“Why is this line here? The one that suggests we’re over budget on our aether requirements for this month? Reports from Lord Dyrena’s city indicate what? That the populace is declining? And, what is the problem with that? They are unable to supply the aether dust we projected for this quarter? That is why we left overseers there. Why have they not rectified the situation? They say they need more bodies? Well we need more bodies to fuel for the victory festival, and this festival takes priority. Recall the overseers and add them to the Kindling. We can always find new ones. What do you mean we can’t? The overseers belong the Lord Kurst? They have Protected Envoy status? What cut are they taking of the aether dust production? Fifty percent! Attache, begin drafting up plans for the dissolution of Lord Kurst’s domain. If Dyrena call fall, so can he.”
– Vaingloth the Eternal on learning that the parade for his Ascension Day Anniversary might need to be cutback by one percent.
That people didn’t hate we was, in all likelihood, because they didn’t know me. The thought that anyone would want me to take a Neoteric Lord’s throne, anyone who’d actually met me, was so laughably silly that I didn’t even spend an hour imagining what it would be like.
Getting to order people around? Never being cold? Always eating the kind of food Vaingloth got from his private gardens? Nah. I couldn’t imagine that at all. Wouldn’t want to even.
Of course that wouldn’t be what it was like. Sitting on a throne had to have some upsides, and if you had the kind of power Vaingloth did you could, demonstrably, get away with being as awful as you wanted. For someone like me though? All sitting on a throne would mean for me is that people would know exactly where to find me.
The moment someone else decided they wanted the throne more than they wanted me to keep breathing, I would probably be dead. Sure people like Lucky and Zeph seemed to be invested in keeping me alive – running me through the Deep Sewers was rather tangible proof of that – but there were so many people, all of the elites and all of the commoners who wanted to be an elite, who’d only need one bad decree from me as motivation and evidence that they could do better, and from there it would take all of one knife in the back and I’d be done for.
If I had Sola’s help things might be different. She could probably melt any assassins that came at me, but that still wouldn’t be a particularly enjoyable experience for anyone involved.
Fortunately, putting me on a throne was pretty much the exact opposite of the action of what we were doing in the sewers.
“This complicates our plans,” Zeph said, pacing me to make sure my tiny legs didn’t cause us to move slow enough that we got caught by the monsters Vaingloth had released. “Our supplies are mostly assembled but if they knew where to find us, then we have to assume the supply depot is compromised too.”
“I don’t like that they found us there. I didn’t poke my head out for the last week, so it’s not like anyone saw me.” I still had the imagined scenario where Lucky had been coerced to lure me out and into a trap, but even the variation of that were she was double-crossing Vaingloth seemed increasingly less likely.
“They didn’t know where you were – not exactly,” Lucky said. “They’d narrowed it down to the general area in the precinct with some weird magic.”
“Weird magic?” I asked, absolutely hating the idea while also being entirely unsurprised by it. The Neoteric Lords didn’t get to be what they were without a ridiculous amount of magical prowess. Even Vaingloth, who was not notably a fan of his fellow Neoteric Lords, had been quite open about the magical might the nine remaining Lords possessed.
“Candle magic.” Zeph said the words like the curse they were.
“The guy who brought us the info didn’t know what it was, but he was pretty freaked out by it.”
“Freaked out enough that you believed him?” I asked, trying to understand how she’d actually gotten entangled in this.
“We knew the patrols and the inquisitors have been searching for you since you vanished,” Lucky said. “When they started moving together and establishing a cordon around the precinct you were in, we knew Jelspar’s info was probably right.”
“If they couldn’t nail down where we were exactly, how did you manage it?” I asked.
“Easy. We searched all the placed where we you weren’t.”
“Wait, when you say ‘we’, who are you talking about? I mean your nest was nice but you didn’t have anywhere near enough people there to search a whole precinct. Did you?” It wasn’t effortless to talk while moving at a solid jog, but it was worth it to understand how strange the world had become.
“I miss that nest. We were doing some nice work on it,” Lucky said. My solid jog was a brisk walk for her, so she could afford to waste time being philosophical I suppose. “But, no, no we didn’t have enough people there. What we had was enough people to spread the word of what we saw.”
“The word?”
“We all felt the light when Mumora was healed,” Lucky said. “It changed us.”
“Oh no,” I said, thinking of how Vaingloth occasionally ‘changed someone’ when they displeased him, or he needed a new sort of tool, or he was just bored.
“Not like that,” Lucky said. “We witnessed a miracle though Little. You know. You saw it too. I…I was running the nest because it was something to do to kill time. Working was fine, but after our crew…” she paused, searching for words she couldn’t find and switched track to continue on. “I needed something to fill the time. I’d tried a bunch of things, but I was able to think too much. So I setup the nest so I’d have other people’s problems to think about instead.”
