“I know this is a particularly odd question coming from me, but should you really be buried in research stacks on a day like this Dyrena?”

“A day like this? What sort of day is this Helgon?”

“Many sorts I suppose. It is, for example, our first day of pleasant weather after what was reportedly the most beastly winter in living memory. Also it is notably the first day of our week long school break when we are encouraged to seek out experiences our studies do not normally provide. Then there is the minor point that the research stacks have been closed for twenty hours now and access to the library is forbidden to anyone in the absence of the library staff.”

“Oh? Well that would explain a few things I suppose.”

“Such as?”

“I was rather curious why there were no guards stationed at the arch to the Forbidden Lore crypts.”

“I believe the vault doors and the sealing spells are meant to serve in lieu of an active guard presence.”

“Are you sure? The sealing spells were quite rudimentary. And the lock on the vault was, as you can see, rather easy to circumvent.”

“I believe they did not account for someone of your considerable talent to take an interest in gaining the access you presently have.”

“And you as well. I didn’t disturb the seal spells or the lock after all.”

“It is far easier to follow someone else’s lead than work out solutions from first principals.”

“And you followed my lead why?”

“I wished to prevent you from encountering any difficulties such as expulsion were you to be discovered.”

“I am reasonably sure they will wish to expel me regardless of any discovery of today’s work.”

“They are fools, but to expel the best student they have? Is the faculty truly that dim?”

“I doubt I am the best…”

“You are. Unquestionably.”

“Even if that were true, I can’t imagine they will prove to be tolerant about the rituals I’ve discovered here.”

“Why would they wish to expel you over simply learning a ritual? Learning is what we’re here to do isn’t it?”

“Yes, but we’re not supposed to learn how to end the world.”

– Dyrena discovering the insufficiently flawed and misleading version of the rituals she would eventually refine and put before the High Accessors who became the Neoteric Lords.

It should have been somewhat crushing to learn that my world only existed, only could exist, because of the destruction of the world that came before it. I, however, was about to be gobbled up by a blob of non-existence, and, more importantly, the world that had existed was something I had no interest in restoring.

It had made Malgenia after all.

Granted it was also a world where Diyas had been fully herself, and that I would like to see, but…

But I’ve changed too. The communion between the Blessed and the Divine was far more impersonal before we fell. We were literally not the part of your world that we are now, Diyas said with a sign that was equal parts sorrowful, resigned, and grateful.

“One other question then,” I said, addressing it to Dyrena. “While it’s good to know what you did and why, the Beast is about a hand’s width away from swallowing me whole, so, how does that help me?”

“Mostly I’m hoping it helps you believe I’m being honest here and that what I’m about to suggest won’t sound entirely mad, or at all hostile.” Dyrena folded her hands on the table in front of her, preparing to offer what I knew was going to be the worst possible idea there could be in this situation.

And the most terrible part was, I knew what it was going to be.

“I’m supposed to sit here and get eaten aren’t I?” I asked, not even vaguely uncertain as to whether that was the plan or not.

Dyrena nodded.

“That implies that there is some other options I could choose to take?” I asked, knowing what they were as well, and why I couldn’t take them.

“Two other options,” Dyrena said. “You could fight or your could flee.”

“But to flee, I’d need to use Malgenia’s power,” I said.

Dyrena nodded again before adding, “And even if you managed to avoid godhood again, the Beast Fragment would simply follow.”

“And the defenses around Malgenia’s sanctum?”

“Wouldn’t slow it at all. You would be able to ensure that the other Deaths joined you though.”

“And fighting won’t work either.”

“I couldn’t beat it when I had my full self. I don’t think beating it is even possible in any meaningful sense,” Diyas said.

“And being eaten by it?” I asked, horror beginning to creep up my fingers as windows of possibility closed before me one after the other.

“It will change you,” Dyrena said. “All experiences do, but this one more than most.”

“I’ll survive it though?” I asked and then understood what was truly scaring me. “Wait, no, will Diyas survive?”

I wasn’t being brave. I was broken. I’d been raised to believe in ascension through death. I just didn’t have it in me to be properly afraid of dying. I’d dreamed about becoming a proper acolyte to Malgenia from the moment I could say her name. Even with how I felt about her, that part of me was still a dream my mind clung to.

Losing Diyas was a different story though.

I’d heard the echoes of her pain. I knew what she was the to the world. What she was to me. I could burn, that was fine, but Diyas was another matter.

“I didn’t last time,” Diyas said. “But last time I didn’t have you.”

“She’s right,” Dyrena said before a mountain of doubt could crush me beneath it. “She’s not what she was, and the communion you two share is something outside the design of this Beast.”

“You made it so it couldn’t hurt Blessed like me?” I asked.

“No, no, but I made never accounted for what Blessings would be like when the gods were part of the world. You are a problem the Beast can hurt, can destroy, but the hurts it inflicts can’t define you, and the destruction you endure is one you can recreate yourself from.”

“That doesn’t sound easy,” I said.

“It won’t be,” Dyrena said with an apologetic frown as the Beast’s maw finally descended over me.

The world went away.

I went away.

I was nothing.

Except…

There was that “I” sitting there.

If “I” was nothing, then nothing was a quality I could possess? And if “I” could possess qualities, then “I” was something, and if I was something…

That particular bit of nonsense cost me a million years to work out. 

But I did work it out.

It was a millionth of a second after the Beast swallowed me that I upgraded the statement to be much more powerful.

Not “I am.” but “We are.”

We. 

Diyas and me. The Beast could dissolve my body, but Diyas was the God of Life. Making a new body for me was trivial for her. Or why even bother with that? She wanted my body to stay alive so alive is what it stayed.

The Beast could have erased Diyas as well of course. It had in the past after all, and among all the other things it didn’t have, a compunction against erasing gods was definitely at the top of the list.

Small problem there though. Where the gods existed on a mostly conceptual plan, I was solid. That wouldn’t have been enough to save me on its own but in conjunction with Diyas, where I protected her and she protected me? It was all too easy to see what Dyrena had meant about the two of us being a problem the Beast simply wasn’t built to handle.

Not that we escaped unscathed exactly.

Or alone.

Or quickly.

“The second time through was a little easier than the first, but I still owe you both a rather severe apology,” Dyrena said.

We were back in my house. Or the remains of it. The one the Beast had destroyed.

“Who am I?” I asked, since it had been about a million years since I’d had a name to work with.

“Mine, you are mine,” Diyas said, which was delightful because she’d been my companion for those million years and I still knew her name.

“Give her a moment,” Dyrena said. “I think I learned a bit from Little’s ordeal, so I’m hoping that this time wasn’t quite so rough, but I had to be very careful of alerting anyone about what was actually happening.”

“What actually happened?” I was tasting the words more than asking a question. It felt like someone had punched my memories in the face repeatedly.

I think I might have undersold what being eaten by the Beast was like.

It wasn’t fun.

And if Little had a worse time than I did?

Could I make someone a Saint?

Oh!

Wait!

I’d made someone a Blessed! 

Reason!

I went to cast my awareness out to her by Dyrena grabbed my hand first.

“Don’t!” she said. “You are in a precious instant, don’t waste it. Reason’s fine. All of them are fine.”

“They’re still alive?” I asked as my memories dragged itself up off the ground and started coughing up the names and faces I desperately needed to remember.

“Your time got a little frayed but it didn’t snap,” Dyrena said.

“It felt like a million years,” I said. “We were lost in there for a million years.”

“I think it was less than a second,” Diyas said.

“I’d hoped it would be less than a second, but that was the time I had to work with, out here, six months have passed.”

“Six months? Six months! I was lost in there for six months! What did the others…,” I couldn’t even finish the question. What could the others have thought? How mad with grief would they be? 

Oh, hmm, mad, yeah. They were going to be mad. 

Like really mad.

Maybe crawling back into the Beast wouldn’t be so bad?

“They know we’re okay,” Diyas said.

“They do?” That seemed like an unreasonable thing to hope for, much less find to be real.

“Apparently a perk of being separated as I am,” Diyas said. “I was there with you, but I was also with the fragments of me that they found.”

“So why can’t I talk to them?” I asked, the entirely irrational fear that they all had decided they hated me while I was away feeling unquestionably real.

“Because you’re dead,” Dyrena said. “Not really of course, but as far as anyone who is not part of your immediate family knows, ‘Malgenia’ was consumed by Beast Fragment six months ago. Malgenia being who she was, no one has quite given up on the idea that she might still be around, so the Neoterics are still outwardly counting you as among their number but privately they’re making plans based on you no longer being part of the balance of power between them.”

“So they think there might still be eight of us but they’re scheming like there are only seven?” I asked, happy for the momentary distraction from worrying about where my people were and how much they hated me.

“They’re scheming like Malgenia, specifically, is missing. The threat of her wrath was one of the great stabilizing forces in our little cabal,” Dyrena said. “It’s why I insisted we have her. Also, with her around it was much more likely that they would kill me.”

“You are strange, you know that don’t you?” I asked, feeling more and more the weight of the six months that I’d lost closing in on me.

“You’re not the first or the thousandth person to observe that,” she said.

“So, why can’t I talk to my family?” I asked, coming back to the most important question in the world.

“To talk to them from here, you’d need to use Malgenia’s power and, while they think she’s gone, every one of the remaining Neoterics is focused on little more than finding you and Vaingloth’s power.”

“Why would they think weren’t just erased by the Beasts? I mean that’s definitely what happened to Vaingloth and what should have happened to me.”

“They might have found a paper in my old journals concerning ‘the circuitous route power lost to a fragment might return to the world’. Searching for that route and the power they could claim has kept them just a tiny bit distracted.”

“And we want to keep them distracted. Got it,” I said and got up at last. Without wasting a second I began scouting around the house. I didn’t need food or water, thanks to Diyas, but clothes and travel supplies like a tent seemed useful to have.

“You’re going to find them, aren’t you?” Diyas asked.

“Yeah. They deserve the chance to throttle me themselves. Then we’ll turn our attention to taking out the right person.”

