“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.