“How would you like to be remembered Dyrena? Pretend for a moment that they will be someone to remember us.”

“Ideally? I’d like to not  be remembered at all, Helgon.”

“That seems rather unlikely given what we’ve done.”

“Yes. I suppose there will be some small, and wholly insufficient, measure of justice in the infamy my name shall carry into future generations.”

“You don’t imagine we shall be worshipped? Sasarai seems to be convinced that we shall garner more and better worship than the gods themselves ever enjoyed.”

“That is what he would believe isn’t it? I suppose I have no doubt that he is correct, at least in regards to his own situation. The design of his Garden was written quite meticulously, as was his selection of the people he would include within it. The fact that they will also be the most likely cause of his eventual downfall is also undoubtedly something he has failed to consider. It follows inevitably from the preconditions he arranged and was clearly laid out by a variety of sociological studies, but it seems unnecessary to point that out given how very clever and insightful he had always claimed to be.”

“He quoted one of your own papers back to you again, didn’t he?”

“Not directly. That would imply he’d actually read and understood any of them. He merely suggest a trio of papers to help me understand the foundational points I’d missed in his argument concerning the conversion yields he can expect.”

“And you wrote, no wait let me guess, two of them and co-authored the third?”

“I was co-author on two of them, but those two both drew from my original paper. Perhaps that will be my legacy? Oh, yes, as an extra spark of justice; Sasarai could republish my papers under his own name and be handed all of the credit for the work by future historians, while my name remains attached only to our failures.”

“I would not allow that worm to claim credit for even one of your papers, and who would believe that claim? All one would need to do is read any of the papers he actually wrote and compare the two.”

“I believe that by the time our legacies are being decided, neither of us shall be in a position to argue with those future academics who will malign or misattribute our works. In fact, I believe that to be a requirement for those future academics to exist at all.”

“You’re still committed to your plan then?”

“I must be. To falter at this stage would be to succumb to the most despicable of temptations.”

“Is it despicable to wish for as much time as one can grasp hold of?”

“Dearest Helgon, we all will reach our ending. That is not to be feared. What is to be feared and hoped for is what we can make of our lives and what we will leave behind. I have been the cause of great sorrow and overwhelming horror and my only comfort is that I will be leaving behind a world of sorrows and terrors where there might instead have been nothing left at all.”

– Helgon and Dyrena looking to the future fates they can accept

I was staring death in the face, quite literally, while around me whirled the end of everything. The loosed energies of the slain Neoterics were pouring into the Assumption Ritual faster than any number of mortals or gods could have withstood.

“If you would let me, I would carry all of this to the lands of the dead,” Malgenia whispered into my ear.

We were pressed so closely together that only hair cut in half could have fit between us.

“That’s your world isn’t it? The one you wanted to make?” I asked, wondering which of us was holding themselves away from the other at this point.

It’s her, Responsibility said.

We’re ready for this, she never will be, Clarity said.

And how could she be?

Who did she have to face the end that was awaiting us? Vitor was lost to her and always had been. Who was it who would be with her beyond the last veil?

I had my answer. After a lifetime of failing to connect with them, I’d found my answer and together we could face anything.

“It’s the only world that can exist,” Malgenia said. “Life is transitory. The others sought eternity, without understanding that this is what eternity is.”

“You settle for far too little,” I whispered into her ear, sliding my lips so close to her that even an inhalation was a caress. “Your eternity is empty and silent. Simple. That’s not the eternity that we choose.”

“There is no more ‘we’. There’s only you and I. The world beyond us has burned away. Will burn away. Just touch me and all this power can render a true cenotaph to mark its passing. To hold its history. To sing of its beautiful demise.” And she backed away. Malgenia backed away from me?

To give me a choice?

No.

No that wasn’t it.

She was afraid.

Of me?

Why should she be afraid me? After I all, I loved her. Couldn’t she see that in my eyes? Hadn’t she felt that in my touch the last time we’d struggled? When I’d grabbed her by the throat and choked her until the last of her life had departed? Wasn’t that what she’d taught us love was?

Don’t be mean, Responsibility said, remind me how often our love had been expressed disguised as violence and anger. It was something we’d walked away from though, a mask we’d been able to let drop once we saw each other as we really were.

And saw ourselves.

The kissing had helped a bit too.

Okay, more than a bit.

We don’t want to move in cruelty. It will mar what’s to come, Clarity said and she was right.

I mean of course she was. She’s Clarity.

With a quick mental hug of my better halves, I let out a breath, let time move beyond the moment we were frozen within, and hugged Malgenia.

Which did not go quite how she’d been expecting it to.

To touch Malgenia is to die.

Which I did.

As I did though I took Vitor’s place as the fulcrum for the stolen centuries worth of power that was set to unravel the fundamental substrate of creation.

“No!” Malgenia screamed. “You can’t! It will all be for nothing!”

“It was all for this,” I said, embracing her tighter than ever. 

I had too much power and too much more was trying to surge through me. Death? Obliterating that would have been something that happened without my being even slightly aware that I’d done it. Godhood? What I was holding was something far more than any god could have wielded. 

That was why I needed Malgenia. In holding onto death, I held onto my mortality, onto myself.

“Let me go! Let me take this! You can’t do it alone!” Malgenia pleaded.

My voice was strange to me when I spoke. It wasn’t loud precisely, but it filled a volume which shouldn’t have been possible to fill.

“You are helping,” I said.

“And she is far from alone,” Beauty said.

“She never has been,” Inhibition said.

“And neither were you,” Reason said.

“We’ve always been with you.” A chorus of Deaths spoke, risen at last from their long slumber filled the space around us.

Beauty, Inhibition, and Reason were the ones who’d been the most present for me, since they were the most recent and the ones I’d known before their Assumption rituals, but there were so many others who’d been consumed by so many other Assumption rituals before us. 

Consumed but not lost, rather they were trapped within the weave of Malgenia’s power, locked in a dead, dreamless slumber until I happened to claim so much power that shattering the cords that bound them was impossible not to do.

They were my sisters and more. Parts of my soul, the scions of my lineage, strangers bound to me closer than blood could ever have allowed. I could never have known most of them, their lives beginning and ending long before I was born, but even so I recognized each and every one.

I needed an army to hold back to the flood of divine light, and they were more than ready to make their stand and hold the line, giving everything they’d ever been to buy me the chance to say the most important words I’d ever uttered.

“This doesn’t matter,” Malgenia said. “Even all you whoever ever lived, all of my precious Deaths, you are not enough. Not for this.”

“You mistook what I was,” I said, squeezing her tiny, frail form tight. “Not just before, when we fought and you let me win, but now, here.”

“You will unmake even death itself. There will be nothing. No rest for the departed and no history of their passing.”

“You would give them the world, wouldn’t you?” I asked. “The resting spirits. The echoes of those who’ve gone before us? Your world would be a monument to them. To all of us, since we would all be silently departed.”

“It will be truly eternal.”

“Do you think so?” I asked, and in the overwhelming light, I let my shadow unfurl from within me. 

Light banishes shadow.

Ultimate light banishes everything.

But my shadow wasn’t a part of everything. It was an error in the universe, a division by zero, an exception to reality. In Malgenia’s eyes I saw understanding bloom. Whatever world she made, the End of All Things would eventually consume, either the one she’d summoned or the one which filled the space of the concepts which withered away over time. 

With no living people, what would remain of the concepts that only the living could embody? Could music exist with nothing to play it and nothing to listen? Ephemeral concepts weren’t the only ones at risk though. Over countless aeons, even solid, unreasoning matter would cease its ringing and melt away into non-existence. 

“Everything ends,” I told her. “Everything. You showed us that. You defended it and made us the guardians of it. For the longest time I didn’t understand how important what you’d given us was.”

I drew back from her, still holding onto her, still dying over and over to keep the deluge of power from unmaking me.

“It’s change. A world where nothing ends, is a world where nothing changes. We die so many times, every day, becoming new people as we leave our old selves behind, bit by bit. With the power you and the other Neoterics assembled, you thought you could avoid that. Vitor, for all his experiments, never really wanted to change, he just wanted to become what he already thought he was. And you? You guarded death, even explored it but you’re afraid aren’t you? Letting go of all that you’ve been? When you haven’t had to change at all since you were a child? I know it’s terrifying. I know its what you want to avoid, what you want to be the master of, but this is your chance. You’ve been Malgenia. It’s time to let go. It’s time to become someone new.”

“I…I can’t,” she said.

“Then let me help you.” I had to look into her eyes. I had to let her look into mine. Her touch was killing me, but I had to let her see what had never been true before.

She was a monster.

She was a terror.

She had done unforgivable things.

I saw all that.

And I saw her too.

It wasn’t my purview to forgive her, but I could still open my heart to her. 

I could still offer her peace.

If she wanted to, she could have claimed the power of the Assumption Ritual then. Even with all of the Deaths standing together, even with my shadow to shelter me, we still couldn’t have stood against her.

Instead though she nodded, slowly, and dropped her hands from the embrace she’d been holding me.

“Goodbye. And thank you,” I said and kissed her on the forehead.

And I stopped dying.

Because Malgenia was no more.

“You have spent quite a while preparing for today haven’t you my dear Death of Insight?”

“I have my lady.”

“You’ve read the scriptures?”

“I have my lady.”

“You have practiced the steps of the dance?”

“I have my lady.”

“I suppose we are ready to begin then, unless you have any last questions?”

“No my lady. Well, except, I was wondering how much of that was actually necessary?”

“Necessary Insight?”

“Yes. I mean, I have studied the scriptures you gave me, and I know I can perform the steps of the dance as you’ve directed, but I can’t seem to follow how they go together. Or the words of the song either? On their own, each is certainly beautiful, but I can’t see the mystical connectivity between them.”

