“Will not all this construction draw attention to our plans?”

“It shall draw attention to us, which is all the better to disguise the plans we have laid.”

“But you are turning your city into a fortress. One does not build those unless one anticipates a being on the receiving end of a war.”

“And yet, these fortresses shall serve to prevent war.”

“Fortresses?”

“Mine is far from the only one. So far as I know, all of the others have been constructing such defenses. Surely you’ve begun similar preparations?”

“Why would I? There will be none left to defend ourselves from.”

“What we plan, for the gods, for the world, it will not be clean. Do not presume that the world will be left without perils simply because it will be ours.”

“So are we to be prisoners in these refuges of our own making?”

“Even the gods are limited to existing within their own domains. Better the safety of a refuge we control absolutely than an eternity cut short through the whims of chaotic peril.”

– High Accessors Helgon and Vaingloth inspecting the newly erected walls of Mt Gloria two  seasons before the Sunfall.

I was being carried again. I’d been carried a lot in my life. Not always literally, but it happened often enough when people were impatient, or when I was simply too weak or small to escape a situation on my own. Some of those times I’d agreed with being carried. Some of them had even saved my life. Despite the roaring inferno of mystical fire that I had devoured, and the intoxicating rush of knowing I was more powerful in that moment than everyone I’d ever known put together, I was still rather happy to be carried.

Because I was weak and small still.

And that was just the best!

We were well outside Mt. Gloria’s walls in the blink that it took Vaingloth to understand what I’d done.

Poor, pathetic, Little me. Only a total loser would find me to be even an annoyance, and an actual threat? Impossible. Simply impossible.

The Central Fire Portal building exploded, unable to contain his rage and fear.

“I don’t think he expected this,” Zeph said, her words somehow not ripped away by the deafening winds that screamed past us.

“How could he have,” I asked from the safety of her arms. “I’m so harmless after all. If a tiny thing like me can take a third of his power from him, just imagine what the other Neoterics will be able to do to him.”

“I still don’t like that part of this plan,” Zeph said, leaping over a trio of hills that were in our path. “This is going to stir up all of them, and we don’t have a plan for dealing with that.”

“Unfortunately, I do,” I said. All of my plan had come back to me but I was still revising bits of it as I went. Never a really good idea, but then nothing I’d done since stabbing the patroller really even approached ‘good idea’ status. “That part’s all on me though.”

I had several constraints my plans. The biggest one, of course, was to free Sola. So long as Vaingloth was alive that was going to require his cooperation to break the bindings he’d cast. I’d put in a lot of work to make sure cooperation was the last thing he’d ever offer me though, which left the alternative I really wanted.

“You? You’re going to take on the nine Neoterics all on your own?”

“Well, there’ll be eight of them then,” I said. There was an outcome to all this that was all for me. Could we have redeemed Vaingloth somehow? Turned his phenomenal talent and power to nurturing his people rather than literally burning them up for personal power? Anything was possible. The more important question though was did I want to, and I’d never been unsure as the answer to that one.

“I thought the plan was to lead Vaingloth away from his stronghold and then cutoff the other two portals to leave him weak enough for the others to take apart?”

“That was one of the plans, yes,” I said, and nudged her to change course towards a mountain on the horizon.

From the distance behind us, light bloomed and began racing closer with a terrible inevitability.

Vaingloth was using his own power, and he was not being careful with it anymore.

I winced at that.

My vengeance had definitely cost people their lives. There was no chance Vaingloth’s exit from the city had been gentle enough not to crush buildings and vaporize those who’d been caught in his path.

If I regretted anything, it was them. The people who’d been caught up in this through no fault of their own. They didn’t deserve what had happened to them. It wasn’t fair.

I’d learn their names in time. It wouldn’t do anything for them. Nor would my regrets. I wasn’t going to forget them though. That would be an insult. I’d chosen a path which had led to their destruction and that wasn’t something I’d ever be able to fully set right.

I hoped at best I could make a world that the people they cared for would find some comfort in.

“I can’t let you destroy yourself,” Zeph said, as her steps accelerated still further. “Not again.”

I could feel Vaingloth’s rage stabbing out towards us, but for all his power, he was no match in terms of pure speed to one of Sola’s Fox Winds. Of course, he didn’t have to be. The world was only so big. We were going to run out of places to run to long before he ran out of rage to push him into following us.

“I’m not going to destroy myself or endanger Sola,” I said. “All of this? You have no idea how much of it is for me. Screw going out in a blaze of glory. That’s Vaingloth’s job. Mine is to have the last laugh.”

Zeph’s pace slackened for a moment as we rounded the lower slopes of the mountain.

“You really believe that don’t you?” she asked, navigating through a forest of twisted, claw-like trees.

The spirits which had twisted the trees and generally planned to use them as tools to rip apart themselves and anything else they could get their branches on were busy running as fast as they could out of our path, largely because I’d asked them to.

There wasn’t much else I was able to ask them to do, even from the limit set of things they were still capable of, but it at least got through out of Vaingloth’s path.

“I wouldn’t have asked you to help me like this if I didn’t plan to walk away from it,” I said. “Dying would have been a whole lot easier and safer for everyone else.”

“But…” Zeph started to say but that was when Vaingloth got serious about catching us. 

He couldn’t match Zeph’s speed, but he also didn’t need to let little things like a mountain slow him down either.

The last time I’d seen him, he was wearing his ‘mostly human’ form. Barring the flames that had been continually consuming his ever-regenerating eyes (really a mistake on his part investing his magic in those), he’d looked like he had before his ascension. What burst from the mountain however was nothing but a ball of terror with too many arms, and too many mouths wrapped around it.

Incinerating all of the various bits of Vaingloth which surged around us felt incredibly tempting. The only problem was, he still had all of those contingency spells in place and was more than ready to absorb the fire I’d taken from him. In fact, and this was only partially a guess, he was also ready to absorb the Heart of the Fire Portal, which was impressive since he had to have spun that spell up while he was chasing us. 

To be fair, the loss of heart of the portal was probably the one thing which really threatened to cripple him in the long term. I think my plan would have worked just based on the insults I’d dealt him, but stealing the gate had made his pursuit a certainty.

As his fingers swelled to the size of buildings and began to blot out of the horizon in front of us, I wondered for an instant whether it might be possible to overwhelm his contingencies and burn a path to freedom, but it would be a bad bet. Vaingloth had underestimated me. I was not about to underestimate the guy who’d overthrown the gods. If he had a spell setup for something, betting on anything short of a god taking it down was too obviously a losing play even for me to try.

Instead, I went with a winning one.

I was holding onto the fire I’d stolen, but in stealing it I’d changed it too. In Vaingloth’s hands, it had been the fire of his office, a measure of how complete his domination was. In my hands, it was a badge of how I’d outsmarted him right up until I let it go.

Giving it back to him was out of the question, and simply casting it off would have been worse than useless. 

So I gave it to Sola.

Some of it.

I needed almost all of it, but there was definitely enough for an offering to my distant and silent god.

My distant and silent god who nonetheless blessed the sacrifice I made to her and allowed me to pass it on to one of her court.

Lighting Zeph on fire had not previously been a part of my plan.

Sharing Sola’s flame with her however was not exactly something she was opposed to.

The world became nothing but a blur.

Zeph only slowed down because we were suddenly out of sight, beyond the horizon from Vaingloth and we didn’t want to lose him.

“This is…!” Zeph’s excitement was so intense I could feel her chest vibrating with it.

“A gift from a god who loves you dearly,” I said. “There’s not far to go now either.” I pointed towards where a chasm lay waiting for us. Once it had been the deepest reach of an ocean. Dark and impenetrable. In the wake of the Sunfall, it became the home to something far worse than crushing pressure and creatures which could never walk on land.

“I’m staying with you when we get there,” Zeph said.

“You can’t. This is something I have to do alone, no one else can help with this.” I wished I’d broached this part of my plan with Xalaria. She could have confirmed that it had to be me.

Or she might have killed me where I stood for even suggesting the idea. Since I wasn’t exactly sure which reaction she would have chosen, I’d kept this idea to myself, but, it turns out, sometimes not trusting people can be a bad idea too.

“The other Neoterics aren’t here,” Zeph said. “There’s no one to stop Vaingloth when he catches you. And he’s going to catch you as soon as we stop.”

“I know. That’s part of the plan. I can’t….he can’t catch you too though. You have to be safe for any of this to work,” I said.

“Why? What are you doing?” 

This was the moment I’d been dreading. It was entirely possible Zeph wasn’t going to trust me either because there really was a serious risk to what I had in mind. Not so much for me as for the entire world and everyone left in it.

That would be a lot of regrets to carry, but not enough to make me hesitate.

“I need you to drop me into the abyss there.”

“You’ll die.”

“No. There’s something down there.”

“There’s not. That’s been empty since the ocean dried up.”

“Oceans don’t just dry up,” I said. “The thing that drank the ocean dry is down there and if Vaingloth wants me, he’s going to have to follow me down there and catch me before it drinks me down too.”

“Then we have an accord.”

“An accord presumes that balance can be maintained. You seek from us a portion of our power but the only coin which will suffice is mortal power in equal measure.”

“That, allow me to assure you, will not be a problem.”

– Vaingloth the Eternal and the Primarch of the Seventh Flame concluding their negotiations.

I’m not a genius. My plans had no secret guarantee of success. I could have failed and I had definitely overlooked several things already. Despite the fact that failure was still very much a possibility though, it felt so delicious to have been proven right about my guesses.

Almost as delicious as the Central Fire Portal was.

I think it was the strange cackling sound that filled the portal room which finally broke through Vaingloth’s rage to wedge the first tendrils of real awareness of his situation.

And with awareness, fear came rushing right along too.

I could see it in his posture.

If he’d still had any eyes, I probably would have seen it there too.

That made me cackle louder. Oh, right, it was me cackling. Wow. That was loud. And didn’t really sound like me at all. Probably not an issue though. There was still lots of fire to dig into after all!

Which was kind of one of things I’d overlooked.

I’d known, or to be honest ‘strongly suspected’, that I would be able to do some horrible things to the Fire Portal thanks to both Sola’s blessing and the fact that I was partially something unbelievably horrifying.

What I hadn’t counted on was how much I would enjoy it though.

My teeth ripped into the flames at the center of the portal and tore off a huge gout that I drunk down like the sweetest of wines.

And it was far more intoxicating than any alcohol which had ever been brewed.

My skin was seared, not by the flames around me but by the fire surging within.

The fire wasn’t Sola’s and it wasn’t from the portal.

It was me. It was the wild, inhuman joy at finally, finally, holding the power I needed. 

I told the others that I could draw on the beast’s nature. That I’d need to dance on the edge of madness a little but that I could hold it together since I had so many burning reasons to stay connected to the world.

