improper gnashing was still dangerous though and I felt the pressure of its hatred and hunger crash down all around me.

It loathed me.

It loathed Sola.

We had an existence. We had memories and experience and dreams. We had the power to recall the past and the power to shape the future.

And it wanted all of that.

It’s rage at god and mortal for holding back what it desired, for not surrendering everything it craved no matter the cost to us was immeasurable. Even just as a fragment of the true beast, the yawning pit of avarice within it dropped off into infinity.

Sola wanted to burn it. To rid the world of at least this tiny bit of the beast. It wouldn’t be much of a victory, but any victory over her foe was one to be cherished.

“Don’t,” I said, speaking to my friend, since commanding a god was the sort of hubris that deserved to pressage someone’s downfall. “It wants your power. It wants to consume anything it can from us.”

We couldn’t fight it. As satisfying as it had been to burn out Vaingloth’s eyes, the same sort of retribution was impossible against the beast. It wasn’t…

It wasn’t real?

My mind sort of shattered trying to absorb that concept.

It had to be real. It was eating me. I’d seen it with my own eyes, and the darkness I was being tossed and turned around it was lit with the streaks of fire which burned in colors no mortal eyes could capture.

But that wasn’t how fire worked.

Fire burned and even if some of the light couldn’t be seen – thank you Sola for gifting me the understanding of that – it was still present, just shifted to a color my eyes weren’t adapted to perceive.

This fire though emitted a light which was not part of the same spectrum at all.

Because it wasn’t light from this world.

I was on the verge of internalizing a lot more than my sanity could handle, and trying to see anymore than I had was absolutely not going to be safe at all

But it might save Zeph.

And it might save Sola.

And if it didn’t save me? If it didn’t save me, then I was at least going to go out for the right reasons, for my reasons.

Clinging tightly to my sense of both the real world around me and how tiny a part of it I was, I opened my eyes and opened my thoughts and opened my heart.

And I saw, and understood, and felt it all.

And it was far, far too much.

“This is a terrible plan.” 

“Of course it is. It is the very definition of a cataclysmically bad idea. Quite literally in terms of the cataclysm part.”

“And we are going along with it why then exactly?”

“Because it will happen whether or not we do.”

“You think the others would really…no, I can’t even pretend to be so foolish as to believe the others would pause to question themselves if we refused.”

“They would not. More importantly though, if they knew we disagreed with this plan, they would ensure that we were among the first harvested to see it come to fruition.”

“And so instead of being reaped by the others, we’ll hold the scythe to the world’s throat ourselves? What poor new Lords we will make if that’s the best option we can imagine.”

“You never wanted to a be proper Lord did you? It was always your creations, these mechanicals, that have fascinated you.”

“They can be more than we are. Less fragile. Less fallible. Able to replace the pieces that don’t work with new refinements as their understanding grows. I just need to find the means to grant them a spark of true awareness.”

“Then that is your answer, your better option. You will do this for them. If this world is lost, perhaps it deserves to be since its peoples gave rise to things like us. Think of this as wiping the slate clean so that your new creations can flourish.”

“You make a compelling point, it just seems off to call it a good one. It feels as though we’re missing something important too.”

– Helgon and Dyrena, in a private meeting, prior to their ascension as Eternal Lords.

So the first thing I did after discovering that I’d apparently inspired the entire city to plot a secret rebellion against an Eternal Lord was to run off into the wastelands and abandon them.

Honestly? That was pretty much what I would have expected of myself.

So why was I feeling so out of sorts?

“Are you cold?” Zeph asked in a whisper.

We were only a few hours out from Mount Gloria, picking a path through the empty, quiet wastes which lay beyond the light and warmth the city had to offer.

The road we followed was a broken, shattered mess. I climbed up a four feet high ledge where part of road had been crushed down only to find another ten foot high ledge a few paces beyond that.

Here and there, the remnants of life remained. Trees which had been dead since the Sun Fall.  Clusters of skeletons here and there, probably from people who’d tried to eek out their survival outside the fringes of the city. And shadows. Everywhere there were shadows, darker and deeper than any the city had to offer.

