“Well, we just gotta deal with it. Some people have to burn up for the flames we get. Better that a few get cooked than we all freeze to death, right?”

“They could ask for volunteers or something though couldn’t they?”

“Maybe they did. Bet they ran out early on though. Who would volunteer for being burned alive?”

“I would. I would have volunteered if it would have saved Mela.”

“Well, don’t worry. You’ll get your turn. We’re always going to need more people to burn.”

“Yeah, nothing we can do about that I guess.”

– a conversation repeated in endless variations among residents of Mt. Gloria without ever reaching the most obvious question.

I couldn’t see the look on people’s face as I lifted the globe of fire over my head, and that sucked! With the globe radiating enough heat to warm the entire street, I knew they had to be impressed, but seeing their expressions would have been priceless. The audible gasps I heard conveyed their surprise pretty well but it it just wasn’t the same. These were people experiencing a wonder which we should have lived with long enough for it to common place, and I wanted to share in that wonder, even if only vicariously.

Instead, I felt a whole new ball of rage being stoked inside me. Rage at Vaingloth for yet another thing he’d taken from us. As it turned out, I really didn’t seem to have an bottom to that particular well. There were always more things to dredge up which could make me want to murder him again.

Especially, ESPECIALLY, when I considered that for all their amazement, the people around me weren’t understanding the truth about the fire portals yet.

“Little?” Zeph asked, probably wondering why I was creating a miniature sun on a random street and, more importantly, what I planned to do with.

I couldn’t kill Vaingloth again despite how much I very definitely wanted to. Somehow even feeling him being torn apart bit by bit and then being corroded into nothingness didn’t seem sufficiently awful. He’d planned to kill me, resurrect me, and kill me again and, unfortunately, I could understand the appeal of that all too easily.

“It’s okay,” I said. I’d had my vengeance but of course it hadn’t been enough to fill me up. That wasn’t what vengeance did. I knew that even if I didn’t feel it. Knowing it was enough though. It meant I wasn’t going to look for proxies to seek further satisfaction from.

Yeah. Looking. Hard to get that out of my vocabulary.

The important point was that I let the star I’d been holding ascend into the sky above Mt. Gloria rather than turning it on the bound and gagged minions of Vaingloth. They had a reckoning coming, most certainly, but it wouldn’t be one I decided on alone. It shouldn’t even be one I had much say in. 

The people of Mt. Gloria had freed themselves. All I’d done was remove one overgrown parasite that was standing against them. They deserved to be the ones who decided what they were going to do with the freedom they’d fought and died for.

My job, hopefully the last job I had left for a while, was to make sure the lie we’d been shackled by since the Sunfall was finally brought to light.

Literally.

“What…what was that?” the orc we’d stopped to talk to said.

“It’s…” the dwarf near him wasn’t able to find the words to describe what they were witnessing.

Which, again, sucked. What I’d done was so simple. It shouldn’t have been so awe inspiring.

Imagine if I was able to take my proper place again? Sola said and shared a memory with me of a sky clad in a brighter blue than could ever possibly been true with a flame atop its dome that was so bright even looking near it hurt too much.

Maybe it’s good we’re starting off small, I said. It sounds like they’re losing their minds at that little thing.

Not losing, I think, Sola said. Finding, I would say. 

She did something then that I didn’t quite understand. I still couldn’t see the people around me anymore than I’d been able to a moment earlier, but I could feel them. Their warmth. Their life.

It was a lot to take in and I stumbled under the unexpected weight of it there, but I didn’t even fall an inch. Zeph was there.

“Should we keep going?” she asked.

“Yeah, that,” I gestured upwards with my chin, “should show people there’s an alternative to the bonfires coming.”

Inside me, that alternative blazed so loudly I missed the next few things the orc and dwarf said. Zeph was closer though so I heard her response clearly enough.

“There’ll be a gathering called in a few hours to explain all this and make plans for where we go from here. At the moment, I need to speak to Xalaria though. Do any of you know where she is?”

We didn’t need Xal specifically, but where she was we would probably find the other leaders who’d stepped up to make the rebellion happen.

What I needed more than that though was to get to the highest point in Mt Gloria. Which was, as I recalled, on the tallest parapet of Vaingloth’s castle. Which was on fire, from Zeph’s reports.

You’d think that would have dissuaded me. I would have thought it dissuaded me. Vaingloth’s castle has never been a place I’ve wanted to visit and it being on fire really shouldn’t have made it more appealing.

But it did.

The fire thing meant I wouldn’t have to deal with too many people interrupting me, and, important bonus, I wouldn’t have to worry about incinerating any of them myself! 

“Wait!” the dwarf woman called as Zeph started to lead me onwards past them. “Who is she? How did she do that?”

That was a little annoying, to be honest. I mean, I was standing right there, and I had just spoken to Zeph, so I obviously wasn’t mute or anything. They could have asked me either of those questions.

Not that I wanted to answer them, so maybe they’d picked up on that?

Ask me your questions, but don’t speak to me? It’s possible that I had a somewhat complicated relationship with people (in general). Working out the hoard of contradictions that were all tied up inside me was one of those “hobbies that’ll last you a lifetime” sort of things too so it wasn’t like I was going to unravel all that, instead I just had to live with it.

Happily, while Zeph isn’t overly talkative either, she was willing to play translator for me.

“She’s got something we took from Vaingloth. We need to let people know so they don’t burn anything they don’t need to,” Zeph said, understanding why I’d made a display of the fire I was carrying earlier than we’d originally planned.

Of all the blessings Sola had given me, Zeph was clearly the best, by far.

“I think…Xalaria is the crazy War-Lady right?” a new voice asked. Kobold maybe? They sounded small but with a more gravelly pitch to their voice. So probably a Kobold. I think.

It was going to take a long time to get used to identifying people by their voice alone. I was guessing it would leave me inclined only to be around people I already knew. Oh wait, that’s how I was already. 

Was anyone even going to notice I was blind? Given my history, probably not, since it wasn’t like they noticed any other part of me. Was I feeling whiny and sorry for myself when I had far more important things to think about? Important life lesson: there is always time to feel whiny and sorry for yourself. If you put it off, then you just wind up being whiny, sorry, and unreasonable later on, and I, at least, had plenty of ‘be unreasonable’ already scheduled so fitting more in was going to be challenge.

“Crazy War-Lady, yes,” Zeph said with just a touch of mean-spirited delight, “yes, that’s her exactly.”

“I heard she was leading a group against the Inquistor’s bastion over in the Hillmount Precinct,” the kobold said.

I am a deeply broken person. I know this because my first instinct, despite every other rational thought and impulse, was to ask Zeph to bring us over to Hillmount so I could join in the fighting.

Mostly that was just the thirst for more vengeance piping up, which some side cheering from the impulse to handle things myself so no other idiots would wind up getting hurt. There was a not insignificant voice that wanted to see Xalaria in action too, especially when her aim would be to absolutely ruin the days for a whole bunch of inquisitors.

Reigning those in one by one, I reminded myself that I wasn’t going to be seeing anything, that Xalaria was in fact more capable than I was of making sure the idiots didn’t get hurt, and that I needed to go on a vengeance-free diet for a while for the sake of my own sanity.

“Can you have someone get a message to her,” I said, apparently surprising people that I was capable of speaking to them, despite the fact that I spoken to them a few times already. Throw one little star into the sky to light up the whole city and people start treating you really strange I guess?

“What is the message Holy One?” the orc said.

Oh. Oh that was not good. I needed to put a stop to that right away.

“I’m not…” I started to say but Zeph cut me off.

“Let her know that we have the stolen portal key and we’re going to put it in its proper place,” Zeph said.

“So, we’ll have fire again?” the dwarf asked.

“Who will feed it first?” the kobold asked.

“No one,” I said, standing up straighter and turning to face where I could feel the crowd.

Sola’s most recent gift left me able to all but taste the mix of fear, confusion, reluctant acceptance, with the barest hint of a sliver of hope hiding somewhere in there too. When I spoke, I wasn’t speaking to the people as strangers anymore, I was talking to those slivers to fan them into brighter flames of courage and strength.

“People were never burned for the fires we were given. That’s not what they were needed for,” I said. “Fire wants nothing more than to spread. It doesn’t crave people. If it craves anything it craves the air we have. We’ve burned people up for one reason and one reason only; to feed Vaingloth more and more power.”

I’d figured that one out of my own, and I felt really proud to have done so.

Of course, it hadn’t been that hard to work out when we were sitting in the Factorum enjoying light, heat, and food in a city which hadn’t had anyone living in it for longer than I’d been alive. 

No living people, no people to burn up, and yet plenty comfortable? Yeah, I’d had what one might call just a few tiny clues to work with there.

Also Helgon had confirmed my guess, which had been one of the cornerstones of the plan I’d put together.

Taking Vaingloth out and leaving the city to die without his support wouldn’t have been much of a victory. Knowing that we didn’t need him and had never needed him though? Oh, that had definitely changed things.

Of course no one believed me.

And I couldn’t blame them.

I hadn’t questioned the “fact” that the flame portals were just a cost of living. That without sacrifice, it would be impossible for us to survive in a world as broken and cold as the one we were born into. 

I mean, burning people for fuel wasn’t a new thing. It was how it had always been. There’d been lots of people before us and if there was a better option, they would have found it. Clearly the system we had was the best one and trying to change it was either doomed to failure or going to destroy everything we’d worked so hard for.

