“When this goes wrong, not if, but when, we will be left with a hunger which cannot be sustained.”

“Not if we manage to transcend our current forms, my dear Dyrena.”

“You call me dear but we both know you would be the first to turn your knives on me if given the chance, my dear Helgon.”

“All the more reason for you to assist me with my endeavors! When, not if, I succeed, our mechanical forms will need fear no blade or spell, and, as you are quite dear to me, I would of course have you join me in such an ascended state.”

“We will hold the power of the gods and you still believe your contraptions and gadgets will represent a material change in our being?”

“The material is exactly the thing. We are made of what, the base clay of the earth? There is no hope bodies such as these can endure. We are stifled by these poor raiments of flesh.”

“My poor Helgon. With the divine power coursing through our veins, we will be limited by nothing at all. And when we fall, the depths we plunge to shall be unlimited as well.”

– High Accessors Dyrena and Helgon a few days before the Sunfall, sharing their dreams with one another.

So what do you do with a Destroyer of Worlds after you’ve infected it with the idea of how pathetic it is? That’s a great question. I have no idea. Ask me the same thing about what you do with a tiny fleck of a Destroyer of Worlds though and the answer is apparently ‘bring it home with you’.

Listen. I know. I am deeply aware of how that sounds. I am painfully conscious of exactly how bad an idea that is. I’d spent a forgotten eternity being ripped cell from cell as a demonstration of how literally cataclysmically dangerous the Mini-Beast was.

So I know. And I knew then. But I did it anyways.

How? Shockingly it was a lot simpler than you might imagine. All I had to do was ask it. 

Why? Because while it didn’t seem to be able to speak, it was perfectly able to understand me. Why didn’t it kill me? I did mention it can’t speak right? I mean I could ask it but I think the answer ultimately boils down to ‘it didn’t want to’. Oh, why did I want to bring it back.

No reason.

Shut up.

I did not feel sorry for it.

It broke my world!

It killed Zeph. Sorta.

I did not feel sorry for it.

It was kinda funny coming back through. I should probably say that’s why I did it. I mean the look on Zeph’s face was beyond priceless. Yeah. We’ll go with that. I did it to prank Zeph.

“What…Little…what?” Blaming Zeph for being at a loss for words would be about ten shades more evil than I’m capable of being. 

“Uh, hi there. You doing okay?” I asked, not being all that great with words myself. Behind me, the Mini-Beast loomed over me, more than twice my heart and four times my width. I couldn’t see it but I could feel wariness radiating off it like heat from a bonfire. 

I could also sense the fragmented spirits who’d been herding us into the beast’s maw. Or, more than sense them. I was connected to them.

Which made sense.

I mean, I’d destroyed them.

The world reeled around me.

“Little! What happened!” Zeph was holding me in her arms and I hadn’t hit the rocky ground thanks to her quick reflexes.

That was nice.

“Oh. Nothing,” I said. I mean, it wasn’t exactly a lie. I just didn’t finish the thought since ‘nothing I’m even vaguely capable of explaining’ was far too many words for me to manage.

The Mini-Beast snuffed at me. It knew how I was doing, mostly. 

I mean, it was me, wasn’t it?

The world spun again and the last rations I’d eaten a few billion eternities ago threatened to make a return appearance.

Strangely, that was exactly what I needed.

Puking is never what I would call ‘fun’. It is, however, a deeply physical reaction. Nothing really connects you to your body like your body being deeply upset about something and my stomach had decided that enough was most definitely enough.

To my credit, I managed to turn my head so that I hit neither Zeph nor my Mini-Beast.

I think the Mini-Beast appreciated that more than Zeph did.

She was, understandably, a little concerned for me, especially since the colors of what came up matched neither the colors of what we’d eaten, nor any color which should be present inside a Ratkin’s body.

“Oh, right. I bit it,” I said and waved a hand towards the Mini-Beast in apology.

It’s fur was so soft. I don’t know why that surprised me.

“You…what?” Poor Zeph. I couldn’t find a spot to begin explaining the thing I did know and I was sure even when I did, everything I said was going to raise more questions than there were answers.

“Just…a minute,” Three words was pretty eloquent for me at that point, and it left me with enough strength to try to force down the rest of the unhappiness my stomach was objecting to.

My stomach was stronger, and apparently smarter, than the rest of me. It won the argument I was having with it twice more before it settled into a grumbling sort of contempt for every other part of me and most especially the idiotic brain that had gotten the rest into our current mess. Sadly, along with the last few weeks of rations it seemed to have ejected, it had also thrown out the last vestiges of strength my body had clung onto.