“The Neoteric who tried to kill you?” Dyrena asked.

“Them too, but I was thinking more it would be whichever Neoteric was the last one standing. Whoever tried to kill me needs to go, obviously, but just because they beat the other six to the punch doesn’t mean the rest won’t try to do the same or worse if we give them a chance. So they have to go. All of them.”

“You have a pet Beast Helgon.”

“I have no such thing Vaingloth.”

“There is a Beast fragment not two hundred yards outside your city walls. It is sitting there and it is not moving.”

“Aren’t most pets ones that people keep inside their dwellings? I would think being outside the city walls would make the Beast Fragment more akin to livestock?”

“Are you serious Helgon? You’ve captured a Beast Fragment and running who knows what sorts of experiments on it and your quibbling over the things nomenclature?”

“But I’m not running any experiments at all Vitor. We discussed that, was it last year? Or the year before? They sort of run together. Always have. Hmm, perhaps achronal magics would make a good area of study next. Might be what we need to unsnarl this whole mess. Or make it worse I suppose.”

“Helgon. The Beast Fragment. Why do you have it?”

“I don’t Vaingloth. As I just told Vitor, I am not keeping it as a pet or livestock, nor am I running experiments on it. Those would be far too dangerous and would yield little concrete data in isolation.”

“Then explain why you’ve allowed one so close to your city when you were the one who designed the warding rituals to ensure they can’t rampage through our strongholds as they wish.”

“Well that’s very simple Vaingloth, I can’t.”

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

“Can’t. Did I mumble that? My apologies. But no, I cannot explain why the Beast Fragment is where it is. I did move my wards in when it approached but that was really more an experiment on the wards, not the Beast Fragment itself, which as we discussed is much too dangerous to conduct experiments on and the experiments would not yield definitive results.”

“So let see if I understand this right, you claim you have no idea why a Beast Fragment has decided to camp on the edge of your city, and you are not undertaking any experiments related to it at all?”

“Well, I mean, I did invite it, and I have a whole host of experiments related to the Beast going on as we speak, but it’s not a pet you see, and I’m not doing any experiments directly on it, more ‘around it’ if you want to be exact.”

– Helgon almost managing to get himself executed by the other Neoterics sooner rather than later, and in the process convincing them that there were no viable avenues for attacking the Beast Fragments, and no avenues at all for controlling one.

So I didn’t have any means by which to survive and that turned out to be oddly comforting.

Had anything else come crashing through my wards to destroy half my house I would have been caught in a terrible quandary. Staring into the maw of a Beast Fragment however meant the urge to draw on Malgenia’s power was non-existent. The Neoteric had some highly specialized spells which could keep the Beast Fragments away from their cities, but those spells took months to prepare, a tremendous amount of power to maintain, and largely functioned by shunting the Beast Fragments elsewhere rather than blocking them. 

And that was the absolute best answer the Neoterics had for dealing with the Beast Fragments. In a direct confrontation their only answer was to not be in a direct confrontation, and that worked right up until a Beast Fragment was focused on you. 

If I’d been willing to use Malgenia’s power I could have teleported anywhere I wanted to, but the Beast’s relationship with space and distance was patchy at best and so it following me would have been an inevitability.

“Don’t try to run,” Dyrena said, still sitting at my table with Diyas.

“I’m not sure she can,” Diyas said. “There’s an interdiction field in place.”

“You two have slowed time down?” I asked, feeling an odd weightlessness in place of the gnashing teeth tearing through which the next second or two was sure to hold.

“No. This is familiar though,” Diyas said.

“You faced this before when the sun fell,” Dyrena said. “Its part of being devoured.”

I’m sure she could have picked less comforting words to say. I have no idea what those words could possibly be, but there’s probably something worse to hear than that.

“If we’re being devoured, that why is it over there and we’re a good arm’s length away from it still?” I asked, not panicking largely because there was simply no point to it.

“What we see as a fragment of the Beast is only a part of it,” Dyrena said. “Even a small piece of it is still massive enough to swallow the whole world.”

That it was close enough that I could extend an arm into it if that appendage had offended me somehow made Dyrena’s words less than thrilling to consider.

“So it slows us down so that we can’t get away?” I asked, grumpy at the idea that a cosmic void could somehow still hold cruelty inside it.

“Not at all, it’s slowing down time because it’s eating time as much as space,” Dyrena said. “I thought that was a particularly clever expression of its nature, though I will admit that it’s also as annoying as I imagined it would be.”

“Your talking like this is your fault – like personally, more than just as one of the Neoterics,” I said, wondering why I didn’t hate her completely yet.

“There aren’t many other people I can confess to,” she said. “Or commiserate with.”

“And we would have sympathy for you why exactly?” I asked. I was about to be destroyed, so the answer didn’t really matter, but as last moments went it was better than thinking about Responsibility and Clarity and how I wasn’t going to see them again.

Also, and this was irrational then, and probably mostly stemmed from Dyrena’s greeting, I didn’t think I was facing a hopeless situation. I couldn’t see any reason to hope mind you, but the tone she had taken told me there was something important I wasn’t aware of yet.

“Because she’s largely the reason we’re all still here,” Diyas said, who, notably, was also not fleeing from the every-so-slowly closing maw of the Beast Fragment.

“So because she only broke a few billion dishes, or one twelfth of a few billion, we should be grateful that she left us with, what a a couple million or so?” Was I being fair? No, not in the slightest. Did ANY of the Neoterics deserve the benefit of the doubt? I don’t know, let’s ask the billions of dead people they are directly responsible for? Or how about the remaining few million who get the joy of living under Neoteric tyranny?

“I see why you were drawn to her,” Dyrena said, throwing a smile in Diyas’ direction.

“You’re allowed to defend yourself,” Diyas seemed capable of doing that for Dyrena but also not exactly happy with the notion.

“I’m really not sure I should,” Dyrena said. “I mean, she’s not in the slightest bit wrong there.”

“Yes, but she needs to at least listen to you, and it’s unfair to hide things from her. You saw how it went last time did you not?” My god is the best god. It’s not a competition of course, but if it was, she would have already won it.

“You raise a valid and reasonable point,” Dyrena said before turning back to me. “I was never sure exactly what suspicions Malgenia had of me. She was disturbingly insightful sometimes, and cataclysmically oblivious otherwise. Tell me though, have you gleaned anything from her memories as to why I joined the Neoterics? Or why they really killed me?”

“Did they? Kill you I mean. You seem remarkably not dead at the moment,” I asked, unwilling to go probing around in the remnants of Malgenia’s thoughts as my last action before I was erased.

“Oh they most certainly killed me. There is, sadly, nothing mortal left to me at all. Which, I should confess, was also a part of my plan.”

As plans went that seemed like one that probably sucked, but I refrained from point it out. It just gave me a new benchmark to measure my own against. The others were going to be simply *delighted* with that, I was sure.

“They killed you so that you could attain godhood freely,” I said, her actual plan clicking into place and putting a scowl on my face. I needed to surround myself with people whose plans were worse than mine, not actual clever schemers.

“I’m not a god,” Dyrena said. “Though the difference is admittedly subtle.”

“I do have Malgenia’s senses you know. I can tell what you are.” Why she would lie to me at this point was puzzling in the extreme.

“Look deeper,” Dyrena said. “Look for my domain. Look for where I touch the world. Look for even one worshipper who could send me grace.”

And so I did.

And, huh, she hadn’t lied.

“Your domain isn’t…it isn’t a part of the world? And neither are you? What the…? And you’ve only got one worshipper?” It was confusing largely because I had Malgenia’s memories of what the gods were like to compare to and Dyrena had none of the standard elements, just the same aura and presence and well of divinity within her.

“Yes, exact…wait, what?” she said. “Are you losing your senses? The Beast isn’t supposed to be that close to us yet.”

“My senses are fine,” I said, which was true apart from the bit where all they felt from the Beast was a violation of everything that made up existence.

“Look again then, I don’t have any worshippers either. Like I said, I’m not a god. I’m more of a celestial janitor now.”

“Well you’re a celestial janitor with someone who’s holding you in their heart,” I said, ever more certain of what I was sensing.

“That’s not…no, wait, it’s not important now. What is important is that I make myself clear to you,” Dyrena said. “I’m not a god, I can’t be one. The Sunfall and what came to pass afterwards was largely my creation. I’m taking more credit than I should since there were a lot of people whose work went into realizing and defining the plans I’d put together, but the overall scheme is something I have to take responsibility for and no one whose done what I did deserves to be revered by anyone.”

“And what, exactly, was it that you did,” I said, feeling like it was not exactly a good moment for lengthy and inexact explanations.

“She put together crafted the plan which allowed the Neoterics to summon the End of All Things and overthrow the gods,” Diyas said. “She did so largely on her own, and certainly without any divine assistance, but she did so in a manner which ensured the world and the gods would exist afterwards.”

“How?” Again, no sense wasting time.

“The short form? I shaped the plans the others came up with to ensure we got exactly the End of All Things that we needed. The rituals to do what we Neoterics did have existed since the gods came into their dominions. They are literally how the world is meant to end, and they kept being rediscovered throughout the ages. Each time the discoverers either tried to hide them, and eventually failed, or tried to enact them and came perilously closer to success each time.”

“So you made sure they succeeded this time, but only enough so that people would see they should never be attempted again?” That didn’t sound right to me, but the next alternative that came to mind was even harder to believe.

“No. There’s no lessons you can teach to one generation that a later one will not forget or ignore. The rituals carried the ultimate lure you see; the one who ends the world can use its remains to create a new one.”

“But with twelves of you…oh. Oh, seriously??” It didn’t matter that there were twelve of them. That had been a smokescreen too, the part of the plan which hid its real goal.

“The world can never be what it was,” Dyrena said, sounding both mournful and proud of that fact. “In destroying what was, this Beast, our Beast also destroyed what could be and shattered the rules that allowed those rituals to work in the first place. It is both the first end of the world and the last. I sacrificed what was to ensure that what will be is no longer doomed to the ending its architects foresaw. This is your world, not theirs.”

