“Darkness breeds perversion, and the light brings purity. We will bask in his Holy Radiance and be forever pure, all as one, and one to light the path for all. You, who have fallen to criminality and vice. You who have fled from the embrace of the light. You who have sinned against our Eternal Lord and against your fellow man. We do not cast you out. We do not damn you to darkness. Always, the light will welcome and receive. Always will you be held within the fold. And on this day, will your sins be forgiven, your darkness washed away, and your place in the Holy Light secured, now and forevermore.”

– Executioner Three Seven reciting the Litany of the Kindling to a group of ten Bugbears who the patrollers had brought in for ‘Crimes: unspecified’.

Brawls were the kind of thing I ran from at best possible speed. Nothing good ever came out of them, unless you counted how often they wound up with the violent types getting tossed into the flames as Kindling.

I didn’t even have to look around as Oolgoo landed the first hit of the melee. I already knew where my exits were. 

Behind me there was a sewer grating. Not a good option, but a close one. Getting the grate off would take maybe ten seconds? Normally a complete mark against it, but there were enough of us here that the patrollers wouldn’t be paying attention to a little thing like me that was running away from them.

Better than the sewer though was the abandoned building across the street from where Lucky’s place was. It was a longer run but the door was missing so it would take no time at all to break line of sight and put something between me and the patrollers. Something that, critically, could block a Death Mark.

That wasn’t viable either though. The path to it was out in the open and plainly visible. If one of the patrollers did see me running for it, he might think I was going for reinforcements, and that would get me shot dead well before I could make it to the open door.

Which left a straight run away from the brawl. I’d have to get to the far end of the block before I’d find anything that could meaningfully be called cover, but it wouldn’t be hard to communicate with body language that I was not a combatant. As long as the patrollers had to contend with the rest of us, the most they would do with me was remember that a small Ratkin girl had been at the scene and had gotten away.

It would take them zero effort to tie that to the report of a Ratkin girl who murdered one of their fellow patrollers and they’d be out for me in force and with Death Marks ready to shoot first and ask questions never. A lot of small Ratkin girls would die before they decided they’d probably gotten their target, but none of them would have to be me if I was fast and clever enough.

And I could be.

They didn’t know what they were dealing with.

I could hide in places no one had ever even thought about hiding thanks to what Sola could let me do.

A straight run was perfect, and it was right there before me.

So why in all the flame scorched hells were my feet not moving?

It wasn’t Sola.

She was quiet.

And watching.

I could run.

I was really good at running.

And I had every reason to.

“Get out of here!” Lucky said, a single stride carrying her from behind me to five feet in front of me.

So, there! I even had permission to run! Someone who knew me wanted me to leave. Wanted me to live.

Because no one here was going to.

And they knew that.

Oh, the melee was decidedly in their favor. Oolgoo’s hit was only barely the first one and far from the hardest. 

The patrollers and the Inquisitor had better weapons, better training, and better armor. They were practiced at fighting, in theory, though the sort of fighting they were used to tended to involve more kicking unresisting victims as close to death as they could without rendering them ineligible to use as Kindling. That fact revealed itself in glorious splendor as they were met with a hoard of people who’d passed the breaking point. 

The patroller who’d been in the second floor was the first to fall, literally, as a group of elderly residents grabbed him from behind and hurled him to the street.

Ratkin and Kobolds can survive falls from second story balconies and human’s can too, unless they land head first. I couldn’t hear the impact over the yelling and screaming of the fray but I saw it clearly enough to imagine the the shattering crack as skull met stone. The patroller twitched a few times but I’m not sure if that was any sort of living response.

The death of one of their own would have driven the patrollers into a frenzied rage, except for the small detail that they were already in a frenzied rage and it wasn’t enough against the sheer numbers against them.

Punches and kicks had limited impact on the patrollers, but sheer weight dragged each of them off their feet a whole lot faster than they’d been expecting.

The Inquisitor was more of a problem. In part, he seemed to have a supernatural amount of strength, and in part even touching was burning the people who were trying to keep him under control.

Since physical contact wasn’t working out so well though, more than a few turned to simply hurling stones at him. His enchanted robes protected him from most of those attacks as well, but ‘most’ is not ‘all’ and getting clobbered by half a dozen stones every time he tried to speak was disrupting his spellcasting quite effectively.

All of if which made it look like we were winning.

But there wasn’t any winning this. We could make the patrollers and the Inquisitor surrender and they would be back with an army twenty times the size. We could kill them and the army would kill not only those responsible, but everyone in the precinct.

And if we could somehow stop that from happening?

If we pushed back the small army of Inquisitors and patrollers they would send against us? 

In that case, Vaingloth would show up.

Or one of his Champions.

Vaingloth had been able to imprison a god.

There wasn’t any fighting him.

I had to run.

So I did.

Into the fray.

Yeah, I know.

One of the patrollers had managed to pull his Death Mark from his belt though. I don’t know who he was aiming it at. I’d like to say Lucky, or Smiles, of Mumora. Or anyone I should care about. The reality was though that I didn’t know who he was trying to take out before the mob crushed him, except that it wasn’t me.

It wasn’t me, but it should have been. That might have saved him from me biting his wrist hard enough to break bone.

I’m not strong enough to wrestle things out of the hands of any patroller really, except if said hand is no longer functional and producing blinding amounts of pain.

Which gave me a Death Mark.

People holding Death Mark’s are a priority kill target. 

But I didn’t throw it away.

Through Sola I could feel the power in it.

It wasn’t divine, but it should have been

This…this is wrong. This should be a Sacred Relic but no part of Death’s dominion is here. This is an idol to a lie. Sola was freaked out. I was freaked out to be holding a Death Mark, but Sola was freaked out by something far more profound.

I don’t think this one is special, I told her, looking it over quickly to see if there was anything about that seemed custom or unique.

The creator of this has fashioned a replica of the Divinity of Death, Sola said. They’ve created the shell of a false god to steal the power of Death without bearing any of the responsibility of Death’s divine realm.

That made sense on a surface level, but I could tell there was an awful lot more to unpack from Sola’s words than ‘somebody set themselves up as the new god of death and is being a loser about it.’

“Stop!” Lucky’s voice was loud enough to carry over the sound of the melee and held enough authority that people listened to her.

“You will all die for this sin,” the Inquisitor said, his arms pinned to the ground by a dozen or so people with heavy boots stepping on them. Can’t burn flesh through a good thick layer of leather.

“This city is better served if it does not lose a Inquisitor and any more patrollers today,” Lucky said. “This was a misfortune. Nothing more. Let it pass and you will see or hear of none of us again.”

“You will not escape judgment so lightly.” For a guy who was pinned face down on the ground, the Inquisitor didn’t seem to be able to see how precarious his personal position had become. 

Or maybe he could.