It couldn’t be the case that the whole structure of our society was designed for the benefit of the one at the top of it. Right? The things we were taught not to question weren’t things that served the interests of the few people who actually benefited from them? Right?

The edges of my whiskers caught fire the more I heard the crowd mumbling in denial of what I’d said.

I knew they didn’t want to believe it, because it was too horrible. A part of me wanted to believe that maybe things had been different right after the Sunfall. Maybe resources had been too limited. Maybe there hadn’t been another option then, and maybe it was our fault since we’d accepted what we had to do then and just stopped looking for a better answer.

Except for the part where the answer we’d found was, as it turns out, the best possible answer for Vaingloth, and a perfectly acceptable answer for his inner circle, the patrollers, the inquisitors, and everyone else who fervently believed in him.

I wasn’t going to convince people with words though.

I had to show them.

There was a light that, even blinded, I could see calling me forward. 

My new tomorrow was going to be everyone’s new tomorrow, and the whole world was just going to have to deal with that.

“But should we succeed, what world will we create.”

“A better one.”

“Better for who? Not for those who had made this one, surely.”

“When we succeed, they will be no more. We cannot have a better world with them in it.”

“And what of the others, the ones they’ve favored? Those gifted with wealth and power who have done nothing to earn it.”

“You believe people will forgive them for that?”

“I don’t imagine they will, but do we embrace their destruction as well?”

“What other possible option is there?”

– High Accessors Helgon and Vaingloth during early discussions of the fate of the gods and the High Clergy who would not be part of their revolution.

My arrival back at Mt. Gloria was met with fire and screaming and the scent of death. Zeph was the one who told me about the fires, but I was able to pick out the screams and the scents on my own. 

I wished I could say I was surprised, but everything I’d read in all the lost histories had said people tended not to behave terribly well after escaping oppression. Not to mention the part where not everyone who was part of the fight against oppression was around when the oppressors were no more.

The people of Mt. Gloria surprised me though. It turns out the “wealthy elites” that I figured the rest of the population would tear apart the moment Vaingloth was removed, some of them had been the first to join the rebellion against him.

Others were still fighting for what they had of course. People are still people, even with actual divine inspiration guiding them, so stupidity and greed were going to dominate at least some portion of any populace.

A fair portion of Mt. Gloria’s “upper class” though had lived on exactly the same pins and needles as the rest of us. Did they have more light and heat, and better food? Yeah, right up until the point where Vaingloth or one of his inner circle decided they’d stepped out of line, or an example needed to be set for the others, or they simply got bored and needed a prettier fly to torment than the bugs who lived in the lower city.

The fires, as it turned out, weren’t from the upper city being set on fire by my people. With the Fire Portal gone, the city had been plunged into darkness and cold. The upper city was burning and the lower city was burning because people had picked the buildings they liked the least and set them ablaze so they they wouldn’t all freeze to death in the dark.

Were people unhappy that they’re houses were turning to ash? They probably would have been if anyone had burned their own houses, but the lower city had plenty of abandoned buildings and the upper city had that yummy, yummy castle that Vaingloth had built just for himself. 

The castle had a lot of stone for its defenses, but given how much rarer wood was than it had been in the pre-Sunfall world, of course the petty little tyrant had insisted that as much as possible to be used for his personal accommodations.

That explained the screaming I’d heard too. See it turns out that when you spend a few centuries sending the children of a population off to die leading pointless fighting underwater, or to rot from within so that fresh air can be piped in constantly, or, you know, just burning them as fuel for really no good reason, yeah, people don’t enjoy that do much, and they’ll cheer rather loudly when they break away from your control.

I had to get a lot closer to one of the gatherings to make out that the screaming was more celebratory than anguished, though I also noticed it sounded more than a bit crazed too.

Probably because no one knew Vaingloth wasn’t coming back.

This wasn’t a wild victory celebration of freedom.

This was a people who’d been pushed so far past the breaking point that when a crack formed in the wall of authority Vaingloth had erected and his power faltered, they seized the chance no one believed was even real, because even a moment of relief was worth it.

Not that everyone got to experience that relief though.

Vaingloth’s patrollers and inquisitors hadn’t gone down gently. They hadn’t laid down their arms and surrendered because the fate Vaingloth would have visited on them for doing so would have been so much worse than death.

But they’d escaped too I guess. 

And taken a lot of people with them.

Which explained the scent of death, and the anguish which lay under the celebration.

“We should tell them what you’ve done,” Zeph said. “They’re safe at last.”

“They’re not and we should definitely not,” I said. I did not need the headache that came with people either praising or blaming me for Vaingloth’s death.

“What do you mean? Why aren’t they safe?” she asked.

“Because of the other Neoterics. They’re going to be frightened for a good while, but fear doesn’t last forever. They’re too hungry. Eventually one or more of them will come here to claim it as their own.” I’d known that was going to be a problem too but, unlike with Vaingloth, I didn’t know the other Neoterics enough to even begin to guess how we could deal with them.

Well, okay, I knew one option we could try, but ‘go talk to Helgon’ was pretty weak as far as plans went. I mean it wasn’t like he’d be able to deal with them, so any advice he could give was suspect at best.

Of course, I had Zelaria and Kilkat to work with too. 

In fact, it was probably better to say they had me to work with.

I’d had a useful role to play in Vaingloth’s demise largely thanks to the cheap shot Sola and I had gotten in when we burned out his eyes. The other Neoterics would have no particular vendetta against me, so inciting them into a proper mindless rage wasn’t in the cards.

Which was great! It meant dealing with them wasn’t going to be my problem!

Except for the part where when they came to Mt Gloria all together, I’d get squashed like a bug the same as everyone else in the city would.

So…I could move to the Factorum right? Let Mt. Gloria get squished and hang out with a ghost for the rest of my days.

Honestly that would have been very ‘me’. Running away still seemed like a phenomenal strategy to me, and, I would point out, had in fact served me very well in taking down Vaingloth.

But I didn’t want to see Lucky get squished.

Oh wait, problem solved there! I wasn’t going to be seeing anything at all anymore!

A shudder ran through me and I clenched my jaw. I was done crying about my eyes (I definitely was not done, I just didn’t have time for it, any wetness on my face was due to something else).

I didn’t want Lucky to be squished, regardless of whether I could see it happen or not.

And running away to the Factorum would mean living with the spectre of that. Knowing it was coming and wondering forever if it was finally the day it would happen and if there wasn’t something that could have been done to prepare for it.

“You don’t have to fight the other Neoterics,” Sola said. “There are other people out there, other Blessed. We have so much to do here.”

“Yeah. People here need you, a lot,” I agreed. “But, if the other Blessed could have handled the rest of the Neoterics, I’m pretty sure they already would have.”

“You do have certain advantages over them,” Zeph said.

Sola had continued to speak to us both, but I could tell she was also speaking to other people as well, and, unless I missed my guess, Zeph privately too. Zeph wasn’t terribly chatty normally but there’d been a distracted air to her as she’d carried me back to Mt Gloria. Not an unhappy one, just distant, like each time I spoke I was interrupting a conversation she’d gotten lost in.

“I’m not sure it’s an advantage,” Sola said. “I’ve been trying to repair the damage she took and I can’t.”

“That’s not entirely surprising, healing is not part of your domain,” Zeph said.

“It is for one of my Blessed,” Sola said. “Or it’s supposed to be. I even tried borrowing something from Kala’s domain and it didn’t help.”

“Kala was always more focused on flora than fauna, I’m not sure Little wants to grow leaves any time soon,” Zeph said. I was holding onto the hem of her tunic so I wouldn’t get lost, but she put out a hand to steady me anyways as we came to an abrupt halt.

“Looks like you two have seen better days,” an unfamiliar voice said, probably from an Orc? An older male orc, possibly? 

I could hear a few people behind him.

“Hoping tomorrow’s going to be a bit easier,” Zeph said.

She sounded concerned, which puzzled me. If there was a problem, she could have had us out of here before the orc had finished the first ‘L’ on ‘Looks’.

“Maybe for us,” the orc said. “Not so much for them.”

What’s going on? I asked Sola. Just because I couldn’t see didn’t mean the god inside me had any issues perceiving the world around me. 

There’s a bonfire ahead and they have a squad of patrollers and a couple of inquisitors bound and gagged in front of it, Sola said.

“The Fire Portals gone,” I said, confused why they’d bother burning the patrollers. 

Sure, I could get why they’d kill them. When they’d been armed, the patrollers had been an active danger and the inquisitors were deadly, armed or not. Bound and gagged though, they’d all be a lot more helpless, but vengeance doesn’t tend to care about that.

I was definitely not going to slam the orc and his friends for being vengeful either. The hypocrisy of doing so would have slapped me senseless if I’d tried.

No, what puzzled me was why patrollers were still alive at all.

Sure, fight them. Sure, kill them if you need to.

But why waste time? They should either already be on the pyre or being locked up somewhere convenient. Leaving them out in the open was just asking fate to rescue them.

So imagine how I felt when I realized fate had done just that.

“Yeah, that’s the problem then, isn’t it?” another voice spoke up, a dwarf woman maybe? “No more fire and not that much to wood to go around. We’re going to have to scrounge for everything we can burn and when that runs out?”

“When that runs out, we freeze,” the orc said. “Everybody knows it, but if it’s that or burn when his Lordship makes it back from his walkabout, well, we’ll take what time we can get.”

