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

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

I didn’t need to breathe. 

But I very much still wanted to.

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

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

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

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

No. Not swim. I could fly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which was strange.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you don’t.”

“Nor do you.”

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

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

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

So why was I feeling better as we talked?

I shook my head.

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

It definitely wasn’t that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are we running from or running too something?”

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

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

I was also too stupid not to try.

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

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

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

Divinity sucks.

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

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

“No,” I lied. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not if we stay down here.”

“But the garden isn’t safe.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What happens if I do it too much?”

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

“So, a ghost then?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Miracles? For plants?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Who does then?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And yet you rescued me.”

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

“I still don’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Traditional prayer to Solus the Divine Sun.

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

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

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

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

“People like me?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t have one. Not any more.”

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

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

“You were kidnapped?”

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

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

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

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

“Where should you be?”

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

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

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

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

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

Which left me where?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I laughed for her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you’re something more.”

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

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

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

I held out my hand to help her up.

“If you’re sure?” she asked.

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

And that was the end of me.

I burned.

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

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

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

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

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

Something that couldn’t protect me though.

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

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

Right back into my body.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her words were wise.

But I was glowing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I ran.

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

And they’d hurt me for having it.

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

Not that I’m bitter about it.

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

Yeah, that had probably been a mistake.

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

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

And that was bad.

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

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

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

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

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

But I didn’t.

And I was tired.

And hungry.

And more than bit bruised.

And also, still covered in blood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was another mistake.

I smelled food.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again though it was warm? 

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

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

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

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

It started watering.

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

Where I shouldn’t have gone.

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

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

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

But I had to know.

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

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

Into the brightest place I had ever been.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was well fed.

I was warm.

I was sheltered.

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

And somehow that was okay.

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

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

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

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

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

“A night descends which shall never pass. The sun has fallen, devoured by the nameless beast, and with its last light faded, no more gods stand to bring us to salvation. I write this for the uncaring void and the empty wastes which will remain as we, the peoples of this mighty world descend into madness, and barbarism, and, at the last, the silence of unquiet death.”

– Grigo Weltham, recording an oracular vision on the day of the last sun fall. Cited in the following decades as how very wrong seers are capable of being.

The greatest city in the world was full of rats, and I was one of them. We huddled down in the unwanted places, snatched up the scraps people let go, and tried our very best to draw absolutely no attention to ourselves.

Predictably, that did not always go so well for us.

“Little! Move your ass! The patrol just got Pibby.”

I wasn’t overly fond of hearing my own name called out. In part because “Little” was annoying accurate, and in part because I really didn’t like the idea of the City Patrollers knowing that I even existed much less that there was someone with my name that they’d missed. There were a lot of things that pissed off the Patrollers but high up on the list was anything that reminded them what a bunch of screwups they were, like, for example, the fact that they were consistently failing to capture one tiny little Ratkin girl who had a habit of making acquaintances with other, more idiotic Ratkins.

Pibby wasn’t someone I’d known long. Which was true of most of the others who were scurrying down the alley with me. Unlike us though, Pibby hadn’t been clever or lucky enough to dive into the alley when the Patrol’s wagon came rumbling around the bend, and as a result, Pibby was going to be volunteered for the Holy and Sacred duty of taking part in the Kindling Tithe.

He didn’t deserve that.

None of us did.

No one at all did.

But that’s what the Lords said was needed. Sacrifices had to be made in order to keep the flame portals open. Without them we’d have no warmth and no light, which would mean no food either.

People like food. I know this because I’m people, and I like food a lot.

As it turns out, a lot of other people only disagree with the part where I get to be a ‘people’. That’s not unique to Ratkin. Lots of people who aren’t favored by the Neoteric Lords don’t get to count as ‘people’. We’re still useful as kindling. We burn just fine after all. And we can be put to work for a lot of different things which, if we’re lucky, is enough to get the Patrollers to look elsewhere when they go out to round up the month’s Kindling supply.

Pibby hadn’t been that lucky though, and as I ran so hard it felt like my lungs were going to explode, I had all kinds of visions that I wasn’t going to be that lucky either.

