“I am but the first. You all realize that don’t you? If twelve can be cut to eleven, then you must know that eleven will become ten and then nine and on and on, until there is but one, or perhaps zero? But of course you know that. All eleven of you and you all think you will be that one. It is perfect. Precisely what we deserve I suppose. Very well, enjoy this paradise you’ve created and know that as each of you falls, my laughter will welcome you to the void.”

– Dyrena the Eternal’s last words as the first of the Neoteric Lords to perish after the Sunfall

Usually when I’m trying to hide, running into someone I know is a stroke of luck. Finding a secure hidey-hole is great but finding an accomplice is so much better.

Usually.

“Didn’t know you were here Lucky,” I said, looking up at stocky bugbear woman who’d led the first and only work crew I’d ever been a part of. “I’ll just be…”

Going. I intended to finish that sentence with the word ‘going’ and punctuate it by leaping off the balcony I was on. Sadly I wasn’t quite quick enough.

“Ah, you look good kid,” Lucky lied as she dragged me into a suffocating hug.

Like most Bugbears, Lucky was twice as tall as I was and had arms long enough to catch me from the other side of the city, so my failure to escape was not my fault, or at all unexpected.

The hug however was.

“Careful, I’m breakable,” I managed to squeak out, which was both true and something I’d had to remind her of often while I was a part of her crew.

Lucky had picked me out of one of the day job mobs waiting for work in the crop houses. At the time, I’d thought she was taking on a pity case, but it turned out small people like me can handle work that great hulking lugs like bugbears are too big for and that let Lucky volunteer her crew for a bunch of jobs they’d been missing out on.

Being valuable for the first time in my life had been pretty thrilling at first. After the tenth time I got to clean out one of the tiny sewage pipes that only ‘Little’s hands can reach into’ though, the magic started to wear off.

“You’re tougher than you look,” Lucky said, crushing me tighter. “Always have been.”

“Air! Air!” I said, despite the fact that, for a change, I didn’t really need any. 

Or rather I didn’t need any if I was willing to start glowing like one of the fire spigots. Since that would get me and everyone in a three block radius reduced to Kindling though, it seemed like a good idea to take a breath or two.

“Aww, it’s good to see you again, kid,” Lucky said, and let me go, though not so far that she couldn’t grab me again if I tried my ‘jump off the balcony’ trick.

“Yeah. Sorry. Been trying to stay outta sight.” It was normal to feel like a complete heel for abandoning someone who’d done you a good turn, right? Not just a me thing?

“Ain’t we all,” Lucky said and moved to make space for me to get in the door. “Feels like you’ve been keeping warm at least?”

“Scored some extra food today, must be running hot trying to digest it,” I said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. The meal from the garden was still gurgling happily in my belly. That wasn’t why I was warm though.

I checked in with Sola, but had the sense that she was simply watching my exchange with Lucky with fascination.

“Always like hearing that,” Lucky said and closed the door after us. “Don’t suppose they’ve got more to go around?”

“Sure. Triple portions for everyone!” Exaggerated lying is it’s own form of telling the truth I’ve found. In this particular case, I was being somewhat honest though since the garden probably did have enough food in it for stuff everyone at this Nest and then some. Not that any of it would ever make it out of the ‘Eternal Lord’s’ private dining hall.

“Well get into the pile and share that warmth then,” Lucky said. “Got some cold ones here today.”

Cold ones being people who hadn’t been picked up for a workshift and therefor hadn’t gotten to ‘enjoy’ any time in the relatively warm crop houses or fish farms or one of the other places that had a real amount of heat pumped into them.

“Sure. I just. You know.” I had no idea what I was trying to say. ‘Sorry’ didn’t seem to cut it, and wasn’t terribly accurate either. I’d left Lucky’s crew at a bad point – one that hadn’t been my fault, but that I would have burned for anyways. 

Burned like most of the crew had burned. 

“Yeah. Me too,” Lucky said with a resigned sigh, which, wonderfully, could have meant anything.

I tried not to think about what Lucky was resigned to. Was it the past we shared and the people who’d been lost? Was it that she was going to turn me in for what had happened back then? Or had she gotten wind of what I’d done to the patroller, and if so what would she even think about it?

“You got anything for tomorrow?” I asked and almost bit my tongue when I heard myself and how the words sounded like I could be asking for another job. “It’d be nice to catch up if not.”

I don’t know if that was convincing but Lucky smiled anyways.

“This is what I’ve got now,” she said. “This place wasn’t fit for an hour’s flop a few months ago. We’re putting it back together though since the other Nests here are getting full.”

That was basically Lucky in a nutshell.

And it was a very bad sign.

The limit on Nests, and the population in general, wasn’t living space. Whatever city Mount Gloria had been built on top of had housed a whole lot more people who lived here since the Sunfall. Places never got ‘too full’, or even came close though, because there was never enough food for many more people. Technically, no one starved because burning up as Kindlings, or being recruited to work one of the Water or Air portals came well before starvation. Any of those options seemed to work great at keeping our numbers down though.

“Let me help warm the place up a bit if I can,” I said, thinking it was least I could do before I worked out somewhere else to hide.

“Get to it then,” Lucky said and gave me a friendly swat on the back to move me in the direction of the slumber pile.

I slipped into the slightly-less chilly room at the end of the hall to find somewhere around two dozen people huddled under blankets and sheets that were probably as old as the city. There was a spot among them that was reasonably close to the door so I plopped down there, going to back to back with an elderly orc gentleman and front to back with a dwarf lady who was snoring loud enough that I’d heard her out in the hall.

Nest’s are not quiet places, or pleasantly scented ones, but I’d long ago learned to tune out noises, smells, and the occasional jostle.

This time however my filters seemed to be completely absent.

I’ve never seen anything like this, Sola said silently within me.

People sleeping or people sleeping like this? I asked.

Either. Both. 

I don’t know if people needed to when you were around. It sounds like everything was warmer then. Like there were fire spigots everywhere.

I was there, and I was warmth, and light. I should not have fallen. I should not have lost myself.

There was more than sadness in Sola’s words. There was horror. At something as usual as a slumber pile?

It didn’t look like you had a lot of choice in the matter, I offered. It wasn’t the most comforting idea I suppose, but it didn’t feel like Sola should be beating herself up over losing a fight that everyone else had lost too.

There were choices. There had to have been.

Not always. And even if there were, that doesn’t mean any of them were good ones. At this point I think you need to assume you made the best choices you could then, and that any of them that sucked are ones you can turn into fuel to make sure you make better choices next time.

The dwarf lady’s breathing evened out and her snoring became much gentler, which was great. She also shuffled a little closer, which was less wonderful since I knew I could be a restless sleeper and sleep-smacking a dwarf in the face was not a fantastic method making new friends.