Reason doesn’t hold in the face of madness though and as I tore piece after piece out of the gates, I danced far beyond the edge of madness.

Why stop after all?

There was power there for a taking. Power that I needed. Power that I deserved!

Did I deserve it?

Did I need it?

Did any of that matter when it felt so unbearably good.

I’d been cold before.

I would never be cold again.

I’d been weak. Always so weak.

In the flames though I was power itself.

All my life I’d been Little.

Constrained.

Trapped.

A victim of forces far beyond my control.

As I consumed and consumed though I became a force beyond control.

The beast fragment had tried to take everything from me, but I was used to that.

This though? This was different.

This was my chance to take.

The world around me had a pathetic little tyrant wailing and gnashing and trying so very hard to unmake me.

It was wonderful and my laughter rang not off the ceiling of the Fire Portal’s chamber but off the dome of the heavens itself. I could feel Vaingloth’s fear rise at that. Could feel the fire in his heart turning to ice. He began tapping into deep reservoirs of power. Old old magics, like the kind they had called on to sabotage the gods and ensure the beast’s not-quite-complete victory.

I should have cared about that, but did I? Could I? No. Not in the slightest. Not with the blinding rush of power which was doubling and redoubling within me.

I’d thought I would be able to steal the portal’s energies. Take from the little gnat who was throwing spell after spell at me and use that as bait.

But why?

I had a plan didn’t I?

Why did I need bait?

Did it matter? I’d been wrong. It wasn’t the portal’s energy I could steal. It was the portal’s energy and all the fire it had given the gnat. All the power he had traded the lives of his people for.

And the more I took, the more I could take.

Words began to fade.

Thought began to fade.

What words does the beast need to explain its hunger.

What thoughts are there to think?

All is hunger.

All must be consumed.

All must be mine.

Glory and rapture.

The limits of form and sentience gone.

Power and more power until all is burned out and only absolute desolation can claim me.

Absolute…

Desolat…

A soul touched me. And then another. And another. And still more after that.

I’d been falling, fading, and dimming despite the overwhelming light around me, but they caught me.

Within the flames, I wasn’t alone.

What response could I make to the beast’s hunger? To the emptiness I’d always always felt? Souls don’t need words, but they gave me an answer anyways.

Their touch alone was enough.

The Kindling Tossed weren’t gone.

They hadn’t been lost.

Just lost to me.

“Mom? Dad?” I found my words at last.

No words answered, but I didn’t need them. All I needed was what they showed me.

That they were still with me. That they were a part of me and that I’d been a part of them and together were connected in a chain that carried the hopes of everyone who’d come before us and the dreams of everyone who would come after.

Unlimited power?

I was already part of something that didn’t have limits.

I was Little, but Little Hands Can Do Great Things.

I’d never believed that.

Had hated it for being an oppressive lie.

Except it hadn’t been.

It had been their hope and promise to me.

A new fire rose in me. It wasn’t greater than the fire I was consuming, but this fire I controlled.

It was mine. And it was theirs.

It was what the beast had lost.

In consuming and devouring everything, it had lost itself and everything it had been a part of.

I could easily have done the same.

Would have done the same for sure.

But I wasn’t alone.

It didn’t suck any less that all the people who’d been pitched into the gate had died. The world would have been better to have them in it. Their lives though? They had not been lived in vain. Each and everyone one of them had touched someone else’s life, and to touch one life is to touch them all.

I thought my world was dead, and maybe it was, but the dead can still have things to teach the living.

Outside the portal, Vaingloth’s spells were nearing completion.

Even stumbling drunk on power like I was, I found my appraisal of him as a ‘gnat’ had perhaps been a little biased by the ecstasy of the flame. I could sense the shape of his working as it built, and it was definitely going to a be problem.

Which, didn’t actually surprise me.

He’d caged Sola.

He’d stolen the power of a countless number of gods.

And he’d called the beast from beyond the bounds of reality to our world.

Sure he’d had help with all of those but he couldn’t even have been a part of those rituals without near perfect mastery of spellcasting and a deeper knowledge of the workings of divine power than anyone who didn’t bear the title of ‘Neoteric Lord’.

I’d had a plan for that though? Hadn’t I?

More power?

I turned to drink in more of the gate’s fire, fully aware that gambling on retaining my sanity when I did so was not a bet I was likely to win.

“No more,” a voice in the fire said.

Or…

No, the voice wasn’t in the fire. It was the Fire.

“You have consumed that which was bargained for,” the Lord of Fire on the other side of the portal said. “No more may be taken unless the balance is paid.”

“Balance?” I’d planned on consuming a frankly illogical amount of power. Far more than any mortal could ever handle. That had been a mistake. Not because I couldn’t handle it.

I mean, I definitely couldn’t handle it.

No the mistake had been that there would only be an illogical amount of power. There was so much more.

And Vaingloth was still ready for that.

His spell was going to bind me just like Sola had been bound. All the power I was carrying? Yeah, that was what was going to bind me. He was going to turn me into the the next Central Fire Portal.

I was going to be the one to burn up all the future Kindling.

So of course the right answer was to lash out at him.

To incinerate him with eternal fire. His eyes were going to burn forever and the same could be done to the rest of him.

Perfect right?

Vengeance, safety, and a use for the titanic amount fire I was carrying which was moments from being turned against me.

So, important question, why was I not doing exactly that?

I’m an idiot. I mean there’s plenty of evidence of that. In this case though, I wasn’t quite idiotic enough to do exactly what Vaingloth wanted me to.

It didn’t take much to avoid being that stupid though.

He was standing right there, seemingly purely focused on weaving his binding spell.

Raising no defenses.

An immortal who wasn’t trying to avoid permanent injuries?

And oh, look, what was that behind his metaphorical back? A freaking wagon-load of contingency spells? All waiting to capture anything I threw at him.

So yeah, I’ll just give him all the power I just stole fair and square. Sounds brilliant right?

Here’s a better idea though! How about I remember what my plan was? While I was working on that, I gave a little of the fire I was carrying back to the flame beyond the portal.

Not much, just enough that the spirit there wouldn’t be worried I was going to take anymore.

And then a tiny bit more.

So that they would shut the door.

And not reopen it.

Not unless someone had the heart of the portal I’d just consumed.

To be honest, that had not been part of my original plan. Mostly because I hadn’t known there was anything on the other side of the portal. Or at least anything that I could speak to.

I also hadn’t known I’d be able to chow down on the portal so thoroughly that I absorbed the whole thing. As my thoughts tumbled back together I remembered that I’d only needed to steal some of the fire portal’s power. Just enough that the other Neoteric Lords would think Vaingloth was as weak as they were ever likely to catch him.

Not that I was planning on letting the other Neoterics have him.

I mean, I might have let Helgon have some playtime with Vaingloth. That had seemed like it would be fun for Helgon and very much the opposite for Vaingloth. It would also have come with a lot of unknowns though. If Vaingloth’s spellcasting mastery was ‘near perfect’, then it was safe to assume Helgon’s was too and Helgon’s status as ‘dead’ might be a lot more negotiable than anyone else’s.

No, I wanted to make sure that when Vaingloth was taken out there wouldn’t be a ghostly version hanging around to haunt the world anymore than the memories of him inevitably would.

With my gift of fire to the flames, I moved one step closer to that goal and felt the inferno of the portal close around me.

That had been another escape, if I’d wanted one. When the portal closed, I could have chosen to remain on the side of the Infinite Flames. I had my own flames though, and my mind back, which meant my plan was in place too.

Vaingloth was speaking in three voices at once as the last of the flames died away. His words were ones even the darkest of gods would have considered unforgivable blasphemies.

And his spell was going to work since my choices were hit him with everything I had, and thereby give him all the power I was carrying while rendering myself powerless, or hold on to my stolen power and watch as his spell bound me for eternity.

He was on the last word when I nodded for the next stage of the plan to begin.

That was all it took for me to take flight.

Not of my own power.

Though I was burning as hot as Sola ever had, Zeph didn’t seem to mind at all as she raced us both out of the city at celestial speed.

“And should there pieces of the gods we cannot reclaim? The world will fare poorly if the balance of divine power is allowed to leak away.”

“Some loss is inevitable.”

“Inevitable or desirable?”

“I’m sure I don’t take your meaning there my friend.”

“Friend indeed. You are not so opaque my good Accessor Vaingloth. If the power of the gods is allowed to run down it will expose weaknesses in those of us who hold the remnants. Weaknesses which will allow…perhaps we should call it ‘consolidation’ of the remaining power.”

“That is certainly a possibility, though a distant one you must admit, dear Hanshel.”

“What is distance to those who will live forever? Apart from an opportunity for which plans must be laid.”

“For the Eternal there will be no end of things to plan for.”

“These plans I speak of will need to be quite singular though. To replace the lost divine energies would require…what? The invention of new gods? Some means of bartering for power at an advantage? Tell me, you’ve worked it out, I’m sure. What secret schemes have you not shared with the others.”

“As a loss of any of we Twelve would destabilize an already precarious balance, I assure you Hanshel, I am as transparent as you might ever hope for a soul to be.”

– High Accessors Hanshel and Vaingloth in an exchange a week before Vaingloth’s research into elemental portals was concluded.

There are things we don’t want to do in life. I subscribe firmly to the philosophy that the right answer is simply not to do them. Which was why I was climbing up a narrow cleft in the bedrock which Mt Gloria was laid out upon, creeping ever closer to the single most terrifying thing in the world. Was I shaking inside and desperate to be anywhere else? Uh, yes, obviously. Was I happy that I was dragging Zeph and Kalkit along with me and had almost zero ability to keep them safe? No, I was not even a little bit happy. Did I wish MB was with me and that I could simply bury my face in its fur and wait for all this to go away?

Oddly, no.

MB had stayed behind of its volition. There were children around it. It liked them. I think it wanted to keep them safe? Or maybe it wanted them to keep it safe? MB was me, mostly, but I couldn’t really claim to understand my own actions all the time either, and the bits that weren’t me might have given it a very different perspective on somethings, a perspective I was not in a position to understand without a lot of reflection.

Reflection which might have shed some light on exactly why I was climbing up towards the searing heat above us.

I mean, I knew what I had in mind. I’d vetted it with Xalaria and if the Blessed of Battles thought I had chance then it wasn’t the least intelligent plan I could have come up with.

But why was I doing it?

I mean, sure, Vaingloth was going to kill me, but that was only if the other Neoterics didn’t get him first. Could I have allied myself with one of them? Yeah. Definitely. I sort of had with Helgon, though he didn’t really count by virtue of the whole ‘being dead’ thing, even if it was a questionable sort of “dead”.

I didn’t want that though.