“And burn the ones who put us here,” the dwarf said.

I sighed.

I hated to be holding the news I did.

I could have just shut up about it. I should have just shut up. I could just wait till the patrollers had been turned to ash and then let people know what the future held.

Except they would be burning more than just the patrollers.

The jubilation of the successful uprising was going to turn to dread soon enough. I could hear it in the orc and dwarf’s voices. 

And where would dread lead them?

Right into madness.

From what the average person in the city could see, the future held only death either by frost, starvation, or, the worst option, Vaingloth’s return.

Some people would get a jump on things and pick their own exit.

Others would lose their minds.

Others would invent whatever superstitions they could find comfort in.

And some would try to help.

Maybe a lot would try to help.

Which was why I needed to help.

My sigh turned to a curse.

A curse on myself, because I’m an idiot, and this was an obvious outcome of my plan.

“There’s not going to be any problem with finding things to burn,” I said. “In fact, we’re never going to need to burn anyone ever again.”

In proof I held out the hand I wasn’t holding onto Zeph with and produced a ball of, I’m assuming, brilliant fire. 

“I have never seen the sun and I shall never see the sun. My days draw to a close and my struggles are far from over. Victory lies beyond a horizon I can no longer reach. Those I would save will perish before our work is done and before the tomorrow we dream of can possibly arrive. And yet, I am satisfied. No one can carry the world themselves, and no one is meant to. I have carried the dreams of those who came before me, as mine will be carried by those who follow after. Though it take a lifetime to carry each stone, in some distant day the home we envision, one where we all are family, will open its doors. What people will see then will be no more than the outward manifestation of the truth I at last can feel in my bones.”

“Though homeless and bereft of light and hope, we are a family already. Blood from different rivers may flow in our veins, but I am kin to all those around me, and the unity we will someday discover is a unity we have forged with every kind word, every shared meal, and with every helping hand. None of it has been wasted.”

– A quote from Rogaz Teachelle as seen on the first plaque visitors to the Mt Gloria Historical Museum as presented with as they enter.

I’d escaped the darkness, but I couldn’t see a thing. That was mildly concerning. Hyperventilating is also a mild response. Shaking uncontrollably? Very mild, all things considered. Screaming at the top of my lungs? Somewhat less mild. Also not terribly dignified.

The laughter though?

Well, it was honest.

Unexpected.

Maybe a little out of place.

I was blind. I could feel that, but in a rush it hit me, harder than Vaingloth every could have, that I could feel!

The ground under my hands? Soft and rich with stone so hard I could squeeze them till I broke my fingers and they’d still be there.

Does that sound like a bad thing? No! I existed still! I had fingers! I could break parts of myself! 

I mean, demonstrably I had broken a rather significant part of myself, given that my eyes were very definitely not working.

But the rest of me?

I was still there! 

I spun around a few times and fell over onto my back, laughing the whole time. 

Genuine, joyous laughter.

Okay, there may have been a few mad giggles that crept in around the edges, sure, but Come On! 

I had jumped into the thing that killed the gods. Again. And I’d gotten out. AGAIN!

That was so ridiculous I couldn’t stop laughing even my abdomen starting to shriek from effort.

I’d survived.

I was alive.

I would see the world after Vaingloth.

I would see a world with Sola in it!

Okay, maybe not ‘see’. I needed to start adjusting my vocabulary there a bit.

The laughter, mad and otherwise, gradually released me and I sagged down into the embrace of soil that no one had ever walked on.

I was standing near the bottom of what had once been the ocean. Generally not a place the books I’d read suggested people went for casual strolls.

Books! Oh no. No, no, no.

Oh, that one hurt.

I couldn’t see. So I couldn’t read either.

Was it too late to dive back into the beast fragment and wrestle my vision back from it?

Yes. Oh missing stars above, yes it was much too late for that.

For as much as I wanted to rage, and bargain, and deny what had happened, I couldn’t escape the awareness of what I’d done.

I’d escaped the End of All Things. In part because I’d become the End of All Things, but that had really only let me communicate with the beast fragment, to the extent the beast fragment was able to form things like impressions and reaction and whatever passed for a thought in something which was emptiness incarnate.

What had really let me escape wasn’t the fact that when the beast fragment tried to dissolve me, it found it was dissolving itself. The shadow of its emptiness I carried mixed within me wasn’t exactly armor, more an acknowledgement that what I am is what it had been and what it was I could become. 

If that sounds like I don’t have a great handle on it, that’s exactly correct.

What I did have a handle on, for I-was-still-freaking-out-about-it values of ‘having a handle on it’, was what I’d communicated and what I’d left behind. That had been what saved me.

And it was what would have repercussions to come.

I couldn’t return to get my vision back. 

And I didn’t need it.

I tried to tell myself that, but I’m really bad at lying.

Not that I don’t do it, a lot, but I’m still bad at it.

In this case, the lie exposed a terrible, growing ache within me. I wanted nothing more than a small space, a new book, and to curl up and and pour myself into the pages until I lost all sense of the world around me.

And I would never get to do that again.

Which brought back the tears.

I could have cried out ‘why me’, but the truth was it ‘was me’ because I’d demanded it be me. Could I have had someone else carry out my plan? Sure. I’m sure almost anyone would have been willing to do everything I’d done, up to and including pitching themselves into the beast fragment to destroy Vaingloth.

Would any of them have survived? Probably not. The other Blessed might have worked some strange miracle. Maybe Zeph would have been fast enough to dash from at the last micro-instant. 

But probably not.

Was that why I’d insisted I be the one to do it?

It’d sound really heroic if I could answer ‘yes’ to that question wouldn’t it? Little, who was willing to give her life that others might live! 

Yuck. I had to make sure that idea never caught on. It was gross to think about people being that wrong about me.

Sure, I was happy Zeph and the others were okay, but I’d been the one to destroy Vaingloth because I had to know, I had to be there and I had to be absolutely certain. It wasn’t enough to believe he was dead and gone, I had to feel the bites that devoured him and taste his unmaking.

Did I deserve what had happened to me as a result?

No.

No one deserved anything Vaingloth did to them. It wasn’t right that I should suffer in order to bring him down. Someone else should have killed him ages ago. Or he should have been better from the start. Maybe somewhere, something had happened to set him on the course he wound up on and if only that could have been changed or fixed, he would have been a decent person. Maybe he could have been a good one even.

But he wasn’t. 

And I didn’t regret what I’d done.

I wasn’t thrilled to have lost my sight. And I still had so much anger inside me over what he’d done that even knowing he was dead and had suffered in dying hadn’t been able to assuage it.

I hadn’t been looking to give up my anger though. I’d been looking to prevent all the harm he would have done. To me. To everyone I knew. And to everyone I didn’t know. 

Could he have done good? Yes.

Was the world better off without him? Absolutely.

Was I better off without him? I would be. Even with what I had lost. I could feel things shifting in my heart. Old wounds aching that I’d had to bury so long ago. Old rage searching for anything else it could protect me from. Old fears echoing on and on, unable to believe that the world could suddenly be a better place.

That was the real tragedy of it though. For all his potential, the world was a better place without the man Vaingloth had chosen to be.

Not all tragedies are ones to shed tears over though. Sometimes the only thing to do is turn away and leave them behind. 

Which I saw it was time for me to do.

Was I blind? Sure. Could I still see though? Not like I had before. I’d been right about not emerging from the endless abyss as the person I’d been. What I’d lost I would always grieve, but grief wasn’t going to be the entirety of my life, or even the majority of it if I had any say in the matter.

The awareness I’d gained from my fusion with MB remained even if my natural sight was gone. I could still smell and feel and hear. No better than I could before, but in an empty wilderness it’s easy to pick out sounds when everything else it quiet as grave.

Also, Zeph’s not exactly ‘subtle’ when she moves at speed. The rolling boom that preceded her arrival told me I’d climbed up pretty far away from when I’d dropped into the abyss.

She wasn’t the first thing I heard though.

“Why!” Sola asked. “Why did you do that!”

“You’re back!” I shouted. I’d been walking away from the abyss, but I stumbled to my knees when I heard her.

“I was always here!” she shouted back at me.

I should have been concerned that my god seemed a bit annoyed with me. Perhaps upset even. 

I was not.

I could hear her again!

“I know, I know!” I said, and since my eyes didn’t need to bother with ‘seeing’ any more, they decided to go to town with their other function and pour a river of tears down my face.

Dignity is for people not experiencing divine oneness, and they can all just shut up.

“Why then! Why! We could have fought that thing!” Sola was still shouting, which, again, should have left me trembling, but I was too happy in that moment, too excited that my faith in her continued existence hadn’t just been self-delusion, to be anything but delirious with joy, even if I was due a divine smiting or two.

“No. No, I am never having you fight that again. Never. You never need to do that for us. You have done too much. You saved us. You saved me. No, you are never going to fight and you are NEVER going to be destroyed again!”

I might have screamed that last bit.

Aloud.

Which Zeph boomed close enough to hear.

“Listen to the Ratkin girl,” she said, leaving an implied threat at the end of her words which did not seem like something a servitor should be doing to her appointed god .

“You would turn on me too?” Sola asked, speaking from some place within the two of us.

“Oh we’re not turning from you,” I said. “We’re just not going to let you turn from yourself. You did your part. We get to do ours. That’s how this works.”