“But it seems to me that the fragments of Beast – the smaller ones – represent a prime opportunity for us.”

“A prime opportunity to meet our former gods Helgon? Because I for one am not eager to make their acquaintance again.”

“Don’t be silly Vitor, the old gods are gone. Not just dead, your sister would have them if they were merely dead. No, we shall never see them again.”

“And likely no one would ever see one of us again should we flirt with actually encountering the Beast’s offspring.”

“But don’t you see Vaingloth? That’s the point. These aren’t offspring. The predator we summoned isn’t capable of having offspring. It’s not capable of having anything at all.”

“Ugh. Philosophy. Helgon what is your point. Find it sometime today, please.”

“My point Vitor is that the fragments of the Beast which are scattered about the world are not creations of the Beast-Which-Yet-Looms-on-the-Divine-Plane. They are the Beast-Which-Yet-Looms-on-the-Divine-Plane. I can hear your objections, and yes, I acknowledge that there are no causal links between the fragments and the greater whole. Any experiments we run on a fragment will have no effect on their source, but that’s the joy! Don’t you see it!”

“I see nothing but peril Helgon. Let us imagine the best case scenario you propose; some foolish number of us turn our attention to discovering the form and limits of a fragment of the Beast. Let us imagine as well that we bend our efforts to understanding where those extents would provide us a means with which to erase the fragment rather than allowing it to erase us. What would be the point and purpose of such an exercise when, by its very nature, the result could not be guaranteed to apply to even one other fragment, much less the greater threat on the divine plane?”

“Vitor is correct, we would risk ourselves for an outcome which is uncertain at best and cataclysmic at worst. Also, and this may have escaped you Helgon as I believe you were not paying attention to Insikir’s presentation at our last gathering, but we have no means by which to direct or contain even the smallest of fragments, so your proposed experiments must fail on the grounds of insufficient practicality.”

“Oh? How odd. You are quite correct, and I must apologize Insikir, Vaingloth is correct, I wasn’t listening closely enough I guess. There was a theorem I was working on. You can see it here, it covers directing the movements of the Beast fragments and the sort of micro-portals we can open to keep them warded away from a roughly city-sized area. Again, my apologies, but the idea you mentioned was quite captivating, and I thought it might prove to be something useful. It would seem not though?”

– The Neoterics meeting wherein Insikir joined Vaingloth’s growing faction for the murder of Helgon.

I wasn’t alone. I’m not sure why people had imagined I would be.

I think it was always the nature of the gods to fade from people’s moment-to-moment awareness in the course of their days, Diyas said. I feel we may have worked best when people turned to us for guidance in our domains or when they were seeking direction in their lives.

Giving thanks and the festivals sounded like they were pretty fun parts of the package too back then, or was Malgenia right that people didn’t have any fun on the Holy Days? That had seemed like it was probably only a ‘her’ thing?

I wasn’t as close to the world then as I am now, so I’m not certain I can say. The Holy Days were always accompanied by great swells of grace, so they seemed delightful to me. It was only with the Sunfall that I really understood how there could be a disconnect between the grace people gave to us and their own happiness. 

Hearing Diyas, the god I had pledged myself to, Diyas, the reason I was alive and not eaten by the worst monster the world had ever seen (and yes, I am including the god-eating End of All Things in that list), Diyas, the first person who told me I was even worth saving at all, hearing the sadness in her voice was heart breaking.

But I let it break.

Reaching out to her with any sort of soothing offering of grace was not only be a step towards the divine I could not afford, it was also exactly the problem which had wounded her in the first place.

“You’ve mentioned a couple of times how the Neoterics poisoned you and the other gods. I don’t think I’ve ever understood how they did that though? Or why?” 

I flipped the book I’d been reading closed. Part of the aetheric geometries it spoke of were starting to make sense, but I had a lot of work to do there and offloading it to my subconscious wasn’t necessarily a terrible move.

Diyas was with me – she’s always with me – that’s how gods work – but I folded my hands and looked to the chair opposite me at the table I was sitting at as an invitation.

Her appearing there wasn’t exacting a manifestation or an incarnation. I wasn’t in the midst of a divine revelation – not the ecstatic kind that allowed for a god’s observable presence in the world. Being Blessed just came with a few perks, like being able to see and speak with one’s god when the current moment wasn’t pulling ones attention away from the god onto more material matters.

“I’m not sure poisoning us is strictly accurate, but it’s close,” Diyas said, accepting my invitation. “Back then, Malgenia and the others who eventually claimed the title of Neoteric Lords were our High Accessors, not pledged to any one of us but rather to the management of several temples at once. As gods were weren’t always in harmony and we had little reason to prioritize each other over our domains since we were, we thought, endless and infinite.”

“So the High Accessors acted as coordinators between competing gods then?” I could imagine it, but that felt foreign to me. To be fair though, a world of more gods than just Diyas was almost unimaginable and I’d even met, hmm, I wasn’t sure how to count how many I’d met.

“Not so much competing as inconsiderate,” Diyas said. “Oh, some of us got along quite well. We had relationships which mirrored mortal ties, certainly including rivalries and real animosity, but for the most part we simply didn’t consider each other all that much. Solas and I, for instance, met often since her light was one of the core requirements for the life which flourished on the world’s surface. I’d like to think we were friends, but if a year or two went by between conversations, I’m not sure either of us would have noticed.”

“And the Neoterics took advantage of that somehow?” I was both curious as to what sort of scheme Malgenia had come up with, especially since it hadn’t involved just directly killing the gods herself, and, more importantly, how I could make sure to never hurt Diyas in the same way ever again.

“I think our separation may have been the first thread they pulled on to unravel us,” she said and rose to wander into the kitchen. I could hear her without trouble so I let her go, having a strong inkling she would be returning with a meal for me since I hadn’t really been paying attention to food much lately.

What?

Reason was off being my Blessed, helping shepherd Beauty and Responsibility safely to Mt. Gloria, while Clarity and Inhibition were escorted to meet Helgon by this Theia person I’d never met. 

So I was worried.

I mean, sure, the Blessing had been a success. A surprisingly quiet and simple affair in fact. I’d wondered for a moment if Reason taking the spark of blessing I offered had even worked, but when she opened her eyes and they were filled with stars it was hard to deny that she was something a little more than she had been.

And then she’d left.

Because we, both, needed, not ‘wanted’ by Needed, to make sure the others were safe.

Spending more than two weeks alone after that had not been my definition of fun. Especially since there was another two weeks left before either party arrived at their destinations! 

(Maybe the world was too big).

In theory I could have dropped in on Reason as easily as Diyas dropped in on me – no divine power needed, just a reflection of the new bond we shared – but I really, really did not want any of the other Neoterics discovering what I’d done.

For one thing, it would make Reason an immediate target. For another I needed them to think I was still hard at work on ‘discovering the how to destroy the Beast fragments’, although after several weeks of my ‘focused study’ even Vitor seemed to accept that I wasn’t going to make any progress radical enough to warrant daily visits. Most of all though, I didn’t want them to think of trying the same things themselves. 

The world needed more Blessed.

Desperately.

Even one Blessed pledged to an actual Neoteric however was far, far too many, and was probably the other reason which would convince me to draw on Malgenia’s power again.

“In the end it really came down to power,” Diyas said. “One of the principal roles the High Accessor’s held was to direct and shape the grace offered by the peoples they oversaw and ensure that it flowed to the proper deities. The festival for High Summer Stars for example was one of the great periods of worship each year and the grace generated was shared among perhaps a thousand or more gods. Ensuring that each god received their proper share was something no divinity could do because we all saw our proper share as being ‘every bit from each person who venerated us’, and so it was left in mortal hands to make fair and equitable divisions.”

“Wasn’t the problem that they gave you too much though? Malgenia had said the gods demanded more and more and the people couldn’t keep up, but it doesn’t sound like you were demanding at all?”

“We didn’t demand, but we did accept. And yes, the High Accessors presented us with more and more grace each year, as they ‘grew out flocks’ and ‘brought people closer to our doctrines’.”

“I’ve met the Neoterics. There’s no chance that’s what they were really doing.”

“They were not. As best as I can tell, they had converted some of our followers into little more than prayer machines. Beliefs as rigid as iron, with a monomaniacal need to be ‘Pure’ and ‘True’ and always, always under the control of those ‘above them’. It destroyed those worshippers lives and flayed their souls, but in the short term it generated such an intense swell of grace that we were sated and beyond, and that was our undoing.”

“They were fattening you up like festival geese?” I’d read about those as part of a ritual the day before and the practice seemed so bizarre that it could only have come from the world before the Sunfall.

“Yes. Drunk and swollen on the power they’d fed us, we fought first for ourselves, each defending nothing more than our own domains, when the Beast began to tear away at us. Maybe if we’d fought for each other instead? Maybe if some of us had been willing to lose everything so that the rest could achieve victory…? I don’t know. That part of the past was lost with all the pieces the Beast devoured. Perhaps there was never a chance that we could have defeated it. It could have been that the grace the Neoterics fed us was merely to keep us from noticing the trap they were building. In the end though, the Neoterics poison dulled our senses and our sense of self and that was all that was required for their victory to be assured.”

“I can tell you it took quite a bit more than that,” Dyrena said.

Manifesting before me in the seat to the side of Diya’s and mine.

Manifesting before me…

“Yes. We have some important things to talk about, but at the moment there is a slightly more pressing concern,” she said gazing up and to the side as though she was listening for something.

“What concern?” I asked, not feeling anything amiss.

And then half my house disappeared.

“That concern,” Dyrena said, pointing at the Beast Fragment who had penetrated the barrier around my house and was consuming more than half of it.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if we just applied to be Blessed though sister?”

“Easier? Easier in what manner Vitor?”

“The Blessed lived a, well, blessed life. No studying, no striving to master the abilities they’ve been granted, and they’re all treated as though they were beyond reproach, so no listening to father bang on and on about ‘our responsibility to keep the family name in the highest of standings’ and the rest of that rubbish.”