Was it because allying with a living Neoteric would mean being complicit in the atrocities they had committed and were continuing to commit with none to oppose them? Sure. That was true.

Was it because, given what I was, they would all want me to be erased or consumed to bolster their own safety? That was both true and an eminently valid reason not to seek their help.

Was it because Sola wouldn’t want me to join forces with the people who’d ultimately been responsible for her destruction and the destruction of the World That Should Have Been? I felt safe in saying that Sola would definitely not have enjoyed any connection with the Neoterics and was likely quite pleased with the choice I’d made.

So those were all true.

But they weren’t my truth.

Vengeance could have been my truth. I hadn’t even begun to plumb the depths pains and misery Vaingloth had been responsible for in my life, even without considering what he’d done to everyone I knew, had ever known, or could have ever known.

It would have been nice to say that wasn’t it. That I was a big enough person to forego vengeance. A better person than he was. It would have been nice and also a complete crock. He deserved vengeance, and I wasn’t a bad or lesser person for wanting it. For me and for the entire world, past, present, and future, but while I was by no means opposed to balancing the scales, that wasn’t what kept me climbing up.

What kept me going wasn’t anything courageously noble or unbreakably grim.

I continued climbing, up and up, as the rocks grew so hot that no one but those blessed by the divine could have touched it, because I wanted to believe.

In myself.

In Sola.

In Zeph, and Lucky, and even stupid and slow Pibby who’d gotten me into this mess.

I’d never believed tomorrow could be better because it never had been.

Because I saw over and over again how things fell apart. How awful people were to each other. How often no one listened, or came together, or believed in anyone else.

I’d spent my life running from one thing.

Ever since my family had been burned up as Kindling, I’d done anything I could to avoid meeting the same fate.  No matter how miserable it made me, no matter what it meant for anyone else, if it kept me from being tossed into the fires, I’d do it.

Zeph hadn’t done that. She’d fought.

Sola hadn’t done that. She’d fought too.

And Lucky, and Mumora, and Smiles, and even the Beast Fragment.

They all had held onto something.

 Onto themselves.

Maybe they hadn’t known who they wanted to be anymore than I had.

But they’d made a choice and dared the consequences.

A lot of other people had made choices too and the consequences had ended them.

But we all end.

Our ending isn’t what matters.

It took me a whole lot of examples to see that.

Hell, the whole world is an example.

What matters isn’t that we’ll be gone, it’s who we were when we were here.

And I knew who I wanted to be.

At last.

And at last I was where I needed to be.

The fire above should have burned me, but though she was wrapped away, my god was still with me, and my god is a mighty one.

One punch was all it took.

The crevasse ended in shell of solid concrete which had been used to seal the cracks in the chamber above.

And in one fire fueled punch I shattered it.

From there it was only a few feet more of a climb before we arrived.

I dragged myself up into the room to find the Central Fire Portal looming over me.

Drawing on Sola’s power had not been subtle.

Subtlety’s time was done.

It was time to be loud.

Fortunately there were a whole lot of guards in the Central Fire Portal room which made being loud not only an option, but inevitable. To make absolutely certain that Vaingloth knew where I was though, I drew on the lessons Fulgrox had given me and and called on power in Sola’s name.

That was the kind of thing that had been more effective when I had a god actively with me, but while Sola wasn’t there to use her voice to call on the power for me, her name, a lot of faith, a bit of divine power, and a willingness to burn everything down made a surprisingly potent incantation. It may have made things just a tiny bit easier that I also had a portal to a realm of infinite fire close at hand which was designed to funnel power into the material world.

Those opposed to my little summoning spell included Vaingloth’s guard, who were armed with some very high quality Death Marks. Vaingloth, it seemed, was not messing around when it came to the defense of the Fire Portal from which all of the other Fire Portals drew their power. The guards also had some of the most menacing, and probably effective, armor I’d ever seen troops outfitted in. None of that was going to help them though.

“Time for you two to vanish,” I said, but I was speaking to empty air. Kalkit and Zeph were already so well hidden that they were obscured even from the glaring light coming off me.

Zeph hadn’t been a fan of this stage of the plan. As target’s went, I’m both squishy and abominably easier to hit than either of them would have been.

I had something they didn’t however.

“Alert Lord Vaingloth and open fire! Maximum intensity!” the duty captain of the guards shouted.

“Ain’t gonna help,” I said. I didn’t shout but I didn’t have to. I was bleaching the walls I was glowing so brightly, my voice carried to every soul in the room whether I wanted it to or not.

Did I mean that maximum intensity on their Death Marks wasn’t going to help? Yes. Yes I did and I demonstrated that by burning the incoming bolts out of the air.

Silly guards.

Why were they surprised.

Everything burns after all.

Everything must burn in fact!

Burn, burn, BURN!

I pulled my thoughts in when that one crossed my mind. There’s a big difference between wielding power in Sola’s name and being the one who was being wielded. The flames from the portal didn’t have Sola’s divine majesty behind them but they did have a hunger that was far greater than any a tiny thing like me could contain.

Fortunately, I wasn’t speaking to them for just myself. My voice wasn’t Sola’s but my purpose was and I knew we were more than enough to control the fire that raged around and through me.

A wordless swell of pride bubbled up inside me at that, and it wasn’t my own, which felt delightful.

The other thing I’d meant in what I said, was that calling Vaingloth wasn’t going to help. For one thing, he was already completely aware of where I was. For another, him appearing in person was exactly what I was hoping for and why I hadn’t done anything else but defend myself up till that point.

While he was a disappointment as a human being, and as a god-figure, Vaingloth was at least not disappointing in his response to my revelation.

I mean, his minions might have been a little disappointed that a half dozen or so of them got incinerated when he arrived.

The explosion which heralded him, blasted the remainder of the guards off their feet, which would have bought me a moment’s reprieve from deflecting their death bolts, except for the small point that Vaingloth came in swinging his own power like a hammer the size of the mountain itself.

I hadn’t been able to defend myself from him before, and I wasn’t able to do so this time either. I did survive though, and I’d known I was going to. Vaingloth didn’t want me dead. He wanted and needed me to suffer. If he’d wanted me dead, he would have burned all of Mt. Gloria down the moment he even suspected I was inside it.

Instead of killing me, he hurt me, or at least he tried to.

His aim was a bit off.

Probably because his eyes were still on fire.

Oh. Oww. I hadn’t realized Sola had managed to do that to him.

It really looked like it hurt.

So.

I was happy.

I was also being pushed back though.

Into the fires.

Into quite a lot of fire.

As a Blessed, I could obviously call the fire and command it to some extent.

But the Blessed have limits.

We’re still mortal.

Vaingloth, arguably, was not.

With access to divine force far in excess of my own, he was able to shove me towards the thing I’d feared most in the whole world.

I’d been so scared all my life of becoming Kindling and that’s exactly the fate he was going to inflict on me.

So I let him.

With a smirk that should have screamed at him what a bad idea he’d had, I let him fling me into the portal.

There was enough fire primal enough in there to reduce me to ash, even with Sola’s blessings.

But I was more than a Blessed of Sun God.

MB was me, but I was also it, and like my beastly forebearer, I began to feast.

“And if the people we choose to bring along into our new world as less then appreciative?”

“What would their alternative be?”

“Rebellion. Some will choose to fight us. However foolhardy, however doomed they might be, some will choose to rise against us.”

“Good. Let them. In fact we should encourage it. Let us orchestrate a full uprising. When we crush it, we can make the fates of all those who stood against us serve as a lesson to the rest for a thousand, thousand years.”

“And which of our cities shall we inspire this rebellion in?”

“Well, not mine certainly.”

– High Accessors Hanshel and Vaingloth devising a scheme which never came to fruition.

No one believed me. I mean, I couldn’t blame them. I only half believed myself. When you plan to take down the next-best-thing to a god that the world has left in it, your base odds of success are somewhere in the realm of ‘you’ve at least picked an amusing method of annihilation to embrace’ and, if you’re plan is really good, might rise as high as ‘well, at least it’ll be quick.”

The funny thing was, it was definitely going to need to be quick. Given enough time Vaingloth was going to find me, that was an absolute given. Maybe if I’d been the Blessed of Secrets I could have built on the blessing with my natural skills and instincts to hide away forever. Sola though? Shockingly the God of the Sun is not particularly good at ‘hiding’.

Really makes one question why she picked me, doesn’t it?

Really also makes one question why I picked her.

I had answers to neither of those questions.

But I had a guess.

I think we needed balance. Both of us.

I mean there was also the point that, at the time, neither of us had anything approaching a better option, and I absolutely don’t believe ‘destiny’ or ‘fate’ brought us together.

If there ever was a grand ‘fate’ which guided the world, the beast definitely ate it. 

We don’t live in a world that is controlled and even ordered by a divine will.

We live in the world that we’ve made. 

Sure, some of us have a lot more say in making the world than the rest, but it’s still us. From the Neoteric Lords, down through their wealthy sycophants, even unto a puny Ratkin girl eeking out however meager of a life that she could. If there’d been a mystical, magical, godly force planning everything that had happened, then it was sufficiently chaotic as to be indistinguishable from random chance shaped by the consequences of our choices anyways.

Also, the beast had been thorough, and a Fate god would have been one of the first ones up on the menu.

I didn’t need to believe in fate or destiny though.

And I wasn’t marching to meet my doom.

I was marching to meet Vaingloth’s doom.

“We are going to lose people,” Lucky said as she walked (and I jogged) down a tunnel filled with dust, stale air, and the haunted shadows of those who’d clawed it from the stone and earth.

“Yeah.” Was I supposed to lie? Tell her and the others that a ‘divine hand would shield them from harm’? It’d be nice to make believe that we’d be safe, to pretend that my actions weren’t going to have terrible consequences, but I couldn’t do it. Not and be able to live with myself afterwards.

If I had all the power in the world, could I have been that divine shield? Sure. Except for the people who didn’t deserve it, right? The world would be better off without all the evil folk who infested it. I wouldn’t even have had to swat them down. I could have just protected the good ones and let the bad ones die out.

Just like the Neoterics.

To be fair, the Neoterics had been even less reasonable than that, but give me enough power and I’d turn into a pretty fair approximation of one. Give me almost enough power, so I still had to fight and contend with them, but could do so on an even footing and I’d likely be even worse since I’d have so much to lose and the lure of perfect safety if I could simply expunge them rest of them from the world.

“Be a lot easier to convince people if we knew how we were supposed to win,” Lucky said.

That would have been a great line from someone planning to betray me.

She wasn’t though.

She was just scared.

Which, sure, she still had one or more functional brain cells so complete and abject terror was absolutely the correct emotional response to the situation.

“It wouldn’t,” Xalaria said.

Not who I had been expecting to defend how I was handling things, but given that she’d agreed to the plan in the abstract back in the Factorum, I suppose I had more of her support than I’d been admitting to myself.