“I’m supposed to be the answer to your prayers. I’m supposed to guide you and shelter you. I am the light that reveals the new day, and the fire that brings life to the world. I should have been with you, to protect you, to burn your foes.”

“You were,” I said. “Hundreds of years ago, you were. You burned and you protected and thanks to that there was a world left for me to be born in. You’ve sacrificed everything you were for me and everyone else.”

“Not everything,” Sola grumbled.

“Enough. More than enough. More than you ever should have had to,” Zeph said.

“There was no choice. The world would have fallen and without the world, what would I be?” Sola asked. “All I am is in you and those who remain, those few I and the others could spare.”

“And that’s why I couldn’t bring you with me. That’s why I will never let you fight another battle. You’re a part of us, a part that’s been missing my whole life. A part the world needs more than any other. Nothing is going to take our new days from us, because nothing is going to take you from me.”

I hadn’t known gods could cry, but I suppose it could be hard for them to accept that they were loved too.

“This can be happening! I’m immortal!”

– Neoteric Lord Vaingloth’s last words.

Falling into the endless abyss that was the Greater Beast Fragment was a one way trip. I’d known that from the moment I sensed it out on the periphery of the world. I’d told myself I was ready for it and I did have a plan that I could believe in.

When your skin evaporates and all the world turns to emptiness though it’s hard to deny the reality around you.

This was going to hurt.

And I wasn’t going to come out of it.

Someone would.

But she wasn’t going to be who I was in that moment.

That was why I cast Sola free.

“We can fight this!” she screamed as the last of Vaingloth’s bindings on her was severed with the severing of his “immortal” life.

I didn’t have words for her at that point since I didn’t have words left in general. Instead I sent gave her my feelings – the hope I felt that she would return to the world, the resolve that I had to see it with my ever-so-mortal eyes, and the gratitude that meeting her had brought me here.

I’d run my whole life trying to stay alive, but I’d never put any effort into making sure my life was one I would have cared to live at all.

At least not until I met her.

As Sola rose away, hurled skyward as the sun was supposed to rise from the dark, I dropped into the deep, impenetrable darkness of the beast fragment.

That wasn’t enough though.

I needed to go deeper.

I needed to follow Vaingloth down to the fragment’s end and take one last thing away from him.

As a mortal, what I wanted wasn’t possible.

I’d been here before. I’d done this already. I knew what it was like to dissolve and be torn apart and unravel entirely. I hadn’t fought it then because nothing mortal can fight the end of all that is.

From Vaingloth’s screams, first the living ones and then the dead ones from the ghost that remained, he had understood that at last. He and the other High Accessors had unleashed something that they knew would damage and destroy the gods, but they hadn’t understood what it really was. They’d cast down the gods but none of them had appreciated what that had felt like, the agony they’d inflicted.

None of them till Vaingloth experienced it all first hand.

I watched as he struggled, seeing him fighting and scheming and clawing for the dwindling drops of his existence. We were caught in a realm without light but I saw him twist and writhe and boil away. A realm without sound but I heard him curse and weave fell words of power and, finally, try to unmake the world if it couldn’t be his.

And that was what I took away from him.

Mortals had no bodies, no minds, no will at all in that space, and for all the power he held, Vaingloth was still very much a mortal.

I wasn’t.

Not all of me at any rate.

When he tried to hide in the remnants of the power he’d stolen, I pointed the beast fragment towards where to find him.

When he tried to shield himself with a great workings of spellcrafter, I whispered words to the beast so that it could find all the weak points it needed to pierce the shield and consume Vaingloth’s words so he could never speak them again.

Destroying the world was what destroyed him though. That magic I didn’t interfere with. It was greater than me, and I very much wanted to be part of the world still. So the Beast Fragment and I let Vaingloth’s spell of Absolute Annihilation complete successfully. 

Had Vaingloth thought that would defeat his enemy? I can’t say. He could have had nothing else left and cast it out of spite. He could have been planning to turn the world’s death into a source of power, or an escape. The most likely thing though? I think he simply refused to believe he could lose.

That was his first mistake.

 We are, all of us, flawed and fallible. Losing is something we do almost the moment we are born. It can drive us onward or break us down, but in either case it is a part of who we are, and we pretend otherwise at our peril.

A more fundamental issue for Vaingloth however was trying to use a weapon of annihilation against an entity that was nothing but annihilation. It would have been like trying to set one of the Lords of Fire on fire and thinking that would somehow diminish them.

The Beast Fragment allowed the spell to finish, at my suggestion, because with Vaingloth bound up within it, the Neoteric Lord was the entirety of his own world. A world which his spell shattered and wiped from existence. 

A shock went through me, the Beast Fragment, and passed out into the world beyond. 

A Neoteric Lord had fallen. A Neoteric Lord was truly gone.

Three Lords had fallen before him.

None had ever truly died though.

Vaingloth had always imagined himself the first among equals.

Instead, he was merely the first.

That could have been the end of me too. My vengeance was as satisfied as it was possible to be. If that had been all I’d been hanging onto I would have fizzled away with him. As it was, fizzling away was almost unbearably tempting.

In finding his destruction, Vaingloth had been granted the one gift I couldn’t deny him.

Peace.

It’s the one guarantee all mortals have. In the end, no matter how bad things may get, we all find peace. 

Like I said though, I wasn’t entirely what you might call mortal anymore.

Mostly mortal? Oh, definitely.

As flawed and fallible as anyone else? Beyond a certainty.

If anything the part of me that wasn’t mortal, was even more flawed and fallible than the rest. The part of me that was emptiness and hunger and loneliness, the part that was the beast spent most of it’s time asking the rest of me what to do and why and how and whether any of this made any sense.

It didn’t want to return to the emptiness, but believing that life had anything to offer beyond the pains which built day upon day could be so very difficult.

And could I say it was really it was worth it?

In the midst of endless loss, loss which had swallowed more than one world, could I really say that the good parts of my life had been worth enduring all the miserable parts that surrounded them?

No.

That would have been a lie. The good times don’t pay for the bad ones. That’s not how life is balanced. We don’t endure suffering to earn some form of reward. Suffering and misery suck, and people who inflict them can go straight to hell. When the world inflicts them through random chance or by its very nature, that sucks too. None of that is something we have to put up with.

And that’s why, along with my bestial, shadowy self, I began to climb.

Because when things are terrible, we can change them. Or endure them until we can change them. Or take one step forward so that someone else will be able to take a step beyond that.

The world, in my experience, is immensely stupid and unfair.

But we’re capable of being better than that.

We can learn.

We can become more than we were.

There’s no guarantees. We can and absolutely will fail. We’ll be stupid and mean and make the worst mistakes possible, over and over again. It’s so easy to believe in the face of that, that our lives count for nothing.

Easy, but not correct.

As I climbed, the beast fragment asked me a question. Not with words, or thoughts, or anything coherent. It’s question came in the form of an insistence that I dissolve too. That I admit to the reality which defined it. A reality which said than in the end nothing it had ever been mattered. That the only truth it had ever found was that there was no truth, and that everything was without meaning.

You don’t fight that kind of thing with spells or fists or screams that ring off the heavens. You can’t fight it at all. What had happened to the gods proved that. They tried to find meaning in their power, had tried to fight the End of All things with rage and defiance.

But rage burns off, even the rage of a star, and defiance can crumble into acceptance when it’s foundations grow weak and melt away.

So I didn’t try to fight.

I just kept going.

I couldn’t defeat the beast fragment with words or deeds. I had to make my argument by living it. By showing it, and more importantly myself, through the example of who I chose to be and what I chose to do. If I wanted to prove that it was worth carrying on, the only tool that could really do it, was to carry on and live.

The beast fragment didn’t have a response to that. It’s hunger didn’t understand, and in a sense, couldn’t understand.

It tried to consume me, but what was there to consume? Wasn’t I the same as it was?

Obviously that wasn’t true. There was a lot in me that wasn’t in the beast fragment. Or, maybe not a lot, but definitely a Little (yeah, I crack myself up sometimes).

The beast fragment was not amused by that. It wasn’t anything at all, but ‘amused’ was a bit farther away than the rest.

I ascended and felt it tearing away at beastial bit I carried.

It wanted them back.

I didn’t deserve to have them. It could not stand that I’d turned a piece of itself against itself. That was the closest thing it understand to blasphemy, and it struck and tore at the nothing around me again and again.

Each time it struck it pulled back with nothing, and I was left with nothing around me.

I could have escaped like that.

It would have been easier than a lot of things I’d done, but there was one tiny problem with it; the beast fragment would follow me.

Could I have run one of the other cities and fed another Neoteric Lord to the beast fragment? Maybe? Would that have killed more people than I could count? Unquestionably.

Instead, I gave it what it wanted.

A part of me.

Not a big part, and not a part I was losing either. It was more likely a piece of myself which reflected the whole of me.

I couldn’t have it chase me, and I could leave it where it was. The world was never going to heal with an open unending wound in it. 

So the beast fragment needed to become something else.

It wouldn’t be me, not like MB was. Instead it would see the story of me and the story of MB. It would see who we were and who we’d become.

What would it learn from that? What would it chose to become?

I couldn’t begin to guess. It was nothing and so when it chose to become something it could wind up as anything.

Eternity is a long time to climb, but rising out of an endless void doesn’t some with distance markers or a good method tracking progress.

An infinity of years later though, I reached the top of the chasm.