If I’m asleep, will you be aware of our environment? I asked, feeling about fifty times too paranoid to surrender myself to helpless unconsciousness for hours given everything that had happened recently.

I will be. We may talk in your dreams if you like, though I will only be aware of those which you choose to share with me.

I suppose I should try to rest then, I said and promptly failed to fall asleep even the slightest bit.

It wasn’t just anxiety either, though there was a ton of that.

I felt like I could hear and feel everyone in the room. There were all the usual creaks and grumbles. No one was terribly happy, but most of them were hanging in there still.

Most however was not all.

I tried to shut my senses down. Learning not to hear things was a survival skill most of the time, but my ears weren’t ignoring anything and my nose was worse.

There’s a kid who’s freezing on the other side of the room, isn’t there? I didn’t have to ask, and Sola didn’t have to answer. I could hear from his breathing and the small whimpers he was making how bad off he was.

And he wasn’t alone.

A little bit away from me, there was an old lady who was having trouble breathing at all. The kind of trouble that never gets better, just slowly worse.

Take me to her, Sola said.

You might think Divine Commands would carry an overwhelming amount of weight. As it turns out though, a lifetime of anxiety can offer pretty strong incentives too.

We can’t start glowing, I said, Not in here. Not where anyone can see us.

I have to do something, Sola said, I have to make up for this.

No. You don’t. This isn’t because of you. This is us. And it’s Vaingloth and the others like him. We’re like this because this all they’ll let us be. Don’t try to take responsibility for things that are someone else’s fault – it lets them get away with things they should never escape from.

I can help them though, Sola said.

If we’re discovered here, the patrollers will burn everyone here as an accessory, I said.

I felt Sola slump a bit in defeat. I’d known the danger I would be putting people in, the sacrifice I might be inflicting on them, and I’d done it anyways.

Maybe I was a terrible person. It wouldn’t surprise me.

What did surprise me was when I sat up and started moving whisper-quiet around the room.

Sola wasn’t controlling my body or anything. It was entirely my idea.

Where are you going? Sola asked.

To the old lady. You said you could help her right?

But if we’re caught, she’ll die and so will all the others.

We’re going to die anyways, I said. We’re mortals. It’s what we do. And it doesn’t matter. Not as much as how we live. Not as much as how we treat each other.

“We have endured hardship and suffering because the gods were too weak, but where they failed us, our strength will be our salvation. Through sacrifice and toil will a new day bathed in holy light soon be born.”

– Vaingloth the Eternal at the 100th anniversary of the founding of Mount Gloria.

I’d been lucky. It felt weird. I wasn’t used to it. Most of the ‘luck’ I’d ever run into, I’d made for myself. I suppose in a sense the same was true with finding another outlet from the big watery cave I’d fled into. 

As I was searching around towards the bottom of it, the idea that it might simply be a big pocket of water and that I’d wind up backtracking far enough to walk into Vaingloth’s waiting clutches occurred to me more than once. I knew precisely nothing about cave diving, or mining, or how to explore underwater and, unsurprisingly, Sola wasn’t terribly familiar with any of those things either. Together though? Together we managed not to suck.

I guessed that if the water was pooling up in the room I entered from then there was probably some outlet that let the water leave at about the rate it was coming in. I don’t know if that was at all guaranteed, and I was able to easily imagine that the outlets might be a bunch of tiny little cracks rather than nice big tunnels I’d be able to swim through. Since I had nothing to lose by searching though, I swam down to bottom and got to work.

One thing I did know about water, was that being under a lot of it made for a lot of pressure. People who had to retrieve things that fell into the reserve cisterns always complained about feeling like their ears were going to burst. The watery abyss cave was a lot deeper than any of the cisterns were though and I didn’t notice any problems with pressure at all. Apparently having a god backing you up – even if she wasn’t a god who had anything to do with water – was a pretty handy thing.

It took some searching at the bottom of the cave but that was where my skills came in handy. There were plenty of passages out but finding them involved searching the walls since it wasn’t easy to see the gaps, given how rough and twisty the walls became. There were plenty gaps that seemed like passages but most only ran a little bit inwards. The ones we were looking for were the ones which connected to somewhere else.

“Somewhere else” turned out to be another, smaller, abyssal cave, and then a third narrow cave/tunnel which lead mostly upwards and wasn’t fully flooded.

“We must be back up to where we were in the other room,” I said as we came out of the water. I was still glowing so it was easy to see no one was around, the tunnel was only about three feet wide and it ran upward past the point where Sola’s light could reach.

“This is a better hiding place than the grotto was, do you want to stop here?” Sola asked.

I did. Curling up in a tunnel for a decade until people forgot about me seemed like a brilliant plan.

Except Vaingloth wasn’t going to forget. And I had no idea what sort of techniques he might have to find us. Sola was many things but ‘subtle’ didn’t seem to be high on the list, so banking on the Eternal Neoteric Lord being unable to locate her seemed unwise.

As much as I hated the idea, I had a sinking feeling that the safest place was going to be the one which took advantage of my greatest strength; that nearly everyone overlooks me. 

Ratkin aren’t large in general. We can be as tall as dwarves, but we’re about a quarter of a dwarf’s mass and maybe a tenth as dangerous. That I’m fairly small even for an adult Ratkin means I’d get mistaken for a child by people from other species a lot, and that’s when they notice me in the first place.

Where they tend to overlook me the most though is when I’m in the company of other Ratkin. It’s less that there’s strength in numbers for us, and more that when there’s a few Ratkin around, people tend to call on whoever’s the biggest one they can see and assume that’s ‘our leader’.

Because of course we must have leaders right?

As if a ‘leader’ would be able to do anything for us.

If there’s something that would entice one of us – like the offer work for the day, or food in general – that’s really all that’s needed to ‘lead us’ anywhere. Beyond that we tend to follow our own paths.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I guess most Ratkin don’t run away as good as I do, and some of them do seem to have more solid friend-groups than I’ve ever had outside of daydreams. 

You’d think we’d have pretty tight knit families, and I used to wonder if we did once upon a time. With Ratkin being considered exceptionally viable sources for Kindling though, our families don’t stay together very well. 

In a sense that was good news for me though.

Creeping up from the underground tunnels, I focused on breathing normally and feeling the rough tunnel walls under my hands. Bits of the tunnel broken off here and there, showering me with enough dirt to undo the otherwise lovely bath I’d had swimming through the sunken caverns. That was good too.

The dirt and grime helped me look like I normally do. A spotlessly clean Ratkin would have been enough of an oddity to attract attention from almost anyone, and attention was the last thing I needed. A muddy disguise wasn’t an amazing one, but it fit me well.

Even more importantly than acting as a disguise though, climbing up, and getting dirty, and breathing like the absolutely normal girl I was reconnected me with the ‘solid’ parts of me that Sola had talked about.