Would Vaingloth let an Inquisitor live who’d been defeated by the masses and then bowed his head to their whims?

“Our home is gone,” Lucky said. “We know you’ll be back to burn it down, but we will not be here by then. Let that be enough to slake your vengeance.”

“What about Ferrow?” one of the patroller’s screamed. Not the one whose hand I’d broken. “You killed him!”

“He fell. It was an accident. An accident that will keep the rest of you alive. Or he was pushed. Do you want that to be the story you believe? Do you want us to have to act as though one of us has murdered a patroller?”

I probably should have felt a twinge of guilt at that.

I didn’t, but I probably should have.

“Fine. He slipped.” The patroller was not happy but even the dimmest of bulbs are sometimes bright enough to see when there was only one option which led to him taking more than a four or five more breaths.

“Good. Then we can all walk away from here,” Lucky said. “You’ll chase us. We know that. Consider that another part of your vengeance, or do you not know what it’s like having to live outside the light?”

The patrollers grunted, which wasn’t quite an acceptance of Lucky’s argument but it wasn’t a denial of it either.

“No.”

I didn’t want to hear that word.

Not from the Inquisitor.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t from the Inquisitor.

The words came out of his mouth, but he wasn’t the one speaking them.

The people who were holding the Inquisitor collapsed, felled in an instant by a wordless spell.

Abomination. Sola was absolutely certain of that.

“No. There will be no negotiations. Not today,” Vaingloth the Eternal said, rising in the body of the Inquisitor to stand with an aura of dread might which drove everyone to their knees.

Abomination. Sola was not supposed to be a cold god, and I noted that all too clearly.

I hadn’t been overwhelmed by Vaingloth’s power.

I could still run.

Sola would protect me.

Instead, I saw that Vaingloth was right and I rose to stand.

He didn’t see me.

Didn’t notice or care, that I stood when everyone else was being shattered under the weight of his power manifested.

Vaingloth was right though.

There would be no negotiations today.

ABOMINATION.

Vaingloth’s power was overwhelming. He held more force that the entire mass of Mount Gloria, gathered over centuries.

But only so much of it was given to the Inquisitor. Only so much was he willing to risk on this trivial skirmish.

There was only so much protection his offered the Inquisitor and against Sola, it was far from enough.

I didn’t speak a word. I didn’t make a gesture. I didn’t give him any warning at all.

I simple incinerated them.

The Inquisitor, the patrollers, and every trace of Vaingloth I could reach to send the rage and hate that had built up since the day of my birth.

“Oh, I’m sorry, you had another what? Uprising? Among the workers? That you need because why exactly? I mean, are we not eternal and all powerful? No. No I will not be silent. I told you. From. The. First. Day. that you, all of you, were playing with fire. Shut up. Yes I know we’re all managing Fire Portals. That’s not. Ugh. Why do I bother to commune with any of you. Listen. Enjoy your little rebellion. Don’t kill them all, since none of us will spare you any of our citizens, and do not let them acquire access to any of your portals, or we will make sure that information does not spread beyond the bounds of your city walls. Anyone who disagrees with that sentiment, please, by all means, feel free to test me on it.”

– Helgon the Eternal, in a routine weekly chat with his fellow Neoteric Lords.

Mumora was going to die. I hadn’t helped save her. I’d marked her for death. 

That thought froze me in place in a centuries long moment where her unnaturally youthful body arched up over the balcony she’d jumped from and plummeted gracefully to the street below.

It wasn’t the fall that was going to kill her though. Kobolds are about the same size as me, and I can handle falls that would turn one of the bigger folks into a splattered mess on the street. Mumora wasn’t going to go splat either. She was just going to be hurt. Probably in her arms so she couldn’t fend anyone off all that well. Definitely in her legs too, which would mean escape via my favorite tactic of ‘running away’ would be out of the question.

That wasn’t what guaranteed her death though. The injuries I watched rushing closer to her simply guaranteed that her death wouldn’t be delayed at all. It was the Inquisitor who was going to kill her.

Or maybe one of his goons.

I felt Sola coil up in me at the thought and begin to reach out with a miracle that I had to fight back.

Miracles weren’t going to save anyone.

All a miracle would do was get us killed too. By “us”, I primarily meant me and her, but the Inquisitors weren’t known for their restraint. If they had even the slightest reason, everyone here would die, either directly at their hands or as Kindling for being under suspicion of fomenting rebellion.

Sola did not care about that.

Sola wanted to help.

Sola needed to help.

And I didn’t let her.

I wasn’t being brave. Or smart. Or wise. I was just scared. Not of the moment before us, but of all the moments like it I’d seen and all the misery that came from them. Misery that I’d avoided dying to by being scared. By running away and not looking back. By not letting myself care.

I knew there was nothing admirable in that. I knew the whole world was filled with better people than me, but better people died. A lot. All the time from what I could see. The world didn’t want better people. It wanted people who could be used. It wanted people who could hide. It wanted people who didn’t try to change it because for as awful as it was, the world was exactly how the people who were in charge wanted it.

And so Mumora fell.

And I didn’t stop her.

But Smiles did.

I’m not sure how he moved that quick. One moment he was at my side and then next he’d leapt down the street and body checked Mumora mid-fall, turning her falling momentum into lateral motion. He clung to her and they landed and rolled out of the fall, each of them absorbing parts of the fall for the other.

The patrollers were already reaching for their weapons as Smiles and Mumora began to rise painfully back their feet. Neither was broken, but both were bruised.

“Alive!” the Inquisitor commanded at the site of bare steel in the patrollers hands, which prompted them to yank the Pain Marks from their belts instead.

Pain Marks, the joke goes, is how patrollers say ‘hello and good day’ to the citizenry, since every citizen makes a patroller afraid for their lives. That’s not technically true. Usually patrollers reach for their swords because the fist sized spell disks which carry the pain spells are more costly than simply stabbing someone. That patrollers are uniformly bullies and cowards, convinced that the citizens are both pathetic and terrifyingly deadly, is however entirely true in my experience.

I flinched waiting for the electric snap of the Pain Marks discharging. The snap which was always followed by choked screams of agony.

In this particular case however, the snap was interrupted by grunts of surprised pain.

“There’s no need for that,” Oolgoo said. “You came here to ask some question. I’m sure we can facilitate the answers you need.”

He’d caught the lead patroller’s outstretched arm in one of his hands and was squeezing hard enough that the tiniest erg of extra force was going to turn the man’s arm into a bag of shattered bone splinters.

The other patrollers were being hemmed in by the people from Lucky’s who’d been dragged out into the street too.

“Get out of our way. Now. Get out now,” one of the other patroller’s screamed at Crystalline, a young dwarven woman who was standing on her toes in front of him to block his shot.