“Oh, were we supposed to care about any that?”

“Supposed to? Well of course. It’s because he thinks we care about our familial duties that he’s paid for the things we’ve asked for, like this dreary little visit to this dreary little resort.”

“I find the ambiance here quite lovely.”

“Of course you do, and that is why I will be selecting our vacation spots for the foreseeable future.”

“So long as they’re near a necropolis, I’m sure I shall have no objections.”

“Malgenia, please, there’s quite a bit more to life than visiting necropoli.”

“Obviously. Life is full of many things, many tiresome and uninteresting things.”

“I find good meals and charming company neither tiresome nor uninteresting.”

“And becoming a Blessed would provide you with more of either than you have presently?”

“I suspect it would. People throng to attend the Blessed.”

“I do not recall there being any fetes to which you lacked an invitation in this last year? In fact I recall several you wish you could have turned down but were compelled to attend for some reason or other?”

“Father. Father is always the reason.”

“And do you think the High Accessor of whatever god chose to Bless you would be more or less demanding than Father? Of their newest Blessed? And what about the god to which you had pledged your utmost devotion above all other things? Do you imagine they would sponsor you in the endeavors you wished to pursue, or would you be constrained to spend all of your time managing and growing one of their domains?”

“Hmm, well I suppose when you put it like that. But where does that leave us? Perpetually under father’s thumb?”

“I suppose that depends.”

“On?”

“How much influence do you imagine father could exert over a High Accessor?”

– Though many would see Vitor as the more active and thoughtful of the twins, that was largely because few, if anyone, else was witness to certain key interactions between the two.

What I was planning to do wasn’t that much of a violation of the natural order. I had told myself that several times and had almost managed to convince myself of it even if Reason found my arguments somewhat incomplete.

“I think the most impressive thing is that you managed to outwit us all,” Reason said. “We all knew you had some sort of scheme cooking, but we were so focused on predicting the sort of insanity you might attempt that I don’t think any of considered that the insanity might be contagious.”

“So you’re saying you will help then?” I asked. I knew the answer. She knew that I knew the answer. The important bit was at least maintaining the appearance that she’d tried to dissuade me, especially since the others would hold both of us accountable for anything we failed to consider.

“I shouldn’t. Should I?” Reason turn to address the question to Diyas who was calmly enjoying some tea from the stores I’d conjured earlier.

Given the peril of utilizing Malgenia’s powers, I was rather grateful Responsibility and Clarity had been with me for well over a month. Early on, conjuring anything they needed had been simple and easy, but for common things it had become easier to simply conjure a reasonable stockpile and fully automate the house so that they could do things like ‘grab a snack whenever they wanted’ or ‘take a shower when I was napping’. In theory that had made our little home harder to cloak, but in practice it had only required that I cast a trivially stronger cloak and jam enough power into it to sustain it for longer than we planned to be out in the wastelands. Two years seemed sufficient and far, far longer than we could afford to spend, especially since it looked like two months might be vastly more time than I had left.

“Should and shouldn’t are decisions for you to make,” Diyas said. “I can tell you what the consequence of those decisions might be though. Or, I could have. While all of you have done a wonderful job assembling my missing fragments, there are still many unaccounted for, an overwhelming portion of which I’m certain are lost forever.”

“She’s still more familiar with the process than either of us though,” I said. 

“Familiar enough to say this won’t push Insight directly into godhood?” Reason asked. “A Blessed’d relationship is with a god after all, isn’t it?”

“They were,” Diyas said.

“Were?” Reason asked.

“I am no longer what I once was,” Diyas said. “And yet, my blessing still joins my Blessed to my domains.”

“And so what would a blessing from Insight join me to?” Reason said.

“Malgenia collected a lot of domains during the Sunfall, though I’m sure you can guess their overall theme,” I said. I’d been considering the question of what blessing to give Reason and have come up with the brilliant answer of ‘let her decide’.

“The Death Neoteric? No, no, can’t say I have any idea what sort of domains she might have been interested in,” Reason said with a roll of her eyes.

“Which brings up the next question,” I asked, “if we do go through with this, is there anything in Malgenia’s repertoire that you’d even want to be saddled with?” Which was my real concern. Carrying Malgenia’s power wasn’t something I had a tremendous amount of choice about, but it didn’t have to be like that for Reason.

“It would need to be more than an office she was willing to endure,” Diyas said. “The relationship between a Blessed and their god is forged upon a shared communion through the domain. If the domain isn’t one which is fully compatible with the Blessed then the blessing will wither or never be received in the first place.”

“And that’s how it is with you and Insight?” Reason asked, looking to either of us for answers.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I do, and yes, I was able to give her my blessing because she burned with life when I met her, and our bound has remained unsevered despite the weight of the death domains she carries because she has chosen life at every turn its been offered to her, no matter the cost the choices have entailed.”

“I mean, what else was I going to do?” I said, feeling extremely unworthy of the implied praise in Diyas’ words.

“What Malgenia did,” she said. “As you’ve said, you had reasons which spurred you onwards in your fight against her, but what ultimately decided that battle was that Malgenia chose oblivion over the pain of continuing on.”

“So I would need to find something I was willing to fight for no matter the pain involved in doing so?” Reason asked.

“Not exactly,” Diyas said. “In the cauldron of the Assumption Ritual, Malgenia and Insight’s futures were pitted against each other. There are, or were, many domains which are not defined by conflict or suffering. The Blessed of Daytime Slumber, for instance, tended to lead by their examples rather than any verbose arguments or great rhetoric, and certainly not through any battles and by overcoming great challenges. 

“I don’t suppose that’s one of the domains Malgenia grabbed is it?” Reason asked.

“Oddly, yes, she did catch a fragment of that. Her collection is a bit more eclectic than you might imagine, it’s just predominantly themed around her favored interests. The question for you though is do you think afternoon napping is a core enough part of your being that you could forge a blessing bond with me through it?”

Reason considered that for a moment and then sighed in defeat.

“I haven’t taken a nap during the day since I was five. That’s probably not the level of connection I’d need for a comfortable domain like that is it?”

Ah, Reason, how I love thee and they self-awareness. Diyas chuckled a bit too before saying, “No, you’d want something a little more present in your life than that I’d afraid.”

“That’s the other problem we have though, isn’t it?” Reason asked. “I’m not alive. Not really. I didn’t manage to do what Insight did. I gave up too. Just like Malgenia.”

“Nope,” I said, because I’d seen this objection coming. “Not like Malgenia at all. In my case, Diyas helped me meet Malgenia on a somewhat even playing field. At the heart of the Assumption Ritual we were both a part of the power she’d gathered and neither of us was. She had all her experience, sure, but experience only goes so far. In your case, you were faced with someone who was supposed to love you, someone you’d been taught to love and honor all your life, and someone who had you at the most extreme of power imbalances. You never gave up because you never had the chance to. The Assumption Ritual isn’t supposed to be a battle, not really, it’s supposed to be a feast for Malgenia and no one like fighting with their food.”

“Not true on a few points there my Blessed,” Diyas said. “First, in the world that was, there were some who very much enjoyed fighting with their food. The world was vast and strange in those days such as you can no longer imagine. That quibble aside however, you are also wrong about Reason’s Assumption. It’s true it wasn’t a battle. But Reason held on nonetheless. Its why she is here today. If she was truly dead, she would be quiet as all the dead are to the living.”

“What are you saying? I’m still alive?” Reason asked.

“What you are is unprecedented from before the Sunfall,” Diyas said. “You and the others stand on the border of my domain, not fully within it, nor quite lost to it either. You live in many important senses, not the least of which being that its possible for us to converse, but what shape and boundaries that life holds even I can’t say, and I suspect that would be true even were I restored to my previous grandeur and glory.”

“There’s a lot to consider there then,” Reason said. “But one other issue remains with your plan Insight; even if we could find the right domain and I could become a Blessed, and even if that didn’t push you over into godhood; we dispatched two groups. How would I alone be enough to protect them both?”

“Oh, that’s easy, you wouldn’t be,” I said.

Reason scowled at me, and rightly so. It wasn’t fair to tease her, but I had so very few chances I really had to take advantage of the ones that were available.

“Responsibiliy and Beauty will be fine,” I said. “They’re heading to Mt. Gloria, which has more than a few Blessed of its own these days.”

“And if something happens to them in the Wasteland while they’re traveling there?” Reason asked.

“You needn’t worry about that,” Meluna said, stepping from the shadows right on queue. “One of my god’s Blessed is traveling with them and Theia is quite adept at cloaking herself and others.”

“How long have you been here?” Reason asked, glaring at me with fully justified suspicions.

“Only a moment, after decades and decades of the world resting in silence, there is suddenly a great many things in need to doing. I didn’t want to miss this at all though.” Meluna nodded at me with an amused and somewhat chilling smile.

I really had to fight not to like her too much.

I am so broken.

“You’ve spoken with her?” Reason asked, clearly wondering why I hadn’t spoke with her first.

“I spoke with Diyas,” I said. “Who in turn spoke with Night, who I presume brought Meluna in? And Theia too?”

“Just me. Night tries to remain as quiet as possible. Makes it easier to avoid attention.”

And that was all she said about that and all she needed to. I wasn’t thinking even one thought about what we needed to avoid the attention of, or the five words I was never going to ever say.

“So do you think this will work then?” Reason asked but Meluna shrugged.

“It’s never been done before, and by rights should never have been possible for a mortal, but then by rights this world shouldn’t be possible so my curiosity is well and truly roused. Fear not though, in the worst case, your passing with be swift, painless, and silent.”

I looked to Reason to assure her that her passing would be none of those things because whatever it took I would not allow that to happen. Strangely that didn’t seem to reassure her at all.

“We are still left with finding a domain that might even vaguely fit me though,” Reason said, her voice sounding half filled with hope and half with resistance.

So I played my last card to tip the scales.

“I believe there is one in Malgenia’s portfolio which might fit that bill,” I said, offering her a single spark in the palm of my hand. “How would you like to be the Blessed of Research?”