I was about halfway up the tunnel when I noticed the glow of her power around me beginning to fade, and I had plenty left to go by the time it winked out entirely.

“I fit in you? I don’t understand how you did that?” Sola said.

“I don’t either.” No point lying to her there. “I noticed before though that the more I was just me, the more the glow dimmed down. I think if I don’t use your power, I’ll stay more myself and, I’m guessing, if we do much ‘godly’ stuff, I’m going to glow to the point where maybe I’ll burn up or something?”

“I won’t burn you up,” Sola said. “You carry me in you, and I could never wish you ill.”

“Even if I did something directly against you?”

“If you turned on me, or began to hate me, you would no longer be carrying me inside you,” Sola said. “I…I think I would still cherish you for freeing me from the garden though.”

“Was it that bad there?” I asked, remembering what a paradise the place had seemed like.

“I was trapped. I was being used, and I was blocked from being any more than what the gardener wanted me to be,” Sola said. “While I was there, so much of me drifted beyond my reach. So many parts of who and what I am were cut off from me. With you, even if you’d stayed hidden in the underwater cave, I could grow into the fullness of your life, and then beyond it.”

“Do you really want to though?” I asked. “I mean, isn’t reclaiming your missing bits going to put you on a path towards running into the thing that ate you again?”

“Yes. It will. I believe that’s why its still here. It knows that life persisted through its assault. It can feel that embers of me and the rest still remain. It knows that it in time those embers will flare up again, and again it will feast.”

“Can’t say I’m a fan of that idea. I don’t want to get eaten, and I definitely don’t think it would be good if you did either.”

“We are of one mind on that,” Sola said. “Which is why, in this lifetime or the ones which follow, I must discover the truth of the devouring beast. Everything has a weakness, and everything can die. I will not rise again until I hold whatever knowledge and weapons are needed to ensure that my next meeting with my ancient foe will be its last.”

How you could kill something that was large enough to eat the sun, the stars, and the sky itself was so far beyond me that I didn’t waste anytime thinking about it. Plus there was really only one answer I could make to that.

“I’ll help.”

Sure, my help and the help a random bug could give would be more or less identical in terms of usefulness, but I was used to only be able to make small differences.

“You already have, but I won’t say no to anything else you bring me.”

I’m not going to lie, feeling the gratitude of a god is a heady thing, even if the god in question is a tiny little fragment of who she used to be.

That little rush stayed with me as I squirmed through some tight places and finally managed to pop out into the lower sewer tunnels.

I was home! Sort of. I didn’t live in the tunnels really. Nothing did. I did however use them often enough while running away that I had a decent idea how to get back to the streets of the Low City, which I could more properly call home.

Had I been one of Vaingloth’s chosen, I would have had an actual building of my own to call home. If I was one of the Requisites, I would have at least had an apartment to wander towards. Instead though, I went looking for a Nest.

‘Nests’ had all kinds of bad reputations associated with them. No privacy and no consistent occupants. Violence and theft being the standard way of life. All the usual stuff that people thought the Kindling-bait of the world got up to or deserved.

In practice though? In practice, most Nests were pretty decent. With only a couple of candles of heat and light, it made sense to sleep in big groups. Violence happened, sure, because…well, people are people, but it wasn’t hard to see coming, and avoiding it usually wasn’t too difficult. 

Food was shared a lot more than the High City people seemed to think too. There was never as much as I would have liked, but I’d been able to get by. 

From where I finally popped back up into the Low City, I had about a fifteen minute walk to get a Nest for the rest period. I was able to tell it was time for rest largely because the beacon from the Eternal Lord’s tower had been turned to its lower setting.

Also only a few people were still wandering the streets.

Thankfully, and as was typical, none of them paid me any mind. I was a scrawny little rat girl who wasn’t carrying anything interesting beside some mud and grime. Beating me up would get my attacker some dirty knuckles and nothing else.

The nice thing about most Nests is that those qualities would also make for an easy entry pass since I clearly wasn’t the kind to start any trouble, or, if I did, it would be trivial for them to kick me out.

I’d come up pretty far from my usual haunts so I had to wander around a bit before I found the Nest’s entrance up on a second floor balcony of a pair of buildings which were largely boarded up to keep what little heat there was sealed in.

I was looking forward to a cursory couple of questions and then settling down in a nice anonymous pile of Ratkin and other bodies where I could rest and make some longer term plans.

Of course that was not to be though.

“Hey, Little, been a while,” an unfortunately familiar voice said as the door to the Nest opened.

“Though the gods have failed us, and allowed our world to be cast into darkness and desolation, through our great efforts we stand at the cusp of reclaiming the glorious day that is ours by right. The sacrifice and toil required will fade away under the glorious light the world will soon know.”

– Vaingloth the Eternal, on the 25th anniversary of the founding of Mount Gloria.

I didn’t need to breathe. 

But I very much still wanted to.

That it had been my idea to essentially drown myself in a pool which had no guarantee of being connected to any other waterways did not make the experience any more enjoyable. It was only the fact that the alternative was coming face-to-face with a pissed off Neoteric Lord that kept me moving forward. The water could only kill me, Vaingloth occasionally got ‘creative’ with his punishments.

Walking down into the pool wasn’t entirely terrible either. While my lungs were berating my brain with requests to do their job, Sola’s support allowed me to mostly ignore that and focus instead on where we were going. I was so used to operating in the dimmest of lighting conditions that the illumination Sola’s essence was providing made the eerie underwater world even stranger though.

What I’d thought was a relatively small pool opened up into a vast, flooded cavern. I stood at the edge of it, where the pool had long ago broken through the wall of the fissure, and felt like I was about to fall into an endless abyss. 

Except of course I wasn’t falling. I couldn’t. I was marvelously light and buoyant. Too buoyant into fact. To move downwards I released the breath I’d been holding. I didn’t need the air since Sola was sheltering me and without it I could swim freely.

No. Not swim. I could fly.

I’d never learned how to swim, That was something for the Lords of the City. Water was too precious to spoil by putting bodies in it, and heat was too scarce to risk the deathly chill anything but a specialized pool would carry.

By all rights, the plunge I’d taken should have killed me even apart from the problems with breathing it presented. The water close to Sola’s chamber had been heated by her presence. The pool I’d run to was much farther away though and was sitting at a much more typical not-technically-instantly-lethal-temperature-but-close-enough, like most other water I’d run across.

Except for me, it was mild and pleasant. Because Sola didn’t want us to freeze.

Sola also didn’t want us to get caught, so where my random flailings couldn’t have been described as proper swimming by even the kindest observer, they did propel us onwards.

Grace came surprisingly quickly too. Without any need to panic, I was able to feel the flow of the water and what worked to move us through it. Sola gave my limbs extra strength but the water still moved best when I cut through it with long, clean strokes. Long, clean strokes which sent me down into the fathomless abyss because unless Vaingloth came looking for us personally, and decided to jump into a random hole and go for a little swim, there was no chance anyone else was going to follow us.