“Put it down. Don’t hurt them and put that down,” Crys screamed back, pointing at the patroller’s Pain Mark but not trying to take it from him.

I understood what she was doing. If she tried to grab the Pain Mark away from him one of two things would happen. She would fail, and he would turn it on her so long that her nerves glowed. That was the good result. The bad result would be that she would get the Pain Mark, and he would then pull out the Death Mark.

Death Mark’s are magical disks, like Pain Marks. They’re tools that all patrollers are equipped with and that a lot of citizenry has access to as well. Magic death amulets seem like the kind of things the Neoteric Lords should probably have kept out of the hands of the populace, and I’m sure Vaingloth would have eradicated them if they were anything more than pacifiers for the common people.

Oh, certainly, a Death Mark can and will kill you if the user has the focus to use them, and there were definitely a lot of people who frothed at the mouth over the necessity of bearing one at all times and practicing with them regularly. The most fervent Death Mark carriers seemed to be certain that it was only the threat of their personal pacifiers which kept a horde of ‘criminals’ from assaulting them at any and every moment.

The truth was, most Death Mark carriers only ever killed themselves with them, either accidentally or “accidentally”. The patrollers had, in theory, some reason to be afraid of them, except for the small issue that they were routinely outfitted with Death Wards. Not great Death Wards, but plenty to shrug off most of the Death Marks a civilian would have.

In the unlikely event that a civilian did manage to kill a patroller with a Death Mark, said civilian could look forward to the Special Patrol showing up. Said civilian, their family, and the block they lived on typically did not survive that encounter.

With that sort of power imbalance on their side, you might expect the patrollers to be a little more comfortable in their day to day encounters with the rest of populace, but no, any and every situation had to be met with total domination and anything which threatened that required an overwhelmingly brutal response.

So Crys was being reasonable, or as reasonable as she could be in the situation.

Which was of course why one of the other patroller’s Pain Marked her to the side of her face.

I’ve been clipped by a Pain Mark before. It sucks. It really sucks. Like lose control of bodily functions level of suck.

Crys gritted her teeth.

And stood there.

My brain kind of fritzed out at that. I was so impressed that for a brief moment, I forgot to be afraid.

And then another one Pained her.

Didn’t change anything.

Except that she smiled wider.

“Please,” Oolgoo said, speaking to the Inquisitor instead of the patrollers. “You need answers. Let us help you get them. It will be easier and faster for everyone.”

“Cease,” the Inquisitor said, and the patrollers stepped back.

With the Pain Marks removed Crys sagged a little but kept herself upright by what had to be a divine level of will.

“Come here, or everyone you see will die, you last and most painful of them all,” the Inquisitor said to Mumora and Smiles.

I watched the two of them glance at each other and I knew the silent discussion they were having.

If they ran, they might get away. Probably not. The Inquisitor would probably kill them, or bind them, or turn their bones to ice or so some other horrible thing before they could take five steps. But maybe those five steps would be enough. He might miss. 

Even if did though, he wasn’t kidding. Everyone else would die.

‘Everyone else’ didn’t necessarily include anyone they cared about. We were people who’d crashed at the same nest, not blood relations, and even the thickest of blood bonds weren’t something most people were willing to sacrifice themselves over.

If I was them, I would have run. Five steps can be a lot.

They didn’t though.

The idiots gave a damn about us.

They were going to die to give the rest of us (except for Crys) a chance to live.

I hate them.

Sola didn’t understand.

Which was good.

I didn’t want her to.

“Why did you flee?” the Inquisitor asked as Mumora got into stabbing range.

“He said I was an old lady,” Mumora said, and gestured to the balcony where the patroller who’d been bringing her out was standing as slack jawed and witless as most patrollers did most of the time. “Said I was unnatural, but I ain’t old and I ain’t unnatural. He wouldn’t listen though.”

“I see. And are you not Mumora Greyfletch?” the Inquistor asked.

“Yeah I am. Named after my grandmother,” Mumora lied.

“Your grandmother? And where is she?”

“Got shipped over to East Market two days ago,” Mumora lied without batting an eye. “Probably catch up to her at Sunk Rock though next time there’s some fish work there.”

It was so terribly plausible that I was sure it wasn’t going to work. Patrollers tend to hate it when you give them a reason to bother someone else and no reason to be petty and cruel in the moment. Inquisitors though I had less experience with, so I waited to see if this one would follow suit.

“East Market and Sunk Rock. Good. We have an investigation in East Market already and Sunk Rock is no great distance,” the Inquisitor said in a tone lacking in malice or disbelief.

It was enough to make everyone, the patrollers included, relax.

But not me.

And thankfully not Smiles.

The Inquisitor drew his Death Mark with such easy grace I don’t think anyone understood what he was doing until he had it aimed directly at Mumora’s face.

Smiles wasn’t large enough to overpower the Inquisitor, but what size can’t accomplish, decisive action sometimes can.

As the Inquisitor brought the Death Mark up, Smiles launch himself up directly under the Inquisitor’s arm causing the life quenching magic to fly harmlessly into the sky.

If there’d been a moment of stunned quiet that followed, all would have been lost. The patrollers were trained, and paranoid, and would have rallied.

The people around me, and the people watching at Lucky’s did not give them that moment though. With a roar the crowd turned as one, and the deadly melee I’d been fearing commenced.

“It has ever been my impression that my fellow Lords insist on populating their cities with the survivors of the Sunfall rather than good solid constructs because they can imagine no other use for power or proof of its existence than the subjugation of others.”

– Helgon the Eternal to no one while tinkering with her thirty seventh failed attempt at creating a self-willed construct.

I wound up in the sewers. I mean it wasn’t a surprise or anything. The sewers weren’t exactly spacious and so me and Smiles were obvious candidates for the crews that got sent down there. There’s no positive spin to put on sewer work either. Maybe once upon a time, sewer workers were held in some kind of great esteem for what they had to put up with, but if so that had died with the old world.

Smiles and I crawled back to Lucky’s that night at the end of the work cycle. He stunk. I stunk. Everyone stunk. Lucky’s had the answer to that though – warm showers! One of the perks of ‘volunteering’ for sewer work was that you could have an extra water ration sent to your home, and for a change the extra water ration wasn’t a miserable little trickle.

I hadn’t needed a shower the previous day thanks to my extended swim, which had been part of the reason I hadn’t been too unhappy with the sewer work. A Ratkin who was too clean was a Ratkin who stood out. I’d managed to get reasonably dusty on my climb out but the smell wasn’t as easy to replicate. One day in the sewers had fixed that though. 

If I wanted to smell bad, why was I happy to have a shower to look forward to when we got back? In part there was the ‘too much of a good thing’ going on. I needed to smell normally bad, not horrendously bad. More than that though, the soap most nest’s used had a specific smell too and that was as much a part of my olfactory disguise as anything else.