“She’s right,” Smiles said. “This isn’t something we can make people believe is a good idea. We all know what it means.”

“And we all know it has to be like this,” Oolgo said.

“Does it?” Zeph asked.

She wasn’t asking about the plan. She wasn’t even asking about the costs we would pay. She was asking if we needed to face Vaingloth at all.

Which was fair.

She had a crucial role to play. If she failed, we were all going to die in the most horrible manner that a multi-century old monster could imagine. 

Far worse than that though, from Zeph’s perspective, was what was going to happen to Sola if I fell into Vaingloth’s clutches.

“Do you think she’d want us to do literally anything else?” I asked.

Zeph fell silent for a moment and then chuckled.

“Yeah. She’d want us to let her handle all of it on her own.”

The Sun God was used to being a solo act? Gee, how incredibly unsurprising.

Suppose I can’t fault you for wanting to be the brightest star on the stage, oh most dramatic one. It wasn’t a prayer, sort of far from one since most prayers don’t involve teasing one’s deity, but I offered it to Sola anyways.

She didn’t answer.

But I was pretty sure she wanted to.

“Are you sure we can’t go with you?” Lucky asked. “If this is going to be our last stand, it’d be nice to at least make sure you can get wherever you’re trying to go.”

“We’re needed elsewhere,” Xalaria said.

“And this is not our last stand,” I said. “It’s our first one.”

“It’ll be the last for some people,” Oolgo said.

“Yeah. Things are going to go wrong. This plan won’t work like we think it will. But we’re not just spitting in face of a god here. We’re not fighting so that we can die for our cause. We’re fighting for the lives that are on the other side of all this.”

“We’re fighting for more that that,” Smiles said.

“Yes. We are fighting for each other,” Zeph said, which surprised me. Of all of us, she should have been the one most willing to sacrifice the city and everyone in it if it meant Sola’s freedom and safety.

Except…

Except Zeph had been beloved by Sola, and had loved her in return, and that kind of love couldn’t help but lead to some level of understanding.

Zeph knew Sola loved us all. 

And so, no, even though it was tearing her heart apart, Zeph could never had sacrificed the city in exchange for Sola because she had to know what it would have done to Sola’s heart.

“Always,” I said as we came up on a ladder which would lead us back to the surface. I turned to Lucky and the people who were going with her.  “This where we part ways though. They need you up there.”

“I don’t like it, but, you’re right, and I don’t like that even more,” Lucky said. “What happened to that kid who I took into my crew so we could win a pipe cleaning job? She wasn’t anywhere near this brave or stupid.”

“She’s still pretty stupid,” I said. “And she’s not brave at all. She does however have the best friends a girl could ask for.”

“Say a pray for us then, I’m thinking we’re going to need it.” Lucky turned to start climbing the ladder.

Before she could get fully away though, I grabbed her leg in a fierce hug.

“I said I have the best friends. I didn’t say I have a lot of them. So this better not be goodbye.”

“Okay,” she said, reaching down a long arm to pat me on the head. “We’ll make it a ‘see you later then’ kid.”

“You better.”

Tears? No. Of course not. And if there were, I wiped them away much too quickly for anyone to notice.

Zeph was kind enough to not disabuse me of that as we continued following the tunnel along branches which lead ever close to the castle.

“You do have backup ideas, do you not?” she asked a few turns later.

“A few, but you’d like them even less than this one,” I said, which had the twin virtues of being true while also vague enough that when Vaingloth heard it, he would be no less confused than he already was.

Or at least I hoped he was confused.

I had, what I felt, were some good reasons to hope that was the case though, beyond the large amount of wishful thinking that was driving me onwards.

For one thing, I was pretty sure no one had ever tried to confront him like I was set on doing. The proof of that was we didn’t have any festivals to celebrate the horrible fate he’d inflicted on the poor theoretical fool, and Vaingloth was absolutely the kind of tyrant to remind people constantly about what a bad idea opposing him was.

The other ‘proof’ of his confusion was the nonsense he was pulling with the patrollers and inquisitors in the city. If he knew what I was up to, spreading his forces around the city was the absolute last thing he would want to do.

“How did you get your furry friend to stay behind?” Kalkit asked. It was easy to forget they was with us, which I was uproariously glad to experience. If the Blessed of Secrets was able to call upon their divine power that deeply, that was final pillar of proof I needed to believe in my plan enough to keep moving forward.

My knees may have disagreed.

And my freezing fingertips.

And my guts.

Okay, most of me disagreed with the assessment that what I was doing was a good idea, but Kalkit’s presence was a strong argument in my plan’s favor.

If we were still a secret, then Vaingloth had to be positively losing his mind.

Picture you have an enemy. They’re a minor annoyance, right up until the point where they injure you worst than you have been injured since the world ended, worse than you probably even thought it was possible for you to be injured. What would you do?

Why, you’d smite them of course!

Except the sniveling wretch is whisked away before you can finish the smiting.

And then you almost find her.

Except she escapes again.

Out into the wasteland. The wasteland which is guaranteed to kill her by virtue of the fact that there’s nothing living out there at all, and all the unliving things are really interested into sharing their fate with anything they run across.

The only danger is if she heads to one of your fellow all-powerful lords. 

But she doesn’t. She heads to a dead city, with the shade of a dead lord you dealt with ages ago.

You still want to kill her. Need to really. But it would be a hassle, and, far more importantly, expose you to the machinations of your fellow lords, who would very much like to reduce their current number from nine, including you, to a much more manageable eight.

So you sit and bid your time.

Maybe you cook up some new servants. Ones who can survive the wastelands. At least long enough to kill that hated nuisance, or better yet, bring her back so you can inflict the dozens of fates worse than death that you have in mind for her.

You know it’ll be a long wait. She’s far off and well hidden and she has no reason not to keep running and hiding.

But you have time.

Centuries.

Millenia.

You’ll get her eventually.

And then a couple of weeks later, there’s a light on the horizon.

She’s coming back on her own.

Why?

Why would anyone do that.

Your city is in revolt? No it’s not. That’s a few people who’ve forgotten the lessons you’ve taught them. You have plenty of terrors you can unleash to get them back in line.

But the light’s getting brighter.

Why is the light getting bright?

Why is it getting so close!

And then it vanishes.

You can’t sense her anymore.

Where is she?

What is she doing?

What did she find?

Why does she know?

Feeling terrified yet? 

I certainly hoped Vaingloth was.

“Time to go up,” I said, feeling an unholy heat radiating through the stones above me.

The fires I’d fled my whole life were waiting for me. 

“You’re picking the people you’ll carry forward into our new world? Whatever for?”

“Because they’ll need to be survivors.”

“Nonsense. They’ll survive because we decide they’ll be spare.”

“And if one of us decides some of them are inconvenient?”

“Why would we want any inconvenient people? Get rid of them and let the remainder make more. It’s what these people are best at isn’t it?”

“We’ll be losing quite a bit of what people are good at.”

“And our world will be better off for it. All we need are numbers. The more we can control the better, certainly, but without us? Without us they will do nothing but come to the end they’ve been so happily racing towards for centuries now.”

“I still say you haven’t won that argument. And in any event, what does it matter what I do with my protectorate? We will all be sovereign over our own domains, won’t we?”

“Of course, of course. Just see that your ‘survivors’ don’t infect any of my populace with any heretical ideas. Just because we can put down uprising does not mean I wish to waste my energy or resources doing so.”

“Yes. Far be it from any of us to interfere with one another’s workings.”

– High Accessors Vaingloth and Dyrena at Dyrena’s Festival of Many Beauties before the slate of one thousand winners was announced where more than half the winners hadn’t even been contestants.

I wasn’t glowing anymore. I was hiding again. It felt natural and right and comfortable.

And I hated it.

Holding Sola’s power inside wasn’t that tricky anymore. Fulgrox is a much better teacher than he’ll admit, to the point where even Xalaria wasn’t openly critical of my abilities as a novice junior acolyte wanna-be priestess.  His praise and her concealed rather than open disdain weren’t what left my skin itching though.

It was Vaingloth.

He was searching for me. He knew I was inside his city, and he had a host of stolen divine powers to reveal me and then remove me, often with less than a heartbeat between the two.

That should have made hiding the second most wonderful feeling in the world, with only ‘running away’ being a superior choice.

It wasn’t time to run though.

And I didn’t want to.

The argument that I hadn’t really reintegrated myself as ‘Little’ would have been supported by that feeling pretty well, except for one sharp counterpoint.

Vaingloth had me back into a corner, a corner the size of the entire world. With nowhere left to run, I tend to do things like ‘grab a patroller’s knife and stab him forty or so times’.

Stabbing Vaingloth wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

Which meant I wasn’t going to be that nice to him.

And people were going to be hurt because of it.

If I was a better person, maybe I could have found a better answer. If I was a better person, maybe I would have cared to try.

Instead, I was happy to be a monster. 

Mostly because the more I focused on that, the less afraid I had to admit to being.

“Things have changed a bit since you left,” Lucky said.

It was still hard keeping up with her – damn her long legs – but the days we’d spent walking back from the Factorum had been enough for my body to regain the strength that I’d lost and then some. Sure, I’d eaten far more than my fair share of Helgon’s ridiculously good food, but I had no regrets on that regard.

Okay, maybe one regret. Zeph had very kindly indulged in only small portions of the food and she definitely deserved far more than that. Going back to the Factorum for more food would have been the obvious answer, but I knew what the right payback for her was.

I had to free Sola. 

That would make Zeph happier than anything or everything else in the world.

Which was apparently something quite a few people agreed with her on.

We stepped around a corner and onto a walkway which spiraled down the outside wall of a cavern filled with a hundred or more people. 

Our arrival was noticed immediately, but it wasn’t until Zeph came into view that people understood we were more than just Lucky and her friends returning from a simple errand.

The gasps of joy and muffled excitement shifted to quieting concern as MB entered the cave at the rear of our party.

MB, sensing just as well as I would have, that it was the object of far too much attention, sat down, brushed it’s face with one paw and let out a questioning meow in my direction.

I sent an unconcerned shrug back. We weren’t in danger from the people here, and my hope that they’d be welcoming of some monsters willing to fight on their side against the monster who ruled Mt Gloria seemed to be confirmed by the shrugs I saw in the crowd.

“How did you get all these people together?” I asked. Impressed with the small army Lucky had assembled.

“Didn’t have to do anything really,” she said. “They all found us. Or most of them did. We spread the word a bit after you left.”

“I’m impressed. I didn’t think there were this many people who’d be willing to risk becoming Kindling like this.” Given the number of people I’d seen sell out everyone around them in order to avoid being thrown into a fire portal, I had to wonder if half the people present weren’t planning to turn traitor. Lucky didn’t seem to be worried about that all though.