I make statements like that and then everytime I shudder waiting for the world to smack me for being arrogant enough to think that I knew anything at all. In this case however, I was right. It helped a little that Sola’s absence hadn’t quite been discovered at that point, or that when it was, no one would even begin to imagine that someone like me had been the one to steal her away, but my reasoning was still sound, and I stand by it.

The abyss wasn’t quite as endless as I at first imagined it to be either. It was still vast and filled with more water than I’d ever seen in my life. 

Which was strange.

Where the fire portals brought heat and light into the world and had to be feed with Kindling disturbingly often, there were also water portals which were needed to supply the fresh water the city required. The water portals didn’t demand sacrifices like the fire portals did – not simple, direct ones anyways. Instead they required constant vigilance and warfare to keep open since the creatures which lived beyond the portals had a habit of seeing the things on our side of the portal as free snackies. Being recruited for the water legions was a great method of rising above the lot in life me and people like me had, with the one, tiny, caveat that it was an even better method of rising above life in general and becoming the free snackies the water domain creatures were looking for.

If the fire portals were kept open by burning Kindling, then the water portals fed on the blood of the legions who fought within them. That wasn’t the official story but I’d never met anyone who was under the impression that things worked otherwise. Even that didn’t stop the legion from finding the recruits it needed though. From the people who signed up because whatever money they made before dying would keep their families going for a bit longer, to the ones who ‘signed up’ with a blade held at their throats. The legion needed bodies and whatever it took, it got them, and in exchange they won a small trickle of clean water to make life in the city possible. The thought of how many lives would have been required to fill a cave of this scale was horrifying on a level I’d never considered before.

“There should be fish here,” Sola said, her voice audible only to me in the cavern of water.

“They’d freeze wouldn’t they?” I asked. The fish I knew would be lost in a place like this. No tank walls, no air bubbled in, no warmth, no food. The fragile little things were clearly meant for some very specific conditions, as witness by the how many of them turned up dead and floating each day and had to be tossed onto the processing lines immediately before their bits ruined the meatslaw base that a lot of other foods were made from.

“I don’t know,” Sola said. “My memories of the world-as-it-was are scattered and disconnected. I can’t recall who held dominion over fishes, or if there were separate domains for the fishes of the salt and fishes of the fresh. I just remember that there were fishes. More types than anyone ever counted.”

I stopped swim-flying for a moment and sat with the ripple of loss which swept through her.

“They say there’s not much left of the old world, but it was always hard to imagine how much more there could be than just more people and more cities and more Lords,” I said, trying to guess how a space like this could be filled with anything but the fish I knew.

Maybe bigger ones? And smaller ones? The bigger ones wouldn’t have been preserved because they were too much trouble to fit in the tank we have and the smaller ones wouldn’t have been worth the effort to process. So probably there were fish of different sizes. From Sola’s words though I had the sense of the diversity went far beyond just size.

“Could they be brought back?” I asked. “If we found the others like you? The ones who were supposed to take care of the fish?”

“I don’t know. I remember shining on the fish in the seas and the fish in the lakes and streams, but I never knew them,” Sola said, still lost chasing a memory. “I think…I think what’s lost is lost. I don’t think even the one who bore the domain of the seas could restore them. I think instead they might make new ones. Ones to the fit the world as it is rather than the world as it was.”

“Is there anything that would fit the world as it is?” I asked. “Is there even still a point to this place at all?”

“That’s for you to say. I am of this world, but your choices are the one that make it,” Sola said.

“I don’t think my choices matter all that much. Or at least they didn’t before I met you. Now they mostly matter because if I make a wrong one I’ll get us both killed.”

“You choose to be in this world. You fight and struggle to stay here.”

“Is being afraid of dying that much of a choice though?”

“It’s enough of one,” Sola said. “And it leads to so many others.”

“So what choices should I make from here then? I was thinking we’d see if we could find any other places to come up and then hide from there but beyond that I’ve got no idea what to do next.”

I could be honest with her more than I was with myself because I wasn’t going to scare the wits out of her by facing the fact that previously zero things I’d done in the last several hours had any sort of thought put into them.

“Survival is reasonable goal,” Sola said. “It’s what I chose long ago and its made me I’m what I am.”

The words were in my voice, which was growing to sound natural, but they bothered me because they were my words too. I was a ‘survivor’ in the sense that I’d scurried away from everything that was going to kill me. So far at least. I knew that could change in an instant

“What if…,” I started to ask and then reconsidered it. “Are you happy with what you are now? With what putting survival first made you into?”

“That’s two questions with many different answers,” Sola said. “Am I happy to be here? Yes. The state I’m in is a miserable one, and my limitations are all but unbearable, but I am bearing them, and I am still here despite them.”

“Do you even have a choice about that though?”

“Of course. I could hurl myself back against the thing that devoured me. My domain would return. Something would be born in time to fill the place where I stand too. But it wouldn’t be me. I could throw aside all the problems I see before me and let them be someone else’s issues to deal with.”

“But you don’t.”

“Nor do you.”

“I don’t do anything to fix the problems though. I can’t.”

“If you can’t, then simply choosing to survive until you can, or until you can be a part of fixing them, is still doing something.”

She wasn’t supposed to be the one cheering me up. I was fine after all. She was the one who’d lost more than the entirety of my existence.

So why was I feeling better as we talked?

I shook my head.

I was not going to think about how long it had been since I’d had anyone to talk to. 

It definitely wasn’t that.

Cool thing about floating in an underground abyss? It was impossible to claim someone was crying.

“We could just stay here forever couldn’t we?” I asked as I started swimming again.

“Not forever. There is no forever. I think that’s what the old me learned. But, yes, we could stay here. If that was what you wanted.”

“Never hungry, never cold, and no one able to find us or hurt us? I’m not going to lie, it sounds pretty good.”

“But not good enough?” Sola asked as I kept swimming and saw the abyss’s floor come into view.

“It might be great for me, but you need more,” I said.

“I am for all intents and purposes a new creation, but I can feel the ages I once existed through. We could spend the whole span of your life here and I would still be better off than trapped in the garden as I was.”

“Maybe, but more people need you than just me, and Vaingloth would probably find us here eventually. We need to keep moving.”

“Are we running from or running too something?”

“For now? We’re just running,” I lied.

I was too small and too unimportant, even as a god bearer to change the world.

I was also too stupid not to try.

“Where the god abandoned us, we shall forge our own bright and shining star through sacrifice and unity to illuminate this world that all may see the greatness we bring in the coming days and weeks!”

– Vaingloth the Eternal’s promises at the founding ceremony of Mount Gloria.

I was a god. Or we were. Really Sola was. But she was a part of me, so I was stuck being one too.