I’d had that all planned out. What I’d forgotten to plan for though was Sola.

Are you making the water warmer? I asked her when I noticed that it wasn’t merely ‘not cold’, it was actually warm to a degree that felt criminally good.

I should be warming oceans, Sola said. I thought this was the least that I could do.

It’s heavenly but it’s going to attract more attention. There’s mist rising in here.

I’m heating all of the water in the building.

Which…I don’t know why that surprised me. I knew how vast Sola was, or how vast she had been. To her, something like all of the water coming into Lucky’s building was no different from all of the water in a teacup or all the water in the city.

Can you afford to do that? I asked, thinking of the beast that was waiting to devour her still. One quick flash of light and everyone who saw it lost their minds. This isn’t going to make them any saner.

To be fair, the people from Lucky’s were the sanest madpeople I’d ever encountered. My second biggest fear had been that one or more of them would start blabbing about the light they’d seen which had to be exactly the sort of thing Vaingloth’s agents would be looking for in order to discover where I’d gone.

That was the second biggest fear only because I was convinced that the Eternal Neoteric High Lord of Supreme Blah Blah Blah must have some infallible mystic means of tracking Sola and so was going to show up right behind me, personally, and ruin my day something fierce.

But he hadn’t.

I’d kept my head down and worked on repairing a few holes in the sewer walls while staying ready to flee on an instant’s notice only to have that instant never arrive.

I got out of the shower and signalled the next person, a halfling guy, that the stall was free. My clothes were almost dry by the time I got back to the slumber pile but I stayed in my borrowed bathing dress anyways since it should have taken until more before they were wearable under normal circumstances.

There were fewer people in the room than there’d been the previous evening which I attributed to the bits of side talk I’d heard on the journey back to Lucky’s that with most of the work happening in other precincts, the people from Lucky’s were going to be able to spread the details of our plan farther by finding a nest for the night in those districts. That happened a lot,  though not typically as an exercise in community building. Usually people took wherever they could get it and crashed wherever that was. The city shuffled people around as needed, but it did not shuffle them back to where they’d been. If you wanted to return home after your shift, you needed to get back on your own.

The other reason the common room was empty, it turned out, was because when people were put into the mindset to make connections with each other, a fair number of them either admitted to the romantic connections they’d been hoping for, or were inspired to pursue said connections once they learned more about the people around them

Happily, I was neither hiding feelings for anyone, nor inspired to develop any. Smiles was roughly my age and the right species but, and no offense to him, no. Just no. It’s possible I was wired different than other people, and even other Ratkin, but I had less than zero interest in pursuing anyone, Ratkin or otherwise.

Smiles seemed to be of a similar mindset, which I’d observed to be more common than people assumed for Ratkin. We had the reputation of being fertile little baby machines since we typically had four to six kids at a time and could have them a couple of times a year. What people missed about that was how most of us had to be outside that process or we’d overrun the meager food supply that was available to us.

“Food wagon’s going to be coming by in a bit,” Smiles said when I flopped down onto the floor beside him. “Want to help me grab stuff for the old folks?”

The old folks weren’t terribly old in most cases. Shockingly, in a populace that was used for fuel and expendable troops and whatever happened to people beyond the air portal, a lot of people didn’t make it to old age. That didn’t mean a lot of people didn’t wind up too hurt to work for extended period of time though. Some of them were never going to be able to do the kind of work that the Milgos of the world doled out, but that didn’t mean we threw them away. It was too likely that we’d be in the same boat as they were for a while at least. That’s what we told each other, but I think a truer reason was that letting people die for our own convenience wasn’t who we wanted to be. 

I’m not saying we can’t be awful to each other, and there are definitely nests where only able bodied people are welcome, but most nests seem to understand that you gotta help everyone if any of us are going to make it.

I tromped down to the street with Smiles and a bunch of other people, letting my thoughts linger on how many of the food packs I could carry back and feeling marginally safer since there were no signs that anyone had noticed my role in healing the old Kobold lady Mumora.

That I literally ran right into one of Vaingloth’s Inquisitors as I turned the corner at ground level should have prompted any number of unfortunate reactions, but I lucked out. I froze. Just like any other Ratkin would have.

Perfect cover.

“Pick this one up,” the Inquisitor said the patrollers that were behind him. “Pick them all up.”

“Shall we call for the wagons sir?” the near patroller out of the set of four asked.

“No. We just need to question them. Hold them in the center of the street and don’t let any scamper away. If any try, cut their legs out. Our Lord Eternal may want to personally question them if it looks like they know anything of value.”

One of the patroller’s short sword’s poked me in the back.

Rudely.

So I moved.

I could feel Sola moving too within me, but I shushed her down to buy myself a moment to think.

We don’t know what their questions will be, I said to Sola, since for the first time in my life I had someone to throw my crazy ideas at for review. There’s zero chance they’re not looking for me, but they clearly don’t know that I’m the exact person they’re looking for. 

They will not harm you, Sola said with the sort of grim determination that was the opposite of comforting to hear in the voice of a god.

I don’t want them to harm anyone, I said. I think the option we have for that though is making them think there’s nothing interesting here. This has to be part of a general sweep right? If they’d heard what happened last night they would have brought more than four patrollers.

If he knew you were here, I believe my captor would have come in person.

That was good, but it definitely did not make me feel good.

“Looks like you were about to have dinner,” one of the patrollers said. “Sorry to interrupt there. If you can help us find the lady we’re looking for, we’ll let you get right back to that.”

They were looking for a woman.

I was a woman.

Only a lifetime of practice kept my feet bolted to the floor. 

Could I have asked them who they were looking for?

Yes.

Was it ever, EVER the right idea to talk to a patroller?

No. Never.

It wasn’t worth lying to them and telling them the truth was the literal worst possible choice in every situation.

My fellow captives, since that was what we were at the moment, knew that too. Even the scumbags among us have had it drilled into them that patrollers cannot be trusted. Too many people who’ve opened their mouths have wound up as Kindling for that to be a point that’s open to debate.

“If there’s cause for us to think any of you are hiding her though, we’d have to impound this shipment and arrest you all as potential accomplices.”

Because there was never a carrot without a much bigger stick when you were dealing with the patrollers.

I was oddly proud that no one said anything. Solidarity wasn’t guaranteed by any means, but for a change people were managing to not be idiots.

“This Kobold the one?” a patroller asked from a balcony on the second floor. He had Mumora by the arm and it looked like he’d dragged her out of the shower.

“Bring her down here and we’ll see,” the Inquisitor said. “Keep the building sealed though in case it’s the wrong one. No one gets away, am I making myself clear this time.”

“Yes, Inquisitor,” the patroller’s said in unison.

I’m not a good person. I should have felt horrified that they’d found Mumora but my first reaction was relief. I was safe. Then the horror came, tagging along after the thought of what Vaingloth was going to do to her.