“Helgon has been making noises again.”

“About what Vaingloth?”

“About Dyrena, Vitor.”

“Seems rather late for that doesn’t it? Or has he finally come around to understanding that her betrayal could only be answered as we did?”

“There were other options but none of you would let me take them.”

“Those options can never be taken Malgenia. You know none of us can risk falling over into divinity. Not even you.”

“Yes. It is a sadness. We were supposed to be gods, and now we can’t even be worms.”

“We are still the lords of this world though sister. And our powers are not so constrained as all that, are they? Didn’t you put up a new exhibit in your garden last week? I don’t think you would have been able to make such a…sculpture?…without the power we now have access to.”

“I would ask but I am sure your sister will share her work with the rest of us when she’s ready.”

“I always share my works. No one ever appreciates them though. It is a sadness.”

“It will be a sadness if Helgon turns out to be hiding Dyrena’s secret tomes.”

“But Vaingloth, we searched for those tomes, and there was never any evidence that they existed at all.”

“With the power she held, is that meant to be surprising?”

“Perhaps not, but we cannot jump at every shadow and quaver in fear that Dyrena may have hidden something in it. She was still only a mortal woman. We proved that rather soundly.”

“Her prowess is the evidence of their existence though Vitor. She knew too much and predicted too accurately everything that occurred. The fact that we are left in the state that we are can only be attributable to some cache of hidden prophecy or wisdom one of the ancient scholars like Krytsak failed to secure due to his incompetence.”

“As I said though, we have searched everywhere. There were no books from Krytsak or any other ancient scholars in her possession.”

“And what if they weren’t in her possession? What if they were being held for her? By the one among our number who she shared her true vision with?”

“You think Helgon has her missing tomes? I don’t know…”

“It is possible. He’s much smarter than he lets us know. And if he has them, we must have them too I suppose. It is a sadness though what that will mean for him.”

– Vaingloth stirring his fellow Neoterics to murder over a set of tomes he knew never existed at all.

I have to send away the women I love. Oh, woe is me. I am forced by the cruelties of fate to cast out those most dear and precious to my heart, stranding myself to labor in cold and empty nights, beset on all sides by fell beasts who could be my undoing.

You are doing that specifically to torment me, aren’t you? Beauty asked.

I don’t know? Is it working?

So, I had a plan.

But no one liked my plan.

What are you talking about? We all like your plan. Most of it. We just don’t like the ‘leaving you alone’ part, Inhibition said.

“You four are arguing about the plan, aren’t you?” Clarity asked.

The other Deaths were projected around the living room in my conjured mansion in the Wastelands, but speaking privately was still easier and quicker. I suppose our distracted air and how we were looking at each other was something of a giveaway though.

“She’s tormenting me,” Beauty said.

“Why are you tormenting our elders?” Responsibility asked, having decided that teasing Beauty, Inhibition, and Reason with their being at least theoretically older than the rest of us was fair game.

“She’s trying to convince Beauty to go off and leave with you,” Inhibition said.

“By whining about how terribly, terribly, alone she will be,” Beauty said.

“I thought we were going to leave Reason here with you?” Clarity asked.

“She’s going to assign Reason to do some research project or the other the moment we’re gone. Then she’s going to do something unreasonable,” Beauty said.

“I am capable of refusing requests like that you know, don’t you?” Reason asked.

“Capable? Yes. Historically likely to pass up an opportunity to understand the problem before acting on it?” Beauty gave a shrug of disbelief as the answer to her own question.

Reason started to form a retort but sank back into her sofa with a frown.

“Could we ask Meluna to stop by?” Inhibition suggested, which, while possibly a wise idea, was absolutely not what I wanted to see happen.

No offense meant to Meluna there. She had a strangely comforting presence while also being somewhat less than subtly menacing.

Or maybe it was because she was less-than-subtly menacing that I found her presence reassuring. I grew up worshipping Malgenia. There are parts of me that are broken that I know I’m still not aware of.

“She doesn’t seem the sort to make house calls,” Clarity said. “Or act as a house sitter.”

I half expected her to appear with a snappy rejoinder to that, but the shadows in the house remained that simple spots of dimmed illumination that they were supposed to be.

“I did come back you once already,” I said. “You don’t need to worry that I won’t be here when you all get back.”

Beauty eyed me suspiciously.

Because she caught what I hadn’t said.

All of the rest caught it too, but it was Responsibility who refused to let it slide.

“You can’t use any more of Malgenia’s power. You said that and you still believe it, don’t you?”

“I do. And I won’t. Trust me, I barely remember any of it, but what I do remember is more than enough to convince me that Malgenia was right and godhood is to avoided at all costs.”

You remember that, and you remember why, Diyas said. She wasn’t asking me so much as checking in with me to see if I was creeping any closer to dooming us all.

I would lose all of you, I said, answering the question without directly answering her hidden concern about what I’d seen of the Beast. 

Which was exactly the right answer for me to have chosen.

There were five word I was never going to say or even think again, and the farther I stayed away from them, the better.

“It’s hard to even form the words ‘Malgenia was wrong’, and worse when we find things like this where she wasn’t,” Responsibility said.

“Malgenia was wrong. About the both of you,” Clarity said. “And likely about most of the other things she told us. It’s just her power that she understood, so not terribly surprising that she got something related to it right.”

“If we’re agreed, then can we also agree on when we’re going to set out?” Inhibition asked.

“I was going to suggest after another sleep cycle, but I don’t think we know how much longer Insight has,” Responsibility said. “We should probably leave the moment we have our supplies gathered.”

“You’re on her side, aren’t you? Admit it!” Beauty said.

“Freely,” Clarity said, answering for, I hoped, all the others too.

“Good,” Beauty said. “As long as she knows that then.”

And so they left me.

Well, it took a few hours to get stuff together since I couldn’t just wave my hand and conjure everything we needed. 

When I’d told them I couldn’t afford to risk using any of Malgenia’s power I had not been kidding to even the slightest degree. The divinity Malgenia had captured was bursting at the seams within me. It had tasted the briefest of restorations to its natural state, remembering for a fleeting instant what it was like to have a world where it served and supported the natural processes which gave rise to it and that kind of thing? That sense of purpose and oneness and of being right where you were supposed to be, doing what made you complete? Yeah, I could not fault the divinity I was carrying from wanting that back.

It was its poor fortune that I wanted something else a lot more.

“They’re going to make it through the Wasteland okay, right?” Reason asked a few minutes after the rest of our little family departed.

“Malgenia was never particularly gifted in foresight,” I said.

“But they’re going to be okay,” Reason said, questioning I think herself as much as me.

“They’re going to be okay.” It was more a promise than a reassurance. We both knew exactly how long my self-prohibition against using Malgenia’s power would hold up if either group wound up in danger.

“We’re afraid for you too, you know,” Reason said.

“I do. Which is why I’m really not going to use Malgenia’s power,” I said.

“But you’re also not going to sit here, powerless, and take care of yourself, are you?” Shocking that Reason knew me, right? Yeah I didn’t think so either.

“Taking care of you all IS taking care of myself,” I said. “You know what put me over the top in the Assumption Ritual, right?”

“Yeah. Diyas,” Reason said.

“She gave me the opening. It was her power that kept me alive and whole when Malgenia’s safeguards tried to kill me. Without her I couldn’t have survived long enough to fight at all, but when it came down to Malgenia and me in the heart of her power? She was alone there, but I wasn’t. She had an eternity she’d grown bored of to fight for. She had experiments that she was mildly curious to see come to completion. She had her pride which had been poisoned into arrogance by a life without consequences. And I had you. All of you. I wanted to live, don’t get me wrong, but I could hear all of the Deaths who’d gone before me crying out in their slumber. And I knew who Malgenia would take next if I failed. You, Beauty, Inhibition, Clarity, and even Responsibility, you are why I still exist. Twice now I think.”

“Do you really not remember your brief Ascension at all?” Reasons asked. “It feels like there’s things hidden behind thick clouds in your memories.”

“I’m sure there are. And I’m sure those clouds are there for some damn good reasons, because I’m sure I was the one who put them there.” This was not a great conversation to have, what with it risking ending the world and all, but I knew Reason was the one I needed to have it with, thus why I’d asked for her to be the one to stay with me.

“So you do remember some of it then?” she asked. Because it’s really hard sitting in comfort with not understanding something. We’re similar in that we both just want to pick at whatever it is until we know what we’re really dealing with.

“Some. Like I said. But most of what I do remember just shows me that my mind, hell even Malgenia’s mind, doesn’t not have the space or capacity to hold even a small fraction of what it’s like to be fully divine.”

“So how are you going to keep them all safe then?” Reason wasn’t questioning whether I could, she just wanted in on the real plan now that the rest where safely too far away to interfere with it.

“I’m not,” I said. “You are.”

“One tiny problem with that,” Reason said. “I’m here and they’re there. Also, I have no powers that aren’t yours.”

“Yeah, about that,” I said. “Beauty and Inhibition are fully incarnated now right?”

“Yes, but they’re not independent of Malgenia’s power. We’re all still wrapped up in it. If their bodies are hurt or destroyed, they’ll just go back to our usual spirit realm. Unless a Beast Fragment catches them.”

“That’s correct. They’re not independent of Malgenia’s power, but they are independent of me. I said that I can’t use Malgenia’s power and that’s because I’m too close to the border of divinity. You, however, are not.”

“Because we’re not on course to become the new Malgenia.”

“Because you’re on course to become something else. If I’m almost a god now, then I think that means we can make you into something like a Blessed.” My family isn’t wrong that I have bad ideas they’ll probably object to, but sometimes my bad ideas are ones that I’m pretty certain are going to work.

“What? How?” Reason asked, flustered in a manner she rarely is.

“I believe I can help with that,” Diyas said, fully present as she can only be during a moment of divine revelation.

“A toast my friends, to the gods we shall become!”

“Indeed Vaingloth! Together we shall be a pantheon the likes of which the world has never dreamed of seeing.”