Divinity sucks.

“Does it hurt?” Sola asked. I couldn’t see her as a separate person anymore, but her voice was still distinctly her own.

I mean it sounded exactly like mine, but she had a presence the size of a mountain and I very much did not.

“No,” I lied. 

Which was pointless. She was a part of me. She knew immediately when I was lying, but a lie is sometimes a choice more than a statement of fact, and for the time being, carrying the divine essence of sun did not hurt.

“I need to be smaller,” Sola said. “You’re right that we shouldn’t be glowing like this. I’m just too big though. I’m spilling over I think, but I don’t know how to throw away any more of myself.”

“What do you mean ‘throw yourself away’?” I asked.

“Before, I was a lot more than I am now. I remember being torn apart though. There’s something out there. You saw it I think. In my old home. I escaped by tearing this part of me away so I wouldn’t be eaten.”

“How do you…?” I started to ask and then reconsidered the question. It was godly nonsense. They were different than people like me. Different rules applied to them, so, sure why couldn’t they rip themselves into bits and then live on in those bits. “Don’t worry about it.”

“They’ll find us though. They’ll find you.”

“Not if we stay down here.”

“But the garden isn’t safe.”

“Which is why we’re leaving,” I said and scurried over to the gap in to roots I’d entered through. 

I tried to draw them back closed to hide the passage. The effort worked better than I could have hoped. Not only did the roots shifts to block the entrance, they grew even thicker, obscuring the gap completely.

With the glow that was radiating from me, I could see more of the passage I’d fallen into more clearly than before. The rocks still looked fractured and disturbingly likely to come crashing down, but they remained solid as I crept past them, working deeper into a maze of cracks and crevices which suggested a massive force had broken the land at some point in the not terribly distant past.

“We’re not going to be safe here for long, but if we can keep moving, we’ll be a bit safer until we can figure out where we need to go.”

I said that like I had a plan. I did not. I had instincts and intuitions and neither of those scored high in the reliability department.

But I was god now, right? So why was I running. Why not just smite my pursuers with the power of the sun?

I’m not terrible smart sometimes, but I’m not a total bonehead either.

Sure. Sola was a god. Or part of a god.

She’s also been captured and held for at least long enough to make a garden stuffed full of near extinct fruits and vegetables. Had she been powerful enough to smite her captors, they would likely be a burnt ashen stain on the ground long ago.

So, no, I was not interested in testing the fragment of godly might I carried against Vaingloth the Eternal, Neoteric Lord and Savior of Those Who Live Under His Blessed Light.

Which was how I found the flooded cul-de-sac.

The fracture I’d been following had split several times and it had taken me about a hour to reach the end of the path. I hadn’t been following any particular strategy but the trickles of water had led me to a widened area where a pool had formed.

The water smelled clean and cool, then when I dipped a finger in I didn’t feel a chill at all.

“That’s me,” Sola said. “We’re sustained by own our light.”

“So I won’t be cold anymore?” I asked, trying to imagine what that would be like. I could sleep anywhere! Anytime!

“Only if you want to be,” Sola said. “No hunger either. Rest and sleep will be good for you still, but if you need to, we can go a lot longer without any of that than you’re used to. The same with breathing.”

“Wait, I don’t need to breathe anymore?” That was far more than I’d imagined was possible, despite that fact that I was magically glowing in a very impossible manner already.

“If you need to go without, we won’t need to, but it’s not something you want to do too much.”

“What happens if I do it too much?”

“You’ll become more like me. You’re still almost entirely an Incarnate, but a little bit of you is less solid than it was. If all of you shifts towards what I am, then we’d lose our grasp on this world. You could become too divine to be a physical part of the world anymore.”

“So, a ghost then?”

“Not even as substantial as a ghost,” Sola said. “Think of it more like becoming an idea in place of being a person.”

“You seem a lot more like a person than an idea.”

“That’s because you opened your heart to me and let me in,” Sola said. “Before you came into the garden, I had no one. The only thing I could touch in the world was the life in the garden. I nourished it and it held me safe, but I couldn’t be more than what the fruits knew I was.”

“How did plants keep you safe? Or hold you at all?” I asked, trying to fathom how something as vast as I could sense Sola to be could have been trapped by an acre of fruit an vegetables.

“I needed something in this world to cling to,” Sola said. “Something to keep me here and not out there, where the thing that destroyed me is. The plants couldn’t ‘believe in me’ like you can but there was a relationship between us. I was able to give them a part of myself, enough to hang on here and work miracles that reinforced our bond.”

“Miracles? For plants?”

“I brought them back,” Sola said. “They began as dead and lifeless seeds, but I was able to bring them the life which had been stolen from them.”

“You can raise the dead?” People were never specific about what the dead gods had been able to do or why they mattered. Whatever stories there were about them had been mostly forgotten I think once people saw that they couldn’t do anything for us. After all, who needed the gods a bunch of dead people used to worship when every city had a Neoteric Lord who served basically the same function?

“No, and yes, and its complicated and messy. That power wasn’t part of my domain. I held sway over neither growing nor reaping, neither harvest nor planting. I know that, but I also know that there is no one who holds those domains, and no one to stop me from claiming them. Not fully anyways.”

“What do you mean ‘not fully’?” I asked feeling like there was something more important there than the gods have a bunch of different jobs and the ability to sub in for one another if someone was out sick for the day.

“I was once the Sun. Or a part of the Sun. The old me had many domains to bear, Light, Knowledge, the breaking of darkness, and the giving of life. I remember those, and I’m sure there were others. The thing is, all the others? They’re not a part of me anymore. I can act through them and any of the other unclaimed domains, but I am not the one who bears those burdens.”

“Who does then?”

“For many of them? No one,” Sola said and I felt a heartbreaking loneliness of her words. There was loss within her that felt both agonizingly familiar and vastly alien. “There are pieces of me out there with no one to carry them. There are pieces of all of us, the others like me, scattered across our world and and the domains of most sit unclaimed and without anyone to nurture or care for them.”

“Most but not all? Does that mean there are other people out there like you and me?” I had to know because any other god bearers, or whatever I was, were either going to be my best possible allies or my worst conceivable enemies.

“I don’t know,” Sola said. “I can feel some of the domains that I was once tied to, but not all of them. It could be that the missing ones are still recovering, or that they’ve been truly forgotten, or that something else has taken them.”

“The beast that ate you? Could it still have some of them?” 

Asking questions I don’t actually want the answer to is a shockingly stupid mistake I’ve made a lot in my life, and it seems to be one I am simply incapable of learning from. If the god eating monster still had the other parts of Sola, then it would have a piece of her in its gullet and, by extension, a piece of me too. Me, who couldn’t even fight a patroller fairly, and had absolutely no hope against a Neoteric Lord, or even one of their minions. My only hope against the god eater was that I was literally beneath it’s notice. I was so small, it was incapable of perceiving my existence. It could perceive Sola just fine though and if it sniffed her out, I would amount to a single grain of salt on the snack it would make of her.

