Sunderings

The runt of the gods wanted only kin, and reached for them — and its reaching could kill. They set a dead heir's crown on a hunter's brow to speak to it, and let the rest of the night come apart.

The floor of the Celsian Athenaeum's Audience Hall still gaped where the Runt God had come up through it, and The Enduring Lesser Lights stood ringed by uneasy almost-allies: Ygva dead with saplings growing out of her, Casper tol-Otheidas calling down angels to kill the risen god, and the Keeper of Splendor shrinking from a thing she had never seen. Casper tol-Otheidas summoned a pair of junior seraphs — grim angels of maces and floating orb-clutching hands — and set them to killing the Runt God, and sent Dagga running for the scepter at the Sacred Pyre. Heyou traded on old Syndicate ties to reach Ash-begets-Tide, and argued the god was too much to lose; the fungal priest answered by clamping stone around the creature and pinning it where it stood, open to harm.

Its Reality Quake threw Sylvie and Draz loose from the world for a moment; and a pseudopod folded gently over Sylvie's mouth — not to smother her, but the way a lonely thing reaches for its own kind — and through her siphon she felt what it was: only wanting to belong, harmless in its wanting, and able to kill her by accident.

Heyou took Casper tol-Otheidas from behind in a chokehold, and Draz and Jamal struck together and all but unmade him; his last breath was a command that called fresh junior seraphs to stand over his corpse. And Draz pried a small, plainly magical circlet from the dead man's brow and set it on his own head — and a new sense opened in him: he saw Splendor now as light and aura, the Runt God blazing brightest of all, Sylvie glowing a lesser echo of the same.

Inola argued to keep the god alive as a well of Splendor, then poured out a hoarded reserve of power into a great Resurrection over Ygva's remains — and it guttered and failed. Ygva stayed dead; Casper tol-Otheidas too was past all return. Draz, newly able to see the light in things, reached into the dead man's opened throat to draw the Splendor out of it — and the corpse won the pull, and left a slick of gold and blood crawling up his arm.

The bound god tipped over and crushed Ash-begets-Tide beneath it. Dagga came back through the glass wall astride Pinchie, the scepter held high; the seraphs heaved Casper tol-Otheidas's body onto the Runt God to be swallowed, and Sylvie shoved it clear with a push of force and Heyou turned the corpse invisible, while Pinchie and Inola and the rest cut down the last of the angels. And Jamal, battered by the thing's flailing, hurt it once and precisely — enough to make it turn and look at him — and spoke to it.

Then Inola took Draz's face in her hands — my son; it is a blessing; take it — and Dagga pressed the scepter into his grip, and his new sight swelled from a single note into a whole symphony: power alive in himself, in Inola, its dregs in Heyou, a roaring fire in Sylvie, and the Runt God a blazing sun he could not look upon. Draz spoke to it in the tongue of living things and poured calm over it, and the god — terrified of him, and aching to be near him — folded in on itself and went quiet. Between Draz and Sylvie the party held now a thin thread to a god. And three roads lay open before them: to kill the Runt God and burn it for an Ascension as Casper tol-Otheidas had meant; to cage it and widen the Athenaeum's shelter as Inola wanted; or to carry it and all its gathered power down into the World Below for Ygva's plan, which they were warned would ask a life. And Dean Therion Calanthe they kept, unconscious, for leverage.

Retcon (storytime cleanup): the life-essence drawn from Casper's corpse crawls up Draz's arm, not Heyou's; and Dean Therion Calanthe, downed here, is unconscious rather than dead — he dies later, in Session 21.