“Do you really think these defenses will protect you, Helgon?”

“I should think they would be a considerable deterrent at the least. Why? Do you see a flaw in them Dyrena? Something I should improve?”

“Everything has flaws, even the gods as it turned out.”

“Well then I shall address them. That is what we do after all, isn’t it? Learn, innovate, improve and create a better world tomorrow than we have today.”

“That is what you do my dear Helgon. I would believe you to be unique in that regards, but then you’re not without the same blood on your hands as the rest of us are you?”

“I wouldn’t say our hands are clean, but we have, I believe, somewhat less bloody hands than the rest of our number.”

“And we live because the rest are unaware of that fact, or of what we truly did with those we selected for our portion of the culled population.”

“Less bloody however is not the same as clean, is it?”

“No. No it is not.”

“Will you tell me the flaws you see in my defenses then? Or would it be more fitting and just to leave my fate to whatever outcome the others may devise?”

“Just? Oh, how beautiful it would be if there was a single erg of justice left in this world, but we made sure the Heavenly Court was among the earliest to fall, didn’t we?”

“I distinctly recall you advancing the claim that the Heavenly Court being devoid of true justice was a moral cornerstone to the course we chose.”

“Yes. After we corrupted them, well, not all of us. That was mostly the twins, but yes, by the time our great scheme began to become real, there was real corruption it served to undo. Along with almost all the good things in the world too.”

“Only almost all. You after all are still here, and you have always been the best of us.”

“No, Helgon. Of all our cabal, I am by far the worst.”

– Helgon and Dyrena coming to terms with the destiny they had chosen

Helgon smiled and there was a sense of relief? Amusement? Wistful nostalgia? Trusting that I could read the expressions of a NeotericLord  properly, and a dead one at that, was probably unwise but I felt comfortable landing on something like ‘generally positive’.

“We are, I am sad to say, far beyond the end of my plans. They were somewhat interrupted by…” He gestured to all of himself.

“Pardon me for saying this but being dead doesn’t seem to be a bad look for you.”

“Thank you. Unlike ‘aging gracefully’, I suppose I can rely on staying like this for the meaningful future.”

“For the future to be meaningful, wouldn’t you need to be a part of it?” I asked. I could feel Draconia restraining herself in the back of my head. 

I knew she and Umbrielle had spoken privately and there seemed to be some agreement between them concerning Helgon. I wasn’t be urged towards his immediate destruction, assuming I even could destroy a ghost, but neither was there precisely forgiveness in Draconia’s heart. 

That didn’t surprise me. Some things weren’t really forgivable. 

Helgon did appear to be useful though and, given the circumstances before us, we needed as many ‘useful’ allies as we could get.

“I thought that for quite a while. The only future that mattered was one that I created and could continue tinkering on. As a motivation towards immortality may I offer my opinion on how foolish that is. We all represent the futures of those who came before us, and our own futures are best entrusted to those who will have their own questions they seek answers to. Our job, I believe now, if perhaps a bit too late, is to seek the best answers we can find for those who follow to build upon.”

“So there’ll come a time when you’re not even a ghost, or is this an immortality you can no longer reject?”

“The shackles that bind me here are of my own creation, forged from myself to entrap myself. I believe there will come a day when they fall away, a time when I too can journey onwards, and yet I can’t help but remain tightly clasped to this existence, however sparse it may be.”

“Why?” It was too simple a question, but I felt like I needed to understand the ally I was going to use as a lever to move the heavens with.

“Why? Why indeed. I asked that question once too, and the answer I received was laughter I hear even now. I, unlike a particularly cruel person I know, will provide a better response though; I remain because I am not yet done, to leave now would require laying down the hopes and dreams of far more than myself, and after all I’ve done, I am not yet ready to fail them.”

“So I was right? You do have a plan then?” I knew we were advancing along someone’s agenda because my continued existence was possible only because others had been in place to help me at too many junctures.

“I had a plan. A brilliant, glorious plan with the chance to learn so very much about my fellow Neoterics and the true reality of this new world and the divine elements within it. I can show you the secret vaults I have which are filled with notes and contingencies and double blind trials.”

“But all of that ended when you died?”

“Death has a knack for doing that it seems. It was quite poetic in a sense. I’d been part of cutting off so many lives as they were right in the middle of the plans for their lives. There was no justice left in the world, I had been told, but even without the Heavenly Court, there is still poetry it seems.”

“Is that why you let them kill you?” I asked.

