“If we didn’t ration the heat, there wouldn’t be enough to go around.”

“But there’s not enough. Mr. Walker upstairs froze last night.”

“Well, he was old. It’s what happens. He wasn’t doing much work so he wasn’t keeping himself warm.”

“He was sick. He couldn’t work. He couldn’t even get out of bed.”

“So that was probably what got him then. He was old and sick. Was probably going to die anyways. Giving him heat from the rest of us wouldn’t have done any good, and we’d have just had less.”

“But the castle always has heat. And a lot of it! You saw, didn’t you? Last night, after curfew? When the whole city was dark? There were lights on all over there!”

“That’s just how it is. Work hard and maybe you’ll make it to the castle someday too.”

– a conversation had in My Gloria roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand variations since the Sunfall.

The castle was just as I’d always imagined it to be.

Which is to say it was warm.

What? There wasn’t a lot more I could say about it, apart from ‘oh yeah, it also stunk of blazing wood’, which, to be fair, had not been something I’d imagined. Without being able to see things, I had to imagine the gilded pillars wreathed in flames with their gold sloughed off and pooling at their bases. I’m sure Vaingloth would have been delighted by that. 

Which made was another price to pay for plotting his downfall as thoroughly as I had. If I’d left him broken and alive somewhere, he could have been forced to watch as everything he built was torn down and taken away from him. 

Sure, his end hadn’t been pleasant or quick, but the finality of it meant that he at least got to be at peace, which was a little unfair even if it was probably worth the tradeoff for me to be able to sleep without one eye open for the rest of my life.

That the flaming pillars weren’t going to be holding up the floors above them forever would have been more of a worry if I could see them, but for what I had in mind, I only needed them to hold up for a little bit longer. The burning stairs were also an issue, or they would have been if Zeph and I weren’t blessed by the sun which, notably, finds mortal flames amusingly chilly at best.

Were they actually chilly that might have been the explanation for the shudder that went through Zeph as we reached what I guessed was the first landing.

“Something wrong?” I asked, when what I should have said was “what awful thing did we just run across?”

“It’s nothing,” Zeph said. “Just a bad memory.”

There’s a pelt in a case on the wall, Sola said, only to me I think. It belonged to one of my other Fox Winds, long ago.

Okay, so maybe it was good that Vaingloth was dead and had suffered horribly. 

I didn’t pause when Zeph led us onwards. I didn’t want to linger near anything that hurt her like that. I did reflect for a moment though on it.

The rage I felt for Vaingloth was never going to leave me.

Even if I forgot everything he’d done to me and mine, there were so many other people he’d hurt that there would always be new atrocities to stoke a hunger to see him hurt more.

And that wasn’t going to do me any good.

I had a job to do and losing myself in the desire to destroy Vaingloth’s stuff was not only going to cause me a lot of pain, it could pretty easy leave Mt. Gloria a smoking and lifeless ruin.

Was I exaggerating there?

No. Sadly I was not.

See, mortals are not meant to hold the sort of power I’d taken from the fire portal.

Nor are they meant to contain the key that portal within themselves.

Vaingloth, for all his claims of divinity, acknowledged that reality and had left the bulk of the power he’d converted the populace into stored safely away outside himself.

I hadn’t known just how much power that was when I’d been setting up my plan, and, to be honest, I might have reconsidered since it meant I was bomb with the power to flatten more of the world than anything since the Sunfall.

“The floor’s fallen away in front of us,” Zeph said, stopping me with a gentle touch of her hand.

“Too much fire?” I tried to picture how hot it was getting around us. With Sola’s blessing, the breeze blowing past us didn’t smell great, but the toxins and flesh searing heat was a non-issue.

“No. Something was here. Something he’d kept bound.” Was she angry about that? From her calm tone you might never know. From the tension she couldn’t keep out of her fingers though? Oh yeah, she had plenty of rage to deal with too. Probably even more than I did since she’d seen a lot more of what Vaingloth had done than I had.

“It, or they, are free now,” I said, aware all too acutely how some forms of freedom were better than others.

“I know, I just…” She wanted to go find them. Between Sola’s fragment, the pelt, and now someone else Zeph knew, I had to wonder if Vaingloth had intended to style himself as the King of the new world by pretending to be its sun?

No. What was I saying. Given his ego, even without all the rest that would have been obvious.

It was comforting that while I could understand his desire to kill his enemies, resurrect them, and then kill them again, I could point to his desire to rule the world as an enormous point of different between us.

“Yeah. We’ve spent too much time suffering for no reason,” I said. “Don’t waste any more. Go find them.”