“Oh, this isn’t all of us,” she said. “Not by a long shot.”

“Wait, how many have joined you?” Zeph asked. I wasn’t in danger of collapsing between one step and the next anymore, but it was still nice to have her close by to catch me if I was wrong about that.

“No idea,” Lucky said. “I know there’s at least ten groups this size, but we only have contacts with about half of them. I’d  guess there’s probably as many more than we haven’t heard about because they’ve been smart enough to not draw attention to themselves.”

“That’s too large an organization to keep secret. How haven’t you been found yet?” Xalaria asked as we descended to the group floor.

“They’re not secret,” Kalkit said after tasting the air a few times.

“Not from the Patrollers. They know good and well that we’re out here. They are trying to downplay our numbers to keep the rich people calm, but it’s not really working.”

“You’re a trap then,” Xalaria said. “Bait left out by our enemy to lure us in.”

“We’re thinking more that you’re the bait to lure them in,” Lucky said.

Which was not the answer I’d been expecting. The people around us, despite having the numbers to be a small army where clearly not a fighting force.

Most were grouped in small clusters. Some were just talking, like people everywhere do, while others were listening to people reading from books of different shapes and size, while still others were mixing together food rations into ‘Hungry Packs’.

I hated ‘Hungry Packs’. The whole idea was to take the worst of the rations and ruin a bunch of at least barely edible ones by mixing them together. If you were hungry enough, they were worth eating as an alternative to dying, but just barely.

I didn’t have to even glance over at Xalaria to ask if people who were subsisting on Hungry Packs were ready to fight off Vaingloth’s elite forces. Between the children who were running around and the elderly people who were either being tended to or tending people themselves, I was pretty sure a single Inquisitor armed with a stick and a couple of rocks could wipe the place out on their own.

“You cannot stand against a Neoteric Lord,” Xalaria said. “Or is that the point?”

Meaning, had all these people grown sufficiently fed up with Vaingloth’s tyranny that they were looking at death as simply an escape?

They weren’t.

I looked at MB who’d plopped down and immediately been descended on by a pack of a dozen children of almost as many different species. They were poking and petting MB with the sort of careless curiosity that would have made them delicious snacks if MB wasn’t, you know, me.

These weren’t kids who were looking to escape their miserable lives. They probably wanted better ones, or at least tolerable ones, but they weren’t interested in checking out just yet.

No one in the cavern was.

I noticed that a moment before I noticed something far more interesting.

I wasn’t glowing.

But I could still see them. Which was pretty usual. People don’t normally stumble around in the pitch dark. When the lights go off we go to sleep. Everyone was up and about though because the cavern was filled with the usual pale and dim lighting that had characterized everyday of ever since the Sunfall.

But this lighting wasn’t flickering flame light.

It was steady

And soft.

And golden.

“Sola?” I could feel her. Not inside, or not just inside, but in the room. Her gentle warmth and little sparks of her abundant radiance. “Oh. Oooooh.”

She…I didn’t even have words for the thought I was trying to form.

She was still trapped in me, bound up in chains that I was more than willing to murder to break.

But she was here too.

Because that’s how gods worked.

What I’d done in fighting Vaingloth hadn’t just reminded the city of Sola’s existence. It had brought her into their lives.

These people weren’t rebelling against Vaingloth. They were fighting for her!

“Figured you’d notice,” Lucky said. “Took ya a while though.”

“Shut up.” It was easier than hugging her.

I went up to one of the groups who was listening to someone reading from a book. The nearest guy, a Satyr, moved over a bit and offered me a spot to sit within the circle.

He didn’t recognize because why would anyone know or care what a ratkin girl looked like, but they were all still willing to accept me into their circle.

A circle which was listening to one of the most heretical of all possible things; a book on philosophy written before the Sunfall.

Xalaria and Fulgrox were more interested in discussing strategy or whatever with Lucky, and Kalkit had more or less disappeared the moment we came into the cavern. Zeph though took a seat on the group beside me as the book’s reader resumed from the passage where he’d left off.

Apart from MB, who seemed to be a welcome relief for the adults as a distraction for the kids, the rest of use didn’t draw much attention and it was soon clear why as a steady stream of people of all shapes and sizes arrived and left without any particular fanfare.

“And so we turn to the question of divine infallibility,” the speaker, Harshant, an older Catkin gentleman read. “We take the dictates of our deities as our gospel, as wisdom granted from a source of deeper and wider perception than any we may possess. Yet, it is a wisdom which must always be questioned. Even though we walk as children and talk as children, is in questioning that we may grow to the understanding which will mark us as the adults they bid us to be. Though some may claim otherwise, the High Assessors ability to interpret the will of the gods is not meant to be the end of reason and investigation but rather the beginning, with the High Assessors themselves no more than a stepping stone we must all, in time, walk beyond.”

He put down the book into his lap and looked at his small audience.

“So are we supposed to question things? Is it dangerous? And what does this section mean now, since we don’t have any High Assessors left anymore?”

“We do though,” a chunky Ratkin lady said. “We’ve got Little. She’s out there somewhere, but she’s a High Assessor if ever there was one.”

I became painfully aware of everyone in the room who knew my name and sent the loudest, unvoiced prayer I could to Sola that each and every one of them would keep their big mouths shut.

“I’m supposed to be dead.”

“We could send you back if you like.”

“I was supposed to be Kindling.”

“You still could be.”

“I don’t understand. The Lord’s will is absolute.”

“That’s certainly what he wants you to believe. A few of us have chosen to disagree with that however.”

“But how?”

“No one is all powerful. Not even the gods as it turned out, and your little Neoteric Lord there is a pale and pathetic reflection of what they once were.”

“Okay, but if you’re rebels he would have hunted you down already.”

“He’s certainly been trying but let me fill you in on a little secret. No tyrant in history has even been able to suppress all dissent. You can’t hate everyone and not be hated back after all.”

– from a diary titled “The Testament of Those Who Refuse to Bow”, written within the first decade post-Sunfall.

 There was a welcoming committee waiting for us when we got back to Mount Gloria. I’d expected that. Hell I’d gone to a fair bit of trouble to ensure there would be one. Which is why I was surprised when it turned out that there were in fact two welcomes waiting for us.

The one I’d expected was arrayed atop the walls to the city. It wasn’t the best place to deploy troops, but Vaingloth had plenty of disposable and generally useless minions to work with so spending a few to ensure he had the earliest possible warning of our arrival was a reasonable use of resources.

Why didn’t he simply venture out and confront us in the wastelands? He couldn’t. I don’t mean he was physically incapable of leaving the city. He’d left the city at least three times that I knew of after all, but I was hardly another Neoteric Lord who required his personal touch to dispose of. Or, really, I wasn’t another Neoteric Lord with a bounty of divine power he could look forward to laying claim to. To personally venture forth and expose himself to the perils of the wastelands for someone like me would be to elevate me to a vastly greater rank of importance than even my proponents probably believed I deserved. 

He could have dispatched his troops but then what if I snuck in and found him without an army to back him up? Sure, he’d soundly beaten me the last time we met and had every reason to believe another confrontation would end just as badly for me as the first one had, but what if it didn’t? 

I’d been to the Factorum. Vaingloth wasn’t stupid, he could work out where I was returning from by direction and duration of the trip. Helgon had offered his hospitality, which Vaingloth wouldn’t have been surprised by, but the fact that I’d rejected that hospitality and chosen to return? That had to raise some dire questions. Ones like ‘what did that little rat learn out there?’ and ‘she fought that hard to stay alive, she’s not coming back here to die, but how does she plan to survive?”

I’d been worried when we left that Lucky had sold me out, but even if all of the people I knew had told Vaingloth everything they knew about me in an effort to save their own skins (which I hoped had happened if any of them had been caught), there would have been nothing in any of their stories which could have explained why I was coming back.

So was the person approaching not me then? That was far more likely than the reality. With Helgon in the mix it was impossible to rule out that I’d been replaced with something else. More than a few of the machines that had decorated Helgon’s lab were formed in the shape of torsos and heads and such. Would it have been that out of character for him to send an automata to work some mischief on Vaingloth? 

Well, yeah, it would have been. I’d talked with Helgon for a few hours and even with that brief an exposure I could tell that he had zero interest in provoking the surviving Neoterics when  he could be happily puttering about in his lab instead. I don’t think it was even that he was afraid of them. I think he just didn’t care that he was dead and found the other Neoterics to be a hassle to deal with.

But Vaingloth couldn’t count on that. Someone in his position had to always assume that if there was anywhere else near his level of power and influence that they would try to destroy him sooner or later.

Which, to be fair, I’m sure the other Neoterics were planning to do.

But me? A tiny, insignificant ratkin? He couldn’t acknowledge that he was afraid of me. That would tell the other Neoterics that he had grown weak enough that someone like me could be a threat. 

And they would happily devour him the moment they believed that.

Was that my plan? It would have been a reasonable one except for the part where I had no interest in handing the other Neoterics Vaingloth’s stored power.

That they might be incapable of taking him out was also a bit of a problem. He did know them after all and had to have some serious contingency plans in place in case they moved against him before he eliminated one or more of them.

So. No army’s beyond the gate. No going beyond the walls himself. Posting plenty of guards at the borders though? When the city was up in arms and going through one its periodic ‘unruly phases’? No one would bat an eye at that.

The wealthy of the city were probably making bets as to how quickly the whole situation would blow over and how much extra fuel for the fire portal they would reap from the “deviants” who were caught.

All of that was so obvious that I hadn’t needed to explain my reasoning for longer than five minutes and I’d had the others, and even Helgon, onboard with that part of my plan. 

The second welcoming committee though? That I had no foreseen, and, frankly, it made no sense.

“Could I interest you in a lovely tunnel into the city?” Lucky’s voice was barely more than a whisper but we all stopped dead in our tracks when we heard it.

We were still somewhere near-ish to a mile from the city. Far enough that they couldn’t make out of a lot of detail about us, I hoped, but close enough that we could have navigated by the light the city gave off.

“Who is that,” Xalaria whispered. She wasn’t holding any weapons but from her posture and the rising aura of divinity around her I could tell that was an instant away from changing.

“A friend,” I said, not bothering to whisper. What? The people on the walls were going to hear me? 

Good.

Let Vaingloth be aware that I was coming into the city and he couldn’t be sure where.

I loved that idea.

“Can we afford to disappear now?” Zeph asked.

“I think disappearing now is a miracle I may need to thank Sola for,” I said and hopped into the pit.

Not, possibly, the brightest of moves, but Lucky didn’t exactly have a hard time catching me either.

There are benefits to being Little.

I grinned at the though. No one else would appreciate the joke, and for a change I wasn’t entirely joking when I thought that.