“If it did, it would have taken my place,” Sola said. “I don’t feel anything carrying the burdens I and the others carried. No grace flows through any of the domains I can feel, not now anyways.”

“Okay, so it ate you but it didn’t get your power? Or your position or whatever?”

“We were more than the power and authority,” Sola said. “We were wellsprings of grace, we were imagination and potential given form. We took the dedication and love of our worshippers and rewove the threads of fate, untangling snarls, guiding the right effects to the causes which we wished to produce them. When we were devoured, all that was lost. The dedication given to us, the love, and hope, and faith, all of those were torn from us. The world you were born into grinds onwards because the people of it are stubborn, and that stubbornness is the only tool they have to push past atrocity and nightmare.”

“I don’t know how well we’re doing with that. Most people just ignore what they don’t want to see.”

“They don’t understand how to do anything else. Or why they need to.”

“That’s me most days. No idea why any of this is worth it.”

“And yet you rescued me.”

“It felt like the right thing to do. And you weren’t asking me to. You didn’t want me to get hurt.”

“I still don’t.”

“I haven’t met a lot of people like that. I don’t think I can afford to let any that I do go.”

In the dark, I felt a mighty tremor rumble through the ground.

Which was interesting, both because the rocks didn’t come crashing down on me and because the glow around me had faded away while Sola and I had been talking.

I also felt more centered, and about as well rested as I had on my ten best days combined.

“My jailer has noticed I am missing,” Sola said.

“Yeah. I think we need to get farther away. Feeling kind of worried he’s going to level Mount Gloria looking for us.”

“We’ll need to backtrack. I can sharpen your memory if that would help?”

“I’ve got a different idea. Let’s go where they won’t think to follow and may not be able to even if it does occur to them.”

And with that I walked into the water and stopped breathing as Sola’s glow began to shine from me once more.

“Under your holy light, we stand revealed and accepted, and through the darkness, your shepherds will guide us to your understanding and love.”

– Traditional prayer to Solus the Divine Sun.

“To your flame we give ourselves, for your glory, we burn. Your light shall scourge the wicked from the world and purify your people.”

– Neoteric chant of the crowds gathered to watch Kindling being sent off to the portal of flame.

I was looking at the sun. Directly at the sun. That was supposed to be a bad thing wasn’t it? So why was I seeing more clearly than I ever had before?

“I can go,” my sunfire twin said. “I don’t want to, but I know, or I think, being around me can be bad for people like you.”

“People like me?” 

Just the most brilliant question I know. Top work of the world’s most clever mind. In my defense, literally nothing in my life or any story I’d ever heard had prepared me for what was in front of me. I think the only reason I didn’t either go stark raving mad or, more sensibly, run until my legs gave out, was that being bathed in the light of understanding comes with a natural calming effect.

I was still nearly petrified of course. Overwhelming awe isn’t something you can just laugh off with a cynical chuckle. Or it’s not something I was able to laugh off, and I’ve had lots of practice being cynical, so I presume that’s a general rather than personal truth.

“Incarnates. Ones who are part of the world’s solidity.”

“I’m what now?” I’m not stupid. Really. What was in front of me was impossible though, and my brain had a lot of reorganize to fit in the belief that was I seeing could even adjacent to real.

“I’m sorry. I’m not what I was. I should be able to just show you all this and have what I want you to know just appear in your mind. I’m supposed to be able to do that, but I can’t.”

“It’s okay. We can just…why don’t we start over?” I suggested. The blazing copy of me was powerful beyond my imagining. That was easy enough to see that it penetrated the confusion that was swirling around in my head. What came with it though was a sense of how vulnerable the other me was, and that made the least sense of anything up to that point. “You can call me ‘Little’, that’s what everyone else does.”

I sat down and invited the other me to do the same.

“But that’s not your name?” she said, sitting down exactly as I had.

“It’s part of it, and the rest is ridiculous,” I said. “What’s your name though?”

“I don’t have one. Not any more.”

“What happened?” It seemed like both a nicer question than ‘what are you’ as well as being one that wouldn’t be as terrifying to hear the answer to.

“I don’t know. I think something stole me.”

“You were kidnapped?”

“No. Maybe eaten would be closer? I know I’m not what I was. Things are missing. I’m…maybe smaller is the right term? It’s confusing and it sucks, because I’m supposed to know all this stuff. I can feel it. But instead I’m just…just broken and trapped here.”

I don’t know if her frustration and resentment struck a chord in me because she was speaking in my voice, or because her emotions were too close to my own most days. 

“What do you mean ‘trapped’?” I asked, looking around for the walls of a cage that had to be wrapping around us. Not a single bar was visible, but I still had the sense that my double was telling the truth.

“I’m not an Incarnate like you are. I don’t have a place in the solid world like you do. I don’t think I’m supposed to be here at all.”

“Where should you be?”

“Somewhere without the weight of this place. Somewhere I can be everything I am, even the parts that contradict each other.”

“Can you get there? If you could get out of here you mean?” By which I was also asking if she’d be able to take me there since it sounded a lot better than anywhere I’d ever been.

“No. It’s not safe there. I don’t remember much about it, but wherever my home was, it’s death to go back there.”

“That makes two of us then,” I said and started thinking for the first time since I’d been grabbed, what my future was going to look like.

The patrollers did not tolerate even small acts of rebellion, and stabbing one of them as much as I had was more than a small act. They were going to be hunting me until the day I died, and they were going to put considerable resources into making sure that day came real soon.

Which left me where?

Could I hide in tunnels forever? I wouldn’t have thought so because of the whole issue with starving to death, but the garden around us still had plenty of food. I could live a long time on just what was around me, and the plants could always grow more.

Except, I couldn’t stay in the garden either, because gardens had gardeners and the gardener of this place was going to want to kill me even more than the patrollers did.

The food here was someone’s secret, someone who was not into sharing priceless treasures like this. My sunfire double made things even worse. If the food was priceless, then her worth was incalculable.

A shiver ran threw me despite the warmth of my twin.

A priceless garden that was home to a being of unimaginable power (even if she was hurt and broken)? There was one person in the whole city and one person only who could be the owner.

“We need to get out of here,” I said. 

If I didn’t take her, it was possible I might be able to hide in a deep enough hole to live out whatever days it might take for starvation to do me in. Surviving together seemed laughably unlikely, but since my death was pretty much assured in either case, I wanted to at least be able to live with myself until it came.

“I can’t leave unless you’re willing to carry me,” my twin said.

“That shouldn’t be hard, you look pretty light.” I shot her a stupid smile to go with the joke and congratulated my brain for coming up with the remark when it was worked, not a half hour too late.

