I was standing above and watching the workers when Miana finally crawled her way out of the cavern. The twinge in my shoulder where I had been stabbed kept me from easily forgetting what she'd done, but when I looked at the woman, all I could see was exhaustion. To her credit, she did leave her blades in the cave, this time, but... it was hard for me not to worry, nonetheless.

I sincerely doubted any "Goddess of blades" was ever really unarmed. I am sure she could have turned her fingernails into a deadly weapon if she tried.

She came straight up to me, and I watched her eyes, seeing them travel immediately to my shoulder, then drop to the ground. Miana was a clever woman, from what I'd seen, and a good warrior, but still shy. I was sure that she didn't feel at all good about what she'd done, but she didn't seem to have an easy time with apologizing.

It was, however, the first thing she did, if awkwardly.

"I..." she looked at the ground more than at me. "I more than lost my temper. What I did was... wrong, and foolish. You did not... you were not..." She suddenly growled, gritted her teeth, and forced the words out. "I apologize. I was wrong."

I watched her, painfully aware of how I had once been as awkward. Rather than growing out of that, I had mostly just fallen into a role with my job, and that made it easier--I was apologizing not as myself, but as a product designer or a middle manager or an employee in general. In my private life, I was still terrible at it.

So I smiled and forced myself to, first, play out my role. "I accept your apology and apologize for..." it was difficult to find an apology that I meant. What I wanted more than anything was to snap bitterly at her and suggest that what I most needed to apologize for was doing her job for her or something similarly pointy. But... "for interfering in your affairs. But I... do care what happens to my friends as well."

"You friends?" Miana's eyes, when she met mine, were ringed with darkness that spoke of a woman too tired to play games. "You barely knew them."

"You know that I was from another world, Miana." I gestured for her to follow and walked over to the cliff, where I sat down on the edge. I didn't like these kind of admissions. "Do you want to know what it was like? My life in that world?"

The silence from behind me told me Miana was not all that interested. I forced myself to continue, anyway.

"I was surrounded by people who pretended they had found a place in life and hadn't. I was surrounded by people who were keen to pretend that they were happy, healthy, and in charge of their own lives. But long ago, Miana, I gave in to bitterness, and I did not pretend, when pretending would have given me a better life."

"I had no friends, Miana, because I was not willing to put others' feelings above my own." I looked out over the the cliff, feeling an odd sense that my godly domain's perspective was influencing this conversation, somehow. "I didn't think of it that way, but when I became sick, when I was dying, I reflected on my life, for what I thought was the last time. I looked back on dates I'd had, and understood them better. If I had offered people hope, I would have had a companion rather than being alone in my dying days. Perhaps that companionship would have been empty; perhaps I would have regretted it. But there was no joy in being alone even if my instincts were right--even if those women were empty people searching only for their own satisfaction, as I thought and assumed they were."

"I could not have saved them," I turned back and looked at Miana, a little surprised to find that she was staring at me, and seemed to be paying attention, at least. "I could not have made them happy. They would not have wanted me. Those were things I thought at the time but doubted later, when my life was ending and I had no way to take those choices back. When I no longer had anything to offer them at all, I wondered if they would have been there for me anyway if I had done the right thing. When I had finally sunk even lower than I was at the time, I wondered if maybe I had been strong enough back then to make a difference, to change my fate and my life."

"Perspective!" I turned and made a grand gesture over the cliff, raising my voice as though I was an actor on a stage, and my voice turned bitter and sarcastic. "Oh, isn't it grand all the things you see at the end, when you turn to look over your shoulder and discover how wrong you were. Isn't it grand how you can see your whole past laid out, every mistake, every act of cowardice and foolishness, isn't it grand to be reminded of every time you were wrong. For all that eyes do not grant you hindsight, nevertheless that is my greatest source of strength. Not the power to see the future, but to see my own past and the gods-damned foolishness that is stretched behind me."