The others followed me down into the darkness without question. I don’t think it was that they’d developed a deep and abiding trust in me. I think it momentum. We’d come this far, walking towards one of the worst foes the world had to offer. If we’d been inclined to stop, we could have easily just stayed at the Factorum.

Well, okay, that’s not exactly true. I was more than inclined to stop. I very much still wanted to run away. That I wasn’t doing so was largely because I knew I didn’t have that option and if I was going to be hunted down and murdered by Vaingloth’s assassins, I at least wanted to die at a time that was convenient for me, not him.

“You found some new friends?” Lucky said, looking more than a little surprised that I had four people with me rather than one.

“It was more than they found me,” I said. “Turns out they’re not fond of Melty Boy either.”

While I wanted Vaingloth to know I was back in a general sense, I switched back to uncommon euphemisms for him because I didn’t want him to know exactly where I was for as long as possible.

“You’ve been organizing the resistance,” Xalaria said, staring at Lucky with a gaze that seemed to be slicing her up and assigning a numerical battle value to each component she could divide Lucky into.

“We’re not that organized,” Lucky said. “Not yet anyways.”

“Really? How did you know to dig a tunnel out to where I was going to be? Or even better how did you know I was even going to back?”

Before she could answer, MB hopped down into the tunnel as the last one in.

MB’s size is basically ‘yes’. It’s big, but exactly how big is a little flexible. I hadn’t been too worried about it fitting into the tunnel, but once it was there, filling the whole corridor, Lucky and the few people she’d brought with her began to look a bit dismayed.

“And that?” Lucky asked, hedging away from me and MB. “What’s that?”

“Call it MB,” I said. “This is a friend. It also wanted to do horrible things to Melty Boy, so don’t worry. You’ve got monsters on your side now too!”

That really shouldn’t have been reassuring, but I don’t think Lucky understood that I was including myself in the count of ‘monsters’. Explaining everything to her wasn’t something that we had time for and I’m not sure I could have presented any of it in a believable fashion for someone who had never been touched by the divine like my traveling companions had.

“Can it follow us?” Lucky asked and then amended. “Can it fit through these tunnels? We couldn’t make any of them all that wide.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said, certain that MB would either fit or would make sure the tunnel let it fit. “I still don’t understand how you managed to make a tunnel this long though, and right where we needed it?”

“We didn’t make most of this,” Lucky said and began leading us back towards the city. “People have been making these for a long time. We just chose where it broke up to the surface.”

“Which just somehow happened to be where I was? This wasn’t meant for me was it?”

“It was meant for her,” Lucky said. In exactly the same manner that Zeph did when referring to Sola.

“Understandable. How did you pick where to break up? I mean your positioning was wonderful. I can’t imagine anyone could predict we’d disappear this far out from the city.”

“We didn’t. Predict where you were going to be that is,” Lucky said. “We’ve got tunnels all over the place. There are at least a hundred paths we can use to get in and out of the city.”

I toppled a bit and touched the wall.

That was a mistake. 

Of sorts.

The wall wasn’t natural stone. It had been worked by a Ratkin’s hands.

A century ago. He’d been tired and scared and angry, but he’d scrapped away at the stone I was touching, carving what little bit he could with makeshift tools and the remnants of his strength.

And he hadn’t been alone.

I’d walked back thinking I was coming to Mount Gloria to strike against Vaingloth the Neoteric Lord. I’d thought that my fellow Blessed would lend me there support but that it would be up to me to enact my plan. That I’d started things and it would fall on me alone to finish them.

I’d been wrong.

I wasn’t alone. I never had been. There were so many people who had fought back in so many ways. Who were still fighting back.

I put my hand fully against the wall and felt the echo of not one soul, but hundreds. They were gone, but the dreams they had for the future carried on.

They’re effort, our efforts, the good that we could do, it wouldn’t be in vain.

“This is madness. You would have us style ourselves as ‘Eternal Lords’ because why? Because you imagine we can overthrow the gods? The very definition of the eternal? Do you not see the contradiction? Even if this mad vision of yours was practical and not the most deranged form of blasphemy imaginable, it would still argue against itself. If that which is truly eternal can be cast down and destroyed then by what measure could you claim to be eternal when the same could as easily be done to you? No sir, I will have no part in this. You cross lines which we dare not ever even venture near! Go to the Council if you will with your evidence of my crimes if you will since I shall certainty be presenting my accusations against this insanity.”

“As I always believed you would. The others disagreed of course. They said we needed you. That you held too much sway to not be included in our little cabal. I, on the other hand, find thirteen to be an inauspicious number, so, to be quite honest, I am quite grateful you have chosen to reject the membership which they demanded I offer you. I’d been afraid for a moment there that the evidence we assembled might be convincing, but you have more conviction than I guess. Bravo, sir. That leaves us, however, with just one matter to attend to.”

– High Accessor Olmen’s final interview with High Accessor Vaingloth before Olmen’s demise of ‘perfectly natural causes’.

The trip back to Mt Gloria felt a lot less perilous than the outward bound one. As usual though, my feelings can be pretty stupid.

Oh, sure, the deadly, maddened spirits weren’t an issue, largely because I didn’t want them to be. In hindsight, that might have been a mistake, ordering them away that is. Maddened spirits have to go somewhere after all and are staggeringly good at causing problems. Since those problems didn’t immediately involve me however, it was easy to overlook them. I just knew I didn’t feel like getting pulled down into a sink hole because a mountain spirit couldn’t conceive of any other expression for the absence it felt.

Also, for as wonderful company as Zeph can be, it was even more reassuring to have three other Blessed walking along beside us. I’d suggested Helgon could, and in fact should, join us (my plan would have worked even better with him there), but, as I’d expected, he opted not to, explaining that he was “much too at home in his labs to be up for any sort of adventures”.

A glance at Kalkit and the responding shrug had confirmed that Helgon wasn’t lying, but I was pretty certain he wasn’t telling the truth either.

Which was fine. If we didn’t all have our little secrets then what kind of fun would be left for Kalkit, right?

Of course it turns out that sharing a secret doesn’t revoke it’s status as a secret if you’re still keeping it hidden from someone, which made convincing them a bit easier that my plan wasn’t as impractical as the ‘we’ll figure it out when we get there’ approach they’d had in mind.

I still suspected that Kalkit had a different, better plan in mind and was keeping it quiet in case mine fell apart, but I couldn’t help but be a surprised that Fulgrox had thought that “winging it” was the right approach to taking down a Neoteric Lord. Xalaria? Yeah, she seemed hot headed enough to rush into her god’s arena of warfare and battle without anything but a hope and a dream (apparently ‘Strategy and Tactics’ belong to some other god?), but Fulgrox was devoted to the Harvest God, and harvests take planning?

Of course, saying that my Blessed companions ‘liked my idea’ is probably a bit strong. Zeph liked it, but I think that was a little bit based on her faith in me and a lot based on wanting to see Vaingloth dead no matter what it took. If it had been Zeph’s call, the trip back would have been a lot faster too.

But instead we walked.

Not ‘flew in Zeph’s arms’. Not rode atop MB’s soft and fluffy back.

Walked. Like with our legs.

Why?

I wanted Vaingloth to know we were coming.

Normally it wouldn’t be easy for him to sense us, but it doesn’t take god-like mystical acumen to notice a tiny glow dot on the horizon which was steadily getting brighter and closer.

The glow was, of course, me. I still couldn’t talk to Sola, something Vaingloth was no doubt well aware of, but her power was in me and with Fulgrox’s help I was learning, bit by bit, how to tease it out.

Had this been before the Sunfall there would have been hundreds of schools where I could have studied how channel the gifts of grace I was blessed with. All of that practical knowledge had been lost though, and what Xalaria, Fulgrox, and Kalkit could do, they had been required to reinvent themselves from first principals.

Zeph had helped a bit too, but her relationship to the divine was starkly different from the rest of us. The power she held was a part of her, not gifted from a god, and her ability to work with it came as much from the memories of the lives she’d once lived as from any practice she’d done in this one. She understood the most basic techniques we shared and some of the fundamental mechanics, which helped with the first lesson Fulgrox had provided, but what came naturally to her were feats I couldn’t replicate any easier than I could flap my arms and fly like Kalkit could.

After a few days of practicing at all the rest breaks we took, Fulgrox pronounced me ‘not a complete disaster’ as a divine acolyte. I could tell Xalaria didn’t have as kind an outlook on my progress, though part of that was probably concern over the fact that the person leading her into battle (sort of) was about as unsuited for battle as it was possible to be.

Kalkit, meanwhile, kept their thoughts to themselves.

I kind of liked that about Kalkit. Sure, they were judging me just like the others, but unless it became a problem, I wasn’t going to hear about how terrible I was as a divine host or wanna-be priestess.

With my ‘newfound mastery of my divine gifts’ I was able to do such exciting things as ‘glow a little brighter than before and intentionally instead of just as a side effect of existing’ and ‘provide a bit of warmth in a slightly larger area though not as big as when Sola was free to work her power through me’ and, best of all,  ‘light easily flammable things on fire’! 

I have to confess that last one was pretty fun once I worked out how to do it. I don’t have a good relationship with fire in general, but that’s because fire has always been something out of my control, a tool for punishment or a meager reward for far too much labor. Being able to set things on fire myself though? Getting to choose the flame and control the burn? Hehehe. I already loved Sola, but the fire thing? Delightful. Simply delightful.

Also, it made cooking a whole lot easier.

Yes, technically none of us ‘needed’ food, but ‘not needing’ and ‘not wanting’ are two very different things, and while Helgon wasn’t willing to come with us, he did insist on packing us the tastiest selection of foods I’d ever had. 

Don’t get me wrong, raiding Vaingloth’s private garden had been a mindblowing culinary experience, but Helgon understood a couple of little concepts called ‘spices’ and ‘flavor’. 

Did I eat far, far too much of our provisions at the first meal? 

Yes.

And I will not apologize.

We were in the wasteland, and I needed strength, and on my literal soul it was so good I could not stop.

Did that wind up costing us an extra day because I was incapable of any movement until I finished digesting the five hundred meals I’d eaten in one sitting? 

Yes.

I am still not going to apologize though.

Extra delay getting Sola back. More peril for the people in Mt Gloria. The chance that a spirit who wouldn’t listen to me would decide to attack at any moment. 

All worth it.

I already hated Vaingloth as much as I possibly could but if there’d been any room left to hate him more, the fact that he was responsible for feeding me a lifetime of horrible mush instead of even one meal like the one Helgon provided? Death was literally too good for him. There could be no forgiveness for such a crime. Ever.

That first meal on the road did restore a lot of my strength too. I wasn’t exactly up for long runs or any desperate struggles but the hike back to Mt Gloria seemed a lot more viable after I’d slept and my stomach wasn’t threatening to burst at any moment.