“I might hurt you though,” my twin said, apparently her sense of humor being one of the things she’d lost.

I laughed for her.

“You won’t be the first,” I said. “And at least this time I get a choice in the matter.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I think if you cast me out, it’ll destroy me again and I’ll have to start all over.”

“Staying here is going to destroy you too though, isn’t it?” I asked.

“No. This isn’t death. It’s not life either though. I’m locked in here, stuck in stasis. I’ll never be anymore than I am now. It keeps me safe.”

“Keeps you safe from other people, or keeps them safe from you?”

“Both. But I’m not meant to be safe. And I don’t think the people who want to be safe from me should be either.”

“Sounds like an excellent reason to get you out of here. Unless I’m one of the ones who shouldn’t be safe from you?”

“I’m a danger to you, but not like the others. If you carry me out of here, I’ll become a part of you and you a part of me. I won’t burn you up, but I think you’ll change and I know change is hard for Incarnates.”

“When you say ‘incarnate’ do you mean I’m something special, or is that what everyone, all the Ratkins and Avians and Dwarves and whatnot are?”

‘You’re the first incarnate I’ve spoken to who didn’t want to consume me in their own manner, and you welcomed me into your heart the moment we met, so, yes, you are special, to me at least, but I imagine far beyond that too. That’s not what makes you an incarnate though. Incarnates are formed from the stuff of the solid world. You have bones and blood and your existence is a set and defined thing. All the peoples you mentioned, everyone you’ve ever met I would think, are incarnates too. And so is the whole world that you know.”

“And you’re something more.”

“Something else. I think that was a mistake I made before. We, there were others like me, thought we were something above you. We had vision and wisdom and power. Or we thought we did. With what I am now, I have to really question that though.”

Her regrets united with my paranoia and very reasonable guilt to get me back on my feet.

“Let’s go,” I said. “If this is a mistake, then whatever. I’ve made a lot of them, so at least I’ll be in familiar territory.”

I held out my hand to help her up.

“If you’re sure?” she asked.

I nodded in reply and took the hand she held out for me.

And that was the end of me.

I burned.

Every whisker, ever hair, every last little bit of me transubstantiated from matter to pure energy, bypassing gas and plasma entirely. 

I saw the world. All of it. Not as it was, not as a dark and ravaged shell with unnatural tick-cities clinging to its body, burning away what little life remained on it. The world I saw was just as empty and dark, but it was the darkness of slumber and the emptiness of a sea of possibilities waiting to spring to life with the dawn.

In the shadows beyond the sky, something unspeakably fearsome lay. Something with teeth that could rend apart time and claws that could shred even the inviolate concepts the world rested upon.

Down on the solid world, in a realm too fixed and limited for me to do more than pass over like a breeze, there was a body. A tool. That belonged to me. 

The unspeakable beast was too vast to trouble the body. She was too small, and too real, for it to even notice. It could destroy her whole world, would destroy her whole world, but something was keeping it at bay. Something eternal.

Something that couldn’t protect me though.

I was too bright. Too big. The great target the beast had sought.

I couldn’t defend myself, I tried that and failed, but that was before I’d become who I was in that moment, and if there was one thing the me of that moment was good at, it was running away, so that’s what I did.

Right back into my body.

I’d burned and it had been rapturous, but I didn’t need to be whatever it was I’d briefly become. We didn’t need that. We needed to be what I was.

A normal, solid, and most importantly, real Ratkin girl.

Pouring everything we were into the tiny package of my incarnated body seemed impossible when we tried it though. We were bigger than the world. Even the mountains were tiny specs to us. I knew my body though. It was home too, one I’d made bit by bit over all the years I’d been alive. We could hide there. We could be safe, if not from the other tiny little bits of the world, at least from the unspeakable beast.

We reached down from celestial heights and laid a single finger on my own brow which drew us hungrily back in.

I woke up with the sense of having touched an immense, unfolding eternity and found myself alone.

Or rather, my sunfire twin wasn’t standing in front of me anymore.

“We should leave,” she said from somewhere behind my eyes.

Her words were wise.

But I was glowing.

“This is going to be a problem,” I said, trying to imagine how we’d hide from anyone if we brought the brilliance of divine light into every shadow that offered us shelter.

“There’s too much of me here,” Sola said.

How did I know her name was Sola? How could I not know that?

The part of my mind that was still fully me jerked back at that thought. And all of the others which hadn’t been in me before. I knew things no Incarnate had ever known. I couldn’t hold on to any of them, but they were there. Perspectives and insights, facts and histories, fragments of an awareness that extended to the borders of the cosmos and the ends of time.

“What are we?” I asked, and felt my heart plummet as the answer rose all too plainly into my mind.

“Though our world be shrouded now, you may look to me and this city which I claim as my own to light a path to future. Bend no more your knees to the divinities who have failed you. Turn instead to the light which remains before you, to the fire with which I will sustain you for the rest of your lives.”

– Vaingloth the Eternal, speaking to soon-to-be-dead masses huddled before the closed gates of Mount Gloria in the wake of the Sun Fall.

I witnessed a miracle. No one in a hundred years had felt light wash over them in the abundance that the small crack in the roots before me let shine through. It was a gift, a joyous, rapturous blessing which the highest of the city’s nobility would have exhausted their fortunes and more to receive.

So I ran.

I was not the city’s highest nobility. I had no fortune to spend on rapturous blessings. I was not someone who was supposed to be given joyous gifts, and if I received one I knew from first hand experience it simply meant someone bigger and meaner and more important was going to come along and take it away. 

And they’d hurt me for having it.

Which was stupid! I didn’t even try to hang on to things like that and yet the people who took every little thing I’d ever been given, always seemed to feel like they needed to kick me after they had what they wanted.

Not that I’m bitter about it.

Or still covered in blood from the patroller who’d finally pushed me too far.

Yeah, that had probably been a mistake.

I mean, he had been taking me to be burned up, and he knew it, so my sympathy was a wee bit limited for him, but the other patrollers were not going to be happy about that at all. I could turn myself in and that might limit the damage they would do, but since no one would believe I was an actual threat there were going to be a whole lot of extra Ratkins added to the Kindling pile this month.

I slumped down in the dark and the dirt. I wasn’t in the sewer tunnels anymore. My tumbling fall had taken me well below the level they ran at and dropped me into one of the natural caves systems which ran under the city.

And that was bad.

Mount Gloria had been a major metropolis basically forever as far as I knew. When Vaingloth took it over, he’d opened the portals and had the conduits built around the parts of the city which were accessible. Putting in piping between all the buildings had taken a lot of hands  working together but had been pretty simple. Putting piping in through the bedrock the city was built on though? Not so simple.