All was darkness still. The world was cloaked in endless, fathomless night.

I tried to glow, even with Sola free of me, I knew I could still call on her domain.

I felt her warmth spread through me, but the world remained dark.

Or maybe it wasn’t the world that was dark?

“We will not be able to control the thing which we summon.”

“That is rather the point. It would go quite badly for us if we could after all.”

“Because then the gods would be able to pressure us to undo what we’ve done?.”

“Because then the gods would obliterate us and take from our remains any secrets we might possess which would allow them to survive.”

“And what is to prevent them from obliterating us first, out of the hope that we might contain an answer for them, or simply obliterating us on general principal?”

“There will be a fraught moment or two I’m sure. The more power they use however, the more our summon will be able to find and feast upon them.”

“Should we need to use the power we will steal from them, our summon will have no hesitation in feasting on us as well.”

“And that is why we have each been collecting as much grace of our own as we can. Consider, we do not need to defeat either the gods or the summon. We simply need to be hard enough to destroy that they destroy each other instead.”

“And if either of them remains?”

“If a god survives our endeavor, if will not be a problem for any of us for very long. If our summon survives it will not be a problem for anyone in the world for very long.”

“You seem eager to embrace your destruction should it come to that.”

“Not in the slightest. What I will embrace is the undeniable proof of my, I mean of course ‘our’, superiority which the new world will stand as a monument too. If there was no risk of failure, anyone could do this. It is only for us, that the risk of failure is in truth no risk at all.”

– High Accessors Dyrena and Vaingloth, finalizing the theoretical spellwork for summoning the Beast of All Endings.

Convincing Zeph to hurl me to my doom was surprisingly more difficult than I’d expected it to be. Given how annoying a lot of people find me, I’d almost wondered if she would have chucked me into the Abyss gleefully. There were plenty of people who’d have been happy to do the job, just, unfortunately, none quite as exceptional as she was.

“No. No, this is wrong. You can’t survive this,” she said instead and came to a complete stop at the edge of the chasm. 

Up close, I got to see that it did indeed look to be endless. I’d absorbed so much power that I was glowing brighter than all of Mt Gloria put together and my light couldn’t even illuminate the walls past a little bit much less any possible bottom which might or might not still exist.

That wasn’t my main problem though. Far more pressing was the fact that Vaingloth was coming in too fast for us to have a debate over my idea, so I pulled out the last, best card I had for convincing Zeph.

“This will free Sola,” I said. “It’s the only thing that will.” I wasn’t lying and that was what saved (probably not an accurate term to be fair) me.

Fox Winds, it turns out, can growl. 

And when they reach a decision, they tend to act on it without what you might call anything even vaguely like a delay, at least based on the sample size of one I had access to.

One moment I was securely held in her arms and the next I was out into the middle of the vast chasm, falling into a darkness that even the light I burned with was increasingly smothered by.

I was definitely going to die.

If I hit the bottom that was.

Or, if there was a bottom. 

The thing in the chasm? The biggest fragment of the beast left in the world? As I dropped towards its maw, I felt a tendril of its form brush past me and I saw how it had swallowed the ocean.

Compared to the beast itself, the fragment was tiny, an unnoticeably insignificant spec of emptiness, larger to be sure than the fragment I’d touched before, but still less than a footnote in the book of destruction which was the Beast of All Endings. 

Despite being so small though, it was larger than the world itself. It’s body, to the extent that it had anything that could be mistaken for a physical form, existed in dimensions outside any of the ones I could perceive.

Or, to be accurate, any of the ones I used to be able to perceive.

The part of me that wasn’t Little, and never had been, was all too familiar with those empty, screaming, desolate reaches. There were memories my skin bore and held away from from mind, memories of the eternity I’d spend dissolving into nothingness within the beast fragment which had devoured me. Could I draw on those memories? No. They both weren’t real and were something far greater than reality. My Little mind was not built to fathom the endless depths and null space the beast inhabited.

But I could wrap my feelings around the magnitude and nihility of the thing below me. 

I could understand what I was falling into not through reason and words but through metaphor and the emotional wounds which echoed between us.

None of that gave me a sharp sense of whether there was a bottom I might ever reach or if the beast had consumed not only the ocean but the idea behind the physical structure of the world where it landed.  It was as likely that I was falling down to crash on ancient rocks as it was that I was falling into the absence of space and time and physical reality itself.

The further I fell, the more those probabilities shifted away from reality and rock holding firm and more towards the sense of an endless wound, a void in the planet where the fabric of creation should have held firm. It was something that couldn’t be perceived because it wasn’t there, or rather the “there” it should have been was a “there” anymore.

No one had sensed this beast fragment because it was, in a sense, not within the chasm at all. Where it was, where it truly was, was a question without an answer. It’s location was an error in the fabric of creation, a point which couldn’t be referenced anymore, and it was as much that error as it was anything else.

That is what I was falling into, and would fall into forever.

Except that someone caught me.

Just like I’d known they would.

Being caught by Vaingloth was an inevitability. I’d known that from the start. And I’d known what he was going to do to me when he finally had me in his clutches.

With one hand as the anvil and the other as a hammer striking with the stolen speed of a god, he crushed me to a fine paste.

Or that’s what he tried to do.

Smearing me into a single cell thick blob of goop wouldn’t have stopped him from hurting me. He had plenty of stolen divine energy to bring me back to life again and again. His only problem was that to splatter me properly, splatter me so I wouldn’t be able to form a coherent thought and hurt him again, he needed to put some real effort into his hammer blow.

I had plenty of stolen magic of my own to defend myself with after all.

He very definitely needed to overcome that, and any resiliency that Sola could still lend me.

Also, he was angry enough to split the world in half if that was what it took to be rid of me.

Getting him that angry had been so critically important that I laughed when I saw his power building for the last punch I was ever likely to take.

He could totally overpower me. Even with the stolen fire. Even with the Heart of the Portal. Even with Sola’s backing. He was a Neoteric Lord, a Lord of the New World, and he had spent centuries building his power up from when he’s only had enough to overthrow the gods themselves.

He could smite me, fix his eyes, and crush all dissent in Mt Gloria and consider it nothing more than a particularly irritating afternoon.

Except his blow never landed.

Someone was still hungry you see.

As I fell into the starless abyss, the beast fragment had touched me, but that meant I’d touched it too.

This beast fragment didn’t know me, but I knew it. I knew its pain, and I knew what it thought it wanted.

And then Vaingloth caught me and it saw what I’d brought it.

A treat.

Vaingloth was powerful beyond all reason.

He claimed to be Eternal.

But so had the three Neoterics who’d already died.

True Helgon’s ghost remained behind, and that had been a critical foundation of my plan because he had none of the power he’d once possessed. That had proven that for as vast as they were, the Neoterics were still finite beings.

Which was something Vaingloth had forgotten in his rage. 

Something the beast fragment was all too willing to remind of him.

It caught his descending blow, not to save me, but because the power blazing from Vaingloth’s city-sized fist was something it couldn’t ignore.

I watched as Vaingloth’s expression, written on a face as large as an entire precinct in Mt Gloria, twisted from blinding rage to a horrified understanding of what he’d done.

And then the beast began to eat him.

Having been consumed by a beast fragment, I had a keen appreciation of what Vaingloth was experiencing in those first few moment. When I was devoured it had been so bad that I was physically incapable of remembering it fully, but the parts I could recall? Oh, those brought me so much comfort as I watched Vaingloth rear away missing not only the eyes I’d burned out but the hand which he’d planned to splat me with.

Had he fled at that exact instant he might have escaped. It’s not likely. The beast drank and ocean and burrowed a hole through the concept of space, it wasn’t really big on things like ‘limits’ but maybe Vaingloth could have worked something out. Gotten the beast to chase it to some other Neoterics city and let it eat the other Neoteric instead. That might have worked.

“Not looking so Eternal there, I’m kinda disappointed. Guess you weren’t the smart one after all.” There was no chance my words reached him over the roar of the beast. There was also no chance he missed them. 

And that was all it took.

The fear that might have saved him, that might have given him the speed and direction he needed, for just an instant, a fraction of a second was eclipsed by a fresh wave of unbridled rage.

He knew I’d planned this.

He knew I’d done this to him.

And he knew I was laughing at him and always, always would be.

That was it. That was the moment he’d had. The one sliver of time he could have escaped and I made sure he missed it.

The beast did the rest.

Into the burning sockets of his missing eyes.

Past his scream of rage and down his throat.

Straight through his chest, or whatever it was he’d turned it into.

The beast stabbed Vaingloth in his everything and then crashed over us.

I didn’t want to see what came next, and I definitely didn’t want to be a part of it, but I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t call Zeph to save me and I couldn’t call on Sola’s power, even as Vaingloth’s approaching death shredded the bindings on her at last.

I couldn’t because I had to make sure he was gone.

I had to bear witness, so that not even his ghost would have a place in the world that was to come.

“Will not all this construction draw attention to our plans?”

“It shall draw attention to us, which is all the better to disguise the plans we have laid.”

“But you are turning your city into a fortress. One does not build those unless one anticipates a being on the receiving end of a war.”

“And yet, these fortresses shall serve to prevent war.”

“Fortresses?”

“Mine is far from the only one. So far as I know, all of the others have been constructing such defenses. Surely you’ve begun similar preparations?”

“Why would I? There will be none left to defend ourselves from.”