In theory, I could have chased those away. Sola’s glow was still with me, but I’d been bundled up tight by Lucky and her people to make sure we wouldn’t be spotted as we fled the city. We were probably far enough away that I could have taken a glove off or something to illuminate our path, but Zeph had a curious little lozenge shaped device which shone from one side with a deep green light. It didn’t provide the best visibility, but a lifetime of living on the meagerest sparks of light had left me used to navigating under similar conditions.

“I’m fine,” I said, scrambling up the rough face of the ledge.

“You’re shivering,” Zeph said, placing a hand on my shoulder to stop me before I tackled descending to the next bit of the broken landscape.

“I’m not cold,” I said, which was completely true. Between the clothes I was bundled in and the remnants of Sola’s power that still flowed through me, I wasn’t feeling any physical discomfort. 

It was also a complete lie though. 

I was so, so cold. Despite the warmth I was wrapped in, fear had every inch of me clutched in its icy grip. The wastelands did more than scare me. They were death, death that had happened and death that was going to happen. 

I’d known what they were since I was old enough to ask the question “why don’t we just leave”. I’d known that my world was a dead one and that the tiny pocket of life I lived in was an aberration on a vast, lifeless rock. Hearing something though, and experiencing it? I hadn’t been ready for how different those two things were.

Everywhere around me I saw how the old world had failed. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. There were still ruins. Buildings that had stood for uncounted years. Vehicles which lay abandoned. All sorts of signs that people had once lived and thrived here. 

All sorts of signs that the refuge of places like Mount Gloria hadn’t been anywhere near enough. That despite the plentiful light and heat and water and air, nothing they’d done had been enough to save them. 

Nothing I could do would be enough to save them.

I tried to tell myself I was talking about the ancients. The people I couldn’t have been responsible for. The people whose loss had already salted the earth we walked on. I tried to tell myself that, but believing it was something else.

“I would give us more light but we are not on safe ground yet,” Zeph said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever stood on safe ground,” I said.

“This is less safe than most.”

“Why? We’re alone out here, aren’t we?”

“I wish that were true,” Zeph said. “We have not been alone since we left the city though.”

I’d say my ears perked up at that and I started listening intently for pursuers or things waiting in ambush, but my ears had been perked up since Lucky appeared unexpectedly to whisk us away, and I’d been listening for danger at every moment I’ve been conscious for since birth as far as I know.

“The creatures which pursue us have no tangible forms,” Zeph said, which was reassuring. “Unless they take ours.” Which was not.

“What are they?” I asked, noticing that she hadn’t called them ‘ghosts’.

“Shattered spirits. When the gods were destroyed the spiritual plane was impacted as well, and as the world fell many of its spirits fell with it.”

“And they’re still a danger after all this time?”

“They’ve become more dangerous as time has gone on,” Zeph said, growing still as she spoke. “The fragments of malicious spirits no longer know how to direct their malice, and the harmonious spirits have lost everything they were meant to be in harmony with.”

“How do we avoid any of that?” It didn’t make sense to run when you didn’t know where or when to run after all.

“We don’t let them understand what you carry. If they could grasp that they would be compelled to come to you.”

“And then they’d eat me?”

“Unlikely. The power you carry should place you beyond their direct influence.”

“But indirectly?”

“A fragment of river couldn’t drown you, but it could turn a cliff face into a mudslide. Or a piece of a flora spirit might cause spores to burst forth with life, including one’s you’d inhaled.”

“Neither of those sounds pleasant. Let’s avoid that.”

Oddly, but giving me something immediate and graphically unpleasant to worry about, Zeph had done me a favor. My concerns for the people we’d left behind didn’t drift away but at least took a backseat to the more pressing concerns for my own hide.

See! Being selfish is great, right! Right?

We kept moving in silence after that, with Zeph occasionally turning us down unexpected paths. I wanted to ask how she knew where we were going. Nothing about being an attendant of the Sun seemed like it would include understanding land-based navigation or being able to pace yourself to a sustainable speed for a tiny Ratkin girl.