I didn’t pass out of course. That would have been merciful. No, the rest of my body joined in the stomach’s protest and made sure that I remained entirely conscious of just how miserable I’d made us all.

“Sorry,” I said, more to Zeph than myself, but I did harbor a faint hope that my various organs might be appeased by the gesture.

They were not.

“What happened? And what is that?”

“It’s my Mini-Beast,” I said. “We talked.”

I felt like cheering. Five words and they all made sense. I was on a roll!

“That’s not…where…what happened?” I could see the confusion in Zeph’s eyes. She was able to perceive things I couldn’t. Or hadn’t been able to? Part of what was making me so ill was sensory overload.

My poor Mini-Beast. I reached out my hand to it again knowing that it was having things thousand times worse than I was. I was perceiving a bit more than I had before. It, on the other hand, had in some senses never perceived more than itself. 

“I…did something?” I was still assembling the memories of what I’d done so that was the best I could manage then or for quite a while afterwards. “Got a bit mixed up? Blended? Dissolved into? Something like that with the, uh, thing.”

My Mini-Beast wasn’t the thing that had attacked us, the fragment of the Beast. It had been, but what we’d done to each other had left us both changed, it more than me. Which made sense. There was a lot more of it to change than there was of me?

I knew that wasn’t right, so I didn’t try to share the thought with Zeph.

Was it that there’d been less of the Beast than there’d been of me? That felt right. Deeply right. But it made even less sense than the alternative. I hadn’t survived because I was big and mighty enough to wrestle the Beast into submission. I’d survived because I wasn’t mighty, because I was small and normal, and…and because I was real.

And the Beast hadn’t been. 

Not here. 

It wasn’t part of this cosmos and I was.

Clearly that hadn’t stopped it from killing the gods, so it was real in some rather important senses, but so was I?

I drew in a deep and centering breath. Air, real air, filled my lungs. Lungs which need it, because of a thousand complicated processes life required here.

I felt an trickle of strength flow back into my limbs. It was delightful. The kind of delight that only real, livingf things, experience. I tried to shift in Zeph’s arms and discovered that a trickle of strength was nowhere near the same as enough strength to rise on my own.

So I relaxed.

“Sorry,” I said again, but feeling a little more clarity with each breath. “I’m okay. You were right. We couldn’t fight or run from the thing that was waiting for us.”

“Yes, but what happened. It grabbed you up and then turned inwards and imploded. It was like the darkness vomited you out the moment it ate you and then it was that…thing?”

“I talked to it,” I said. “Sort of. It was the kind of conversation that didn’t involve what you would call words so much, and it lasted, uh, I think several forevers?”

“You were only gone from an instant. Less. I didn’t even have time to jump in after you.” Zeph’s voice carried a trace of guilt that she absolutely did not deserve to feel.

“Sola’s grace was working overtime that you didn’t I think,” I said, hoping that invoking our shared goddess would make my point particularly compelling. “It wasn’t…it wasn’t good in there. And I don’t know how things would have turned out if there’d been three of us getting mixed together like that.”

“What do you mean ‘mixed together’?” Zeph’s concern took on a new tone. Which was fine. If she was concerned about what I’d become, she could stand in line right behind me.

“Sola’s still with me,” I said, a fact I was relying on to hold back the terror at what being mingled with the beast could mean. “She wouldn’t let me be destroyed. And I wouldn’t let her be hurt either. I don’t think when the gods fought the beast they had that. I mean, I’m not much of a defender, but what we are, you and me, and I guess every other mortal, solid being, that matters. We’re not vulnerable to things that can change ideas or destroy concepts. Burn up the idea of who are and we’re still here, too stupid to not just remake the idea. Sola was able to prevent the more literal sort of ‘burning up’ since it’s not like a god can be injured by the sort of thing that can kill us.”

“And that’s what let you defeat the beast and turn it into…what is this thing?”

The Mini-Beast had settled onto its haunches and was watching us with careful eyes, its ears swiveling at odd intervals as though listening to things all around us.

“We didn’t defeat it. Like you said, we couldn’t fight it. And I didn’t turn anyone into anything. It chose to become that, I think after it sort of absorbed what I was.”

“It does not look like you. It does not look anything like you.”

“It’s fuzzy,” I said, feeling protective of my Mini-Beast. As though it couldn’t still tear both of us to pieces faster than I could blink.

“You barely have hair on your head, I’m closer to how fuzzy it is than you are.” Zeph’s objections were reasonable but they stirred a giggle inside me anyways.

“I am not bald!” I objected out of principal. I’d known some quite handsome people who were bald. Just because I kept my hair a little above shoulder length though did not mean I was one of them.

Zeph sighed.