“What we plan, for the gods, for the world, it will not be clean. Do not presume that the world will be left without perils simply because it will be ours.”

“So are we to be prisoners in these refuges of our own making?”

“Even the gods are limited to existing within their own domains. Better the safety of a refuge we control absolutely than an eternity cut short through the whims of chaotic peril.”

– High Accessors Helgon and Vaingloth inspecting the newly erected walls of Mt Gloria two  seasons before the Sunfall.

I was being carried again. I’d been carried a lot in my life. Not always literally, but it happened often enough when people were impatient, or when I was simply too weak or small to escape a situation on my own. Some of those times I’d agreed with being carried. Some of them had even saved my life. Despite the roaring inferno of mystical fire that I had devoured, and the intoxicating rush of knowing I was more powerful in that moment than everyone I’d ever known put together, I was still rather happy to be carried.

Because I was weak and small still.

And that was just the best!

We were well outside Mt. Gloria’s walls in the blink that it took Vaingloth to understand what I’d done.

Poor, pathetic, Little me. Only a total loser would find me to be even an annoyance, and an actual threat? Impossible. Simply impossible.

The Central Fire Portal building exploded, unable to contain his rage and fear.

“I don’t think he expected this,” Zeph said, her words somehow not ripped away by the deafening winds that screamed past us.

“How could he have,” I asked from the safety of her arms. “I’m so harmless after all. If a tiny thing like me can take a third of his power from him, just imagine what the other Neoterics will be able to do to him.”

“I still don’t like that part of this plan,” Zeph said, leaping over a trio of hills that were in our path. “This is going to stir up all of them, and we don’t have a plan for dealing with that.”

“Unfortunately, I do,” I said. All of my plan had come back to me but I was still revising bits of it as I went. Never a really good idea, but then nothing I’d done since stabbing the patroller really even approached ‘good idea’ status. “That part’s all on me though.”

I had several constraints my plans. The biggest one, of course, was to free Sola. So long as Vaingloth was alive that was going to require his cooperation to break the bindings he’d cast. I’d put in a lot of work to make sure cooperation was the last thing he’d ever offer me though, which left the alternative I really wanted.

“You? You’re going to take on the nine Neoterics all on your own?”

“Well, there’ll be eight of them then,” I said. There was an outcome to all this that was all for me. Could we have redeemed Vaingloth somehow? Turned his phenomenal talent and power to nurturing his people rather than literally burning them up for personal power? Anything was possible. The more important question though was did I want to, and I’d never been unsure as the answer to that one.

“I thought the plan was to lead Vaingloth away from his stronghold and then cutoff the other two portals to leave him weak enough for the others to take apart?”

“That was one of the plans, yes,” I said, and nudged her to change course towards a mountain on the horizon.

From the distance behind us, light bloomed and began racing closer with a terrible inevitability.

Vaingloth was using his own power, and he was not being careful with it anymore.

I winced at that.

My vengeance had definitely cost people their lives. There was no chance Vaingloth’s exit from the city had been gentle enough not to crush buildings and vaporize those who’d been caught in his path.

If I regretted anything, it was them. The people who’d been caught up in this through no fault of their own. They didn’t deserve what had happened to them. It wasn’t fair.

I’d learn their names in time. It wouldn’t do anything for them. Nor would my regrets. I wasn’t going to forget them though. That would be an insult. I’d chosen a path which had led to their destruction and that wasn’t something I’d ever be able to fully set right.

I hoped at best I could make a world that the people they cared for would find some comfort in.

“I can’t let you destroy yourself,” Zeph said, as her steps accelerated still further. “Not again.”

I could feel Vaingloth’s rage stabbing out towards us, but for all his power, he was no match in terms of pure speed to one of Sola’s Fox Winds. Of course, he didn’t have to be. The world was only so big. We were going to run out of places to run to long before he ran out of rage to push him into following us.

“I’m not going to destroy myself or endanger Sola,” I said. “All of this? You have no idea how much of it is for me. Screw going out in a blaze of glory. That’s Vaingloth’s job. Mine is to have the last laugh.”

Zeph’s pace slackened for a moment as we rounded the lower slopes of the mountain.

“You really believe that don’t you?” she asked, navigating through a forest of twisted, claw-like trees.

The spirits which had twisted the trees and generally planned to use them as tools to rip apart themselves and anything else they could get their branches on were busy running as fast as they could out of our path, largely because I’d asked them to.

There wasn’t much else I was able to ask them to do, even from the limit set of things they were still capable of, but it at least got through out of Vaingloth’s path.

“I wouldn’t have asked you to help me like this if I didn’t plan to walk away from it,” I said. “Dying would have been a whole lot easier and safer for everyone else.”

“But…” Zeph started to say but that was when Vaingloth got serious about catching us. 

He couldn’t match Zeph’s speed, but he also didn’t need to let little things like a mountain slow him down either.

The last time I’d seen him, he was wearing his ‘mostly human’ form. Barring the flames that had been continually consuming his ever-regenerating eyes (really a mistake on his part investing his magic in those), he’d looked like he had before his ascension. What burst from the mountain however was nothing but a ball of terror with too many arms, and too many mouths wrapped around it.

Incinerating all of the various bits of Vaingloth which surged around us felt incredibly tempting. The only problem was, he still had all of those contingency spells in place and was more than ready to absorb the fire I’d taken from him. In fact, and this was only partially a guess, he was also ready to absorb the Heart of the Fire Portal, which was impressive since he had to have spun that spell up while he was chasing us. 

To be fair, the loss of heart of the portal was probably the one thing which really threatened to cripple him in the long term. I think my plan would have worked just based on the insults I’d dealt him, but stealing the gate had made his pursuit a certainty.

As his fingers swelled to the size of buildings and began to blot out of the horizon in front of us, I wondered for an instant whether it might be possible to overwhelm his contingencies and burn a path to freedom, but it would be a bad bet. Vaingloth had underestimated me. I was not about to underestimate the guy who’d overthrown the gods. If he had a spell setup for something, betting on anything short of a god taking it down was too obviously a losing play even for me to try.

Instead, I went with a winning one.

I was holding onto the fire I’d stolen, but in stealing it I’d changed it too. In Vaingloth’s hands, it had been the fire of his office, a measure of how complete his domination was. In my hands, it was a badge of how I’d outsmarted him right up until I let it go.

Giving it back to him was out of the question, and simply casting it off would have been worse than useless. 

So I gave it to Sola.

Some of it.

I needed almost all of it, but there was definitely enough for an offering to my distant and silent god.

My distant and silent god who nonetheless blessed the sacrifice I made to her and allowed me to pass it on to one of her court.

Lighting Zeph on fire had not previously been a part of my plan.

Sharing Sola’s flame with her however was not exactly something she was opposed to.

The world became nothing but a blur.

Zeph only slowed down because we were suddenly out of sight, beyond the horizon from Vaingloth and we didn’t want to lose him.

“This is…!” Zeph’s excitement was so intense I could feel her chest vibrating with it.

“A gift from a god who loves you dearly,” I said. “There’s not far to go now either.” I pointed towards where a chasm lay waiting for us. Once it had been the deepest reach of an ocean. Dark and impenetrable. In the wake of the Sunfall, it became the home to something far worse than crushing pressure and creatures which could never walk on land.

“I’m staying with you when we get there,” Zeph said.

“You can’t. This is something I have to do alone, no one else can help with this.” I wished I’d broached this part of my plan with Xalaria. She could have confirmed that it had to be me.

Or she might have killed me where I stood for even suggesting the idea. Since I wasn’t exactly sure which reaction she would have chosen, I’d kept this idea to myself, but, it turns out, sometimes not trusting people can be a bad idea too.

“The other Neoterics aren’t here,” Zeph said. “There’s no one to stop Vaingloth when he catches you. And he’s going to catch you as soon as we stop.”

“I know. That’s part of the plan. I can’t….he can’t catch you too though. You have to be safe for any of this to work,” I said.

“Why? What are you doing?” 

This was the moment I’d been dreading. It was entirely possible Zeph wasn’t going to trust me either because there really was a serious risk to what I had in mind. Not so much for me as for the entire world and everyone left in it.

That would be a lot of regrets to carry, but not enough to make me hesitate.

“I need you to drop me into the abyss there.”

“You’ll die.”

“No. There’s something down there.”

“There’s not. That’s been empty since the ocean dried up.”

“Oceans don’t just dry up,” I said. “The thing that drank the ocean dry is down there and if Vaingloth wants me, he’s going to have to follow me down there and catch me before it drinks me down too.”

“Then we have an accord.”

“An accord presumes that balance can be maintained. You seek from us a portion of our power but the only coin which will suffice is mortal power in equal measure.”

“That, allow me to assure you, will not be a problem.”

– Vaingloth the Eternal and the Primarch of the Seventh Flame concluding their negotiations.

I’m not a genius. My plans had no secret guarantee of success. I could have failed and I had definitely overlooked several things already. Despite the fact that failure was still very much a possibility though, it felt so delicious to have been proven right about my guesses.

Almost as delicious as the Central Fire Portal was.

I think it was the strange cackling sound that filled the portal room which finally broke through Vaingloth’s rage to wedge the first tendrils of real awareness of his situation.

And with awareness, fear came rushing right along too.

I could see it in his posture.

If he’d still had any eyes, I probably would have seen it there too.