She was doomed. No matter what she answered, no matter whether she was or wasn’t the one they were looking for, Mumora was doomed. They were going to take her in for questioning, use every technique they had for breaking down her resistance, and all the ones that amused them or whatever, and then they would put her onto the pyre. Another life spent to buy warmth and life for Vaingloth and his minions.

Mumora apparently understood that too because she bit the patroller on the hand and wordlessly threw herself off the building.

“You want to eat, you gotta work. Say you can’t work, and you’re saying all you’re good for is this month’s Kindling. So step up if you’ve done the work, and you can have some food, or stay back and you’ll be food for the fires.”

– Quartermaster Joro Dunn as a cover while he secretly distributed foodpacks to the bedridden members of the Blackened Rose Commons. 

Workdays are all the same, and every day is a workday. For people like me, the day started with the First Brightening, when the beacon from the Eternal Lord’s palace was raised to the first notch of brightness. That was the sign that we needed to get up and get to the nearest recruitment point.

Normally, I’d stumble along in the middle of the pack of people from whatever Nest I’d flopped down in for the night. If I could manage to wiggle to a spot at the front of the crowd, there was a better chance I’d be picked for something with a decent daily food allotment. More often than not though, I was left at the back and got to make do with the work no one else wanted.

That was how normal days went. This time I rode to the recruitment point on Goptrop Oolgoo’s shoulders. Goptrop was the Bugbear who’d been sleeping nearest to me. Goptrop had Smiles, the other Ratkin who’d been nearby on his other shoulder. We’d each tried to decline his offer, but Goptrop had been clear that we were all in this together and that meant nobody was going to get stepped on. As a tall guy, it was his duty to make sure of that, or so he’d said.

I could have fought more, refused the ‘kindness’ since it was definitely going to put me in a position where people noticed me. I could have, but that would have made me stand out even more than accepting the offer like Smiles had.

The Nest I’d stumbled into turned out to be in West Pumps, or the Westside Water Pump and Filtration Precinct, which was good since I’d at least heard of the West Pumps. Mount Gloria is huge, and travel through it is limited to those who needed to move from precinct to precinct for work related reasons. Rich people could claim their work required them to be pretty much anywhere in the city, but there were plenty of places none of them ever visited. People like me were more widely traveled, but that was rarely of our own volition.

“How many Firsts did they have yesterday?” Smiles asked. ‘Firsts’ being the jobs they were looking to fill before all the others, the ones they had to get people for, which in turn tended to pay the best.

“I think it was fifteen?” Groptop said. “Maybe twelve? It was low. So should be good for today.”

Looking at the crowd, I wagered that we had somewhere around a hundred people waiting for work orders, and of them there were a bit more than two dozen of us who’d been in Lucky’s Nest and were planning to present a united front. 

I didn’t like our odds. Even If Groptop was right and they had twice as many Firsts to fill, the chance that they’d need all of us for them was minimal.

An hour later though, when the Second Brightening provided us with enough light to see people more than a couple arms length away, I could feel the mood of the crowd had shifted a bit.

“Why are people moving back?” I asked, observing a subtle but definite retreat from the raised podium which was set up in the middle of the square where work was doled out.

“It’s Milgor,” Goptrop said, which explained precisely nothing to me, while also telling me all I needed to know.

I’d never met or heard of this “Milgor” but I’d run into so many people like him that I recognized him instantly from Groptop’s tone.

As the lanky young human man climbed up behind the podium, his story became painfully clear.

He was newly promoted to his position. He’d been following the former Work Administrator around for month, which was how Goptrop and Smiles knew him. From said predecessor, this Milgor had gotten the idea that his words needed to be law, and that nothing was more important than getting all of the jobs assigned to him completed that day, no matter how much time had been allotted for the work. In short, he was going to be absolutely miserable to work for because he had no idea how to do his job, the conviction that he needed to always be right, and lived in absolute terror that someone was going to notice he wasn’t really needed at all.

How did I know all this about Milgor?

You have to deal with precisely one Milgor to recognize the type when he reappears, and I’d dealt with hundreds of them.

True to form, Milgor mounted the podium looking harried and annoyed, which by Second Brightening would have been feat if that hadn’t been the state he was perpetually locked in.

“Quiet dogs!” He banged his hand on the podium to get our attention. That no one was looking anywhere else already had apparently escaped his notice. I would have taken offense since I was clearly a rat and not a dog, but the dogfolk I’ve known have been remarkably cool, so I couldn’t say I minded being confused for one, even if that wasn’t at all what was happening.

“Whatcha got for us today, Boss,” a human guy from another nest called out.

“Work. Just like always,” Milgor said. 

I wasn’t sure if they surgically removed the sense of humor from the Work Admins or if possessing a sense of humor was merely an immediate disqualification from the role. Milgor missed the collective eyeroll of the crowd and ruffled his papers before getting on with things.

“The Gloria Founding Festival is coming up. We’ve got street renewal and sewer work here, and piping replacement in High Press and Baker’s Row. Those are the priorities,” he said, peeling the top three sheets off his stack of papers and placing them on the podium.

“What about the farm pod? It should’ve been ready for harvest yesterday,” a halfling woman near the front called out.

“Farm work is suspended until further notice,” Milgor said.

“What? How are we going to have a festival with no food?” “We’ve got ten rows ready to go now, we don’t pick ‘em they’re just going to rot!” “I spent the last two dozen shifts working the pod. I deserve to be there when they get picked!”

The crowd was understandably unhappy with Milgor’s pronouncement. I wasn’t though. I was terrified.

“Farm work is suspended. Until further notice,” Milgor said. “A member of the Civil Patrol was assaulted yesterday and until the culprit is apprehended, no work on farming will be performed.”

“That’s crazy.” “Who did it?” “I didn’t hear about any patroller getting assaulted, where did it happen?” “Who’d hit a patroller? Nobody’s that stupid.” “What does farming have to do with a patroller getting punched?” “What are we supposed to do about it?”

Milgor clearly did not have the answers to those question, but I did.

That’s crazy? Yes. Yes it was.

Who did it? Well, me, obviously, and the moment anyone else got that answer I was as good as dead.

Where did it happen? Not in this precinct, so it might as well have been on the other side of the world.

Who’s stupid enough to hit a patroller? I am, clearly.

What does farming have to do with the patroller who was murdered not assaulted like the official report claimed? Absolutely nothing, except that it would make people desperate. 

What were they supposed to do about it? Find me and turn me in. That wasn’t going to happen, but I believed that largely because I was sure the crowd would simply grab someone they didn’t like and turn them in instead. Much easier than finding the real culprit and much safer too.

“We’ll take the street renewal and the pipe replacement,” Goptrop said, stepping forward with me and Smiles still on his shoulders. Some of the other people from Lucky’s nest fell in step behind him.