If we’d actually been rats, getting away would have been a lot easier. Vaingloth, our local Neoteric Lord, hadn’t built his city from the ground up. Like all of them, as far as I knew, he’d taken control of one of the big cities of the old world and spared it with the portals he’d been able to open when the sun got eaten up, which meant there were plenty of spots in it someone that was actually rat-sized could have used to escape. I’m sure the great and glorious Neoteric Lord would have preferred otherwise but saving the world hadn’t allowed for much time for architectural renewal in the process.

To be fair, ‘saving the world’ does sound like a big deal, and I’d have to guess it was since I don’t think anyone outside the Lord’s cities managed to, you know, survive. The cost of that survival was everyone who could be packed into the city, was. Then everyone had to deal with the fact that we’re all completely dependent on the Lord’s whim to continue surviving. If he says we’ve got to burn up a bunch of people each month to keep the portals open, then in they go.

“It’s a great honor”, “They only use the ones who deserve it, the criminals, and that sort”, “I think it cleans up the streets nicely”, “Well, we’ve got too many people as it is, of course we need to thin things out a bit”.  

It’s really amazing the kind of things you can overhear when, with a bit of an oversized cloak, you can be mistaken for a human kid who’s just hanging around. Not that it was just the humans who thought that. Or even all of them. Plenty of humans got tossed in as Kindling too, right along with Gobs, and Avians, and anyone else the Patrol decided looked annoying and/or flammable.

I liked to tell myself that as a little Ratkin girl, there wasn’t enough of me to be worth burning. I liked to tell myself I was too clever to get caught too. Too easily overlooked. Not worth anyone’s time really. And too good at keeping my head down and my nose out of trouble.  I liked to tell myself a lot of things.

And, I maintain, I am clever.

When I saw the others I’d been scavenging with take a hard right and head down one of the cross streets, I knew they were dead. The street was too wide. There were definitely going to be more Patrollers there.

And I was right. 

I had a better option though. A thin little gap between two houses on the left that only someone my size could manage.

I threw myself into it and learned, yet again, that sometimes, being clever is not even close to enough.

The patroller who caught me was human. Big guy. Couldn’t fit in the gap I was squirming through if you held a sword to this throat.

His arm though? Yeah, that fit in just fine. He snagged me with a single grab and yoinked me out of the illusion of safety with barely any effort at all.

If I had more ratlike features I could have bitten him with terrible rodent teeth, or scratched him with noxious claws. 

Or something.

Or anything.

All I’ve got are some good ears, whiskers, and a nose that works a bit better than most folks. 

I sagged and went limp. The dead weight of a body is supposed to be hard to lift.

I wasn’t.

“Hah! Got it,” he said, holding me up by one arm to show to the other patroller.

“Sure you didn’t leave some of it back there?” the other one said. “Gonna need three more like that it just to count for one real person.”

I didn’t bother to stir. I wasn’t really that little, but it didn’t matter. There wasn’t exactly a minimum size for the ‘Holy Offerings’.

“Maybe they’ll call it a bonus,” the one that was holding me said. “You know, a little extra for the portal, to keep it happy.”

I was pretty sure the portals didn’t have a ‘happy’ setting, but what did I know? I was just kindling right?

Well not just kindling.

I was clever kindling.

Yeah, I was still hanging onto that despite all the evidence to the contrary. When you’ve got the fighting capacity of an over boiled noodle, you hang onto whatever you can.

Step one of being clever was lulling them into a false sense of superiority. That was incredibly easy since they were superior to me in pretty much every physical attribute.

Step two was not letting them put me into a spot I couldn’t escape from. Like, for example, the back of one of their collection wagons.

“They caught you too?” Pibby said as they swung the wagon door closed after unceremoniously chucking me inside.

“All part of the plan,” I lied to him. I didn’t mind when he shot me a skeptical look in response. I wasn’t try to make Pibby feel better. I was trying to make myself feel better.

I really didn’t want to burn.

Not like everyone else had. 

This city didn’t deserve the warmth it would get from burning me. 

The patrollers moved off to finish corralling the others, so I tried kicking the door, on the off chance that they’d forgotten to put the lock on it.

Patrollers are idiots, but patrollers who let people just walk out their collection wagons wind up on the kindling pile quickly enough that the ranks are not quite idiotic enough to make grandiose mistakes when I really need them to.

“We can’t get out of here like that,” Pibby said. As though that wasn’t staggeringly obvious.

“Of course not,” I said, imaging that I really did have a plan and everything I did was in service to it.