I’d asked before we left if Zeph was going to carry me again – it would certainly have been quicker – but there are apparently things out in the wasteland which are faster than she was and moving at her full speed tended to attract them just as quickly.

So we marched slowly.

And rested.

And marched more.

And slept.

And marched again.

Over and over, passing through the lightless tomb of a world where every breath and every step we took was an intrusion and a violation. I thought I would get used to it, but the farther we traveled the more isolated I felt. And the more I began to understand the scope of the Sun Fall. 

I’d called forth a miracle against Vaingloth. Maybe the biggest miracle the world had seen since the Sun Fall, and it was so tiny and insignificant compared to an hour of walking through the wasteland. 

We were in danger every moment we traveled. Zeph hadn’t needed to tell me that, I could sense the things that were moving around us. Most of them were lost. Mad and no longer a part of the world as it was but rather a part of some infinitely distorted version of what it might have been and what it might be.

That we moved through their presence at all was due as much to the divine blessings we carried at the stealth that kept those blessings from being tested too strongly. On some level I think the spirit fragments knew that to touch either of us would bring back the memories of what they’d once been and I couldn’t imagine anything more unbearable to the things they had become.

For anyone else, the trip would have been a harrowing nightmare but for us it all passed uneventfully. 

Because, unlike me, Zeph actually knew what she was doing.

Which was unfair. She loved Sola, and I was benefiting from that, stealing the love that rightfully belonged to the god who I couldn’t even talk to anymore. Not the most reasonable of thoughts on my part I suppose but it was hard to feel that it wasn’t true, and whatever the case was, I needed Zeph’s help far too much to even begin vocalizing my concerns to her.

“I need you to do something for me,” Zeph whispered as we came to a giant sunken stadium.

I nodded in reply, not trusting myself to be quiet enough even though I was possibly making less noise than she was.

“Do you see the gap in the wall on the far side over there?”

I did, and nodded again in acknowledgement.

“I’m going to head down onto the playfield. I want you to creep around the upper edge here and get to that gap. Then run. The Factorum is about two miles along a road which is still mostly intact. I need you to make it to the gates of the city. They’ll be open. Once you’re inside, you won’t be pursued any further.”

“And you? Why aren’t we sneaking out of here together?” I asked. I wasn’t panicked by the idea, but that was only because it was ridiculous.

“There is something here that wasn’t before. Something that’s been waiting for us.”

“Fine. Let it wait. We’ll go around it.”

“It’s too late for that. I’m sorry. I knew the fragments were following us. I didn’t know they had surrounded us. This is my fault.” 

Said the woman who had guided us safely through the wasteland for day and days, right up to the doorstep of where we needed to be.

“Then we deal with them, or figure out how to sneak out of the trap they have us in,” I said.

“I have figured it out,” Zeph said. “I can make sure it won’t notice you while it deals with me.”

“What is ‘it’?” I asked. I did not try to perceive ‘it’ or search for ‘it’. Something about how Zeph was speaking told me that ‘it’ was something I didn’t want to have any connection to at all.

“More than a spirit fragment. And worse. Much worse.”

“And you can get in their, distract it, and then get away?” I asked, wondering only whether she was going to lie to me or not.

Instead, she was silent. Which told me everything I needed to know.

“Right. We’re not doing that then,” I said.

“You have to. She must be preserved,” Zeph’s voice rose above a whisper and I could hear the desperation in it as plainly as I felt it in my heart.

So I reached up, took her face between both of my hands and looked her straight in the eyes.

“Do you have any idea how unhappy Sola will be if she loses you?” Was it blasphemy to pretend to speak for a god? Yes. Always. Was I pretending though? I looked at the woman who loved my god more than her own life, who had saved me from Vaingloth and from the terrors of the wasteland, who had never asked for anything more than that I live, and my path was more than clear. 

It was divinely inspired.

“We’re in this together.”

And for a change, I didn’t run away.