“Why isn’t it killing us?” she asked. “Or is it going to the moment I put you down?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think it wants that anymore. It was lost. And broken. I think it just doesn’t want to be alone anymore.” I didn’t add ‘like me’, but there was likely more truth in that than I wanted to admit.

Zeph scowled at how ridiculous that sounded and she was right to. The thought that the Beast, Slayer of Gods, Destroyer of the World, could be lonely and want some friends was objectively ridiculous. 

As was the slobbery lick it gave Zeph across the entire side of her head in confirmation of my words.

“This is folly on a scale undreamt of. The only reason we will not be remembered as the most foolish beings to have every walked this world is that there will be no one left to remember us at all.”

“You’re very likely correct, but, tell me, aren’t you still just too curious to pass up the chance?”

“The chance to cast down the divine? The chance to become what they are? I was curious to see how the Divine Codex ruled out such madness, but not that we stand on the precipice of annihilation and it’s clear that the Codex offers no protection against such folly? No, no I am not curious at all. I am terrified. As you should be. As all of the others should be. Why would you risk so much? What you seek cannot be worth the sacrifice.”

“I just want to know. I have to.”

– High Accessor Beildan, who was planned to be the 14th Neoteric Lord but was cast down before the Sunfall and High Accessor Helgon who cast him down.

I, occasionally, make bad decisions. They, always, have unpleasant consequences. In that sense, it wasn’t surprising that my latest bad decision, which was probably the absolute worst decision of my life, had commensurately the least pleasant consequences of any I’d experienced to date.

But that was a good thing.

By all rights, the consequences I faced for opening my body, mind, and soul to the beast that had devoured gods should have been too instantaneous to present any problem for me at all. I am, as many have observed, not large. The amount of time it would take something which can damage a god to obliterate me could also be described as not large. 

Rather than being obliterated though, I was merely melting and exploding and burning and many other conditions for which I’m pretty sure there were no words in any language for.

The key though is that I “was”. I existed. Granted that didn’t seem much better than being a “had once been” or a “was no longer”, but in hindsight at least, I’m glad that I continued existing. For as terrible as existence was in the eternity of those moments, it was still worth it to reach what was beyond them. I knew that even when I knew nothing else and, looking back, there were a bunch of time in my life when I hadn’t been able to say that when facing consequences that were far less severe. 

Probably shows how much I’ve grown as a person. I mean, not in wisdom. That’s right off the table. But, you know, in other ways. Grownup ways.

If it seems like I’m not fond of remembering those moments and that I’m talking around them, I would have to offer congratulations on accurate perceptiveness. When I say it really was not fun being mingled with the beast, I am only understating things because words, as a concept, cannot manage a proper statement of how bad it was.

The important thing to know though is that all of the cosmic miserableness eventually faded. Or maybe ‘faded’ isn’t exactly the right word? It’s probably more accurate to say that from a non-physical, fractured conceptual state each mote of my being found a path back to the rest over the course of several trillion lifetimes, and that what I’d once was retained enough resonance to stitch together something that was a vague approximation of what I was still given that time is an illusion and the point in time when the whole process began was the same as the eternity through which it persisted and the singularity of sensation where it met its final expression. Honestly though, that sounds like nonsense to me even as I try to fit the words I stole from Sola together to make sense of it. 

Where things start coming back into a frame that I am capable of describing (somewhat) is when I saw the star.

The star wasn’t Sola. I knew that right away. Which was impressive in its own right since knowing anything after your being was blown to agonized dust that stretched across the cosmos is a feat even the gods didn’t manage. Not that I’m bragging or anything. I’m sure they put up good fights. It’s no reflection on them that I put up a better one.

Yes, I know I’m going to pay for that, but since I’d already fallen to the depths of creation and then below even that, I wasn’t too worried about how much further pride might be able to knock me down. I may have mentioned the lack of wisdom thing already?

Anyways, the star.

Sola was, or had been part of, the sun. Thanks to understanding her, if even just a little bit, I knew the sun was a star like the ones I’d never seen in our empty sky. I also knew what a star was and had a borrowed memory of the blazing grandeur the night sky had once possessed. Sola’s view of it had been a bit different than mine would have been, encompassing colors and motions that were outside my ability to perceive. Even with a far more limited view though, I could tell it had been beautiful.

The star in front of me was different. For one thing it was tiny. Stars are supposed to incomparably huge, far bigger than my entire world. This one however was smaller than me. Also, it was in pain. Which I could sympathize with. 