“That would be because there is none of course!”

“There’s none? But I thought they were critical elements of the ritual? I’ve been practicing them for a month now. I thought they would help me understand the ritual better.”

“No, no not at all. Your place in the ritual doesn’t require understanding. Merely acceptance.”

“But the Deaths have all accepted being a part of this ritual haven’t they? It’s the greatest honor we can be bestowed?”

“It is. And they have. Eventually.”

“Eventually? Did some of them not love you enough?”

“Love? I cannot say. Love is not something which can be measured and weighed, so judging if love is enough, or true, or exists at all is a troublesome question. The Assumption Ritual is not about love however. It is about continuity. It is about acceptance and finality. It is about building a future from the bones of the past, as all futures should be built.”

“The bones of the past? I don’t…that wasn’t in the scriptures…”

“And it never can be. You are the only one I can speak of it to.”

“Me? Why?”

“Because the Ritual has begun already.”

“But I haven’t danced yet. Or sung! I didn’t recite any of the…”

“None of that is needed. The dancing is to give you a moment of serenity. The singing is to amuse me. The recitation is a test, and I don’t think you would pass it. None of the others ever have.”

“Test? What were you testing for?”

“That’s the wrong question.”

“The others did not ascend.”

“They did not.”

“You’re going to kill me.”

“I am. I already have, more or less.”

“And build the future through my death. Build a future of death.”

“Perhaps you would have passed after all.”

– Malgenia and Death of Insight as the struggle of their assumption ritual began.

Good news! I wasn’t tuning into a god anymore.

Bad news! I knew who was!

Worst possible news – Malgenia.

Just Malgenia.

Just her.

I…

I didn’t have Diyas with me.

I didn’t have her power to call on.

Looking around in the empty darkness of the Assumption Ritual, bereft of light, of strength, of hope, I didn’t have…

I didn’t have…anything?

Oh. 

OH!

Oh that was an idea that was even worse that Malgenia.

Is it? Clarity asked.

Cause we are certainly onboard with it! Responsibility said.

Five words.

I still had five words, and if Malgenia knew about them then she would have already obliterated me.

She, however, was a tiny bit more focused on her traitorous brother than me, her traitorous quasi-daughter.

“Since the womb Vitor? Really?” she said, and Vitor took a step back (metaphorically).

“Does it matter Malgenia?” he asked. “Was that the confession you’d been hoping for all this time?”

“Not at all. I just find the idea delightful! Was I so puissant as a embryo that you feared me even then? Did I kill your favorite bit of placental lining? Tell me, please, how much of a horror was I? You know how I enjoy hearing stories about myself!”

“But you’re the storyteller here, aren’t you?” Vitor asked, and I could feel him gathering in the power of the dead Neoterics. 

I probably should have fought him for that, but even with Responsibility and Clarity’s help there was simply far too much power for any of us to begin to handle. The five us could have drank until we exploded and still drowned in an ocean of the power that remained.

Our world was done.

Jilya’s trick had been brilliant but there weren’t enough people in the world to become Blessed and hold the power we’d loosed.

“A storyteller or a story?” Malgenia asked, and looked at me at last.

“My lady,” I said offering her a small bow.

I should have felt afraid. Paralyzing fear was the single most rational response to gaining Malgenia’s attention, but I felt only peace.

“Who are you talking to?” Vitor asked.

“The one who destroyed me,” Malgenia said, turning back to her brother.

“There’s no one there,” Vitor said. “And what do you mean destroyed?”

“My last Assumption Ritual.” Her back was to me but I could feel Malgenia smile, could sense each muscle shifting in her face. I’d played her for so long, and held her fractured memories for so long that I knew her down to her bones.

“In the Wastelands? Were you performing it when the Beast Fragment attacked?” Poor Vitor, he was either going to die confused, or suffer the far worse fate of understanding exactly what he’d done and failed to do.

“Before that,” Malgenia said. “Years before that. Didn’t you miss me? Didn’t you miss being afraid?”

“Your fear never left him,” Responsibility said. “Even after you were gone.”

“Just like your love never left us,” Clarity said. 

“What? But…” Vitor looked between Malgenia and Responsibility as though each was disappearing the moment he looked away from them.

Beneath us the swirl of power was accelerating, just as it had when I’d fought Malgenia the first time.

Then it had been only her power, and it had still been overwhelming. Though everything was impenetrable, unknowable darkness around us, the light was coming, and it was going to be so much more painful than any of us could bear.

“And he never noticed? Should I feel insulted? That someone else could inspire the same terror as I did? I don’t know.”

“Your fear lives in us too,” Responsibility said.

“And always will,” Clarity said.

“And for that you have my love,” Malgenia said. “For what else can I offer to my legacy.”

“You’re not going to have a legacy,” Vitor said. “The only future this world has is through me. I am the last of the Neoteric Lords. I alone can hold and control this power. I alone have found perfection and absolute perfection will be MINE!”

He moved first.

And a vortex of light exploded around us.

The Assumption Ritual must, eventually, come down to a struggle.

Vitor didn’t understand our Assumption Ritual though.

And he didn’t understand what we’d truly unleashed.

He was right that if he’d been able to claim the power flowing around us, he could have reached perfection, or any other state he desired. It would have lasted a span of time too short to be measured within our universe, but he would have attained it.

If he’d been able to claim the power.

What he missed was that our Assumption Ritual wasn’t one designed for people to struggle against one another.

It was a small change, but in initiating the struggle, he’d chosen the wrong parameters, to fight against us, when, maybe, if he’d cooperated we would have had the strength to at least save ourselves from the power we’d captured in the ritual.

Amusingly though, it wasn’t the ritual that killed him.

It was Malgenia.

“My apologies brother. I should have given you this peace in the womb it seems.”

And he was dead.

Because that was Malgenia’s power. Even a Neoteric Lord with all of the power he could possibly draw on could not save himself from her. She chose for him to be dead, and so he was.

How had I survived?

Diyas had chosen for me to live.

Diyas who I was no longer bound to or Blessed by.

Diyas who I had to save, along with everyone else.

They’d never forgive me, and Night was DEFINITELY going to murder me, but there was an fairly obvious upside to all that.

“And what peace do you need Malgenia?” I asked, releasing my grip on Responsibility and Clarity’s hands.

“You know, once I might have said the peace of the grave, but thanks to you I know that isn’t true.” She turned to face me, and only me.

The light around us was too bright to see, but we didn’t have eyes anymore.

We only had ourselves and the power was closing into burn all that away.

In her ritual, the Death who was sacrificed opened a portal to carry that power away to the domains of the dead. In the ritual she and I fought in, that power had burned and shredded us. I was supposed to die before that could happen, but Diyas had kept me in the fight, and I’d been willing to hold on and endure more than Malgenia had. In the end, she’d been torn apart by the vortex and her death had carried the excess grace she’d built up with her to the domains of the dead.

With Vitor’s destruction, we had the rift to the domains of death that was needed to complete the ritual, but even if we did, the world would end.

And that was what Malgenia wanted.

“That was why you won, you know?” she asked.

“I do. You wanted to know what death was like for yourself.”

“And do you know what I found?”

“I haven’t been that curious yet,” I said, offering her a smile as the vortex tightened to the point where we were within an arm’s length of each other.

“It was peaceful,” she said. “And broken.”

“Because of the Neoterics,” I said. I didn’t have her memories anymore, but I knew her and I knew them.

“In killing everything, we broke everything, can you imagine?” she asked and her hands up to me, palms raised.

To touch her was to die.

And Diyas wasn’t here to bring me back, over and over again.

“I don’t have to,” I said. “I’ve seen it. And I know how to fix it.”

“You’re going to fight me again? Undo the deaths I and the others caused?” She leaned in close, the attention that was her eyes sparkling with delight.

“That would make things so much worse,” I said. “And it’s not what you made me for, is it?”

“Didn’t I make you as a sacrifice? To be the food my eternity consumed?” she asked and her hand reached up, hovering a hairsbreath away from my face.

The vortex had us pressed so tightly together than I couldn’t have slipped a finger through the space that separated us.

Within me, I felt Responsibility and Clarity, the three of us joined as one by our version of the Assumption Ritual.

“Did you? Or do you think I can pass the test now?” I asked her and pressed toward her.

“You should fear me. My fear lived on even after I was gone,” she said.

“I don’t. I don’t hate you anymore either. Not with what you’ve done for us.”

“And what do you think I did for you?”

“Not for me. For us. All of us. You gathered all of the fragments of the gods of death. You preserved the concept of death, when the other Neoterics wanted to eliminate it entirely. They were always going to have to go through you to achieve they perfect eternities, and you stood before them and kept them all mortal until we could arrive.”

“I didn’t do that for you.”

“That’s not how you’re going to be remembered.” I spoke my words like a curse, as the most serious malediction I could conjure against her. “We’re going to tell your story and make sure the love the Deaths bear for you is shared with everyone else. Your legacy will not be one of fear, or terror. We will make sure you are loved.”

“Have you ever thought how all that we’re going to build might end Vitor?”

“I believe the point is that it won’t Malgenia. We are poised to seize eternity and unlike the foolish gods who were born with this world, we will not accept whatever scraps of fortune random chance casts down in our path.”

“We’re quite sure of that then? That our eternities will last forever? We know eternities don’t need to, look at the gods after all.”

“None of us would be doing this if we thought it was going to end in failure. Not even Helgon I imagine, despite how annoying he’s been in picking apart my research.”

“And if we should grow bored?”

“Do you imagine you shall ever run out of questions about your domains? Or that people might deny you the amusement of dying in all sorts of different manners?”