“Sorry,” I said. Apparently my taking off hadn’t done her any favors whatsoever.
Which was great. Typical me behavior.
“Don’t be. You had your own stuff going on.”
“Yeah. I always do, right?”
“Well in this case, I’m glad. I think I needed you to come back into my life when you did. I think everyone needed it.”
“I interacted with maybe a handful of people in the nest,” I said, painfully wary of taking any more credit than I deserved.
Lucky and Zeph both snorting made me raise an eyebrow though. Why the hell were they in agreement of my being wrong about that? I know who I talked to.
“I don’t think she’s fully aware of what she’d done,” Zeph said.
“Yeah, you don’t say. It’s funny, she used to be the quickest member of our crew.”
Which, I gotta admit, kinda stung.
I mean, I know I can be an idiot sometimes. Most times. But I take some measure of pride in being a generally clever idiot. If there was a mountain of evidence to the contrary, then, shut up, no there wasn’t.
I felt a chuckle bubble up inside.
Was…
Was Sola laughing at me too?
What.
The.
Hell?
“Hey! I am quick!” I objected, definitely proving that I wasn’t falling behind both physically and mentally.
“Little. My dear. My friend. The gods are dead. We know that. Everyone knows that. We feel it in our souls with every breath. The only hope this world has known for hundreds of years has been bought by burning up our neighbors, and it’s been dribbled out from the monsters that we can’t live without.” Lucky said that as though she was giving me all the clues I needed to work things out for myself.
Which I could not do. Not while I was running for my life.
“The gods are dead. We know that. Everyone knows that. Everyone but you. When you healed Mumora? We didn’t know it was you, but we knew it was a miracle. We could feel it.”
“Feel what?” I asked, still perplexed.
“Grace. Connection. That the gods weren’t all dead. That we weren’t abandoned. That an impossible future was worth hoping for.”
“I have hungered for the touch of divinity for so long. So long,” Zeph said. “When my spirit woke, at first all I felt was defiance and vengeance, but those coals burn low over time. The light you brought called to me. It banished shadows which had sunk deep into me and taken root in my heart. I was able to believe again rather than sorrowing eternally.”
“That’s what it was like for all of us,” Lucky said. “Come on Little, you saw how the people of the nest were the next day? How everyone started to come together? That wasn’t just because everyone had a good night sleep in a warm room. It was more than that.”
“Not everyone felt like that though. There were people who didn’t come back the next night at all!”
“That’s true, but do you know where they went?” Lucky asked.
“Some other nest, right? I mean it’s what people do.”
“Some of them? Yeah. A few of them just refused to believe what they’d seen. At last outwardly. They couldn’t process it I guess. The others though? The ones that didn’t come back who did understand what we’d seen? They had to tell people. To bear witness. We’re not supposed to be as isolated as we are. We’re not supposed to be broken apart and moved around at the whim of some monster from on high. We’re supposed to be together.”
“So they went out and told people they’d seen a flash of light and an old lady in a lot better shape afterwards?”
“I think they’re message was simpler than that,” Lucky said. “I think they told people ‘the gods aren’t gone’.”
“Why would anyone believe them though? We get people spouting all kinds of nonsense looking for attention all the time?”
I thought back to all the streetcorner proclaimers I’d seen over the years. For some it seemed like a performance piece, a weird sort of living artwork, as much as anything else. Others though? Some of the others were just broken. People who fought to preserve the water portal, and people who shoved Kindling into the fire. The air portal people who went too far never came back, so I suppose they could have been the same, and there were certainly a lot of other things which could simply shatter someone. The proclaimers came from all their ranks, and I’d never once considered actually listening to what they had to say.
“Their words probably would have been blown away,” Lucky said, nodding in ‘agreement’ with me. “Instead though, you went and hurt the monster-in-charge, and you did so much more than that.”
“I’m sure he’s better now,” I said. “He knows how to fight gods, and I don’t think anything Sola or I did was beyond his power to fix.”
“You might be surprised by that then,” Zeph said.
“Yeah. But more than what you did to him, you confirmed what we’d seen with Mumora. Do you get it? The first time, we were surprised, but the second time we were ready to understand. We, none of us, ever expected to see a miracle in our lives. None of us even thought they were possible anymore. But you brought one to us. You showed us that there could be a light which wasn’t bought with the burning bodies of the people we loved and cared for. You showed us that someone believed in us enough to fight when we couldn’t. You showed us that we could be so much more than we’d ever imagined we could be. And we heard him scream. You didn’t just fight for us. You hurt the monster who killed our grandparents, our parents, and out siblings. That’s something we will die to preserve.”
“I don’t want people dying though,” I said. “Can you call them off? Tell them to run away?”
“Runaway where?” Lucky asked. “This isn’t just the people in the nest. This is everyone in the city. We all saw the light of your miracle.”