“You ain’t leaving the sewer work for us,” a goblin lady said from the front of the crowd.

“You’re right. We can take that too,” Goptrop said.

“How many are in your crew?” Milgor asked.

“Around eighty or so,” Goptrop said. I knew that was a lie but it didn’t sound like a lie.

“Crews are not allowed to be that big,” Milgor said, and his deputies shifted behind them. There were only six of them vs roughly a hundred of us, but they had weapons and armor and we had a desire to remain as uninjured as possible.

“It’s not,” Goprtrop said. “We’ve just got people who’ll work with us. No official leadership or crew ties here. Just thought we could make things more efficient for you so the work could start sooner.”

“How quickly will you be ready to start?” Milgor asked. He was exactly stupid enough to see the upside to himself and overlook the shift in power of allowing his workers to determine how work was done. It absolutely would be more efficient and make people a lot happier but it would also show how completely unnecessary he was.

“Now. We can start now,” Goptrop said and for a moment I was afraid that this Milgor might have two entire brain cells to rub together since it looked like he was actually considering the idea.

“Be about it then. Your work will be inspected at the end of the day, so make sure it’s flawless.” 

Milgors always said some variation of that. Usually, no one took it seriously. In this case though? No one took it seriously in this case either since this Milgor was nothing special. The only one who was concerned was probably me, and that was solely because Inspectors, if they actually showed up, were likely to be looking for more than work defects. In this case they would be looking for me and I had no idea how much they would have to go on in their search.

The crowd started to move before I could get too worried about that and I was legitimately shocked to see how many people moved with us. I’d been a little absorbed in my own thoughts on the ride over, but not enough to miss Goptrop organizing most of the workers who were present.

Looking around at the people from Lucky’s nest who were close to us though, I saw that I hadn’t missed anything. Goptrop wasn’t the one who’d been building bridges with the other work crews. It was the Kobold lady Sola had healed. And the kid who’d been freezing. And everyone. They’d spread out when we arrived. I thought they’d done that in order to be sure to catch the Milgor’s eye better but as we headed out they all came back together and shared a series of knowing nods.

When they said ‘we were in this together’, I’d assumed they’d meant the people at the nest. I knew what work crews were like, and while we were too big to qualify as one, it wasn’t unheard of for crews to work together until they got shifted apart or burned up.

There are more of them than there were last night, Sola said and I felt her warmth flowing out across the crowd, radiating not just from me to them but each of them to each other.

How? I asked. Most of these people never met us. They didn’t see what we did, and I haven’t heard anyone talking about it this morning either.

Because if they had they would have been dragged away and everyone knew it.

That’s how faith spreads, Sola said. It’s not from speaking of me, it’s from connecting with each other.

“We can survive without these so-called ‘Eternal Lords’. We’re Dwarves of the Granite Fortress. We don’t need the sun or the sky. All we need is stone to work and tools to work it with.”

– Balkon Heavysmith, last Mayor of the Granite Fortress in his last speech before the Terrors of the Wastes annihilated the Granite Fortress and all within it.

There is very little I like less in life than being caught. I suppose the punishment that follows is usually worse, but that’s rarely something I have any influence over. The moment when someone discovers what I’ve done though, and understands that I was the one who did it? That’s all on me, and it feels terrible everytime.

“Thank you, you made things so warm in here,” I said to the now considerably less-old Kobold lady I was sleeping near.

I don’t know why people try to deny their actions when they get caught. That never works since it’s exactly what the person who caught you expects. If you really want to make them question whether they’ve got the right person, you need to confuse them.

“Oh, no, that wasn’t me,” the formerly-old Kobold last said. “It was you, when you laid down beside me. I felt so much warmth.”

“That’s why I picked this spot,” I said. “It was so much warmer than where I was.”

People think they can remember the exact order of things perfectly, and that is hysterically far from the truth.

People also think that some clever dialog can get them out of troublesome situations, and that is similarly far from the truth.

No matter what I said, the old lady was going to remember me, and if she wanted to believe I was the one responsible she would hold onto that belief, secretly if need be, until and unless someone else stepped forward and presented an overwhelming claim for being the one responsible.

Since she wasn’t exactly wrong, I didn’t have much hope that someone else would step forward to take the blame. I hadn’t stopped to consider it, but so far the event was limited to the people in the room since all of the old windows were boarded tightly shut in order to keep the warmth of the slumber pile in as best as possible. That was going to give me a running start, where the patrollers would have been on us immediately if the flash of light had gone off outside.

I’m sorry. I had to do something, Sola said, sensing the disquiet that was radiating down to the tips of my toes.

No, we had to do something, I said, fighting not to fidget and give away the lie I was telling the Kobold lady. You wanted to do the right thing. We just need to figure out how to survive it now.

Are we in danger? It doesn’t seem anything in my realm noticed us.

Someone pulled the domain away, but I don’t think there the problem. The problem is the people around us. They’re all going to remember this.

That may be good. Miracles have been gone from this world for so long. Perhaps they can be the ones to help rekindle the faith this world has lost.

‘Rekindle’ was not the positive term that Sola apparently thought it was. I tried to move past that but I couldn’t fight off the shiver that went down my arms and legs.

“Are you still cold?” the Kobold lady asked. “You feel warm.”

“I’ve been cold for so long, I don’t think I know how to feel warm anymore,” I told her. Which wasn’t a lie for a change.

She pulled me into a hug, to share her body temperature. And Bugbear who was nearby joined in. Then another Ratkin.

I probably should have come up with a lie instead.

“I think whatever happened here, happened because we were all together,” the Kobold lady said.

“Yeah, we should stick together,” the Bugbear said.

Which was a terrible idea.

This is what faith is meant to do, Sola said. I never held the Domain of Community, but even for as distant as I was, I know that faith in me was meant to unite those I shone on, because I shone on all the same.

If the patrollers see a tight knit group forming who are all getting alone too well, they’re going to get suspicious. If they tell people about the experience they just had, the patrollers are going to take that story right to Vaingloth, and if he’s looking for you, he’s going to be able to put two-and-two together and come up with ‘burn everyone in the group’.

Why? Why would he do that?

Because it’s what he does to everyone, I said. Get on his bad side and he tosses you into one of the fire portals. One simple punishment and you’ve done something useful for the city and are no longer a problem he needs to worry about.

He won’t try that with us, Sola said, a note of mournful certainty sounding in her voice.

What’s to stop him? Even if we could fight him, he can burn this whole city to ash.

That was supposedly the state of the other cities from the old world. The ones which didn’t have an Eternal Lord to watch over and protect them. Opening portals had seemed like a great idea, but it turned out that opening them and controlling them were two separate abilities with ‘control’ being a lot harder.