“And yet one which it has sorely needed Sasarai!”

“You speak truth Insikir, though we must grant our predecessors some grace. They were called forth into a world already spun to chaos and had to work with what their ancient disciples could offer them. Our world will rise above theirs because ours will be perfect from the start.”

“Perfectable I should think, Vaingloth. We shall each be sheltering survivors of the old world, and as we do not know now what we are certain to know then, I feel we must account for the possibility that challenges and issues will await us after our ascensions are complete.”

“But Helgon, don’t you see, Perfection must include adaptability and the capacity for growth.”

“And to what would we grow Sasarai if we and our world are already perfect? Is there a perfection beyond perfection? And if so does that not mean that the first perfection is necessarily flawed in that it lacks to the refinement of the latter state?”

“You quibble too much about the philosophy of the point Helgon. Our perfection shall be one undreamt, an age beyond the foresight or prediction of any god or power save our own, and that, regardless of what we make of it, is what will make it perfect.”

“I may be speaking too much of philosophy, which is passing strange for me, but you, Vaingloth, seem to be speaking too much from the wine we’ve imbibed.”

“Nonsense! Sasarai, tell him how harmless your wines are! Made to be especially gentle to the senses I imagine.”

“That would be the Castel Red, you appear to have a glass of Umbral White Vaingloth.”

“Red or White, the potency matters not. For we shall be gods!”

– Vaingloth leading the festivities at a private, pre-Sunfall party amongst the soon to be Neoteric Lords of the Earth.

“What…what have we done. What have we unleashed!”

“It cannot see us. It must never see us.”

“We can never become gods. Not a one of us.”

– Words from the Neoterics first council after the Sunfall.

Daydreams are not supposed to be dangerous. Daydreams are not supposed to rend the gossamer veil of the world away and lay bare the majesty underlying all of creation. Most importantly however, daydreams are not supposed to cast you out into a domain where you stand exposed to the All Consuming Eyes of The End of All Things.

Apart from my own incredibly imminent demise however, standing on the divine plane didn’t feel quite as strange as I’d imagine it would.

Oh, to be certain, things were a trifle different from my normal experience. Space, for example, was essentially non-existent. I was more or less everywhere at the same time. Wherever death had or could happen, there I was. 

Not incarnated of course. Incarnation was the gift the mortals held and my mortality was…

Hmmm…

I was the God of Death and many other domains, but was that all I was?

Had I lost my mortality because I let myself dream of eternity with the women I loved?

The divine spark that had been building within me certainly wanted that to be true, but divinity is stupid.

Hey!

Sorry Diyas! You are of course the exception to that rule.

Yes, well, what happened to you?

I have no idea, and I’m a bit more concerned about what’s going to happen to me. 

I didn’t have a body to gesture with, but I was still able to indicate the terrifying maw of the End of All Things that was descending on us.

We need to leave here, Diyas said, not bothering to hide the urgency in her tone at all.

I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I’m…me anymore? How am I supposed to go back to pretending to be a mortal woman when I am clearly something so much more?

This? This was never more. That’s something the Neoterics tricked us into forgetting. Divinity is a substrate of the world. We were never more important than you – no more than bones are more important than the body they support.

That’s philosophically fascinating but I have no idea how to apply that to what’s happening now! I wasn’t frustrated with her. I wasn’t even scared really, which was a sign that I definitely wasn’t fully myself. I just really couldn’t see how to pull the power I’d held for so long and stuff it back into an Insight-shaped package in the material world.

How fortunate that I do.

It wasn’t Diyas who spoke.

I shouldn’t have known the voice at all, since Insight’s ears had never heard Dyrena speak, but even as nebulous as I’d become I still held onto the shards of Malgenia’s memories and Malgenia knew Dyrena all too well.

Of the eleven other Neoteric Lords, Malgenia had been unconcerned with ten of them. In Vitor’s case, she knew him too well to imagine he’d be able to move against her without being staggeringly obvious. In Vaingloth’s case, she knew he would save her for last because she was too useful a weapon to turn on the others and far too capable of ending him if he gave her reason to. Most of the others were the same, apart from Helgon who she was saw had little interest in even being a Neoteric Lord and would happily had spent eternity in his lab if they’d simply left him alone.

Dyrena was the one outlier.

Dyena was understood her.

And Malgenia was not fond of that.

It had taken her a while to develop the animosity she eventually felt for the first Neoteric to fall though. Early on, Dyrena had been a relief as one of the few who didn’t ask idiotic question, or have any trouble accepting Malgenia at her word.

They hadn’t been friends. Malgenia didn’t see the need for that, but Dyrena had been pleasant to be around.

Pleasant and reasonable and perhaps the only person who’d ever been able to manipulate Malgenia. Worse, Dyrena had managed her manipulations without challenging Malgenia in a manner Malgenia could understand how to fight against.

Part of me loved that. Someone who’d been able to hold Malgenia back, or at least divert her from the worst of her impulses deserved a place in whatever celestial pantheon there could still be.

The rest of me though knew who and what I was talking to.

“You’re not dead,” I said, conjuring actual words from nothing.

The Beast was closing on us, but time, much like space, was the faintest of illusions. We had eternity in a moment and no time at all, and that was something the shreds of my mortal mind simply had to ignore.

“Is that an offer you would support Diyas?” Dyrena asked.

“Would you accept mortality from my hands, Betrayer?” Diyas asked.

Neither of them appeared before me, but I assigned visual images to them anyways. As deities we weren’t exactly standing around and talking, but the communion between us was so far removed from the mortal sphere that even acknowledging it was going to make things worse and probably permanent for me.

So I put us all in my house.

Or a reproduction of it.

Clarity and Responsibility weren’t there, and neither were Beauty, Inhibition, or Reason, and their absence was all that was giving me hope in that the moment. 

Whatever it took, I was not going to let them suffer for my failings.

“Someday, if the offer was extended, I imagine I would take your hand Diyas, but we both know why that day cannot be this one,” Dyrena said.

“Is that how you would help her?” Diyas asked.

And yes, even with a divine level of understanding between us, they were, in fact, being that damn cryptic.

It’s for your own good, Dyrena said, whispering the message to me.

Was that possible?

Sure.

Was I willing to accept that?

I mean, it was what I’d been trained to do right?

Just listen to the big, wise, god-like people who all knew better than me.

Just turn off all my judgement, don’t ask questions, don’t try to understand, and don’t, whatever I did, ever think I could be capable of understanding something better than the people who were actually important.

That may have been a mistake.

I fear…

Divine wrath is not what consumed me.

My wrath isn’t divine at all, but empty skies above did it feel right.

I was the God of Death? 

No. The Gods of Death had gotten themselves beaten like a cheap drum when they tried to fight the End of All Things. 

Malgenia didn’t ‘remember’ that, not precisely, but she’d watched the gods fall and the various domains around death had held a pretty solid piece of her attention. One by one she’d felt them wink out, and one by one she’d claimed the domains they’d let slip through the hands of the fallen gods who’d failed and were gone.

I wasn’t the God of Death.

I was something new.

Something the Beast had never encountered before.

And something it wasn’t going to encounter yet.

I turned my eyes, because to hell with godly senses. I liked my eyes. Responsibility had gazed into them and they’d seen Clarity. So I was going to use my eyes to see the Beast.

And it was nothing.

And it was not to be seen.

To bad.

It disagreed.

Or did it?

It wasn’t anything. It was a nullification of existence. It hadn’t broken the gods. It had erased them.

So how could it be anything?

Unless…

Oh this is definitely dangerous, Dyrena said and began to move against me.

Insight, you need to…

But Diyas didn’t get to finish her sentence, because I already had.

I had eyes that could see and so I looked at the Beast.

At the End of All Things.

At the end of my world.

But not at the end of me.

How could I see all that? How could I see it at all.

“You’re not what you were.”

I didn’t even whisper it.

I couldn’t.

To speak those words would truly be the end of everything.

And so I fled.

To the only home I had, to the only safety there was.

Forcing a divine eternity down into a single mortal life was difficult? No. No it wasn’t. Not compared to the gravity of what lurked beyond the five words I could not speak held.

So I fled.

Down to my my bones.

Down to me.

Down to someone’s arms who wanted nothing more than keep me safe.

“She’s back! Clarity, grab her!” Responsibility had lunged for me the instant I reappeared.

And a moment later Clarity was holding me too.

“What in the ten thousand hells just happened?” Beauty demanded.

“Give her a second!” Inhibition, beloved Inhibition, demanded right back.

“She’s going to need more than that,” Reason said.

They were all incarnated, and all still bound up in Malgenia’s power with me. The only thing more relieving than that was Clarity covering my forehead with kisses.

“And she’s going to stay with us for as long as she needs, isn’t she?” Clarity asked me.

Except it wasn’t exactly a question.

Or a request.

“Not forever,” I said. “But for all of our lives and then some I think. I love you, and I always have.”

I had not fought back from the wrong side of the brink of divinity to be shy about what any of them meant to me.

“Thank you Diyas. Thank you so much,” Beauty said, offering an impromptu but clearly heartfelt prayer to the empty heavens above us.

“That wasn’t me,” Diyas said, fully incarnated in the room with us.

Which she couldn’t do casually.

Only when someone was having a divine revelation?

She was holding herself still. Not moving to encourage me, or stop me.

I could destroy everything, and she was leaving the fate of all that was in my hands.

I love you too, I whispered to her.

“I couldn’t leave you,” I told the others, “But I may have been over estimating how much control I have over Malgenia’s power.”

“What happened? If you can talk about it?” Clarity asked.

“I let myself imagine being with you forever, and apparently eternity comes at a cost,” I said, feeling the rising force of Malgenia’s power fighting ever stronger within me. It had tasted it’s proper home once and it could do nothing but hunger to return.

In that moment though, my hunger was greater than its was.

“Insikir are you certain of the results you published last month?”

“Certain enough to publish them Helgon, why do you ask?”

“They suggest that our entire endeavor will prove to be impossible.”