Suddenly, with a burst of magic, I was on my feet, and I stalked up to Miana, my own eyes full of darkness and free of any semblance of lie or deceit. "I am tired, Miana, of making all my choices based on cowardice. I am so very, very tired of letting other people rule my life. I am tired of being bound by the bad decisions of my past, and I am tired of being bound by the fucking idiocy of other people. It isn't about strength or willpower or who is in charge at the end of the day. The one and only question that has ever mattered is, did we do the right thing? And I have a whole life of bowing down to bosses who decided no, we weren't going to do the right thing. They knew what the right thing to do was, and they declined. They saw the right way forward and said no. They chose loyalty over the truth and I hate them."

"Compared to that, Miana, I don't give a rat's ass if you're mad at me, or if you're scared." I... no, Xethram put a little bit of magic behind my eyes, so that the tiredness and the lack of bullshit became an overpowering thing about me. "I'm not going to willfully choose to do the wrong thing in order to make you feel better. If it comes down to us being at war or me saving people that deserve to be saved, I will do what I think I must. I may be new at being a god, but I have lived one full life already, one life full of regrets, and by the time that life was over, I was goddamn sick of playing games. So far I have still had to sit around and be a small-time idiot, and I'll probably have to do some more of that, because I'm still a small fish in a big pond and I get that."

"But all I want is to do things right. It's what I am. If you tell me that I'm making a mistake I'll listen, but goddamnit, Miana, don't accuse me of being selfish."

I realized after a minute of standing there in front of Miana that I was closer than I would normally have gotten, and stepped back. She was measuring me with her eyes, but she was also suddenly very much on edge, because I had gotten in her face and ranted like a maniac about... about things that weren't really about her.

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I was starting to wonder if she was going to explode again when she finally opened her mouth to speak.

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Miana, after purging herself of any semblance of blood and black flame, had looked back over the book and discovered after some study that the book was, in one very specific way, a lie.

Ciel'ostra was not "the goddess of blades". It was more than that. She only considered it because Ryan had become so obviously a god of two disparate things, but the more she studied the book, the more certain she was: Ciel'ostra was also a goddess of words.

She didn't know the specifics, but the more she studied the book, the more she saw that deep down, the magic of the book was divine, almost entirely within her domain, and based fundamentally on words, language, something to that effect. That made one other thing make sense--the lie-detecting swords that she had often seen the Guard use. Certainly, as a goddess, it made sense that she could simply make those things, but if Gods were known first and foremost for what they could do--as seemed to be the case--then why would a goddess of Blades be able to do something so specific? Were lies somehow a weapon used against others, a blade in metaphor?

She suspected that even if that were part of it, there had to be some wordy aspect to her own power. Without knowing the specifics--and she had seen nothing hidden in the Book that explained it--it was difficult to put into practice, but she knew that there had to be something.

So she went to talk to Ryan again, steeling herself for what might have been a bad discussion.

And it... didn't go all that well. Some part of him was still hurt by what she did; that was obvious. And although she apologized, and he apologized back, he... clearly, mostly didn't mean it.

To his credit, he then went on a rant to try to explain why he didn't mean it. Why he was being condescending and cruel to a Goddess and to her people. And Miana... her attention was still split. Because there was something that she sensed as he spoke--several things, maybe. But above and beneath it all was a cry of desperation, a voice she couldn't hear and could barely feel, a message hidden within his message, a Truth that he was not expecting anyone to understand.

Over and over, it babbled a message that she couldn't quite catch, but when she focused on this other half of her power, she thought the voice sounded louder, clearer.

Help me, it said, over and over. I can't do this. I can't do this by myself. Help me.

Ryan finished his tirade, and as though realizing that he had lost control, stepped back and tried to compose himself. Miana studied him, though, with that other power of hers, trying to listen to what it was saying.

Don't hurt me. Want to be your friend. Don't want to hurt you. Not your friend. Not your enemy. Want to be friends.

Miana looked at him, and the thing that came to her mind out of the blue were the Blades of the Fallen. Was the Goddess of Blades so powerful that she could entomb souls in a blade all on her own? No, of course not. That was not a power of Blades, it was something else, something more subtle.