I had no idea if that was actually true. I was willing to be that half the stuff that we knew about the rest of the world and what had actually happened to it was made up in order to keep us in our place.

We would not let that happen, Sola said, and I felt a measure of her divine power shift at the thought. 

So. Okay. Yeah. I suppose if a god whose domain was related to heat and light didn’t want something to be burned, they just might be able to do something about that.

What about flooding it then? I asked. He knows what you are, so maybe he wouldn’t try fire. What’s to stop him from using the water gate to simply drown the city.

I will not let you drown, Sola said and then sighed. I will not let you drown, but these people who not be so protected.

That’s what I’m worried about. I mean, Vaingloth probably wouldn’t drown the city just to get us, but he’s got a lot of other tools. Just having the patrollers bring them in and separate us all would be enough. We wouldn’t know what was happening to them and the patrollers could simply kill us off, one-by-one. Vaingloth the Eternal is this city. He can do anything here.

Not anything, Sola said. He has limits, limits closer to yours than to mine, and he is not Eternal. And…and I feel as though I know him? Not from the time he held me in the garden, but from somewhere else. Whatever power he wields now, I don’t think he had it then, and if any power he can gain…

….Is power he can lose, I said, mulling the idea over in my head, as if I had any hope of bringing out his downfall.

It was a happy thing to dream about though.

Except if he dies, there won’t be anyone to control the portals, I said, spotting the obvious flaw in that idea too quickly to able to enjoy the daydream of it.

I could provide everything the fire portal can and more, Sola said and then admitted, the others are beyond me however.

We’d need to be ready for the other Neoteric Lords to come for us too, I said. I’ve never heard of them being friendly with one another, but I think if we could kill Vaingloth, the others would probably be a bit worried about that.

“Tomorrow, we should apply for work together,” the Bugbear said, demonstrating the sort of ‘togetherness’ which we did not want the Neoteric Lords to develop.

And the sort of togetherness which was going to make us look out of place.

“Yeah, like Lucky did,” the other Ratkin said.

I knew how Lucky’s last venture had turned out, so that wasn’t an experience I was terribly interested in repeating.

“We should get her in on it,” I said.

I didn’t have anything against Lucky, and I certainly didn’t want her involved with a group of god-addled Kindling-bait. As the voice of experience though, she was the one person who might able to shut things down before anyone poked there head up enough to get the patrollers interested in us.

The slack jawed and confused face of a patroller who’d been stabbed eleventy-billion times came back to my mind.

Oh. Right. Being associated with me was a terrible idea, even apart from any divine nonsense that was going on.

I wanted to run. Right then. 

And that impulse would get me killed. Sometimes the cleverest option for fleeing trouble was simply to stand still.

I was safe. Huddled in the casual embrace of a group of strangers I was safe. No one would think to look for me, or care about one small Ratkin girl in a group like this. I told myself that over and over until reason started to penetrate the terror of everything that could happen to me.

I was safe and I was warm and things were okay for now. I needed to stick with my plan of hiding alongside everyone else for it to have any chance of working at all. Best case, I could go back to living a life like the one I had with the patrollers and Vaingloth never figuring out who I was. Worst case…well worst case I would be dragged off to a torture dungeon or something in the next ten seconds, but a more realistic worst case was that the patrollers would put the kind of pressure on that would eventually wind up with someone selling me out. 

And then I’d get put in the torture dungeon.

I could watch for the pressure the patrollers were using and where they were applying it though. I could be ready for them and stay a step ahead as long as I kept my ears open and my mouth shut, two things I had a lot of practice doing.

“We should try to sleep if we’re going to try to work tomorrow,” I said, immediately failing to keep my mouth shut.

“Go ahead,” the Kobold Lady said. “I can keep watch over us now.”

Which was technically Lucky’s job, but it seemed like a lot of people wouldn’t be sleeping anymore. In fact it seemed like a lot of them didn’t need to after the revelation they’d experienced.

I closed my eyes to pretend I was sleeping and opened them a moment later when people began to stir and get up.

Which was odd.

That I felt more rested and clear headed than I had before I blinked was odd too.

“The first work bell’s run,” the Bugbear said. “We’d better get down there if we want to get a job together still.”

I shook my head to figure out what had happened only for Sola to speak up.

You didn’t have to sleep, but you needed it, she said. It’s been eight hours now.

Eight hours? Gone in a blink?

I was going to put a plan together though, I said.

Spiraling in anxiety is not the same as plan making, Sola said. I can feel the shape of your thoughts. You needed a reset. And to dream.

But I didn’t dream at all there.

You always walk in dreams. You just don’t always remember them.

So what do we do now then?

You had a plan that involved staying together with these people. Let’s try that and see what we can do by working together.

“So, my turn has come? How wonderful. This is a fiendishly clever little trap you’ve constructed. I suppose I must applaud the God Souled you used to create it. How much of the God of Torments did they manage to scrape together? Oh, burned to a cinder did they? Well that’s too bad. Still a fair trade, one God Souled for my august personage? Almost a bargain really. What’s that? Where are my God Souled? Oh my, did you think to replace the one you lost by raiding my house? You really should have listened to Dyrena’s laughter. I did. The poor benighted mortals who sought refuge with me were sent to safer climes long before you even began to move against me. There was never a treasure here for you to claim. All you’ve done is hastened the countdown our kind from ten to nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one…”

– Helgon the Eternal, the third of the Neoteric Lords to fall, moment’s before self-detonating with enough force to destroy the city of Sunrest and a hundred mile radius of its surrounding lands.

Sola was going to help someone, and I was going to get them killed. That thought crowded out all others as I slinked across the slumber pile towards the old lady whose breathing was disturbingly ragged.

Was I doing the right thing? Probably not. Had I put the proper thought into it? Certainly not. Did I have a plan for when my foolish intentions blew up in my face? Who needs plans when you can have a disaster instead!

To be fair, when disaster is the only outcome regardless of how you plan, the threat of it loses its sting after a while. If everything was going to go to hell, I was at least going to burn up knowing I’d made things less miserable for somebody.

It wasn’t hard to snuggle in next to the old Kobold lady. People were giving her more room than they should have, since we all tend to shy away from sickness. That meant she was getting even less warmth than the rest of the pile though, which was making her condition even worse. I dropped down and went back to back with her. She stiffen at the contact and then relaxed when I held still and simply shared my body heat.

Sola had a lot more in mind than just sharing body heat though.

What I’m about to do isn’t part of my domain, but there’s no one to carry the Patronage of Healers so I should be able to borrow it for just a moment. Are you ready? Sola asked, the trepidation in her voice was the sort of sound you really don’t expect to hear from a cosmically divine entity.

Sure. What do I need to do? I asked. Sola’s concern left me wondering if this was an even more ill-advised idea than the disaster I was expecting, but since it was my idea, I wasn’t about to hold back on making at least part of it work.