“Did you not read the entire publication? And even if you didn’t,  I believe I made a clear case in the precis arguing the opposite of your conclusion, assuming the subject matter was beyond you?”

“No, no, I read the precis, I read the paper too. Rather a lot of philosophy in there don’t you think? No, what I’m referring to is the calculations you used as the supporting evidence and the conclusions you drew from them.”

“The calculations were smartly done, and they’ve been double checked as well, by Dyrena in fact! If you have issues with them, or believe you have spotted an error, may I suggest you have her explain your mistake to you.”

“Well, you see, I have spoken to her. Which is why I am concerned.”

“You think she made a mistake? Truly Helgon is that what you believe?”

“Not at all. I believe you did though.”

“I will hear no more of this! The calculations were flawless, I know my discipline better than you ever shall!”

“I am certain you do. I am also, however, certain that you may be somewhat lacking in the fundamentals of biological processes and protocols.”

“What? What has biology to do with the grace-to-aether ratios for reality fractures?”

“Quite a lot it seems. You see here you predicate the success of our endeavor on the notion that we will only need to create a reality fracture on the submolecular level and that generating the required aether to do so is well within the boundaries of the grace which we are in the process of accumulating.”

“I know what my conclusions were Helgon.”

“The key point is the hypothesis that we need to ensure that the Predator creature which we plan to attract will be capable of widening the breech without our help.”

“Yes. Appendix C explains that. By utilizing a submolecular rift, we can ensure that only a Predator of sufficient ambition and puissance to devour the gods will be capable of passing through. Lesser entities will lack the interest or capacity to widen the breech.”

“I agree. Everything you wrote there is sound, and the calculations are correct in and of themselves. You have simply missed one critical fact.”

“One which you, in your infinite biological wisdom, somehow observed?”

“Oh, not at all. It was Sasarai who found this. I simply confirmed it.”

“Sasarai? Sasarai noticed a problem in my work? Are you serious? What did you confirm?”

“Life, even if it is not as we know it, has the hallmark that it propagates. Your calculations show that a sufficiently powerful entity will be able to breech into our reality. What they do not address is what will happen if that entity is breeching into this reality not for itself but for its offspring. You presume that the entity will also serve to keep other entities out, and the arguments you make are persuasive, unless those other entities are its own young.”

– High Accessor Helgon convincing High Accessor Insikir that they needed a rift which was both much larger than they’d originally planned and far more temporary.

The Neoterics weren’t exactly leaving me alone. Determining how to destroy the Beast Fragments had become something of a ‘group project’ with annoying daily check-ins. 

To their credit, they hadn’t attained the other Neoterics present state without a significant amount of personal acumen (unlike the reports we’d read of the wealthy and powerful of the pre-Sunfall world) so their contributions of the project weren’t entirely useless.

‘Not entirely useless’ was not the same thing as helpful however. 

“You could tell Sasarai to collect ‘beastial stool samples’ himself,” Responsibility said. She was draped across one of the couches I’d conjured for our House in the Wastelands. Clarity was occupying the other end of the couch, her lap full with Responsibilities legs and feet as she read through a book Insikir had sent over.

Following the ‘Not-So-Great Council’ of the remaining Neoterics, I’d popped back to my house to bring the two of them up to speed. Several of the other Neoterics had objected to my continued cloaking of the house, but it had been easy enough to explain it’s necessity since if any of the Beast Fragments did stumble across me before I discovered how to destroy them, things would not end well for anyone. 

Then we’d spent a few weeks pretending to work on a problem which had defied their comprehension for centuries.

Vitor, interestingly, had not been among those opposed to my return to the Wastelands. It was possible that he simply knew fighting against Malgenia’s whims was a losing cause, but he also had to know that I hadn’t performed the Assumption ritual yet and he hadn’t brought that up either (probably because I wasn’t showing any signs of being overwhelmed by Malgenia’s power, since I was doing fine with it).

Malgenia had trusted her brother, not just because they were twins, but because she knew she could see through his schemes and stratagems well before they came to fruition. In my case however, I hadn’t spent my whole childhood with him. I knew him as a figure of terrible awe and majesty, flawlessly perfect in ever physical detail and casually cruel except to Malgenia’s Deaths who were beyond his reach. From Malgenia’s memories, I’d discovered another side to him though. The awkward child who bloomed into a prodigy of any physical challenge he was tested against. The cocksure young man more interested in the rewards his talents could bring him than honing them at all. And finally, the man alive with the fire of ambition, pushing his talents to their utmost to ensure the success of their plans to overthrow the gods themselves.

Malgenia saw all his fallings and foibles. She knew which buttons to push to get what she wanted and which ones to push to entertain herself. All that I knew was that he had depths and desires he’d never shared with her, but seeing past his facade was not something I felt certain I could manage. The glimpses I perceived which seemed to be his ‘true self’ could easily have been simply another layer of subterfuge.

“Poop,” Beauty said. “Tell Sasarai to go pick up the poop himself. Make it sound childish.”

“And we want to antagonize the Neoteric Lord of the Garden why exactly?” Clarity asked.

“Because he knows there isn’t any,” Reason said.

“He wants ‘Malgenia’ to search for it so that she’ll get too close to one of the fragments,” Responsibility said. “It’s his idea of a clever plan to make her the fifth Neoteric to fall.”

“He had an interesting point,” Inhibition said and kept reading as most of the rest of the room stared at her in shock.

“She means the genesis of Sasarai’s idea is that Vaingloth fell a Beast Fragment and his stored grace didn’t erase the world,” Clarity said, with a nod to Inhibition who nodded back in agreement.

“Something to keep in mind should we actually figure out how to control the Beast Fragments,” Reason said.

“Something everyone is keeping in mind,” I said. “Which is why any research we do there needs to be clearly focused on their destruction. The moment any of the Neoterics think that control is an option, a silent war will start.”

The silent war started centuries ago, Diyas said. You are correct that it will go loud the moment any of the Neoterics gets proof that the Beast Fragments can be weaponized.

“Including if that Neoteric is our own,” Beauty said.

“I’d considered that but would we really want to launch an attack we couldn’t foresee the outcome of?” I asked. “That seems like the mistake they made during the Sunfall, and I’m not eager to repeat it.”

“Plus, is it at all a good idea to saddle you with any more power?” Inhibition asked.

“That wouldn’t be a problem. I’ve still got Malgenia’s grace well under control, we don’t need to rush any of our plans to account for problems with that,” I said, ignoring the luminous glow fighting to escape from my soul. Godhood could fight all it wanted, I did not have time for it to be a problem so it wasn’t going to be one. Simple as that.

“I can tell you that this book doesn’t have anything to suggest that killing one of the Beasts is possibly,” Responsibility said, shaking the book she was holding. “The closest it gets is pure speculation on how ‘Aetheric manifolds might coalesce if the fundamental constants of the world varied’, from what they used to be of course. It doesn’t have anything on what they might be now.”

“That one came recommended strongly by Insikir too,” Reason said, frowning in the frustration we all felt.

“There’s supposed to be a companion volume that it illuminates,” Responsibility said. “Apparently they were rare though so the note with this book said ‘hope you still have a copy of the other one’.

“And of course we don’t?” Inhibition asked.

“I checked Malgenia’s personal study and I asked Vitor to check his, but neither one of them held onto the book Insikir referenced. According to Vitor it was ‘hundreds of pages of wild speculation wrapped around three or four solid thesis, most of which could be found in other volumes,” I said.

“And Insikir doesn’t have a copy either?” Clarity asked.

“He said he lent his out decades ago and never got it back,” Responsibility said.

“Seems like time to ask for it to be returned,” Beauty said.

“One problem with that,” Responsibility said. “You can’t ask for things from dead people. He lent it out to Helgon a few years before they blew Helgon up.”

“Technically he blew himself up,” I said, reviewing the bit of memory Malgenia had left of the incident. “They’d caught him outside his sanctum, but he didn’t give them the satisfaction of killing him. Also didn’t give them the satisfaction of absorbing the grace he’d hoarded.”

“How was that possible?” Responsibility asked.

“Malgenia had no idea but laughed herself silly for a few days over it,” I said. “Their theory was that he’d imbued it all into the traps and such that he left around the Factorum, but none of them could sense much there. The parties that they sent in to verify that never came back and so they all chalked it up as confirmation and not worth the effort to scrounge the grace that wouldn’t blow up when they tried to steal it.”

That does leave open the question of whether we even want to try to discover how to control the Beast Fragments? It would be supremely poetic justice, but Little’s example doesn’t seem to point to it being a replicable feat, Diyas said.

“Isn’t wasting time more-or-less what we’re going for though?” Inhibition asked. “We’re still not any closer to discovering how to perform the modified Assumption Ritual. The more time we can invest there the better shape Insight will be in for whatever conflict eventually arises.”

“Worst case, she can do the usual ritual with me,” Responsibility said. “It’ll just mean I get to hang out with Beauty and Inhibition and Reason right?”

“No. Worse case I toss myself into the same Beast Fragment that Vaingloth did. I’m not subjecting you to this for any reason,” I said.

“There’s no guarantee you’d become like us either,” Beauty said. “You could be one of the Sleepers, and trust me when I say it is not pleasant making that transition.”

“Neither of you are destroying yourselves,” Clarity said. “There are other answers and you will find them.”

“Yes ma’am,” Responsibility said placing her fist over her heart.

Neither one of us had technically told Clarity we were desperately in love with her, but some things were obvious even if they weren’t captured by words. Oddly, the old jealousy I’d always felt when Responsibility scored points with Clarity was entirely absent. How could I be jealous of Clarity loving Responsibility? Responsibility was gorgeous and deserving of all the love in the world, even Clarity’s. 

It was good that they had each other in case I had to…

Had to what? 

I stopped that thought right in its tracks.

Like hell was I about to start preparing for my own demise.

I had fought harder than I’d ever imagined possible for my existence and allowing myself to pass on would be a direct insult to Diyas and as much as I loved my girls, my god had a pretty solid claim on my heart too. 