Miana realized she was standing there like an idiot, and took a deep breath. What did she say? What could she say? She had only been paying half attention to Ryan, but his real message was the hidden one, anyway. He was explaining himself so that they could be friends, when clearly him being stoic and standoffish had not worked.

"I understand," she said finally, although that was... not completely accurate. "And I'm not mad at you. But I am lost, Ryan of Eyes. My people are dying, my church is on the brink of collapse, and there is much I do not know and do not understand. Perhaps without you, things would be even worse, but it is hard for me not to look at you as a guide and a leader, and if you were that, then you would have failed in your duties."

"You are not." She refocused her eyes on Ryan, and he met them, studying her eyes the way she had been studying his heart. "You are a friend, but you are not a leader. You are not a parent, a guide, or a guardian. I want to be mad at you because I feel like you promised me safety, security, power. You delivered to me what the Goddess would have, in her stead. These promises are not yours to make." She paused, thinking. "And... you did not make them. I imagined them, because I needed to hear them. I needed more than a friend. I still do."

Ryan studied her. "I am not sure that I can be more, Miana," he said. "I'm doing my best, but this is all that I have."

Those words hurt, a lot. Miana recognized them for what they were, though--not cowardice, just a refusal to make promises that he could not keep. He could have lied. But...

"I told you," Ryan said suddenly, "at the very start, that yours was the worst job. That you would have to run away. The others get to fight and die believing in a Goddess that will save them. They get to witness us throwing around power as though we know what we are doing. It's only us who know for sure that we don't. It's only us who have to pretend to be strong. Every little thing that we do means the world to them. But to us, every action is a chance for us to do something wrong. It's us not being strong enough to fix everything ourselves. It's us being too far away to save Xechi, too weak to just teleport over and smite the invading army ourselves. I just got this power of Storms--sorry about not talking about it, we can discuss it whenever you like--and I am itching to try to flatten armies with a thousand thunderbolts, but I don't have the strength, and the enemy has a terrifying godkiller. Muir has already made good use of it, but... in a way it almost feels like she is more powerful than me. She is there and can do what I can't."

"And in a way..." Ryan closed his eyes and leaned his head back, reflecting on something. "I guess being a leader is always like that. Whenever I was a boss of anyone else, it was because they could do things I couldn't, or at least, they could do the job while I kept an eye on other things. And these guys," he gestured vaguely towards the workers who were starting on another small building, "can do far more than both of us combined, at least without us blowing every last ounce of power that we have."

Miana had to admit that was obviously true, although she wondered how much she could have done with the power the God--that Lu'nella had previously.

"Losing Xechi hurts. I admit I didn't feel..." Ryan's face screwed up, and Miana thought she heard a voice say, I should have cried. I didn't and I should have. "...I wasn't all that torn up to watch her die, but I did promise to protect her, I did think of her as a friend, someone that I should have saved. I failed her, and I wanted to protect her. So I just... failed." He sighed, and Miana could have sworn that a faint prickly green mist escaped his mouth.

Miana wanted to say more, but she got a sudden sense that her people were calling her--not the refugees, but people from her Temples. As the day progressed, more people were realizing that something was off, and things were piling up. Someone in particular was calling, but she wasn't sure who.

So, with some small regret, she reached out and put a hand on Ryan's shoulder. "We will figure this out," she offered, hoping that would be enough. "I do not hate you, Ryan of Eyes. But for now I must attend to my people."

"Of course." Ryan nodded, and reached up to take Miana's hand. She let him, feeling a bit of comfort when he squeezed her hand, and then she turned back to go inside.

In that moment, when he took her hand, the small voice inside of him had said, Thank you. It said it more than once, and it really seemed to mean it. That was something that for all of the other mysteries surrounding Ryan and Xethram, she trusted, because somehow she knew.

She knew that he didn't know, which meant that there was no way he was doing it on purpose. As long as he didn't understand that she knew, or what she knew, she didn't need to fear that it was a lie. And if that voice, those words, were the truth... she could live with that.

She could live with this. Probably. Maybe.