That made me cackle louder. Oh, right, it was me cackling. Wow. That was loud. And didn’t really sound like me at all. Probably not an issue though. There was still lots of fire to dig into after all!

Which was kind of one of things I’d overlooked.

I’d known, or to be honest ‘strongly suspected’, that I would be able to do some horrible things to the Fire Portal thanks to both Sola’s blessing and the fact that I was partially something unbelievably horrifying.

What I hadn’t counted on was how much I would enjoy it though.

My teeth ripped into the flames at the center of the portal and tore off a huge gout that I drunk down like the sweetest of wines.

And it was far more intoxicating than any alcohol which had ever been brewed.

My skin was seared, not by the flames around me but by the fire surging within.

The fire wasn’t Sola’s and it wasn’t from the portal.

It was me. It was the wild, inhuman joy at finally, finally, holding the power I needed. 

I told the others that I could draw on the beast’s nature. That I’d need to dance on the edge of madness a little but that I could hold it together since I had so many burning reasons to stay connected to the world.

Reason doesn’t hold in the face of madness though and as I tore piece after piece out of the gates, I danced far beyond the edge of madness.

Why stop after all?

There was power there for a taking. Power that I needed. Power that I deserved!

Did I deserve it?

Did I need it?

Did any of that matter when it felt so unbearably good.

I’d been cold before.

I would never be cold again.

I’d been weak. Always so weak.

In the flames though I was power itself.

All my life I’d been Little.

Constrained.

Trapped.

A victim of forces far beyond my control.

As I consumed and consumed though I became a force beyond control.

The beast fragment had tried to take everything from me, but I was used to that.

This though? This was different.

This was my chance to take.

The world around me had a pathetic little tyrant wailing and gnashing and trying so very hard to unmake me.

It was wonderful and my laughter rang not off the ceiling of the Fire Portal’s chamber but off the dome of the heavens itself. I could feel Vaingloth’s fear rise at that. Could feel the fire in his heart turning to ice. He began tapping into deep reservoirs of power. Old old magics, like the kind they had called on to sabotage the gods and ensure the beast’s not-quite-complete victory.

I should have cared about that, but did I? Could I? No. Not in the slightest. Not with the blinding rush of power which was doubling and redoubling within me.

I’d thought I would be able to steal the portal’s energies. Take from the little gnat who was throwing spell after spell at me and use that as bait.

But why?

I had a plan didn’t I?

Why did I need bait?

Did it matter? I’d been wrong. It wasn’t the portal’s energy I could steal. It was the portal’s energy and all the fire it had given the gnat. All the power he had traded the lives of his people for.

And the more I took, the more I could take.

Words began to fade.

Thought began to fade.

What words does the beast need to explain its hunger.

What thoughts are there to think?

All is hunger.

All must be consumed.

All must be mine.

Glory and rapture.

The limits of form and sentience gone.

Power and more power until all is burned out and only absolute desolation can claim me.

Absolute…

Desolat…

A soul touched me. And then another. And another. And still more after that.

I’d been falling, fading, and dimming despite the overwhelming light around me, but they caught me.

Within the flames, I wasn’t alone.

What response could I make to the beast’s hunger? To the emptiness I’d always always felt? Souls don’t need words, but they gave me an answer anyways.

Their touch alone was enough.

The Kindling Tossed weren’t gone.

They hadn’t been lost.

Just lost to me.

“Mom? Dad?” I found my words at last.

No words answered, but I didn’t need them. All I needed was what they showed me.

That they were still with me. That they were a part of me and that I’d been a part of them and together were connected in a chain that carried the hopes of everyone who’d come before us and the dreams of everyone who would come after.

Unlimited power?

I was already part of something that didn’t have limits.

I was Little, but Little Hands Can Do Great Things.

I’d never believed that.

Had hated it for being an oppressive lie.

Except it hadn’t been.

It had been their hope and promise to me.

A new fire rose in me. It wasn’t greater than the fire I was consuming, but this fire I controlled.

It was mine. And it was theirs.

It was what the beast had lost.

In consuming and devouring everything, it had lost itself and everything it had been a part of.

I could easily have done the same.

Would have done the same for sure.

But I wasn’t alone.

It didn’t suck any less that all the people who’d been pitched into the gate had died. The world would have been better to have them in it. Their lives though? They had not been lived in vain. Each and everyone one of them had touched someone else’s life, and to touch one life is to touch them all.

I thought my world was dead, and maybe it was, but the dead can still have things to teach the living.

Outside the portal, Vaingloth’s spells were nearing completion.

Even stumbling drunk on power like I was, I found my appraisal of him as a ‘gnat’ had perhaps been a little biased by the ecstasy of the flame. I could sense the shape of his working as it built, and it was definitely going to a be problem.

Which, didn’t actually surprise me.

He’d caged Sola.

He’d stolen the power of a countless number of gods.

And he’d called the beast from beyond the bounds of reality to our world.

Sure he’d had help with all of those but he couldn’t even have been a part of those rituals without near perfect mastery of spellcasting and a deeper knowledge of the workings of divine power than anyone who didn’t bear the title of ‘Neoteric Lord’.

I’d had a plan for that though? Hadn’t I?

More power?

I turned to drink in more of the gate’s fire, fully aware that gambling on retaining my sanity when I did so was not a bet I was likely to win.

“No more,” a voice in the fire said.

Or…

No, the voice wasn’t in the fire. It was the Fire.

“You have consumed that which was bargained for,” the Lord of Fire on the other side of the portal said. “No more may be taken unless the balance is paid.”

“Balance?” I’d planned on consuming a frankly illogical amount of power. Far more than any mortal could ever handle. That had been a mistake. Not because I couldn’t handle it.

I mean, I definitely couldn’t handle it.

No the mistake had been that there would only be an illogical amount of power. There was so much more.

And Vaingloth was still ready for that.

His spell was going to bind me just like Sola had been bound. All the power I was carrying? Yeah, that was what was going to bind me. He was going to turn me into the the next Central Fire Portal.

I was going to be the one to burn up all the future Kindling.

So of course the right answer was to lash out at him.

To incinerate him with eternal fire. His eyes were going to burn forever and the same could be done to the rest of him.

Perfect right?

Vengeance, safety, and a use for the titanic amount fire I was carrying which was moments from being turned against me.

So, important question, why was I not doing exactly that?

I’m an idiot. I mean there’s plenty of evidence of that. In this case though, I wasn’t quite idiotic enough to do exactly what Vaingloth wanted me to.

It didn’t take much to avoid being that stupid though.

He was standing right there, seemingly purely focused on weaving his binding spell.

Raising no defenses.

An immortal who wasn’t trying to avoid permanent injuries?

And oh, look, what was that behind his metaphorical back? A freaking wagon-load of contingency spells? All waiting to capture anything I threw at him.

So yeah, I’ll just give him all the power I just stole fair and square. Sounds brilliant right?

Here’s a better idea though! How about I remember what my plan was? While I was working on that, I gave a little of the fire I was carrying back to the flame beyond the portal.

Not much, just enough that the spirit there wouldn’t be worried I was going to take anymore.

And then a tiny bit more.

So that they would shut the door.

And not reopen it.

Not unless someone had the heart of the portal I’d just consumed.

To be honest, that had not been part of my original plan. Mostly because I hadn’t known there was anything on the other side of the portal. Or at least anything that I could speak to.

I also hadn’t known I’d be able to chow down on the portal so thoroughly that I absorbed the whole thing. As my thoughts tumbled back together I remembered that I’d only needed to steal some of the fire portal’s power. Just enough that the other Neoteric Lords would think Vaingloth was as weak as they were ever likely to catch him.

Not that I was planning on letting the other Neoterics have him.

I mean, I might have let Helgon have some playtime with Vaingloth. That had seemed like it would be fun for Helgon and very much the opposite for Vaingloth. It would also have come with a lot of unknowns though. If Vaingloth’s spellcasting mastery was ‘near perfect’, then it was safe to assume Helgon’s was too and Helgon’s status as ‘dead’ might be a lot more negotiable than anyone else’s.

No, I wanted to make sure that when Vaingloth was taken out there wouldn’t be a ghostly version hanging around to haunt the world anymore than the memories of him inevitably would.

With my gift of fire to the flames, I moved one step closer to that goal and felt the inferno of the portal close around me.

That had been another escape, if I’d wanted one. When the portal closed, I could have chosen to remain on the side of the Infinite Flames. I had my own flames though, and my mind back, which meant my plan was in place too.

Vaingloth was speaking in three voices at once as the last of the flames died away. His words were ones even the darkest of gods would have considered unforgivable blasphemies.

And his spell was going to work since my choices were hit him with everything I had, and thereby give him all the power I was carrying while rendering myself powerless, or hold on to my stolen power and watch as his spell bound me for eternity.

He was on the last word when I nodded for the next stage of the plan to begin.

That was all it took for me to take flight.

Not of my own power.

Though I was burning as hot as Sola ever had, Zeph didn’t seem to mind at all as she raced us both out of the city at celestial speed.

“And should there pieces of the gods we cannot reclaim? The world will fare poorly if the balance of divine power is allowed to leak away.”

“Some loss is inevitable.”

“Inevitable or desirable?”

“I’m sure I don’t take your meaning there my friend.”

“Friend indeed. You are not so opaque my good Accessor Vaingloth. If the power of the gods is allowed to run down it will expose weaknesses in those of us who hold the remnants. Weaknesses which will allow…perhaps we should call it ‘consolidation’ of the remaining power.”

