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

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

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

So I ran.

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

And they’d hurt me for having it.

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

Not that I’m bitter about it.

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

Yeah, that had probably been a mistake.

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

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

And that was bad.

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

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

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

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

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

But I didn’t.

And I was tired.

And hungry.

And more than bit bruised.

And also, still covered in blood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was another mistake.

I smelled food.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again though it was warm? 

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

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

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

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

It started watering.

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

Where I shouldn’t have gone.

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

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

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

But I had to know.

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

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

Into the brightest place I had ever been.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was well fed.

I was warm.

I was sheltered.

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

And somehow that was okay.

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

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

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

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

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