Stay connected, Sola said and I could feel her reaching somewhere and in some direction which was beyond my ability to capture via words or imagination. Stay connected to me. To yourself. To this world. To everything solid and real that you know.

How do I do that?

If I’d ever shone on you, you could recall what that felt like. What it was like to stand on rich soil, with warmth on your skin, and brilliance lighting your eyelids. You could hold onto the feelings you experienced, good and bad, under my light. But I’ve been away so long, and you’ve never known me. All I can think is to have you hold onto what you do know and hope its enough.

But I do know you? I said and called back the memory of standing in the garden, and feeling the alien warmth of it wrapped around me. In my mind’s eye I saw her standing before me as a figure of brilliant but not blinding light. 

I was still only me in that moment and she was a fraction of herself, but one which I could at least comprehend.

From a world beyond, a vast weight turned and brushed against us. 

The Domain of Healers and Healing.

It transcended time and distance. Wherever there was restoration and renewal, there too was the divine domain. When we bandaged a wound, we touched on and added to its grace. When we rallied against an illness, we stood as a part of it, our innate act of healing also a worship of the divinity which Sola called to us.

The Domain merely brushed my hand with the lightest of feather strokes and I felt my mortality outlined in sharp contrast.

I was small in size and finite in life. I was a grain of sand in the ocean of the Domain’s existence. I was nothing at all of consequence and nothing that would be missed if the domain claimed me and carried me away.

Which was just typical.

If there was one thing my life had prepared me for, it was the notion that I was meaningless. The scale comparison with the Domain of Healers and Healing was a bit more than I was used to but the fact that I was too tiny to matter had all of zero ability to shock or dismay me. I didn’t mind being small and meaningless, it made me feel safe. I was too ‘Little’ to bother with. It’s right there in my name!

The Domain pulled back at that. Like it was surprised that I wasn’t being swept away by its scale and majesty. I couldn’t blame it if that’s what it was thinking, but since I already had a god in residence inside me, my ability to be awed beyond reason had kind of burnt itself out.

I felt Sola reach out and call a miracle from the Domain of Healers before it could retreat from us and then I felt something that I could imagine and wrap my head around for a change.

The Domain wasn’t pulling back on its own.

Someone else was pulling it away.

Someone with more claim on it than Sola or I had.

Sola had said I wasn’t the only one who’d made contact with a shard of the gods, but in that fleeting instant before we lost touch with Domain of Healers and Healing I felt my soul touch on the soul of someone so terribly like me my heart almost shattered.

And then they were gone.

The Domain. The other God Bearer. Not fleeing. Not hiding. Simply elsewhere in the vast realm the gods were native too.

Which, a cold dread told me, was a phenomenally good thing.

I was too small for the god devouring beast to notice. Sola wasn’t that small, but as long as she was hidden within me she was arguably safe. Adding more godly shards to our mix would make us stand out no matter how grounded I was, and the beast was still as ravenous as it had been when it first appeared. 

Our narrow escape had been worth it though. Sola nudged me to drop my hand down and lay it on the Old Kobold lady’s back. That was all it took to share the miracle we had taken with her. 

As divine grace flowed into her, the old lady went still and silent. 

Which meant my first though was that we’d gone too far and killed her.

What? It was a reasonable thought. Nine times out of ten that was exactly how my life went, and the tenth time was worse.

In this case though? This time was outside not just my experience but the experience of everyone who was present.

I thought by being quiet, what I was having Sola do would escape people’s notice.

It did not.

Grace shared is not grace diminished. What we gave to the old lady did more than renew her health. It filled her up and bubbled over to touch everyone else in the room.

There was light, brief but undeniable, which drove back the shadows and banished sleep. I hung on to the thoughts of being just myself in Sola’s presence and managed to avoid being the source of the light, but what we do has echoes in the world around us no matter how much we try to hide from them.

The old lady sat up and muttered something in a language her people kept mostly to themselves. 

“What was that?” someone asked. “It’s warm,” someone said with awed reverence in their voice. “Someone was here,” another said, echoing the thoughts of most of the people in the room who were busy looking around for the presence they’d felt wash over us all.

Sola’s presence.

Are they going to start worshipping you? I asked, imaging all too easily how that could go very badly for me.

They don’t know me, Sola said. I’ve never been a part of their lives.

You weren’t a part of mine either, I said.

You accepted me.

They seem like they’d accept you too. I couldn’t help but think that Sola might be better off with someone who wasn’t, well, me.

It would be an exchange. Taking me in to gain something from me.

Isn’t that what I did?

No. You didn’t. You accepted me from the moment we met. Your concern was for me, not for yourself. Some here might have done the same, might still do the same, but I have no interest in risking being devouring by them. I will seek another if I must, but for now I feel safest with you.”

The flash of light in the room was gone but no one seemed able or willing to just rollback over and go to sleep. No one except for the old lady, who I saw was breathing easily and regularly. I couldn’t tell in the candlelight if she looked better too, but something told me the miracle had some more than simply let her breath well and find some much needed rest.

“What do you think that was?” a dwarven guy beside me said, sending a thrill of panic down my spine before I saw he was speaking to a goblin who was on the other side of him.

“Was it something the Lord did?” the goblin asked. “They were saying that he’s gonna be able to fix things up real soon, for everybody, didn’t they?”

“Hell no. That was not King Oh-So-Vain,” an old Ratkin said. “He’s been saying he was going to do something for us any day now since I was too young to work the farms. He’s never done anything like whatever that was and he never will.”

“Careful there Killer,” Lucky said from the doorway to the room. “Patrollers hear you thinking old Vainy isn’t the perfect and wonderful, they’ll toss you on the pyres faster than you can blink.”

“I’ve been careful my whole life,” Killer said. “All it ever got me was being old with old regrets.”

“Maybe, but they’re not going to burn up just you, now will they?” Lucky asked.

“Gonna burn us all up in the end,” Killer said. “But you all deserve the chance to pile up as many regrets as I have before then, I suppose.”

“Why don’t we all get back to sleep and see how it looks when the beacon lights come on,” Lucky said and closed the door to the slumber pile room to keep the heat in.

In the dim light, it sounded like everyone agreed with that and no one did. People moved back to where they’d been, and the conversations took on a more hushed tone, but no seemed to be going back to sleep.

Maybe no one was able to. I certainly knew sleep was off the table for me after the day I’d had. My heart was still racing at how close we’d come to being caught. And the fact that there was definitely someone else like me out there. And all the thoughts of what was going to happen to the people around me who’d been woken up in more than just the literal sense.

With all those things on mind, I missed the old lady rolling over but I did not miss when she laid her hand on my arm and whispered “Thank you” to me.

Her surprisingly young and strong hand.

“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.