“That is certainly a possibility, though a distant one you must admit, dear Hanshel.”

“What is distance to those who will live forever? Apart from an opportunity for which plans must be laid.”

“For the Eternal there will be no end of things to plan for.”

“These plans I speak of will need to be quite singular though. To replace the lost divine energies would require…what? The invention of new gods? Some means of bartering for power at an advantage? Tell me, you’ve worked it out, I’m sure. What secret schemes have you not shared with the others.”

“As a loss of any of we Twelve would destabilize an already precarious balance, I assure you Hanshel, I am as transparent as you might ever hope for a soul to be.”

– High Accessors Hanshel and Vaingloth in an exchange a week before Vaingloth’s research into elemental portals was concluded.

There are things we don’t want to do in life. I subscribe firmly to the philosophy that the right answer is simply not to do them. Which was why I was climbing up a narrow cleft in the bedrock which Mt Gloria was laid out upon, creeping ever closer to the single most terrifying thing in the world. Was I shaking inside and desperate to be anywhere else? Uh, yes, obviously. Was I happy that I was dragging Zeph and Kalkit along with me and had almost zero ability to keep them safe? No, I was not even a little bit happy. Did I wish MB was with me and that I could simply bury my face in its fur and wait for all this to go away?

Oddly, no.

MB had stayed behind of its volition. There were children around it. It liked them. I think it wanted to keep them safe? Or maybe it wanted them to keep it safe? MB was me, mostly, but I couldn’t really claim to understand my own actions all the time either, and the bits that weren’t me might have given it a very different perspective on somethings, a perspective I was not in a position to understand without a lot of reflection.

Reflection which might have shed some light on exactly why I was climbing up towards the searing heat above us.

I mean, I knew what I had in mind. I’d vetted it with Xalaria and if the Blessed of Battles thought I had chance then it wasn’t the least intelligent plan I could have come up with.

But why was I doing it?

I mean, sure, Vaingloth was going to kill me, but that was only if the other Neoterics didn’t get him first. Could I have allied myself with one of them? Yeah. Definitely. I sort of had with Helgon, though he didn’t really count by virtue of the whole ‘being dead’ thing, even if it was a questionable sort of “dead”.

I didn’t want that though.

Was it because allying with a living Neoteric would mean being complicit in the atrocities they had committed and were continuing to commit with none to oppose them? Sure. That was true.

Was it because, given what I was, they would all want me to be erased or consumed to bolster their own safety? That was both true and an eminently valid reason not to seek their help.

Was it because Sola wouldn’t want me to join forces with the people who’d ultimately been responsible for her destruction and the destruction of the World That Should Have Been? I felt safe in saying that Sola would definitely not have enjoyed any connection with the Neoterics and was likely quite pleased with the choice I’d made.

So those were all true.

But they weren’t my truth.

Vengeance could have been my truth. I hadn’t even begun to plumb the depths pains and misery Vaingloth had been responsible for in my life, even without considering what he’d done to everyone I knew, had ever known, or could have ever known.

It would have been nice to say that wasn’t it. That I was a big enough person to forego vengeance. A better person than he was. It would have been nice and also a complete crock. He deserved vengeance, and I wasn’t a bad or lesser person for wanting it. For me and for the entire world, past, present, and future, but while I was by no means opposed to balancing the scales, that wasn’t what kept me climbing up.

What kept me going wasn’t anything courageously noble or unbreakably grim.

I continued climbing, up and up, as the rocks grew so hot that no one but those blessed by the divine could have touched it, because I wanted to believe.

In myself.

In Sola.

In Zeph, and Lucky, and even stupid and slow Pibby who’d gotten me into this mess.

I’d never believed tomorrow could be better because it never had been.

Because I saw over and over again how things fell apart. How awful people were to each other. How often no one listened, or came together, or believed in anyone else.

I’d spent my life running from one thing.

Ever since my family had been burned up as Kindling, I’d done anything I could to avoid meeting the same fate.  No matter how miserable it made me, no matter what it meant for anyone else, if it kept me from being tossed into the fires, I’d do it.

Zeph hadn’t done that. She’d fought.

Sola hadn’t done that. She’d fought too.

And Lucky, and Mumora, and Smiles, and even the Beast Fragment.

They all had held onto something.

 Onto themselves.

Maybe they hadn’t known who they wanted to be anymore than I had.

But they’d made a choice and dared the consequences.

A lot of other people had made choices too and the consequences had ended them.

But we all end.

Our ending isn’t what matters.

It took me a whole lot of examples to see that.

Hell, the whole world is an example.

What matters isn’t that we’ll be gone, it’s who we were when we were here.

And I knew who I wanted to be.

At last.

And at last I was where I needed to be.

The fire above should have burned me, but though she was wrapped away, my god was still with me, and my god is a mighty one.

One punch was all it took.

The crevasse ended in shell of solid concrete which had been used to seal the cracks in the chamber above.

And in one fire fueled punch I shattered it.

From there it was only a few feet more of a climb before we arrived.

I dragged myself up into the room to find the Central Fire Portal looming over me.

Drawing on Sola’s power had not been subtle.

Subtlety’s time was done.

It was time to be loud.

Fortunately there were a whole lot of guards in the Central Fire Portal room which made being loud not only an option, but inevitable. To make absolutely certain that Vaingloth knew where I was though, I drew on the lessons Fulgrox had given me and and called on power in Sola’s name.

That was the kind of thing that had been more effective when I had a god actively with me, but while Sola wasn’t there to use her voice to call on the power for me, her name, a lot of faith, a bit of divine power, and a willingness to burn everything down made a surprisingly potent incantation. It may have made things just a tiny bit easier that I also had a portal to a realm of infinite fire close at hand which was designed to funnel power into the material world.

Those opposed to my little summoning spell included Vaingloth’s guard, who were armed with some very high quality Death Marks. Vaingloth, it seemed, was not messing around when it came to the defense of the Fire Portal from which all of the other Fire Portals drew their power. The guards also had some of the most menacing, and probably effective, armor I’d ever seen troops outfitted in. None of that was going to help them though.

“Time for you two to vanish,” I said, but I was speaking to empty air. Kalkit and Zeph were already so well hidden that they were obscured even from the glaring light coming off me.

Zeph hadn’t been a fan of this stage of the plan. As target’s went, I’m both squishy and abominably easier to hit than either of them would have been.

I had something they didn’t however.

“Alert Lord Vaingloth and open fire! Maximum intensity!” the duty captain of the guards shouted.

“Ain’t gonna help,” I said. I didn’t shout but I didn’t have to. I was bleaching the walls I was glowing so brightly, my voice carried to every soul in the room whether I wanted it to or not.

Did I mean that maximum intensity on their Death Marks wasn’t going to help? Yes. Yes I did and I demonstrated that by burning the incoming bolts out of the air.

Silly guards.

Why were they surprised.

Everything burns after all.

Everything must burn in fact!

Burn, burn, BURN!

I pulled my thoughts in when that one crossed my mind. There’s a big difference between wielding power in Sola’s name and being the one who was being wielded. The flames from the portal didn’t have Sola’s divine majesty behind them but they did have a hunger that was far greater than any a tiny thing like me could contain.

Fortunately, I wasn’t speaking to them for just myself. My voice wasn’t Sola’s but my purpose was and I knew we were more than enough to control the fire that raged around and through me.

A wordless swell of pride bubbled up inside me at that, and it wasn’t my own, which felt delightful.

The other thing I’d meant in what I said, was that calling Vaingloth wasn’t going to help. For one thing, he was already completely aware of where I was. For another, him appearing in person was exactly what I was hoping for and why I hadn’t done anything else but defend myself up till that point.

While he was a disappointment as a human being, and as a god-figure, Vaingloth was at least not disappointing in his response to my revelation.

I mean, his minions might have been a little disappointed that a half dozen or so of them got incinerated when he arrived.

The explosion which heralded him, blasted the remainder of the guards off their feet, which would have bought me a moment’s reprieve from deflecting their death bolts, except for the small point that Vaingloth came in swinging his own power like a hammer the size of the mountain itself.

I hadn’t been able to defend myself from him before, and I wasn’t able to do so this time either. I did survive though, and I’d known I was going to. Vaingloth didn’t want me dead. He wanted and needed me to suffer. If he’d wanted me dead, he would have burned all of Mt. Gloria down the moment he even suspected I was inside it.

Instead of killing me, he hurt me, or at least he tried to.

His aim was a bit off.

Probably because his eyes were still on fire.

Oh. Oww. I hadn’t realized Sola had managed to do that to him.

It really looked like it hurt.

So.

I was happy.

I was also being pushed back though.

Into the fires.

Into quite a lot of fire.

As a Blessed, I could obviously call the fire and command it to some extent.

But the Blessed have limits.

We’re still mortal.

Vaingloth, arguably, was not.

With access to divine force far in excess of my own, he was able to shove me towards the thing I’d feared most in the whole world.

I’d been so scared all my life of becoming Kindling and that’s exactly the fate he was going to inflict on me.

So I let him.

With a smirk that should have screamed at him what a bad idea he’d had, I let him fling me into the portal.

There was enough fire primal enough in there to reduce me to ash, even with Sola’s blessings.

But I was more than a Blessed of Sun God.

MB was me, but I was also it, and like my beastly forebearer, I began to feast.