My “go to” strategy was hiding. When that failed, my backup was running. When that failed, I was supposed to hide some more. It wasn’t a wide repertoire of options, but it had served me well right up until it hadn’t.

Which meant it was time to try something new.

Something new that my fear drenched brain was going to dredge up right away.

Any time really.

But sooner would be better.

Since I would be on fire later.

Not a helpful thought I have to confess, and it was asking a lot for my brain to function at all under the circumstances, but I didn’t really have much else to work with. Just an empty wagon and no tools in sight.

My eyes drifted over to Pibby.

“Want to try something really stupid?” I asked.

“What could be stupid at this point?” he asked in return, so I explained my idea to him.

And he agreed it was stupid.

But he also agreed to try it.

It only took a few minutes to take our shot, since the patrollers wrapped up their hunt early.

“Hey, where’s the other one?” the patroller who’d grabbed me said when he peeked back into sealed cage we were in.

“She wiggled through the bars and took off,” Pibby said, sitting carefully so that I was able to hide completely behind him by curling up into a small ball.

Yes, my big plan was to go back to hiding.

But I was going to try something new too.

“Like hell she did,” the patroller said, at least not referring to me as ‘it’ anymore, which was nice. “Get out here.”

It was a stupid plan. Clever people come up with good plans, and this was a stupid one.

But it worked.

The patroller threw off the lock and reached in to drag Pibby out into the meager light of the aether torches they carried and I clung to Pibby’s back to stay obscured until the last second.

Whatever the patroller had been expecting, it hadn’t been for me to roll around Pibby and go for one of the knives on his belt.

He swung at me with his torch, which did not feel good, and went to grab the sword he was carrying.

I can understand being worried about losing a sword, but he was also carrying a dagger, and those not only fit my hands a lot better, but, as it turns out, they’re much easier to use when you’re inches away from someone.

In the stories they tell in taverns and at festivals, the brave fighter always seems to dispatch their foe with one terrible and/or swift blow.

I think the patroller took something like thirty or forty.

That didn’t take long.

I’m small but I’m not slow.

Not being slow was also what got me running again.

To my credit, I feel, I had the presence of mind to drag Pibby with me. He didn’t want to be dragged along. Which was fine. Following a Ratkin girl who was covered in patroller blood and was probably not going to live long enough to be fed to the fires was not the best company to keep. I at least dragged him away from the wagons though before the other patrollers made it the cart to see what I’d done. 

With precious few options to work with, I hurled us into an a building someone had forgotten to buy a door for.

Pibby, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, went up, scaling the staircase in front of us three steps at a time. Maybe he planned to hop from rooftop to rooftop? Maybe he planned to spontaneously discover an aptitude for flight magics? Whatever his plan was I wished him luck with it and went with what I knew.

Down.

Lots of buildings have access to the old sewer tunnels, and I’d spent enough time in them that I was sure I could get lost better than the patrollers would be able to find me.

Not that they were ever going to stop looking.

But that was a problem for a Little who’d found a new hiding place and could manage to put at least two thoughts together in a row.

My luck, being what it was, left me in the building’s sub-basement running my hands along a wall which lacked the normal hatchway into the sewer tunnels. It was pitch dark of course. Even decent places had limits on how much light they were afforded from the Lord’s precious hoard. I knew what the hatchways felt like though, and working in the dark wasn’t exactly new to me.

Frustrated, I punched the wall, as though I could smash through it with all of my amazing brute force.

Punching walls is stupid, just in case that wasn’t clear.

My fist hurt enough that I stamped my foot and bit back a scream of frustration and pain. 

Also not the brightest move since making any sound to attract the patrollers was a terrible idea under the circumstances.

In this particularly case though, it was a spectacularly bad idea since the floor I was standing on was not, it turned out, especially sound.

I plummeted through the boards as they gave way beneath me and sent me tumbling down a slanting shaft into sheer darkness.

Falling was disorienting, but I knew I’d dropped below the levels of the old sewers and was still going for a while before I came to a hard stop against something that thankfully was neither ‘spikey’, ‘stabby’, nor ‘impaling’. 

Feeling around, I found roots. Thick, old roots. I expected them to crumble away at my touch since most of the old trees had withered and died long before I was born, but these were supple? And warm?

Squirming a hand in between them, I managed to part a few.

And my world shattered.

Down, lost in the depths, rays of golden light unseen in the world for a century flooded through the vines.