“I can’t. You need me.” She wasn’t wrong about that. I would have been weeks or months getting back to Mt Gloria without her, and that’s under the assumption that the other Neoterics wouldn’t have found me first and had other ideas than letting me return and carry on my life.

She wasn’t entirely right either though.

“I owe you so much, you have no idea.” Normally it wasn’t easy to admit things like that. I mean, I owed a lot of people for a lot of things, but the thought of them collecting on that had filled me with terror and despair since my only value had been as kindling for the longest time.

Zeph would never ask that of me though, even before all of this, even when I was just ‘Little’ and nothing more. That just wasn’t who she was.

“You’ve never owed me anything,” Zeph said, and I heard the song of praise for Sola hiding behind her words.

“You should still go. Unless I miss my guess whoever busted out of here is probably faced with a world that won’t make a whole lot of sense to them will it?”

It wasn’t an amazing feat of insight to come up with that. Anyone Zeph knew and felt strongly about had to be someone she’d known from before the Sunfall, at least if Vaingloth had also been interested in them. Picturing going from a world where Sola blazed overhead for everyone to see and share in her light and warmth freely to the dark, dead land we lived in was unimaginable.

But people had done it.

There’d been people who lived through the world collapsing and dying. And they’d kept going, building what they could, persisting even if they couldn’t see the light in their world ever returning.

What if the person who’d been trapped by Vaingloth (since Zeph wouldn’t have the hitch in her throat that was there if it had been a relic of other item) had been one of my ancestors? One of the people who’d pushed forward and hung on so that someday I could exist?

Zeph was silent and unmoving so I squeezed her hand.

“Seriously. Go. You need to do this and they need you too.”

“But you…” she tried to object.

“I have Sola,” I reminded her.

“And I can guide her from here,” Sola said to us both.

I was rewarded with a return squeeze on my hand. Zeph probably smiled too but I wasn’t going to get to see those anymore either.

And then she was gone.

“It’s not too far,” Sola said. “In fact, I can lift you up directly if you want.”

“Thank you, but I want you to conserve your strength. I know you can do a lot more now, but I also know people are going to be asking a lot more of you too.”

“It’s the nature of the divine.”

“Yes, well, I just got you back, so if I can walk, let me give that to you.” As prayers went, walking was an odd one, but it seemed appropriate under the circumstances.

“You’ve already given more more than you can ever know.”

“I’m betting I still haven’t paid back that first feast. Do you know how good that good was?”

“That wasn’t all me.” Sola’s amusement made ‘arguing’ with her a lot easier.

“Don’t care. You were there so you get all the credit. Now where do I go?”

“On your right, there’s a small walkway left. Just hug the wall.”

“The one that’s on fire?”

“You won’t be burned.”

“See, I’ll have to pay this back now too.”

We went on like that, and the silly banter distracted me both from enormity of what I was planning to do and from the anger that had been creeping back into my heart.

Vaingloth was a miserable bag of puke but he was gone and the world had so may other things left to focus on.

“The High Tower is just ahead but most of it has been reduced to ash already.” Sola didn’t sound especially worried about that. She was just letting me know that, like it or not, I was soon going to have to allow her to help me out a bit more.

“We’re probably high enough now,” I said, thinking back to all the times I’d looked up at the castle and wondered what all of the parts of it were used for.

‘To stroke Vaingloth’s ego’ hadn’t been my guess then, but it very definitely was as I stood in its burning ruin.

“The tower will block your creation if you make it here though, wont it?” Sola asked.

It was a perfectly reasonable question. Especially since she had a vested interest in make sure why creation would be able to do its job properly.

“What tower?” I asked and unleashed a teeny, tiny, itty-bitty spec of the power I’d stolen from Vaingloth.

Sola caught me, which was good since I hadn’t intended to explode quite as much of the castle as it turned out my teeniest and tiniest of sparks was able to obliterate.

The wings of fire felt pretty cool though, and if anyone was looking up at the castle (they all were, after the explosion, literally everyone was looking at the castle) I had to guess that I looked amazing.

Not that anyone would be able to tell who the form covered in flames with big flaming wings was, but, still, I liked the image I was able to come up with.

“Now let’s give them a real show,” I said and reached into the ocean of fire I was carrying.

What blossomed in the sky above the castle did more than warm me, or even warm the entire city. It did more than banish shadows which had lain draped over buildings and people for centuries. It woke something up in everyone.

“Wait? This is for me?” Sola’s voice held a note of surprise since I’d told people I was going to recreate the fire portal and left out the tidbit that it wasn’t going to be a portal anymore.

It was a home.

I couldn’t put the sun back in the sky, but I could make a spot for a little piece of it to live right at the top of Mt. Gloria, where everyone would share in what she had to offer.