“No. No, I shouldn’t think so. I do wonder about the others though. Their papers hold so little vitality to them. I don’t see anything that could sustain their interest down uncountable years.”

“We all find our joy in different things Malgenia. Should the others come to the end of theirs, then perhaps they will instead become part of your joy?”

“Will they? Will you?”

“Oh I shall never tire of our new position sister. Or do you find my work without vitality as well?”

“It doesn’t fascinate me, but I suppose it shouldn’t. I just wonder where your interest will turn once you’ve ‘enhanced and improved’ the species under your care as far as they can be changed without becoming a danger to our Lordly selves?”

“That is the trick of it you see, each species I improve will be no more than a tool to understand how we may be improved as well. We shall never be in danger from them as it is the process of refinement and ascension I will study and for that apex organisms are of little use.”

“That suggests you will need a continuous source of new species to play with, yet we will be eliminating the vast majority of the species which are presently available will we not?”

“We shall, and good riddance to them. The flawed and haphazardly constructed people we see inhabiting the world today are little better than chaotic muck. True, from that chaos the occasional geniuses may emerge thanks to random chance, but for proper research a more stable and predictable substrate is required.”

“You plan to make your own species? How?”

“What can be refined can be corrupted just as easily. Once I have pushed a species as far as a battery of tests requires, I shall break them down and start anew. Certainly from that corruption many useless specimens will be produced but with eternity before us, the process only needs to result in success once in a while.”

“And the others? The failures?”

“Subjects who fail my needs I expect should fit yours quite well.”

– High Accessor Vitor managing to placate Malgenia into continuing the cabal’s plans while also cementing his belief that plans to deal with his sister was absolutely required.

I was becoming a god. That was inevitable. And I was dragging Responsibility and Clarity with me. 

Should I have rejected them? Could I have saved them if I had? Was there another path we could have walked? My answers, in reverse order were; not really, sadly no, and absolutely not.

I’m glad you’ve figured that out, Clarity said as the mountain of Malgenia’s power overwhelmed the three of us and our worlds began to crack and shatter around us.

“Now! Do it now, her aether is…” Tallgrim’s last words were reasonable ones under the circumstances. I could have let him finish speaking I suppose, but he’d interrupted quite a lot of people’s lives with the Sunfall, so it seemed only fitting to return the favor.

The bands Vitor had wrapped me in were impressive. Quite capable of holding me even in a fully divine form. Even the addition of Clarity and Responsibility wouldn’t have been enough to sever them. Best of all, because they were made explicitly for Malgenia, they were also proof against her control over the domains of death. Vitor had thought of, and prepared for, everything.

Well, everything except me.

And my shadow.

You know, the fragment of the beast I’d made friends with? The one that could dissolve anything and everything in the world? The one that had let me step through the Neoteric’s High Wards like they weren’t even there? Yeah, Vitor hadn’t, and couldn’t have, planned for that. 

I’d lost a part of myself to the Beast Fragment he’d sicced on me – because of course it had been him – his confession had all but confirmed it and the fact that no one else knew Malgenia’s anti-Beast wards as well as he did meant he was really the only one who could have removed them.

Would Malgenia have been disappointed? Approving? Amused? I thought I felt echoes of all three but I had the whole problem of becoming a god who was about to be devoured to distract me from that, so I didn’t worry about it.

Opening my eyes, I rose from the floating vivisection platform Vitor had conjured slipping free of the bonds with as much effort as tossing aside my bedsheets in the morning.

Okay, a lot less effort than that. Getting up in the morning is hard.

I could have enjoyed their gasps of surprise, or Vitor’s look of crushing existential dread but I was on a fairly tight frame before the world was completely obliterated so I flashed them all a sharp grin and got to work.

Tallgrim was the first to go in part because he was the first to react. He hadn’t completed his warning and I felt him reaching for his stored power. 

All of it.

Yeah, they were just that terrified of Malgenia. Which was silly. She didn’t really have any interest in wiping them out. They were the only real diversions for her in a world which held the threat of eternal boredom. Also, when, if ever, she moved against them, she would have made a game of it. Really drawn out the terror and suffering to make sure she squeezed the maximum amount of ‘fun’ out of the experience, since it was one she would only get to enjoy a handful or so of times before she ran out of Neoterics.

Against Malgenia, they would have had plenty of time to raise their defenses and fight back, and she would have loved it.

I was not as interested in playing around.

With an unnecessary gesture, I called my shadow up to cover the room and then I let the shadow of my index finger reach out and tap Tallgrim on the chest.

Covering the room was important so that none of them could get away – at least not without fighting me for it. Insikir tried as my touch on Tallgrim’s chest snuffed Tallgrim like a candle, mid-sentence.

“This isn’t Night’s…” Insikir tried to say, so he died next.

Unlike most of the others, he still had a plethora of divine fragments to draw on, so I needed to exercise care.

I’ve got this one, Responsibility said, materializing behind Insikir and running a finger from the nap of his neck down to the middle of his back.

Did he explode into a shower of gorey chunks? No. Did he convulse and writhe in agony? Also no. He simply died. 

“Death Wards. Now!” Hanshel screamed, notably after he’d raised his own anti-necromantic protections.

“You don’t hold domain over death. We do,” Clarity said, tapping both Hanshel and Wepan on the shoulders, dropping their lifeless bodies to the ground in an undignified heap.

“He did it! It was his idea!” Grosh said, recoiling from three Malgenia’s as he desperately tried to shift our attention to Vitor.

Who then killed Grosh for us.

In a far messier fashion than our somewhat merciful touches had managed.

“Idiot,” Vitor said, shaking his head in disappointment.

He was holding the soul splitting sword Insikir had crafted, but tossed it aside and sighed. “There’s no surviving this. Not for anyone. Shall we watch the world burn together sister?”

I blinked.

He still didn’t know?

Of course he didn’t. Why was that a surprise? My performance as Malgenia had never been that good, but he simply hadn’t cared. She had always been an obstacle to maneuver around or avoid to him.

I wanted to hate him more for that, but there wasn’t time since he wasn’t entirely wrong. With the deaths of five Neoterics more grace was tearing loose from it’s bindings than the world had ever seen before.

“She’s already dead. She has been for years now,”  I said. “Now it’s your turn, so we can save this world.”

Clarity and Responsibility moved in with me, the Assumption Ritual begun in ernest.

Vitor was different than the others though, in part because he was ready for Malgenia to turn on him, and in part because we needed at least one of the Neoterics as a full part of the ritual and he was the last one left.

To say Vitor was unhappy with the prospect of what was in store for him would have been an understatement.

Getting blasted by the full might of a Neoteric Lord was an experience I had hoped to avoid forever, but Vitor had waited just a little bit too long. 

The Neoterics had never been able to stand against the gods themselves, and my loves and I had started leaving behind our mortality the moment Vitor had pulled Diyas away from me. 

With immortal hands, we pulled Vitor into the ritual and into the heart of our power.

I’d been expecting the inner forge of the ritual to be at least vaguely similar to the landscape where I’d struggled against Malgenia, but what awaited us inside this Assumption Ritual was oddly calm instead.

Dark, empty, and calm.

But I wasn’t alone this time.

I hate that you’re here but I am so happy you’re with me, I told Responsibility and Clarity.

We hate that you’re here, but there’s nowhere else any of us would want to be, Responsibility said, threading her fingers through mine, while Clarity did the same with my other hand.

Others? I should probably have interrogated that but we were falling into the tiniest fractions of a second and time was still running out.

“Malgenia? Malgenia! What have you done! This isn’t how it was supposed to end!” Vitor twirled around in the plan of endless darkness, ignoring three women before him.

“She’s not here,” I said. “She’s not anywhere anymore.”

“What?” Vitor stopped swirling and focused at last on Clarity and Responsibility. His gaze refused to rest on me though?

“Malgenia perished in her last Assumption Ritual,” Responsibility said.

“Your fear outlived her, but it’s not going to outlive our world,” Clarity said.

Vitor looked wildly between the two of them, before the customary smug smile drifted across his features.

“That’s where we are isn’t it? You’re trying to use your ritual against me? Trying to confuse me? Did I ever tell you that I duplicated your ritual? I know how this works. I know how you work!” He cackled the sort of relieved laugh that spoke volumes about how little he understood the situation at hand. “You’ve done it! You’ve given me the world! I’m the last Neoteric. I’ve won!”

“And what are we?” I asked, without managing to draw his attention.

No. Something was hiding me. Something that wasn’t ready to be seen yet.

“Empowered fragments. Look at the two of you, did you think you had replaced the missing gods of death? Did you think you were beyond my power? When I have all of the grace the other fools gathered as well?”

He was still looking at Clarity and Responsibility and not seeing me at all, so I punched him. 

I felt a thrill as I hit, even though it was, in theory, a metaphorical punch. We were in a realm of pure power, so our bodies here were abstraction representations of ourselves. That said, beaking Vitor’s metaphorical jaw felt just as good as breaking his real one would have.

And just like if I’d broken his real jaw, he wiped the injury away without a thought.

But he saw me at last as he did.

“Malgenia?” Confusion and fear were the colors of his voice.

Within me hideous laughter rose as memories swirled and came together, pouring out of me to add a fifth presence to struggle.

“Hello Vitor,” Malgenia, the real Malgenia, said.

“I see you’ve had no more luck with this subject than with the last one Grosh?”

“Oh I would most certainly not say that Vitor. Can you not observe the remnants of the aetheric release lingering in the containment chamber even now?”

“What I observe about the containment chamber is that it is no longer containing anything due to the rather large hole which has been blown in its side. Through three layers of reinforced Zelkar Iron unless I miss my guess?”

“You have a keen eye Vitor. Yes, I’ve built all my containment chambers out of a mix of Grade 7 Zelkar Iron and Purified Jet Copper.”

