“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.