In the back of my mind, I’d expected I’d only be able to put up the “tough” facade I’d been wearing up to that point for a few hours and then I’d be forced to have Zeph carry me for the rest of the trip. That was still tempting from time to time as we crossed the miles of silent, empty ruins, but I was going to need all her speed and strength later so tiring her out by asking her to haul my carcass over days of rough terrain seemed overly self indulgent. 

MB was an alternative too, but it was feeling as nervous as I was and I wanted it to feel like it could rely on me, since it really didn’t have anyone else.

The closer we got though, the more real everything began to feel. In the Factorum, my plan had been a fanciful daydream. With each step on the road though, I was marching closer and closer to a reckoning that had been coming since before my great grandparents had been born. 

I’m not good at reckonings.

Or marching to my doom.

Fleeing to safety? Yep. That was much more my speed.

This world didn’t have any safety to offer me though. Vaingloth could never have forgiven what Sola and I did to him. Which was fine, because he never could have forgiven me for taking her from him before that. Or forgiven anyone for possessing power that he desired even before I found her.

We were doomed, she and I, before we made any choices at all. 

And then a city had risen up and chanted my name.

That put Vaingloth beyond revenge or lust for power.

Our existence, Sola’s and mine, had become antithetical to his.  In us, people were seeing another choice for who and what they could be. Who they could believe in. 

And maybe they were wrong.

Maybe they were madder than Vaingloth was.

I could offer no proof and wasn’t about to make the claim that I knew how to lead them to something good.

I didn’t need to though. All on their own people had figured out that, however bad things could go by believing in Sola, they would still be better off than they were where Vaingloth had brought them.

People may tolerate tyranny, they may even cling to it out of fear of the alternative, but they will never prosper under it.

Vaingloth had locked us into a eternal moment of torment by taking away the promise of a better future. 

Sola, by her sheer existence, spoke of the rising of new days. 

Had Vaingloth understood what that meant, he would never have used her as a glorified crop lamp. If he’d understood what she was, he would have destroyed her and any other fragment of her he could have found.

He hadn’t been afraid of her though, and he certainly was never of afraid of me.

I hung onto that thought as we approached Mt Gloria.

Vaingloth hadn’t been afraid of me, but he was going to be.

“The experiment seems to have caused a detectable amount of damage.”

“Really? Do you think so? The shard is maintaining its authority and form. I think the decrease in power can be attributed to a lack of channeled grace alone. See, watch as I provide it with a little dram, that should perk it right back up.”

“I was referring to the Blessed, not the shard.”

“The what? Oh, the mortal vessel. Yes, yes, we’ll need someone to sweep up the ashes before the next test. Not really a loss there, our stock is quite plentiful after all.”

“Perhaps we should select the next subject with an eye towards compatibility with the shard?”

“I don’t take your meaning. How would we know that?”

“Ask them I would think?”

“A waste of time. If the test subjects could provide useful insight into the process they wouldn’t have wound up as test subjects.”

– from the voice notes of the Neoteric Lords Hanshel and Tallgrim’s first sessions with a shard of Nylssa the God of Fauns.

Complicated questions usually have simple answers I’ve found. ‘No’, for example, tends to works really great. Or at least it tends to be the right answer to a lot of complicated questions. Saying ‘Yes’ to something someone is hesitant to ask usually results in a transfer of the complications they’re facing so that said complications become your problem, and I am not a fan of either complications or problems.

“There is another piece of information you may wish to be aware of,” Helgon said, addressing the other God Blessed. “My newest interloper here is, at present, cut off from communion with the divine shard she carries.”

Xalaria, Fulgrox, and Kalkit turned to look at each other with even more concern than they’d been showing previously.

“Cut off?” Xalaria asked. Was she hoping I would contradict Helgon? Or maybe soften his warning somehow?

“Yep. She’s still there, but I can’t talk to her, and I think she’s limited in what she can do through me.” There was no sense holding that back. If they had intended to trick me into lowering my guard so they could attack, I’d rather had it over and done with sooner than later. If their intentions were more benevolent, or worst case, they needed my help, making them aware that I could do much for them would save me a lot of trouble later.

“How is that possible?” Fulgrox asked. He caught his hand before it could reach forward on it’s own. I don’t think he was intending to shake me until Sola fell out, but for all I knew that might have worked.

“Vaingloth’s handiwork,” Helgon said. “One of his standard spells.”

“Can you undo it?” Xalaria asked.

“I would need rather specialized ingredients for a working such as that I’m afraid,” Helgon said.

“Ingredients like what?” Zeph asked, her attention focusing on Helgon rather than Xalaria.

“The primary one would be my old co-conspirator’s corpse,” Helgon said. “If you could procure that however, I believe Little’s problem might resolve itself on its own.”

As answers to one of the questions which had driven me across the wasteland to this place, that one sucked.

“I see a large, Vaingloth shaped problem with that idea,” I said. “Apart from that though, I’m in favor of the idea.”

“I believe you would find nine Neoteric shaped problems with the idea,” Helgon said. “Or perhaps eight, or, for all I can say, perhaps there’s no one who would stand with that pompous fool.”

“The other Neoterics won’t stand with him, but they will scramble to claim the power he holds if he loses control of it,” Xalaria said. “It’s what we came here to speak to you about.” She was looking at Helgon when she said that which was a relief since I’d already tried to kill Vaingloth and it hadn’t gone well when I had Sola at her full power backing me up.

“Oh, be assured, I am desperately in favor of the notion as well. The practicality of it however eludes me,” Helgon said. “Sadly that is not a new issue either. The Lord of Mt Gloria may be an idiot but he is a careful idiot and quite secure in his position and power.”

“There’s no such thing as perfect security,” Xalaria said.

“Which of the Neoteric are backing you?” Zeph asked, her wary attention returning to Xalaria.

“None of them, despite any claims they might have made,” Helgon said. “Believe me, no one is in a position to compel the Neoteric Lord or force them to honor any bargains they have made.”

“Their treachery is, unfortunately, not a secret,” Kalkit said. “Their weaknesses on the other hand…”

I’d been under the impression that Xalaria as a Blessed of the God of Battle was the primary danger among the trio. I’d thought that because my brain was operating at about five percent of its usual power. Even five percent was enough to pick up on what Kalkit’s simple statement really meant.

I reached a hand down to scratch MB behind the ear and tried to convey the idea that getting on the Crowkin’s bad side was an incredibly bad idea.

Was I overreacting? Maybe. My instincts were on the side of ‘running and hiding’ as a primary defense mechanism and anyone who could intrinsically see what was hidden foiled that almost entirely. That they were sufficiently attuned to their god that they could spy the most dangerous secrets of the Neoteric Lords though told me that I might not have been overreacting enough.

“Is it to be blackmail then? That would be delicious, but also overwhelming likely to backfire,” Helgon said.

“If I told you, then it wouldn’t be a secret,” Kalkit said.

“But we did have a few questions for you,” Fulgrox said, “and for her.”

“How did you even know I’d be here?” I asked. Zeph and I had planned to head to the Factorum well before we actually left Mount Gloria. The trap Vaingloth had managed to spring on us hadn’t required that he be aware of that, or that we were planning to leave at all.

“You kept your intentions secret,” Kalkit said with a shrug of their wings.

“What? That…you can’t know everyone’s secrets all the time.” I wasn’t objecting because that seemed impossible. I’d had a small taste of what Sola could do and someone who’d had more than a week or so with their god would probably be able to share in the god’s domain a lot more than I had with Sola. What I was mostly grousing about was why anyone would ever have bothered to know anything about me.

“Not everyone, but anyone, and you became a bit more worth looking into after the entirety of Mount Gloria rose up chanting your name.”

“They.

Did.

What?”

I  had faced the wastelands, and admittedly been terrified the entire time. I had faced Vaingloth, and admittedly been less than a second from a horrible death. I had even walked directly into a fragment of the god-killing, world destroying beast, and been completely destroyed by it. You would think after all that, I would be immune to panic.

You would be miserably wrong.

“Yeah. It’s why we ran over here now,” Fulgrox said.

When he said ‘ran’ I was pretty sure he was being literal, except maybe in Kalkit’s case who probably flew.

“The situation in Mount Gloria is unique and unstable,” Xalaria said. “And you are a pivotal component of it.”

I could run but it wasn’t going to help.

Actually I couldn’t run. Even the panic gripping my mind wasn’t enough to talk my body into that sort of effort. There were no reserves of strength in my legs for the terror to tap into.

In hindsight, that was probably a good thing, but then if I had run I’m not sure what difference it would have made with Kalkit able to track me wherever I tried to hide.

“You want her to return and what?” Zeph asked.

“Finish what she started,” Xalaria said.

“What I started was ‘dying horribly’ and I have to say I’m super eager to resume that.”

“Even if it would save your god?” Fulgrox asked.

There was a hope in his eyes, as though an appeal to the divinity within me would be the magic phrase to overcome the sense of self-preservation which I clearly had only a nebulous grasp on anyways.

“Save Sola? Nope. She would absolutely not want me to die horribly for her.”

“She’s a coward too then?” Xalaria seemed to think that was her magic phrase.

I could see why. A lot of people I’d known would have jumped up to fight to disprove her claim. 

Yeah. Jump up to fight the Blessed of Battles.

A lot of people I’ve known have been idiots.

“Sure. We’ll go with that if its what you can understand,” I said. It wasn’t the right answer. I mean, I’m kind of an idiot too, and I couldn’t deny that Xalaria’s words did hurt. The thing is though? I’ve gotten used to that pain. Oh, sure, on some level I was still trying to pick a fight with her, which was just as stupid as throwing a punch would have been, but on another level I really did mean what I said.

Was I a coward? Sure. I valued continuing my own existence over almost anything. Did I rise to do the right thing when I could? Nope. Definitely not all the time, or even often enough. 

Was it more complicated than that though? Yeah. Over the years, I’d sort of accepted that it was, and with Sola believe it me, I saw it even more clearly.

I was afraid. Of a lot of things. And that fear served a purpose. Could I do the right thing in spite of it. Sometimes, and those times counted too. More importantly though, by not hiding the fact that I was afraid from myself could I keep from turning inwards and tearing myself into something really terrible? Someone who liked to hurt others for example because the illusion of power that came with perpetrating violence made them feel less helpless? 

I wasn’t a good person. I knew that. But the things I did were done for better reasons and hurt people the least that I could.

Maybe that’s not a lot to be proud of, but its who I was, and Sola loved me for it, and that was what mattered.

“What are you willing to risk then? To see your god freed?” Kalkit asked as Fulgrox laid a hand on Xalaria to stop her from taking the bait I’d thrown out.