“Hmm, clever. That should have given you simply unearthly channeling capacity for grace overflows. I wouldn’t have expected it to fail as we see here. Was the binding laminate flawed during the smelting process?”

“Please. That was the first thing I tested for.”

“You don’t mean to tell me that this was an intentional failure? Caused by the Blessed subject?”

“No. No. They were quite incapable of forming intent well before I placed them into this chamber.”

“I should hope so! You know you are playing with perilous endeavors here.”

“Which is why I thought it wise to invite your review of the proceedings. Trust me Vitor, I have no desire to lose any of more of my population than I need to. I have only begun to advance them and they are showing such promise already.”

“Was that the problem then? Did your modification conflict with the Blessing the subject received?”

“That is one thing I was hoping to have you evaluate. I don’t want to bias your conclusions, but I believe this result points to a more fundamental confirmation of my work, rather than representing a flaw in the technique.”

“I am intrigued as to what the data from this last run might show then. I reviewed your general papers before traveling here, so I believe I can guess what you are looking for, but I must confess I cannot yet see how the conclusions you have drawn would lead to a result of this magnitude. I mean, there’s nothing but a fine mist left of the subject. I had thought our aims were more closely aligned than that?”

“From your papers, I believe they are. We both seek to take the flawed creatures were able to scrounge from the past world and shape them into something more worthy of our domains. In both our cases that has required the sacrifice of some small number of them, not generally in as dramatic a fashion as this I will admit, but the energy output required to leave a subject in this state? Certainly you must see the possibilities here!”

– Neoteric Lords Vitor and Grosh discovering that the bonds of a Blessing could be dissected to far greater effect than they’d previously imagined.

I had been captured. I was helpless. Oh no. How terrible.

Yeah, that had been a distinctly important part of my plan. Losing Diyas however? That had not been on the agenda, and was becoming something of a problem a lot faster than I think anyone else was aware of.

No, we’re aware, Beauty said, her voice pacing around the corners of my mind.

We’ll work something out though! Inhibition was trying to be reassuring, perhaps forgetting that we all knew when the others were lying.

We can change the plan, Reason said, also forgetting that we knew when each other was lying?

She’s not lying, she’s thinking, Beauty said. And she’s right. We need to change the plan. Insikir’s not here and you can’t afford to wait for them to call him in.

I can manage it, I can hold on, I said, ignoring the fact that we can all tell when we’re lying, even when we’re lying to ourselves.

The problem wasn’t so much that the other Neoterics had me in their clutches. The problem wasn’t even that Vitor knew I’d been carrying a blessing from Diyas. The problem was that without that Blessing, all of the divine force that I was supposed to have sent to the realms of the dead months ago was all my problem and mine alone to carry.

I like to pretend that I’m strong, but I really couldn’t pretend that the weight of duty from the mountain of grace I was carrying was something I was even vaguely capable of shouldering alone.

I was maybe one second from going fully divine, and at best about a second more from bursting free from Night’s cloak leaving the End of All Things to feast on one more god after centuries of starvation.

But it wouldn’t just be me who was destroyed there.

Malgenia had so completely captured the domains of death, that my destruction would mean the end of concept of death and everything related to it. Things like ‘life’ and ‘rebirth’ and ‘renewal’, and ‘food’, and so on and so on.

The Neoterics might survive that, but I doubted it. To escape the result of my destruction they would need to fall so deeply into their own wells of power that ascension to godhood would be inevitable, as would their consumption by the Beast.

So I tried.

I gave everything I had to hold the grace I carried inside me. To keep it hidden for just another moment more, because if I didn’t hide it, the Neoterics would take it from me. They would divide me up like they had Kurst. They would each claim pieces of my domains, and they would shunt my grace into whatever holding contraptions they’d devised. That would put off the End of All Things for a day, or a week, or maybe even two, but none of them could appreciate just how much power Malgenia had absorbed from the death of nearly the entire world, and then from every death that followed in the centuries that past.

Kurst had been powerful, and they had drunk their fill of his essence, nearly destroying our world in the process. Had that taught them anything? Certainly not in the sense of ‘perhaps we should never ever do anything like that again’. No, for them Kurst’s death had come as a shock of power as they hadn’t gained anywhere near as much from Dyrena’s ‘death’, but that had made it a puzzle and a challenge.

Helgon had denied them a decent meal as well, venting enough of his power to obliterate the land around him while somehow funneling most of it somewhere the Neoterics couldn’t locate it, despite their best attempts.

It was that, more than anything, which had convinced people like Vaingloth to proceed with caution in eliminating their fellow Lords. With Helgon’s passing, the assumption was that all of the other Neoterics had worked out contingency plans towards making the power they held inaccessible on their demise, and each then tried to figure out what plans they could make for themselves.

Except of course, there were no plans. I had no idea how Helgon had managed what he had but both I and Malgenia were certain it wasn’t an option available to her or any of the rest.

She’d never shared that conclusion with Vitor from what I could tell though, which was curious given how close they were.

The mountain bore me down to my knees, and crushed my arms, metaphorically speaking, and I had to wonder if maybe the extra days from letting them dissect me might not be worth it. The world would be hopeless doomed, but at least people would know and could say goodbye? 

I hated that. I’d fought too hard to survive Malgenia to die to a Neoteric I didn’t love, but as the mountain crushed me flat, I had to admit that I just couldn’t do it alone.

You’re not, Responsibility said and I felt the bloom of a Blessing grow in my heart.

You never have been, Clarity said and her words brought a new Blessing as well.

By hairwidths, the mountain began to rise, and my traitorous heart rejoiced.

NO! If you’re with me, then when they dissect me, they’ll get you too! I had to reject them. I had to break the bond between us, or…

Or what?

We were dead no matter what right? What hold did consequences have over us anymore? If it was impossible that we were going to get through this because that gods-be-damned idiot Insikir wasn’t here and we couldn’t risk leaving any of them alive, then why not keep striving together?

“Are you sure your bonds are going hold your sister Vitor?” Tallgrim asked. “Her aetheric flow is worrying.”

“Perhaps we should begin with the division now?” Wepan sounded hungry. “Insikir retained his divine fragments, he won’t mind missing out on this.”

“No, no, we should keep things fair and balanced,” Vitor lied to them.

I didn’t have the mental link with him that I did with Beauty and Inhibition and Reason but I had Malgenia’s memories of each time Vitor spoke to their father, the vast majority of which were lies, especially their last conversation. Vitor had used the same smooth, honeyed tone when he’d assured his father that “of course I will make you the first among all the other lords”.

And he had, in a sense. Their father had be the first of the nobility in their country who’d died during the Sunfall. By Vitor’s hand. With glee in Vitor’s eyes.

I couldn’t see him, but that same hidden glee was lurking in every syllable he spoke.

The Neoterics were going to die today whether it was by my hand or not it seemed.

It needs to be us, Responsibility said.

All of us, Clarity added, and I heard her words echo far deeper into my soul than I’d imagined sound could fall.

“You should share your vault configuration so that we can ensure none of this happens again,” Wepan said. 

“I would be delighted to! This much bother coming up once is more than once too many. Let’s never have a repeat of this,” Vitor lied. 

Why was he going to kill his sister though? Or had he realized at last that I wasn’t Malgenia? I had to wonder about that because wondering what was happening inside of me was far too much for me to process.

“What about your sister’s cache? We all agree with you that she needed to be removed given her contact with the Beast, but can her hoard of divine fragments be unearthed once she’s passed?”

“She didn’t keep a hoard. She only grasped select gods, the others she allowed the rest of us to capture,” Vitor said. “I will dismantle her domain, dispose of her followers, and tidy up. You know, all the menial tasks. If any of you should wish to join me, you are of course welcome. Perhaps one of her little retinue will attract your fancy?”

“No offense meant Vitor but I wouldn’t touch anything your sister had a hand in, especially not a concubine. Who can imagine what sort of plagues they might carry!” Hanshel said.

“I assure you, that was not the use she put her population to,” Vitor said. “I mean, you have seen her art exhibits have you not? That is where her tastes have always lain.”

“What is taking Insikir?” Tallgrim asked. “There are definitely substantial transformations occurring at the deepest aetheric levels within her.”

“She is struggling. Exactly as I imagined she might. But you see I know a secret Tallgrim. I know the source of my sister’s powers. You know she is different than the rest of us. Her immortality has a different hue than ours. Where we are sustained by our powers, she had a special ritual devised which allowed her to sustain herself on the lives of those close enough to be Blessed by her, who she sacrificed instead. A ritual which I know how to turn against her!”

“But why would she do that?” Tallgrim asked.

“Because the domains she collected had nothing to do with preserving life. She needed to take their lives as her own, and had any of those rituals failed, she would have been lost to us.”

“But if she’d lost control of her power…”

“I was well aware of the danger. That is why I modified her ritual to make these binding spells just for her,” Vitor said. “I knew she would eventually fail, or the ritual would weaken, or some other problem would arise and I would be free, FREE at long last, of her. Did you know that they called us twins? Twins! As though we were ever, in any sense the same! You all have lived with the Beast hovering over us from the Sunfall till now? I have lived with a Beast hovering over me since I was in the womb! Can you imagine what it took to wait till this moment? Can you imagine how I have longed for this exact instant to arrive?”

And the lies had all fled, leaving in their wake only a truth that Malgenia was fortunate never to hear.

“Well then, let’s not keep you waiting any longer,” Insikir said and I could feel the newly forged soul splitting blade he carried with him.

“So I know, Vaingloth, that, of course, we cannot speak of the defenses we have arranged.”

“There is security in obscurity, but it is a fragile sort of safety. That said, I do agree Kurst, we will benefit from keeping some degree of mystery to exactly what sort of defenses we have arranged for our holdings.”