I was pulling myself back together still at that point, regrounding the disparate bits of my soul and identity into the body which remained solid despite my foolishness. I feel its important to note though that the ‘ground’ I found myself standing on was not any part of the world I lived in, so my ‘grounding’ lacked the comfortable stability something like an avalanche might offer. The space around me wasn’t a part of my reality either. The body that I wore? Also not exactly real. What I was experiencing was more what I knew I should be experiencing and who I should be experiencing it as. I was Little and until that changed Little’s body was mine.

If that sounds like I wasn’t put together quite right, that would be correct. Reassembling myself from disparate motes of confused soul essence was not something I was even vaguely capable of. But I didn’t have to be. Sola was with me and I was with her. What I couldn’t do, she was more than capable of, and what she couldn’t be, I was more than ready to embody. 

We’d assembled me enough though that I was able to start walking towards the star. There was no road, but there didn’t need to be one. Not in that space at least.

I didn’t have a plan exactly. I wasn’t put together enough again to manage that, but I knew something was wrong there and I knew that running away was going to make it worse.

Which felt weird.

Running away was really my strong suit.

But I wasn’t going to run away this time.

And I remembered why.

Zeph.

Was she still there to be saved? Did I honestly think I could save her? Maybe? I’d been lost inside the beast from the moment it devoured me, but I thought, or hoped, that I’d held its attention by not becoming the food it wanted me to be. 

Being inside the beast had created a form of communion between us, one neither of us wanted. I’d been bombarded with perspectives and understanding and visions of things that I wasn’t equipped to handle. I’d thought at the time that if I took them in I might be able to find a path to the other side, to someplace where I could comprehend what the beast truly was and understand what we needed to do to fight it. I’d been gambling on the durability that being a real part of the world had seemed to provide me.

Had that worked? Not really. 

Had it had unforeseen consequences though? Oh, most definitely.

The creature I was reassembled, the ‘me’ that I knew, wasn’t exactly the ‘me’ that I’d been before. Which was okay. People change all the time. Whether we want to or not, everything we experience shapes us and alters who were are and who we can be. Most of the changes do not involve no longer being entirely sure which parts of you remain from your mortal life and which parts have become reflections of the beast.

To be fair to me, it wasn’t the least rational thought that, if it was going to eat me, I should bite it too. Ratkin do have pretty decent chompers so biting things that are a danger to us is a perfectly reasonable response. 

Not the correct one it turned out.

At least not if I wanted to remain exactly who I had been.

That’s not the unforeseen consequence which captured my attention though. It was the star I hadn’t foreseen, and which I was sure the beast hadn’t guessed would happen either.

Before we met, the beast was nothing more than a fragment of an entity which was lost to an endless abyss of hunger. I knew hunger, not as deeply as the beast did, so absorbing it’s hunger wasn’t revelation for me. It absorbed something from me though, and that broke it.

Because I was broken.

Not as a new thing, or the result of what the beast had done. That was simply who I was. Little, a small and broken Ratkin girl. I hadn’t thought anything about it. Everyone breaks and we all carry on. It didn’t make me special to be a shattered mess who still got up and dealt with the day before me.

The beast though didn’t understand what it had taken. It hadn’t understood that it was broken. That it had always been broken, even before it was fragmented from its larger self. 

I wasn’t exactly myself anymore after drowning in the beast, but, unbelievably, it wasn’t exactly itself anymore either.

And that was the star.

I drew close enough to step inside it and found the beast waiting for me.

It was laying down within a chamber of brilliant light, it’s body fully furred in the dark colors of ash and cinders. 

It stirred when it saw me and opened its jaws to show the terrible teeth it retained.

It didn’t speak, it hadn’t absorbed that much from me, but it did fix me with the stare of its soot dark eyes.

And then it whimpered.

It was broken. It always had been. But from me it understood what that meant. I’d shown it what it meant to be weak, to be powerless, to be Little. Quite reasonably, it hated the idea. It should have hated me too, but it didn’t.

I should have hated it right back, but I didn’t.

“You didn’t know, did you?” I asked.

Because it hadn’t.

I didn’t understand it like I did Sola, and I could barely remember anything of the time we’d been mingled together, but my brain had room for a few small revelations.

“They called you here, and you came because you’d already destroyed your home,” I said, not as condemnation, though destroying a world would have been a reasonable thing to condemn it for, but as a measure of understanding. 

Because I did understand.

The beast wasn’t real. Not in the sense that I was. It had been though. In its own reality it had been as solid and real as I was. Until it had destroyed everything there.

Why?

Because it’s reality sucked. Or so it had believed. 

Which I understood. If I could have wiped the world clean of all life, there had been plenty of times when I would have done so.

But not anymore. Not since I’d felt Sola’s love for all of us. Whatever else I believed, I knew that there were people out there worth preserving the world for.