“Let them? Oh no. I was certain we were going to kill Vaingloth. He was, in some senses, the most dangerous of us all. Had the others possessed an ounce of sense, they would have enacted Sasarai’s proposed plot against Vaingloth rather than betraying me and casting me down. Or forcing me to cast myself down I suppose. Pride compels me to point out that none of the rest managed to assault me.”

“Then why are you like this?”

“Oh, when it became more than clear that they had me trapped and were going to divide my holdings, which included things like my internal organs, between them I chose to deny them their prize. And their physical forms, though of course they’d come prepared for that so atomizing their bodies was nothing more than temporary inconvenience. I do harbor a hope that it at least stung badly though.”

“And the people of your city? What happened to them?”

“Most assume they were killed in the blast. It was a fairly substantial detonation after all, and the city was left without any power or enchantments for a quite a while afterwards.”

“Most assume?”

“Yes, and you should too.”

“I spent my life assuming a lot of things. I regret all but a few of them now.”

“Once the current crisis with Sasarai is resolved, ask me again. I might have a more satisfying answer for you then. To address an earlier supposition you held though, you are not wrong to assume that there is a plan in play. There are in fact several plans, each of we Neoterics had at least a dozen or so, but there is one which I believe binds and curtails them all.”

“Not Sasarai’s?” I asked, completely unable to believe that the monster who held my people’s souls in chains of lies they’d been fed since birth could be the true master of the world.

That drew a guffaw from Helgon.

“Sasarai? Oh my no. Even the thought…have you ever met him? He is not…one might charitably describe him as possessing a limited imagination. Most of the society he put together he stole from earlier philosophers. No, Sasarai’s plans are so mundane and uninspired that had he not turned to others for help, his precious Garden would have collapsed inside of one generation, or possible within the first few days of its existence.”

That seemed a little harsh. I mean, I hated Sasarai, but the Garden had been my home and it wasn’t exactly falling apart. Life within it was a paradise so long as you acted and thought just as Sasarai wanted, and were willing to sacrifice yourself to his root monsters, or to act as scrying vessels for him, or whatever other use his whims might have dictated.

Hmm.

Thinking about it like that I did have to question how we all managed to be as stable as Sylvan society was? I couldn’t have been the only one who felt like I was both worthless and being crushed by the weight of expectations to be perfect, could I? Why hadn’t anyone else lost faith like I had?

Oh.

Right.

I’d had a god to back me up when I finally cracked.

If Kam had lost faith in the Holy Tree and its Tenders, he would have been drafted, and then eliminated.

How many other traps like that were built into the Garden? How many had I simply never noticed because they didn’t apply to me?

Being ‘thrown over the wall’ had always been my personal terror, but the more I reflected on it, the more I saw other means by which those whose faith was ‘insufficient’ were either ‘corrected’ or, more often, ‘eliminated’. It was disgusting but somehow the fact that those ‘safety valves’ were needed so infrequently was even more nauseating .

The Garden should have been rebelling from the day it was founded, but people had been terrified then and no one was willing to question their saviors words, or no one who had questioned had survived doing so.

And so we’d learned not to. Was something wrong? Well then it had to wrong with us, it couldn’t be the powerful who were wrong. They were divine. They were holy. They were the people we had to listen to, the people who had the right to judge us.

The room was getting noticeably warmer, so I fought back my emotions. I had a growing concern over what I might do the next time I saw Sasarai given how it seemed like every stray thought I had concerning him or the Garden was enough to incite murderous rage in my heart.

Or maybe the murderous rage was always there. Hell, maybe it had been there in the first place. I’d thrown more than few tantrums as a kid, and some of them still seemed pretty reasonable.

And once again I had to leash my emotions before I turned Helgon’s nice bedroom and all the books in it to ash.

That Draconia wasn’t any part of that rage was both comforting and a bit frightening. If my anger was that dangerous what was it going to be like when we found something she really hated?

“Thank you for sparing my collection,” Helgon said. He’d been observing my struggles quietly, for which I was grateful. “As I was saying, Sasarai’s plans are nothing to be concerned about outside of his Garden. He may be more inclined towards violence than usual, but his capacity for mayhem is but a fraction of what it was thanks to your actions…and thanks, I suspect to my dearest Dyrena.”

“Dyrena?” I asked, trying to picture who might have been dear to one of the Neoterics.

“She was the best of us, though she would hate me for saying so. She is largely responsible for this world still being here. And she was the first of us to fall.”

“You loved her?”

“Oh, desperately, which, perhaps, is something I should have told her. Or not. The idea that she wouldn’t have known something like that is laughable.”

“What happened to her? You said she was the first to fall?”

“They killed her. Just like she’d planned for them to.”