“Yes and see that is the thing Vaingloth. What we have setup should be kept as secret as possible, but the fact that we have them must, conversely, be made as apparent as possible.”

“I believe that is what our security summits have been directed towards have they not?”

“They have but they have been woefully lacking in one crucial area.”

“Oh? Have they?”

“Yes. As you are well aware.”

“Enlighten me if you would.”

“There is a threat which shall persist into the new world we will create which I have yet to hear any suggestions or stratagems raised to address.”

“And this threat would be?”

“Must I name it? Even that entails a degree of peril. As you well know!”

“I must confess, I do not. Or rather there are so many perils before us, I would be certain I know of what you speak, before offering what might be misplaced guidance.”

“I’ve not come to you for guidance Vaingloth. This something all of us must consider and if any of us cannot make a credible case for possessing a defense, we risk imbalancing the very delicate balance of power we are striving to achieve.”

“Oh, there I must disagree Kurst. The balance of power we are striving to achieve must be anything but delicate. If we are to reign eternally, then no winds of fate, fair or foul must be capable of disrupting the balance which we create.”

“Then you agree with me! That something must be done about her!”

“About whom my dear Kurst?”

“Malgenia! Malgenia! You know I speak of Malgenia! Who among us can claim to have safeguards against her, should she decide to make include us in one of her damnable art pieces?”

“Why we all will, consider that she has been a part of creating our new world at every step. She will be as invested in it’s continuance as any of the rest of us, perhaps even more as our world will offer her something which this world never could.”

“And if the capricious devil changes her mind?”

“Vitor has already pledged to manage her has he not? Let it be his problem.”

– High Accessor Kurst making an early but critical mistake which eventually compounded into his position as the second Neoteric Lord to fall.

Tallgrim played his part. A little too well if I was being honest. I mean, I’d spent a couple of years pretending to be someone I was not and while I wasn’t the best performer in the world, I was pretty sure I could spot a bad one.

I’d always wondered what the others had planned to do if Malgenia turned on them, and my ‘reappearance’ was absolutely the moment they would set those plans in motion.

Or, hmm. I suppose they’d already set their plans in motion, at least one of them, given the attempt they’d made with the Beast Fragment. 

To their credit, that would have worked. I mean, if Malgenia had actually been stupid enough to hang out in the wasteland and stay in contact with them for weeks and weeks. Honestly, could I even fault them for trying? I’d given them the best opportunity they were ever likely to see to eliminate her. Not taking a stab at it would really have been criminal.

And they’d even been smart enough not to try to stab me in person! When you love and hate someone like Malgenia like I do, it’s kinda hard to decide exactly how to feel about people trying and failing to kill her.

Left to my own devices there, I chose ‘murder’. I was feeling ‘murder’, or maybe ‘murdery’? Murderous? Nah. Just Murder. That seemed fun. And appropriate. And like what Malgenia would have wanted, and what I wanted, so really, how could it be wrong?

Trying to stay in character? Diyas asked.

I feel like I should lie here, I said. Except of course lying to one’s deity is generally about the worst idea you can have. Lies create distance, or revel it, and the last thing a Blessed need – or the last thing I need – was distance from my deity.

I am the God of Life, among other things, Diyas said. Trust me I am familiar with people wearing out their welcome to my domain. A suggestion though; perhaps don’t get so lost in planning their demise that you invite your own? There are other ideas you can hold onto after all.

Yeah, and they want you back in one piece, Beauty said.

We all do, Inhibition said.

Let’s not undersell the danger she’s in, Reason said. We know how potent Malgenia’s power is, but we’ve never seen it tested against the might of the other Neoterics.

I’m counting on that, I said and held fast to my hope that I’d sweetened the pot enough to draw in even the most paranoid of the Neoterics number.

‘Recruiting’ Wepan, Grosh, and Hanshel had been more-or-less as straightforward as my conversation with Tallgrim had been. They’d been dealt weak hands to play and they knew it. That I was inviting them to the table at all meant I intended to take what remained of their power, but at the table, all together, was their best chance of changing that fate. They had to bank on my arrogance and the stratagems they’d set aside for a confrontation with Malgenia or they had to bank on my mercy.

And they’d met Malgenia, so there was really only one right play there.

I hadn’t invited either Insikir or Vitor to our little gathering, ostensibly because they hadn’t lost any of their divine fragments and this was just a ‘friendly little swap meet’ where we were going to ‘put things back into balance’.

I wondered if they would think I was afraid of the two remaining full powered Neoterics? Or if they’d think I was sparing Vitor because he was my twin and Insikir got a free pass as a result?

I never got a chance to find that out, but I like to imagine that on some level the four Neoterics I brought back to my house in the wastelands thought themselves lucky since it meant they could divine my power and domains into four shares, rather than six.

Could they have thought they’d be able to harvest the domains of death from me? It had to be a tempting thought. Not to mention if they could have learned the secret of how I survived a Beast Fragment. 

That was the lure. The promise that all they’d ever wanted was still within their grasp. All they needed to do was deal in bad faith with me. So simple. So familiar.

If they’d had an ounce of sense, any one of them could have run though. Give up their power – the rest or to me – and found some means to pay for their crimes. Turning into the mindless god of worms for example. That had worked for Sasarai, and something similar could have worked for them to. 

Heck even becoming a true guardian and servant of the populations they’d saved would have been enough to hold off my wrath and Malgenia would have been confused as hell and probably let them live just for that.

But none of them cared about their people.

And none of them were interested in atoning for what they’d done.

All four of them just wanted to go back to what they had.

They’d stolen it fair and square, didn’t they deserve that?

“So we should work out what each of you need, and once we have that sorted, what each of you deserve. Vaingloth always said that keeping things fair would keep us safe and secure!” I wasn’t doing a good Malgenia impression anymore, but I was still making a bare attempt at it. They were so consumed with hunger for the divine fragments I’d scattered across the table in front of them though that none of them were evaluating my performance, and if they had been they probably would have chalked up any discrepancies to ‘she was just eaten by a Beast Fragment, must have lost a few bits in there’ or something like that.

“Do you have a proposal for how we will divide these up? Perhaps a draft selection?” Wepan asked.

“First we need to work out what you each require,” I said. “Did any of you manage to retain any of your divine fragments or did they manage to clean you out entirely?”

Was I asking them to choose between admitting that they needed less than one of the others vs. admitting that they had been so foolish and weak that they were completely swindled? Yes. Yes I was.

“I have a few still,” Hanshel said. “Ones I had set aside for more frequent use.”

“I have a similar stash as well,” Grosh said, nodding to the other three as though they’d had their answers pre-selected.

“I was between research projects and all were committed to my vault,” Wepan said, which drew a frown from Hanshel.

“I am in a similar state,” Tallgrim said. “When we lost…or thought we lost, you to the Beast Fragment, I began securing my city and belongings. The vault was supposed to be the safest place for such things.”

They were all studiously not speaking about how I’d walked through the wards and carried them out. It wasn’t a fun topic for any of them to contemplate, especially since I hadn’t used magic to do so.

Or at least not the magic of grace they knew.

“Let’s have Hanshel and Grosh tell us what they have left then,” I said. “I’ve always wondered what you managed to pluck from the dying heavens?”

“I would need to review the stash,” Grosh said. “Perhaps we could adjourn to my sanctum? This feels very exposed.”

“Exposed? I don’t follow?” I said, gazing through the missing wall of my house at the dark and empty wastelands beyond.

I hadn’t repaired the house at all because I wanted it to capture whatever part of their attention wasn’t riveted on the divine fragments.

And I wanted it to remind them what had been done to me already and what I’d survived.

“I suppose you would have a different perspective, but we cannot be so sanguine about an encounter with one of the fragments of the End,” Hanshel said.

“If you could perhaps share the techniques you used? That would place us all on a much better footing, better even I would say than we’ve had since the Sunfall.” Grosh was so ernest I was forced to wonder if he really would have traded all the divine fragments on offer for a chance to learn how to deal with the Beast Fragments.

That having the influence over them that I enjoyed would allow him to destroy the rest of them and claim their fragments was surely not something he’d considered though.

“Techniques? Oh I’m sorry, you seem to be mistaken,” I said. “I used no techniques in my encounter. Or at least none you will be able to replicate.”

Which was the absolute, unvarnished truth, but the funny thing about the truth is how infrequently people are willing to believe it when it conflicts with what they want.

“I told you she wouldn’t be forthcoming,” Vitor said.

I turned to look at him since he’s teleported in behind me, only to discover that I was frozen in place.

“You’re certain she can’t escape this time?” Tallgrim asked. “She all but ignored my High Wards.”

“We won’t have any problem containing her,” Vitor said. “Or dividing her from her domains like we did with the gods.”

“But she survived the Beast Fragment!” Grosh said.

“She had assistance with that,” Vitor said. “And now that we’ve reviewed our collection of divine fragments I know exactly who that was.”

What? No!

And that was the last I heard of Diyas’ voice.

“Is it worrisome that we’ve included the twins in our endeavor Dyrena?”

“Certainly Helgon. Everything about our endeavor is worrisome.”

“I am referring to the amount of time we have spent so far on predictions and balancing equations to ensure that there is at least a rough parity between the powers we shall all obtain.”

“Yes, well predictions of this magnitude are an inexact application of what it already an inexact field of study. I remain unconvinced that Insikir’s projections are as well founded as he believes them to be given that he is basing them on the Felspar-Hollins Hypothesis rather than the work Gertz, Snaghok, and Blinds did to refine it, but Gertz and Snaghok was repudiated for three of their papers which makes their joint work hard to advance.”