The sewer tunnels still saw some use, for obvious reasons, and there were lots of underground spaces which had been converted to act as sheltered areas where heat could be conserved for farming, but anything below that was beyond the bounds of Vaingloth’s protection.

Which meant there were monsters lurking below, or so everyone said.

I’d never seen one of course, as witness by the fact that I was not currently fertilizer and/or being actively digested. Since I did not wish to be a part of anyone’s digestive process, I began scampering back towards the surface.

Or that’s what I would have done, if I’d had the first clue where the surface was.

But I didn’t.

And I was tired.

And hungry.

And more than bit bruised.

And also, still covered in blood.

I kept coming back to the blood because it stank. And I felt guilty. Which was stupid, but then so was getting caught in the first place.

Did that make it my fault? Was it my ineptitude that cost the patroller his life and was going to doom a lot more Ratkin’s to the burn as kindling than should have?

Yeah, that wasn’t a line of thinking that was going to take me anywhere I wanted to go, so I did the sensible thing instead.

I curled into a corner and buried my head in my knees.

What? I was on the run from the law, about to be eaten by monsters, tired, and hungry. Collapsing and feeling sorry for myself was eminently sensible.

Of course it also did nothing whatsoever to make me feel better.

And for as far as I’d run, I still wasn’t cold?

Which was odd. I’ve got a lot of experience with being cold. Most places are at least unpleasantly chilly. It was what made working in one of the farm pods something of a treat on the days where I was lucky enough to get picked for it.

So why was I pleasantly warm? It wasn’t the exercise. I cool down really quick, especially when I’m sitting on the cold ground.

Curiosity and, I’ll admit, boredom, got me to raise my head and give the the fissure-tunnel-thing I was in a sniff. 

That was another mistake.

I smelled food.

Food that was back in the direction I’d come from.

Also, my eyes had adjusted enough that I could see the area around me was rather precarious looking. The walls were lousy with cracks and the whole place looked like it was one silly Ratkin girl’s misstep away from crumbling down into a grave no one would ever dig me out of.

Which wasn’t terrifying at all. I didn’t freeze in place and stop breathing. Not at all.

Roughly a thousand years later, a more important question occurred to me and I let out my breath.

How was I see anything here? The illumination was dim, but the last I checked, they weren’t piping flames down into random crevasses in the earth, and while I had good eye sight, I couldn’t see in literal pitch black. 

I crept back towards the food, focused on listening for the slightest sound of the rocks shifting. I’m not sure what I could have done if they had, maybe arrange myself into a confusing position so I could at least boggle the people who’d never find me anyways? It wasn’t much of a goal but I was working with what I had.

And trying very diligently not to think about the miracle I’d run into.

That was where the food was though, and food was a miracle all unto itself. Granted, it was typically a flavorless paste of a miracle, but people threw out all sorts of thing, including perfectly good spices from time to time, so my meals did occasionally border on being tasty.

With visions of pleasant spiced and unrotten food in mind, I crept back to the roots on my tip toes, and stumbled into what had probably made the tunnel; a small stream which had gathered into a waist deep pool. 

Again though it was warm? 

I sniffed the water and decided that it was, indeed, water, or not a pool of blood, or oil, or demon ichor or something. Just water. Warm water. 

Which made sense given that something was warming this place up, so why wouldn’t the water be warm too?

I dunked my head in it, washing off the blood and dirt that had become my outer layer of clothing. There was only so much I could do but that was true of most of the times I got to bathe or shower and at least this water wasn’t so icy that I risked losing body parts to it.

Emerging a good deal cleaner than when I’ve plopped into the pool, I found my nose wasn’t as blocked off as it had been. I continued breathing as slowly and regularly as I could, so as not to set off a cave-in, when my mouth did something strange.

It started watering.

I hadn’t been sure if I really wanted to risk returning where I’d come from but the smells alone were enough to bring me back to the roots.

Where I shouldn’t have gone.

Where I was going to wind up in a cataclysmic amount of trouble.

Where…where I had to take just one more peek.

I tried to resist. I knew I was doing something stupid. I knew I was making it so much more likely that I would be caught again. 

But I had to know.

Parting the roots let the warm and brilliant light spill forth again. I could smell a season on the air that I didn’t have a name for, and a delicious bounty of fruits that I was pretty sure had gone extinct decades before I’d been born.

I didn’t push the roots any farther apart – I was too stunned by everything I was experiencing – but they parted anyways and I stumbled through.

Into the brightest place I had ever been.

It took me a good several minutes before I was able to see at all. My eyes just didn’t understand how to take in that much light. I could feel my pupils shrinking and shrinking and struggling to shrink more, but it was just too much more than they’d ever had to deal with.

The same was mostly true of my nose. The aromas of so many delicious things was overwhelming. Fortunately my hunger rose to the occasion and provided me with the entirely sensible direction to reach out and grab the first thing that felt edible and let my taste buds sort out what my nose could not.

My tastebuds exploded. Whatever I’d put in my mouth was sweet and I had to have more.

I devoured maybe a billion more berries before it occurred to me that sweet things could still be poisonous and anything this tasty had to belong to someone incredibly important.

I ate another three handfuls and was considering going for more when my eyes finally won their fight and I was able to see where I was.

It was unreal. I could see everything. There weren’t any shadows in the room at all. And no flickering of the light. Which was impossible. Flames always flicker, at least as far as I’d ever seen.

I looked around the impossibly well-lit room searching for the source of said-impossible illumination and couldn’t find anything. Instead what I saw were rows of neatly tended plants – a fair portion of them having sacrificed their fruits into my ravenous maw. In the far corner of the room there was a pedestal with a twisting cage of metal filigree sitting atop it.

The cage smelled like magic, but it wasn’t the source of the light.

In fact, given the lack of any shadows in the room, even my own, I was pretty sure there was no single source of illumination in the room. The light seemed to be everywhere.

Rather than sending me scurrying away – which I really should have been doing – the light made me feel brave somehow. Like despite the fact that I was fully exposed with nowhere to hide, I was still safe and protected.

Something in me relaxed, something I had held rigid since the moment I was born I think, and I let myself just feel how nice the moment was. 

I was well fed.

I was warm.

I was sheltered.

I was also trespassing and meddling in something so far beyond me that no hidey-hole in the world was going to be deep enough to hide me from the repercussions. 

And somehow that was okay.

Whatever happened, it was worth it to have seen the light which surrounded me and taste food which could never have been grown under the light of the conjured flames.

Part of me wanted to stay in the garden forever. Another part knew that forever would end the moment the garden’s owner came back. Part of me thought that would be enough though, that even a brief forever would be okay if I spent it surrounded by the light.

“I wish I could take this with me,” I said and imagined the impact bringing something like this up to the city would have.

“I think we can do that. If you’re willing to carry me?” 

I turned to find a figure standing behind me. She was my duplicate, carved to exactly the same dimensions, but formed from dazzling light.