“Don’t you already know that?” I asked, even parts annoyed and worried that Kalkit might be asking simply to be polite.

“Your motivations and beliefs aren’t secrets, not as far as my god’s domain defines things,” Kalkit said.

“But you’ll be able to tell if I’m lying, right?” Like I said, the domain of ‘secrets’ was potentially a really terrifying one.

“Most lies are design to hide something,” Zeph said. “Kalkit always catches those, but that’s not every lie.”

“That’s oddly inconvenient,” I said. “Broad enough to be annoying and yet not precise enough to use as convincing proof.”

“You are not the first people to remark on that,” Kalkit said.

“For what it’s worth, I can hear lies of all types,” Helgon said. “But, you would all be fools to trust me.”

“Noted,” Xalaria said and locked her gaze on me as though the God of Battle gave her some special insights too.

“Listen to everything I say then, and understand me. I am not willing to risk anything for Sola. Because Sola is too valuable to risk. If the only means I have of getting her back is to kill Vaingloth, then Vaingloth needs to die, but I am not going to toss Sola away, or worse back into his clutches, on a half baked plan that ‘might work if we get lucky’. I do not get lucky. Things always turns to crap, the dice always bust, everything always falls apart. So no, I am not willing to risk myself to save Sola. We’re both too valuable for that, and, much more importantly, I think I have a better answer for how to handle Vaingloth.”

“Why do we provide hospitality, and honor the blessing of the hearth for strangers? Is it in payment so that we ourselves might in turn receive safe lodging and free support when we are not secure in our homes? Is there a calculus to the giving of food and shelter such that we may have the expectation that what we give will be accounted for and returned to us coin for coin?”

“To the miserly that would seem the only fair and proper balance. To give a single coin beyond what will be received in kind is in their eyes contemptible. They do not see that in providing hospitality we invest not in our future but in the world as it is in the moment we provide for others.”

“What those consumed by greed fail to understand is that to live in a better world requires that the world be better for all. That in striving to batter down others that they might rise, all they ensure is that there will be misery for all, and solace for none.”

“And so we open our doors and make free with our table, that by giving of ourselves today, a blessed tomorrow may shine on us all.”

– from the Catechism of Tylna, Goddess of Travelers, being being struck from the official records by the First Council of High Accessors.

If there was anything that proved that Helgon was dead it was that he seemed sincere in admitting what he was.

“The plan to summon the Plunderer was one we debated vigorously of course.” Helgon’s gaze went distant and somber. “Perhaps if even one of us had brought up the right point, or conceived a convincing enough argument the rest would have altered course? Perhaps we could have avoided all that came after? I know that was beyond me – which excuses nothing I assure you, I speak only of my own failing. Dyrena though? No. I think she saw even early on what might become of things, but I think she saw too what would have befallen her had she stood in the other’s path.”

“Dyrena’s one of the other fallen Neoterics? Like you?” I asked. She had to be from the wistfulness in Helgon’s voice, but it was good to be sure. If she was still alive, then she was still a problem, and I wasn’t a fan of the problems I already had.

“Like me? No, not at all. I mean, yes, she was one of the Twelve. And you are correct, she was cast down. The first to be in fact.”

“But she’s not a ghost like you?” 

“She could be. I rather wish she was in fact. Her visits were always a delight. For me at least. She may not have gotten as much out of them. Which is perhaps why she chose as she did.”

“Chose what?” Zeph asked.

“It’s difficult to describe without equations, but I think a functional metaphor might be that she left the building.” Helgon’s left hand twitched like he was looking for one of the chalk sticks to write on a nearby board that was covered in chalk lines, numbers and symbols I’d never seen before.

“The building in this context is the world?” I asked, trying my best to follow along.

“The world, the numinous sphere around it, the conceptual volume we occupy. What you might call ‘everything’, though ‘everything’ for us is not ‘everything’ there is.”

“Because the beast, or the Plunderer I guess, isn’t part of our everything. It comes from a different everything,” I said, grasping what he was saying though I was sure I didn’t understand all the implications of what any of it meant.

“Precisely so. All Dyrena left behind was her laughter. At us. I think she must have known it would come to that. Even early on. She never stood against the plan, but her involvement was always at a remove. Most of what she did provide was commentary on disasters which we would have blundered into quite unknowingly.”

“So she could have stopped the Sunfall by letting you all just screw up?” I asked. Was that as bad as the crimes the others committed? I don’t think that kind of question mattered given the scale of the what they’d done.

“Not at all. Had Dyrena not amended our plans, we would not be sitting here as there would be no ‘here’ at all. When I say we debated our scheme vigorously, it wasn’t out of conscience or a struggle with the moral implications. Those who would have provided moral opposition were removed from power long before any open debate on the matter was broached. No, our discussions, once they became openly acknowledged as such were around the practicalities and logistics of our endeavor. No one had had ever dared what we would dare and so there was no roadmap to follow and no guarantee that our approach would yield the results we longed for.”

“And did it? Is this,” I gestured to the everything around us, “is this what you wanted?”

“I wish I could lie and say either yes or no. Were I a proper Lord like the rest I would say ‘no’, because there was still power I had yet to claim. Were I what I had thought myself to be, I would offer a resounding ‘yes’. Time without end? The chance to study and understand, to build a new world drawing upon all the lessons of the old? A path to the perfected forms and eternal states of being for all? Even cast down as I am, even with the world sunken to the state it is, even with all the dead piled upon me, I should be able to say ‘yes, yes it was all worth it’.”

“Why can’t you?” Zeph asked.

“Probably because of us.” An unexpected voice, feminine but deeper than mine or Zeph’s coming from behind my chair should have sent me jumping to the ceiling. 

I drew in a quick breath, maybe to try the aforementioned jump, but my body completely vetoed that idea. To jump one must have muscles and mine were firmly in recovery mode. My bones were in agreement too. From their point of view, they’d been reduced the elemental dust and were still unsure of the benefits of resuming a solid form.

I didn’t fight either of them for one simple reason though. I knew who was behind me.

Or maybe more ‘what’ was behind me.

“Hello God of Battle,” I said, without turning to look at them.

“Hello to you, God of the Sun,” the woman said, walking past my chair to pick up a cup of tea and sit down on Zeph’s other side. I hadn’t seen many Automatas before, so saying that this woman was a unique blend of organic and mechanical parts didn’t mean much coming from me, but it was hard to imagine many creators who would be capable of making metal flex and flow like flesh and flesh appear as solid and unyielding as steel. If the fact that she bore a fragment of the God of Battle inside her wasn’t breathtaking enough, the artistry of her creation would have blown me away too. 

But she wasn’t alone. Along with her, two other people followed.

“The God of…Farms?” I asked, fairly certain but not entirely so.

“The Harvest,” the Orc who answered was big even by orc standards, but his voice was surprisingly soft. He took a cup of tea too, but pushed a chair back to sit on the floor in our circle instead. That still left him at roughly eye level with the rest of us, but it made him a bit less intimidating than his size would have warranted.

“Don’t worry about guessing,” the last person said. They were a Crowkin, and small enough that even I would have towered over them. They hopped onto the orc’s shoulder and settled comfortably there as though it was their right and proper perch. Since the orc held the tea cup up for them to peck a bit of refreshment from, I had to guess that was, in fact, the Crowkin’s proper place.

“Wasn’t sure you would be here,” Zeph said.

“Wasn’t expecting you would be either,” the Automata woman said. “And we wefinitely weren’t expecting her,” she nodded towards me, “though it is nice to see you both.”

“Little, this is Xalaria,” Zeph indicated the Automata, “Blessed of Battle. And Fulgrox,” she indicated the Orc, “Blessed of the Harvest. And…” she paused, turning to the Crowkin. “Do I have your permission?”

“For her?” the Crowkin gestured towards me with a wing. “Yes.”

“Little this is a Kalkit, Blessed of Secrets,” Zeph said.

“I see why guessing wouldn’t have helped,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you all, though I should apologize for not being terribly presentable at the moment.”

“You are, or is it were, a Ratkin?” Xalaria asked.

“Are. Mostly,” I said.

“You seem to have gotten a bit of…of something, um, all over you,” Kalkit said.

“And inside you,” Fulgrox said. “All inside you.”

“Is it growing?” Xalaria asked.

“I don’t think it would fall within the domain of a harvest if it was,” Fulgrox said.

“I doubt it would either,” I said. “You all seem at home here, I’m guessing you’re familiar with the beast fragment that was outside?”

“Yes. We were a bit worried to find it had wandered off,” Kalkit said.

“Worry no more,” I said. “You found us.”

“Us? Fulgrox asked to which MB opened it’s eyes, raised its head and gave a tiny wuff of acknowledgement.

The three Blessed shook in surprise.

“That’s alive!” Xalaria asked.

“And sleepy,” I said. “We had a rough day.”

“It’s not the beast though,” Kalkit said, hopping off Fulgrox’s should to get a closer look at both MB and I.

“That’s mostly true,” I said. “If you’re looking for the beast fragment though, that’s us!”

“I will get us some more tea,” Helgon said. “You may want to explain in a bit more detail Little, but I shall save you some time and…no, wait, my explanations just make everything more confusing. Damn that woman. Dyrena, I can hear that in your voice! You are quite the cruelest person I know.”

He wandered off without explaining what was up with me, or what he was talking about but I think, even with the brief exposure I’d had so far, I understood what Dyrena had said about him.

“Do you want the long version or the short version?” I asked. Did I trust them? Not really. Was I comfortable with being around this many people who could pull down miracles like melting the eyes of a Neoteric Lord when I, notably, did not have access to that sort of shenanigans? Not so much. Was I far too tired to care at this point and maybe hoping that someone would melt me down? I refuse to address such scandalous accusations.

“She’s okay,” Zeph said. “The beast fragment is gone. She and MB are something else.”

“Something else which holds one of god fragments,” Xalaria said.

“Something which you are not actually worried about, or we’d be having this discussion outside already,” Zeph said. 

I don’t pick up on a lot of relationship queues. I’ve been told that people were interested in me when I never caught the faintest hint of what people assured me was ‘flirting’. My new senses had no expanded even slightly in that direction either, and yet I could still tell that there was some kind of history between Zeph and Xalaria. 

Idly I tossed a thought towards Sola that could have been called a prayer. I didn’t expect an answer or Sola to do anything, I just wanted to share my hope with her that the two nice ladies not decide to stop being nice.

“For what it’s worth, she’s telling the truth,” Kalkit said, indicating that they were referring to me. “Which might complicate the question we came here to ask her.”

That they knew of me at all was a bit worrisome. That Fulgrox and Xalaria groaned and sagged in their seats confirmed that my day was going to continue along just like it had been going.

MB turned and wuffed, offering to carry me far, far away which was a seriously compelling idea.