“I am willing to take as a given that we are lacking in precision but will at least be somewhere near to the correct overall range Dyrena. My concern is less with that and more that if we are not orders of magnitude apart from each other, then Vitor and Malgenia should hold sway over, on average, twice as many domains as the rest of us, will they not?”

“Individually? No. In fact I believe even collectively they will hold fewer than you or I will on our own.”

“That seems statistically unlikely though does it not?”

“If we assume a flat statistical spread, then yes. However Malgenia distorts the distribution rather strongly.”

“Yes. I’ve observed that several times now. Surely she will be as adept at gathering the god shards as the rest of us though? Or is it Vitor who you suspect will be particularly maladroit at the task?”

“Quite the contrary. I expect that both of them will prove to be quite proficient at gathering all sorts of power when it’s freely available. No, it’s more a matter of intent that I am imagining will set them back.”

“You believe they want us to fail? That would be an intriguing turn.”

“Sadly, they are as invested in this as any of the rest. Vitor flaunts his talents it is true but have you noticed that he only does so to the extent needed to win himself attention and accolades? Recall if you can any instances where he was pressed to his limits?”

“He dueled High Accessor Glenlin prior to ascending to Glenlin’s position. I recall that battle being a fairly dire one.”

“Was it? Or did Vitor arrange for it to appear so in order to win more support for his ascension?”

“You believe he was holding back even when Glenlin had a blade of aether pressed to Vitor’s throat?”

“I am sure he was. With how he smashed the blade later in the fight, he could have easily won in that moment, but an early victory didn’t suit him, and so he allowed the scene to play out for his devoted fans and those who imagined they could catch him on the back foot. He plays at being a feckless fool, but he is in some senses the more dangerous of the two.”

“You think he’ll collect more shards than Malgenia even? I thought she was likely to be in the lead over all the rest of us?”

“She won’t be. Malgenia’s interests do not lie in amassing power. She craves an ever greater understanding of death. Where the rest of us will grasp for whatever we can, she is going to be far more selective.”

– Helgon being convinced not to drop a mountain on the city where High Accessor’s Vitor and Malgenia were stationed immediately before the Sunfall.

The time for hiding was done. I’d walked from my house to Mt. Gloria in secret because there was power in keeping the truth of my existence hidden. The hadn’t been a bad call, but as it turned out, there was also a special kind of power in letting people know exactly what I’d become.

“Malgenia! How…” Tallgrim was gesturing so frantically he was barely able to weave a Tier 1 ward against my presence and the panic on his face was a balm to my soul.

I hadn’t really known Tallgrim myself. Since becoming the next Malgenia, I’d spoken with him a few times, and that had been a few times too many. Malgenia had found him delightfully stupid, but what I saw in her memories was a man who’d reduced everything and everyone to a calculation of value and had discovered far too many means to adust those equations to his liking.

Technically the speciality he’d been recruited to the god killing cabal for was ‘Soul Valuation’, which they’d needed in creating the inflationary period of grace production prior to the Sunfall. For me, he was useful because of all the remaining Neoteric Lords, he would be able to see the most clearly that I was no longer entirely a part of their world.

Oddly, I’d expected him to be greedier and less terrified on discovering that though? In Malgenia’s memories I couldn’t find any instances of him being phased by any of the horrific revelations and plans the cabal had come up with.

Perhaps that was a sign that he was the one who’d tried to kill me with the Beast Fragment? He certainly had a motive for the action, but then they all did. Opportunity? Again, they all knew where I was, roughly speaking at least. Means? That was the tricky one. In theory none of them had the means to send a Beast Fragment after me. If any of the Neoterics could even nudge a Beast Fragment onto a course of their choosing, there would very swiftly have been only that Neoteric Lord left.

“Hello Tallgrim, you stopped coming to visit me? I wasn’t sure if you wanted to see the result of my research, so I thought I would come by and check.” I was out of practice with pretending to be Malgenia, my word choice was off, my inflections were all over the place, even my emotional center was far too forward.

And of course Tallgrim noticed precisely none of that.

To his credit he did get his warding spell in place, eventually, but all I had to do was glance at it and raise an eyebrow for him to drop it like a guilty schoolboy.

After all, what did he had to fear from me? We were co-conspirators. We trusted each other implicitly. And it wasn’t like we could afford to harm one another, right?

Right?

I stared into his eyes so that he would stare into mine.

He was good at valuing souls? Good. Let him take a look at mine.

In one of our early mathematics lessons, we were taught about multiplication and division. I was always fascinated by how they interacted with zero. Multiplying by zero produced nothing. Diving by zero however?

Tallgrim’s expression took on the decidedly strange cast of someone who’d brain had divided by zero when he tried to evaluate my soul.

So he knew what I was. As a reward, I did not let my shadow eat him. (That was mostly a reward to the shadow, Tallgrim would probably taste disgusting I imagined, even if it would only be the briefest of passing flavors).

“Y-y-you…” Should I have felt sorry for him? Should I have offered him mercy? Should he have lived long enough to utter another word when so, so, so many people died directly by his hand far before the sun fell? 

Malgenia holds the domains of death but I do not listen to the ghosts of the dead. I can’t. If I did I would hear nothing but their cries for vengeance, and justice, and peace ringing off the heavens so loudly that even endless night couldn’t cloak them.

Sometimes though…

Sometimes it’s hard not to hear the smallest of them whisper through.

Tallgrim should have died then and there.

He should have died the moment I gained Malgenia’s power.

He should have died before he could bring down the sun.

Or best of all, he should have died in his cradle.

It was easy to imagine a world that was immeasurably better for all of that, but that wasn’t the world I had to work with. 

And it wouldn’t be better in all ways.

I couldn’t turn back time, but I could take the things I loved about the world I had and work to make their future as bright as possible, which meant that, for now, Tallgrim got to live.

“Yes, me! I found somethings you lost too,” I said and conjured a handful of jewels into my hand.

That caught Tallgrim’s attention and dragged it up from the depths of the terror my appearance had cast him into.

“The fragments. The stolen fragments! But how?” He rose from his throne. 

Because of course he had a throne.

For all her fault, Malgenia’s place of refuge being a cozy bed seemed vastly less pathetic than a literal gold throne. 

“There were a whole bunch of them in Mt. Gloria. And another Beast Fragment there too. I was looking for one and I found these instead, so I thought I should get everyone together to sort them out. I remember it was important we all have about the same number, wasn’t it?” I said, again doing at best a paper thin pretense of being Malgenia, and again that was more than enough.

“Together? But, no, if you’ll let me see them all I can pick out the ones that were mine and then you could take the others fragments to the rest of them.” Tallgrim wasn’t able to fully restrain his hands from reaching towards me, but it looked like he was trying with all his might to do so.

“I don’t know. There were a lot of new Blessed. I don’t think we’d wind up with everyone even if things went back to who originally had them.” It had been Beauty who’d suggested having an answer for that request and I could feel her delighted approval that something we’d prepared for had come up already.

“The others won’t see us. They’re all…they’re concerned about what’s happened to you and Sasarai and Vaingloth,” Tallgrim said, crawling back onto his yellow chair.

“Vaingloth was silly, we all know that.” Which I felt was objectively true. Chasing Little into a Beast Fragment was just so idiotic. It left me boggling that any of them had made it as far as they had if even one of them was stupid enough to do something like that. “And I’m fine. So I think we’re good to pay the others a visit.” I opted not to call attention to Sasarai’s fate since that was a viable out for the Neoterics, and I wasn’t feeling especially kindly towards any of them.

“We can’t though. They’ve all raised their High Wards. We can barely communicate in writing with each other, much less project ourselves into their domains,” Tallgrim said, missing a point so shockingly obvious that I had to tip my head to the side to try looking at him from a different perspective.

Malgenia would have done the same thing fortunately, so it was in character enough that it didn’t give me away, but I doubt I could have resisted even if it would have.

“Where are we?” I asked, trying to lead him to the conclusion which should have been glaring him in the face.

“My Sanctum,” Tallgrim said. “It is the safest…”

And that’s when it hit him.

The safest place in his dominion. 

Tucked behind the strongest barriers and the most impenetrable magics he possessed and backed by the full force of a Neoteric Lord’s will. 

A Neoteric Lord’s Sanctum was more than just a well defended redoubt though. With the divine power they’d accumulated, their most person space was an area were reality was bent ever so subtly to their will. In no other spot in the world were they as powerful (and everyone else as weak) as they were in their Sanctum.

And we were conversing in it.

Not as projections.

Just Tallgrim and I.

Because his defenses meant nothing to me.

“I’m bored, when are we going to put the world back together Vitor?”

“We have put the world back together Malgenia. It is ours now, we can do with it as we wish.”

“I can make a diorama out of Vaingloth and Wepan then?”

“Well, no, clearly not. They are our fellow Lords. We cannot afford for there to be animosity between people like us, or the world truly will end.”

“That sounds delightful too! Let’s do that!”

“Come now Malgenia I know you do not mean that.”

“How? How do you know that. Maybe I do. I could end the world. We did it once already and it wasn’t even hard.”

“Precisely. If you wanted to end the world, you would be busy doing it. So, come, tell me what it is that is troubling you. Is it your new sculpture?”

“No. That wasn’t really a problem. I just needed to repair its vocal chords so it could scream again.”

“Well there then, you’ve completed another masterpiece, you should feel proud!”

“There’s no frozen keeberry custard.”

“Frozen…keeberry? When did you ever have frozen keeberry?”

“All the time.”

“You did? Who made it? I don’t recall father ever allowing the servants to make plebian sweets for us like that?”

“He didn’t.”

“Then where did you…oh, the church acolytes?”

“No…or, yes. But not them. They just showed me where the stands were. In the market.”

