There was a god too small to ascend with the rest, and it was left behind. Once, she took it up in her hands and thrust it into the sky — and the two who watched her do it have not forgiven it.
They climbed the torn peak on Pinchie, Jamal's crab, and saw them at a distance: Kaelyn and Rhys, and behind them a vast eldritch thing. Heyou went invisible and worked toward Kaelyn. He called across to Sylvie, and the two of them fell to the old wound between them — a Midsummer rite gone to violence, and Sylvie's reported death, and the "gift of the Life Beyond." Rhys was undead now. And Rhys told her the truth of it: that it was she who had sent them up into the higher realm, with the Runt God.
Then Kaelyn closed a nightmare over Sylvie, and put her back at his mercy, bound and helpless in it — and the eldritch thing blasted Kaelyn himself where he stood. Help me, Rhys called; Kaelyn had held its leash. Two stone elementals moved to stand around Rhys.
Draz's blunderbuss shot vanished into the creature like water into a sponge, and a warping of the world left all of them but Draz unstuck from it, their blows glancing wide; the thing struck Jamal down hard. Then Pinchie took it and crushed it in its claws and held it fast, and Jamal struck, and Rhys bound it in a beam of magic — and Draz slid in under it and fired up into the brilliant light of its gills, and it plunged down into the ground and was gone, and the beam went with it.
They rested where Rhys said was safest, and there he told it out. The Heart of Stone they had drawn their power from in the world above was the Runt God — the runt of the gods, too small and weak to rise with the others, until Sylvie had thrust it upward; and Kaelyn had learned to coax it into living beside them rather than destroying them all. Rhys would wrangle it and rise with it again. Draz would save the world they had. Heyou would draw the power back down and keep it here. They did not agree.
Sylvie strained herself down into sleep after Ygva, and dreamed a rich chamber — attendants dressing her, a long table, petitioners come for counsel, a seat at its head beside another figure — and knew it from a picture-book of her childhood, a place somewhere in the Amber Reach to the west. She thought she could step there in a single blink, if she chose.