“Did they…did they give you a recipe perhaps?”

“What? No. They gave me keeberry custard. Why would I want a recipe?”

“So that we might know how to make it ourselves? Or, have one of our people make it for us. One of your Deaths perhaps? They are endlessly willing to please you after all. I’m certain they would make keeberry custard for you if you told them to.”

“They can’t.”

“Why ever not? We can get them all of the kitchen supplies they’ll need.”

“There’s no more keeberries. They were all destroyed in the Sunfall.”

“Well, then conjure some up? It can’t be that hard, berries are simple little things aren’t they? And you can pull almost anything from death!”

“I didn’t say they died. I said they were destroyed. The stupid Beast ate them. They’re gone forever.”

– A pair of Neoteric Lords beginning to understand exactly what they’ve inflicted on themselves.

I was going to kill each and every last Neoteric Lord in the world. It was a delightful notion. Malgenia would have been so proud of me. You know, if I hadn’t killed her first.

Hmm, actually on reflection, she probably would have been proud of me for that too. I mean, she was a horrible, terrible monster, but she did appreciate efforts that produced fatal results. In fact, the more I thought about it, and the more of her memories that came back to me, the less sure I was that she’d really been fighting me as hard as she could have.

Had I done her a favor?

You did the whole world a favor, Diyas said. I’m just saddened that we have to ask you to do several more of them.

I’m not sure there’s anything to be sad about there. Ridding the world of monsters is rather uplifting if my spat with Malgenia is anything to go by.

There was, however, just one tiny problem.

“Assuming you can kill them all…” Theia started to ask.

“She can.” Clarity cut in to stifle any doubts there, which surprised me a little. I mean, I understood the power I’d taken from Malgenia, but she didn’t have the same personal experience with it. Then she met my gaze and I saw that it wasn’t her belief in Malgenia she’d built her conviction on.

Which was kinda scary.

It was a lot easier to believe in Malgenia after all. Everyone was, quite rightly, terrified of her. I was just…

The one who killed her, Diyas reminded me.

“Assuming over the last couple centuries the nigh-omnipotent world destroyers haven’t worked out any defenses against the one person they all agree could murder them with a thought,” Theia said, “Assuming that then there’s the obvious question of how are you going to get them all in one place? Because you only get one shot at this right?”

“We do,” Responsibility said. “It’s possible to perform the Assumption Ritual multiple times but, after the first, any remaining Neoterics will understand what we’re up to and avoid us at all costs.”

“So we’ll need to draw them all together,” Clarity said. “At a time when they are at their most paranoid.”

“Several of them have lost all of their divine fragments from the raids you staged though haven’t they?” Jilya asked. “Could we leave them out of this and handle them separately?”

“Of the remaining Neoterics, we were able to reclaim the divine fragments horded by Hanshel, Tallgrim, Grosh, and Wepan. We couldn’t find a path into the hoards for Insikir, Vitor, or Malgenia,” Little said. “The four lords we did pilfer from however are arguably more dangerous at the this point than the ones we missed.”

“That gives us five hoards to their two,” Jilya said. “Do we need to go to war on them and bring them all together at the negotiating table.”

“Four hoards,” I said. “You didn’t find a path into Malgenia’s hoard because she doesn’t have one.”

“Wait, but that’s not possible. She claimed a lot of domains, didn’t she?” Theia asked.

“She did, but she wasn’t like the other Neoterics. They claimed the divine fragments, but the domains were still held by the bits of the gods they possessed,” I said, watching for when each of them would piece together what I was saying.

Responsibility and Clarity already knew. It hadn’t come as a surprise to them when I’d confirmed the catechism we’d been taught our whole lives. The same was true for Beauty, Inhibition, and Reason, though I hadn’t needed to confirm it for them since they lived it like I did.

“How, exactly, did Malgenia get access to the domains themselves?” Little asked. She’d grasped what I was saying, she just didn’t want it to be true.

But of course it was.

“She gathered all of the fragments of the death gods to herself,” I said. “And then she slew them. There are no more fragments of the gods of death left in this world. There’s only Malgenia…or I supposed me now.”

“And the other gods? The other fragments she claimed?” Jilya asked, horror creeping around the edges of her words.

“There were a few where she collected all the remaining fragments. Those gods died too. The ones where she only found some of the pieces though? Those she just turned over to Vitor.”

“If she’s holding onto the domains themselves though, then would she be…?” Theia asked, denial preventing her from completing the thought.

“And that’s why Insight needs to do the Assumption Ritual. Soon,” Beauty said.

“Malgenia, more than any of the other Neoterics, was always teetering on the edge of expressing the godhood she’d stolen,” Inhibition said.

“It’s why the other Neoterics never struck against her, despite their fear of her,” Reason said.

“But killing gods was kind of their thing wasn’t it? Why would they be more afraid of Malgenia as a god than they were of her as a godkiller?” Theia asked.

“Because we never killed any of the gods ourselves,” Helgon said. “I reviewed quite a few of our early papers which tried to argue that we could and each and every one of them showed that it was impossible. Mathematically, doctrinally, fundamentally impossible.”

“So what did Malgenia do then?” Jilya asked.

“Ignored Helgon’s research,” I said. “To be fair though, when people consulted with her on whether it was possible, she would always say something like ‘well of course’ and then offer, from what I can tell, zero justification or support for the statement.”

“I am afraid that none of us took her quite as seriously as we should have,” Helgon said. “She had a very silly air about her though, or at least that was what the others said. We never worked together much, she and I. I can’t imagine why?”

“She thought you were afraid of her,” I said, a stray Malgenia memory floating into my awareness.

“I was. Terribly so. But then I was afraid of all of them really,” Helgon said.

“Even Dyrena?” Little asked.

“Especially her. She was a true terror. A laughing, mean terror. Just the most cruel I must say.”

Ah, right. I’d almost forgotten that Dyrena still had someone who kept her at the center of their heart. Wouldn’t have guessed a ghost would count, but apparently a heart is a heart and death doesn’t change that.

You are mean, I said to absolutely no one in particular.

And cruel and terrible, no one in particular answered.

Ready to admit that you do have a worshipper? I asked.

It is…it is more complicated that that.

Because of course it was.

I hugged Responsibility and Clarity. Literally everything in my life was complicated, so I suppose I owed Dyrena at least a little compassion there. She might have wrecked the world, but my world had been born out of that wreckage, and at this point I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

“I don’t think we want to complicate things with a war if we can avoid it,” Little said. “We might have more divine fragments, but how many of the new Blessed are we willing to send to their death fighting even one of the Neoterics?”

“It’s worse than that,” I said. “I mean, clearly we don’t want anyone to die in general, but it’s probably worth pointing out that everyone who dies adds to the grace Malgenia is holding. Regular people, Blessed, even whatever we all are, any of us dying will make it ever more likely that I lose my hold on Malgenia’s power and ascend.”

“And then Night won’t be able to cloak you, and the Beast will come and devour us all for good,” Theia said, speaking as the representative of Night in our little gathering.

“That is the central problem yes,” Reason said. “But we also just don’t want any of you dying.”

“The new Blessed are our best chance to bring the world back to life. Losing even one of them, or one of you, would leave us that much more diminished when we may not have enough pieces left to work with as it is,” Inhibition said.

“And, you know, we’ve died, so we can say that living as good a life as you can is worth it,” Beauty said. “You’ve all got eternity to see what comes next, the time you’re here is precious because it’s so limited.”

“So, no dying, sounds good to me,” Theia said. “But that does leave us with the problem of assembling the Neoterics for your ritual.”

“In the past we would simply call a conference if we needed everyone to attend to something,” Helgon said.

“They did that when Vaingloth was destroyed,” I said. “But even with only one Neoteric down they were still too paranoid to come in person. Everyone simply projected themselves into Vitor’s conference room. And then they projected themselves into my house when I was ‘working on studying the Beast Fragments’. I have to wonder if they’re talking at all now given Sasarai’s, uh, demotion, and what everyone except Insikir and Vitor lost.”

“If I know my co-conspirators, and to be honest I’m not sure I ever really did, but I would nonetheless guess that Insikir and Vitor are working out how to divide the world between them, while the other four are conspiring on how to hold off Insikir and Vitor,” Helgon said before frowning and considering further. “That will be what they’re telling themselves. What they will actually be doing is working what the most effective means of betraying each other will be.”

“Seems like they’d be wiser to just try and get the divine fragments they lost back,” Little said.

“They know Draconia is back in play. And they can probably guess what happened to Sasarai – not the being made into the God of Worms thing, but how he lost all his divine fragments first and would never be able to retrieve them.”

“Can we put Insikir and Vitor onto an even playing field with the other four somehow?” Theia asked.

“That’s unlikely. We couldn’t identify anyone who could get into their vaults and none of them have had to expend the grace they have stored up yet,” Little said.

“Maybe we don’t need to push Vitor and Insikir down,” I said. “How many divine fragments do we have that don’t have Blessed yet?”

“Quite a few,” Little said. “What are you thinking to do with them?”

“I thought we might give them back,” I said, taking a page from Jilya’s playbook.

“Do you think we should have a funeral Vitor?”

“A funeral? What good would a funeral possibly do, Malgenia?”

“Well, funerals are supposed provide comfort to the loved ones of the deceased and, as we are now orphans, we must be in need of a great deal of comfort aren’t we?”

“We…what? Orphans? Well, hmm, I suppose we are at that. I’m not sure we necessarily count as ‘loved ones’ of the deceased however.”

“Certainly father always said that he loved us though.”

“Did he? I am trying to recall, did those words ever leave his mouth?”

“He said he was proud of us. Several times.”

“Think back, did he ever tell us that, or were those always as boasts to other people?”

“Does that make a difference?”

“In the end, I suppose it didn’t, but perhaps if he had…? But no, I doubt events could have played out in any manner but the one they did.”

“Well that’s clearly not true. We’ve made many decisions. This is our world because we chose to make it our world, and we’ve done so more purposefully than anyone in history.”

“I was referring to our, um, status as ‘orphans’. Given our gifts, and who our larger family was, I do not see any of the myriad paths we might have followed leading anywhere except to this state we find ourselves in.”

“You mean even if we hadn’t slain the world, we would still have slain father and mother and all our relatives?”

“Perhaps not all of them, but I imagine a large portion always would have fallen to our machinations.”

“Does that mean we don’t get to be orphans?”

“Closer to say we were orphans from the day we were born. Alone in this world save for each other.”

“So no funeral then?”

“You seem distressed by that, but I could only imagine a funeral as a party which we threw for ourselves.”

“Oh! But that’s exactly what it is! Come, let us plan the a year’s worth of funerals where we can dance on the graves of a new family member every night.”

“Won’t we run out well before we’ve filled a year’s worth?”

“We can always add more people to our family.”

– Neoteric Lords Malgenia and Vitor planning their schedules after the Sunfall

Crowded though it was, our conference room felt empty until the two people I needed to see most walked in.

“That’s mine,” Responsibility said, shooing Beauty away from my lap, while Clarity switched places with Inhibition at my side.

Clarity had been right too. Hugging their projections was nothing like cuddling close to them for real.

“Did the latest set of compatibility matrices yield the results we were hoping for?” Helgon asked, reaching for one of the stacks of paper that Inhibition had brought in with her.

“To 57%, well past our base threshold!” Inhibition said.

“Could you bring the rest of us up to speed on this, since it seems like you’ve got an answer for killing Neoterics and I think we’re all in favor of that idea,” Jilya said.

“No problem,” Reason said. “We have two problems here really. One; the Neoterics. Obvious. Been around for a long time. Getting worse the longer we allow them to remain.”

“In fact, if our calculations are correct…” Beauty said.

“And they are,” Helgon interrupted her to confirm.

“Then allowing the Neoterics to continue harvesting grace as they have been is an inevitable death sentence for the world,” Beauty finished.

“They’re managing the grace they’ve collected so far, but their storage devices all have an upper limit,” Inhibition said. “Your Holy Tree Jilya? It was maybe a dozen generations away from a cascade failure that nothing in the world could have stopped. Not even if we had ten times the Blessed that we do now.”

“A dozen generations is a long time,” Jilya said. “But given that Sasarai was claiming to be ‘eternal’, it doesn’t sound like he was thinking time would be up in another few centuries or so?”

“None of them are,” I said, a collage of Malgenia’s memories flickering past my mind’s eye. “Sasarai said his tree would simply grow to accommodate additional grace as needed. Insikir has portioned his stored grace into bounded containers that he claims he could stockpile to the sky if he needed to. Even Vitor thinks he has the answer; he’s been trying to create artificial Blessed since the Sunfall.”

“Well that is rather clever of him. And more ambitious work than I ever saw the poor boy attempt in our time together,” Helgon said. “Of course, if he’d just asked me I could have told him it would never work. He’s trying to create a Blessed without their being in communion with anyone else. That’s where the real power in the Blessing lies. The abilities and magics the Blessed can call on are trivial by comparison.”

“What about Malgenia? What was her plan?” Little asked.

“One that would work,” Reason said. “One that has in fact, been working.”

“Holding it all in herself? Or do you mean the Assumption Ritual?” I asked.

“The Assumption Ritual has been a big part of it, but we missed the most important aspect of it,” Reason said.

“It was the death. Our deaths. That’s what’s been holding Malgenia’s power in check,” Beauty said.

“We knew that though,” I said. “When she absorbed each of you that gave her more, I don’t know the right term, but ‘soul room’ I guess. She was able to hold more and more power because she’s offloaded it onto you until you’re all filled up and then she needs to take another Death.” That I had no useful memories from Malgenia on the matter was probably at least partly deliberate on her end and partly the natural fallout from destroying her in the heart of the Assumption Ritual, so bits of it were the first them she and I lost access to.

“That’s all true, and it’s spelled out pretty plainly in the Ritual. She modified it though,” Reason said.

“Of course she did. That girl,” Helgon said, shaking his head in exasperation. 

“Malgenia doesn’t have a population. She never needed one. She collects the grace from every death in the world. If someone dies in Mt Gloria, their grace comes to her. If someone dies in Sasarai’s Garden…”

“My Garden,” Jilya said, and I heard the echo of a divine claim there, which was intriguing and sent all kinds of wheels turning in my head.

“Sorry, right, he turned it over to you didn’t he?” Reason asked.

“He did. Also, he’s a worm now,” Jilya said.

“He always was,” Helgon said.

“The point is, Malgenia collects more grace than any other two Neoterics combined, and at that rate, she should have melted the world down decades ago,” Clarity said. “She did not however, because with each death in the Assumption Ritual, she is able to send a large portion of the grace she’d collected into the domains of the dead.”

“How does that make things any better?” Little asked.

“Because that’s where the grace of the dead is meant to go,” Responsibility said. “Malgenia has been artificially continuing the natural flow of the world, even if it was only on her terms.”

“Her approach is practical because she’s not hanging onto the energy, it just has an unfortunate requirement to it,” Clarity said.

“To make the flow happen, she needs to kill someone,” Little said, seeing what Clarity was saying despite being blind.

“Does she though?” Theia asked. “I mean from what I’ve heard of her, killing someone  seems like it would be more of a benefit than a drawback in Malgenia’s eyes.”

“We’ve considered that, a lot,” Responsibility said. “The problem is, touching on the domains of death means, well, you die. That’s kind of their whole thing. If anything the Assumption Ritual is weird because it only calls for one person to die at a time. If it had been wholly Malgenia’s invention it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t have put the number a lot higher.”

“So we need to have the remaining Neoterics kill someone ever few years then and everything will be great? Or the world at least gets to keep going?” Theia asked.

“No.” I said. I didn’t have any more of an answer than that, but I’d rather see the atoms of the world burn than have that be the world we lived in.

“Correct,” Clarity said. “That is not a viable path forward for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Malgenia holds all of the divine domains of Death, so no one else can use anything like the Assumption Ritual and achieve the same ends.”

“Which brings us to the other problem,” Reason said. “Her.” She gestured, of course, to me, though I don’t think it surprised anyone in the room that I was a problem. “She’s teetering on the edge of becoming a god. Which is what the Assumption Ritual is designed to prevent.”

“Oh, yes, that is a problem,” Jilya said. Jilya the one who’d made a divine pronouncement. Jilya who had outwitted a Neoteric (even if it was one of the dimmer ones of their number) and had converted him into both the godhood he craved and a state where he could never be a problem again. “I don’t suppose you’ve discovered a means to hide another god within Night’s veil have you?”

“Nope,” Theia said before any of my family could. “There’s no chance. You made an excellent call with Sasarai since he’s tiny and bound to the dirt, but there’s no way she would become a god anywhere near as small as he is.”

“That’s correct,” Clarity said. “You drained Sasarai of almost all his power when you took the Holy Tree from him. Trying to claim the power that Insight currently holds would not go as well for you since you would, as stated, die.”

“Can she?” I asked, somewhat hesitant to point out the fact that there were three of us in the room who were only borderline mortals, and of that number, only Jilya’s spirit burned with the sort of fire that even the Beast of the End of All Things hadn’t quite been able to snuff out.

She is still borders on my domain, Diyas said. Which means she can also be drawn into yours.

Not that we will be undertaking any plans which would imperil her so, Draconia said.

That should be her choice, Umbrielle said, but I agree that other options would be far preferable.

One might almost believe that other options are nearly inevitable, Sola said, considering the work which has been put into them.

I had the sense of a great silence filling the next moment, as though, I don’t know, a full god who’d been working hard for centuries to keep us all protected and hidden was pointedly not addressing Sola’s evidence-less claim.

Theia rolled her eyes but also kept her silence.

And Helgon, poor Helgon, seemed to hear the silence as well and looked from Little, to Theia, to me and back and forth, face puckered in confusion.

“We do have another answer,” Reason said. “We’d originally thought to balance the Assumption Ritual between the three of us, but one of the critical underpinnings of it was finding a means to achieve that balance and with Helgon’s help we found the piece we were missing.”

“Our deaths,” Clarity said.

“Nope,” I said, rejecting any plan that involved either of women I loved dying for me.

“See, I told you she’d get it,” Responsibility said.

“That was a reflex. She’s not seeing the problem yet,” Clarity said, and so, of course, then I did.

“Oh. The Ritual’s point is the death, if you don’t die then the transfer of power to the domains of death doesn’t happen,” I said feeling trapped, but the two of them were too happy for that to be the end of the story. “And, no, that’s just stupid, oh really?” Clarity and Responsibility nodded in confirmation together, “If you die, we won’t be balanced, because you’ll be in a naturally weaker position than me unless one of you kills me like I killed Malgenia.”

“Now you might think we could simply add more people to the mix, say have a dozen people die and that might balance the one living you, but that won’t work either,” Responsibility said.

“Because it’s the living person the grace transfers through,” Clarity said.

“So we had to find another way,” Responsibility said.

“And we did,” Reason said.

“There has to be one, or more, deaths during the Assumption Ritual, but so long as there is at least one death, grace can flow into the afterlife,” Clarity said.

“Any amount of grace,” Responsibility said, staring into my eyes from only a few inches away.

I really wanted to kiss her.

“We can perform the Ritual,” I said, a future I’d never dared to hope for unrolling before me. “We just need to include all of the Neoterics in it.”