Clarity was right. There were other answers and we were going to find them.

Best of all I knew where to look.

“I think we may need some help,” I said. “In fact I think we need as much help as we can get and I know two places we can find it. Unfortunately I can’t go to either one.”

“Because the other Neoterics are watching you constantly,” Clarity said.

“But they’re not watching us,” Responsibility said.

“I haven’t wanted to even think about this because I hate the very idea of exposing you to the kind of danger being outside the house entails, but you can move about without attracting the kind of attention I can.”

“Where do you need us to go?” Responsibility asked.

“I call dibs on talking with Helgon,” Clarity said. “You can have Mt Gloria.”

I looked at my Deaths and felt a wave of pride and inspiration wash over me. They were so brave, and so beautiful. All I could imagine was what it would be like to spend eternity with them.

Which, as it turns out, was precisely the sort of daydream I should not have conjured for myself.

“Sasarai? How have you been doing? Did you need something?”

“Not as such Vitor, I am simply checking in with all of our number. It has been a while since we’ve spoken and it occurred to me that some of us may have made breakthroughs on the issue of the End of All Things which would yield greater results were the findings to pooled together.”

“It hasn’t been that long certainly, has it? Why we just met…we just met…hmm, when was our last convocation?”

“It has been five years since our last formal meeting. I believe Vaingloth met with Insikir and Tallgrim on trade matters last year but otherwise I believe we have simply let half a decade pass us by.”

“That may be a good sign Sasarai. Five years of peaceful coexistence is something we worked quite hard to engineer before hand.”

“Yes, all those ‘boring and blatantly obvious’ meetings as I recall you characterizing them.”

“In hindsight I must say that I stand by my insight then. We spent hours, no, days, locked in a room considering eventualities which not only never came to pass but never could come to pass. So much time spent and nearly all of it wasted.”

“Perhaps, or perhaps the time that wasn’t wasted was what ensured that the rest of the matters which were discussed never became realities.”

“Whichever is true, those days are burnt up and gone, while our future stretches endlessly onwards. So perhaps spending a bit more of it together will not be a problem. Five years though you say? I can’t believe it has been so long.”

“Sadly that does not seem to have been a sufficient length of time for the others to produce any results regarding either the Beast we summoned or the Beast Fragments which litter our world. I presume the same is true of you and your sister?”

“I haven’t had any breakthroughs or insights which I would risk against even the smallest of the fragments, and as for Malgenia? I’m reasonably sure my sister hasn’t given the matter of the Beast a single thought at all.”

– Sasarai and Vitor’s early plotting of a scheme which Sasarai would not see the completion of.

The Neoterics lost their damn minds, and it was one of the most delightful things I’d ever seen.

“What will happen to Vaingloth’s holdings?”

“What if his power runs amuck? No one was there to claim it!”

“Who will govern his city? We haven’t had a population survive the loss of their Neoteric Lord before?”

“Do we really know that he was destroyed? Maybe this is some trick he has spent all this time contriving?”

“Is the Beast moving? Has anyone checked on the Beast? I think we should send someone to check on the Beast.”

The most terrifying thing they’d been able to imagine was being overthrown like Dyrena, Kurst, or Helgon had been. Vaingloth’s destruction pushed that fear decidedly into second place though. The prospect of their fellow Neoterics doing them in, while all too possible, was one they believed they could mitigate and couple of centuries had proven them to be largely correct. The Beast killing them was worse, but the prospect that someone had been able to turn the Beast against them was unfathomable.

“Why are we still here then, if this master of the Beast can turn it against us?”

None of them really wanted the answer to that question, and all of them were willing to pretend to believe that Vaingloth’s death had been a fluke as proven by their continued existence since, if they could control the Beast they knew exactly what they would do with that power.

“We’re sure I can’t go poke the fragment that took Vaingloth? We could learn so much!” That was my contribution, knowing before I asked exactly what the answer would be.

“We can’t risk it Malgenia. We just can’t,” Vitor said.

“You’re brother is correct,” Sasarai said, his illusionary presence in Vitor’s conference room nodding in fervent agreement as he conjured a map of the world and overlaid it with glowing purple arrows to show the known location of the Beast Fragments. “So far as we knew, there was no Beast Fragment where Vaingloth…umm, had his mishap.”

“But our intelligence on the Beast Fragments location has always been suspect,” Tallgrim said. 

Tallgrim was the Neoterics accountant. Not of material wealth but of the value of the souls they held under their sway. He’d been essential to the original scheme by helping them determine which people could be turned into near mindless worship batteries as well as evaluating how much grace each of the populations they’d preserved was likely to generate. The experiments the Neoterics had performed trying to manufacture their own Blessed had relied either on his direct assistance or works he’d published, works which I lacked any of the foundations required to understand. Even Malgenia’s memories had little to offer there as her evaluations of someone’s potential were made along starkly different, and often post-mortem, lines from Tallgrim’s.

“We know there are none within a day’s travel of any of our cities,” Vitor said. “We each have wards in place for that, do we not?”

“It depends on what you consider a day’s travel,” Insikir said. 

He was the Neoteric’s expert on the limitations of the Aetheric medium and how those limitations could be overcome. From Malgenia’s memory I saw that he was their lead researcher on the spells which summoned the Beast in the first place, as well as being responsible for allowing them to breech into the halls of the divinities during the Sunfall and steal away the grace the gods hadn’t committed to the fight against the Beast.

He was an unpleasant man, unconcerned with anyone and anything’s boundaries well before his assault on the gods. Even Malgenia had disliked him and had suggested more than once to Vitor that she should dispose of him during the Sunfall if not sooner.

Vitor had talked her out of that largely by persuading her to wait until they were certain that his part of the scheme would work, which kept Insikir alive until the Sunfall, after which the distance between the Neoterics had served to accomplish the same effect.

“I was considering a days travel for one of our caravans but you raise an important point. The Beast Fragments we’ve observed have been generally stationary. We have no idea how quickly one of them might move or what boundaries might halt their passage if they were to become mobile.”

“From what I saw, Vaingloth went to the Beast. It didn’t need to travel at all,” I said. That had the virtue of being largely true and providing a reason for the Neoterics to remain in their cities.

The last thing Little or Mt. Gloria needed was any of the Neoterics (aside from me) out roaming around the world.

For that matter the last thing I needed was for the other Neoterics to be out roaming around the world. Responsibility and Clarity were still hidden in our house out in the Wastelands and if any of the other Neoterics stumbled on them, then I wasn’t at all sure I would care about the consequences to the world of dropping the number of Neoterics by one more.

I mean, I’d try to argue with that but…, Beauty said.

But we really wouldn’t have done any different if we’re being honest, Reason said.

That’s not true, Inhibition said. You were both far more sensible than that when we were alive.

No we weren’t, Beauty and Reason said in perfect unison.

“And how was it you managed to be there Malgenia? That has to have been phenomenally unlikely was it not?” Sasarai asked, earning him one Certified Insight’s Ire point.

“She was studying the Beast,” Vitor said, with a weary sort of dismissal in his voice, less I think because of Sasarai than from having to deal with vagaries of Malgenia’s whims for so long.

“And that was how she knew to be there?” Sasarai’s disbelief at the coincidence was far from hidden and earned him another Ire point. 

What sort of prize will he win if he collects enough of them? Diyas asked.

Enough of them I’ll have to figure out some means of blighting his stupid shrub, more than that and I pay him a visit myself, I said, sharing Malgenia’s distaste for the organic monstrosity that Sasarai had built his city around. 

Outwardly it was certainly impressive but to eyes that could see the fine structure of the aetheric workings inside it, the “Holy Tree” was an ugly, tangled mess. Malgenia hated it because it bound the souls of the devoted away from her keeping. I hated it because it not only bound the souls of the devoted but twisted their spirits into a mockery of the grace they shared with it.

“What makes you think I was there at all?” I asked Sasarai letting a hint of Malgenia’s madness creep around my words.

He was, predictably, less concerned about that than he should have been given that he was safely far away in his deepest sanctum just like the other ‘visiting’ Neoterics were and thus, in theory, protected from any immediate retribution Malgenia might try to inflict on him.

“You said you saw Vaingloth’s destruction. You had to be there.” Sasarai’s boldness wasn’t driven by actual courage. That was a trait the Neoterics largely seemed bereft of, with one or two posthumous exceptions. He was terrified and ‘emboldening anger’ was the one tool he had to fight that with, assuming Malgenia’s scattered bits of memory were anything to go by.

“But of course I was there when he died,” I said, and resisted the urge to add more explanation. Annoying contradictions were too much a part of Malgenia’s repertoire for me to break character despite the urge to club the Neoterics with the failings of their assumptions.

My reward for staying in character was watching Sasarai’s blood pressure spike along with his anger.

“Yes. So you’ve said. But how!” he demanded.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. “You’ve become crippled by tending your plants?”

Tallgrim smirked at that and Vitor sighed.

“Crippled? What…?” Watching Sasarai sputter was delightful but not going to lead anywhere more productive than his picking a real fight with me, which no one wanted to headache of dealing with (including me).

“Any of us could have been there,” Vitor said. “We all felt Vaingloth leaving Mt. Gloria. We all chose to stay in our cities, except for my sister who was, as I’ve pointed out, already in the field.”

“It’s a fascinating field,” I said. “So much still to learn and study.”

“There’s no dead out in the Wastelands though,” Insikir said. “Or are there?”

“Do you think there are living still there?” I asked in a tone of complete sincerity. I hoped it was received and translated as ‘how stupid are you exactly’ and from Insikir’s frown my hope was redeemed.

“Leaving that aside, we need to decide what we will do next. Tallgrim’s right that we don’t know enough about where the Beast Fragments are or where they roam. Do we try to monitor them to understand at least that?” Vitor asked. He wasn’t the leader of the group in any sense other than he was the one who seemed to be able to stick to the topic at hand the best. I suspect that was a skill he’d had to hone thanks to both Malgenia and I.

“That begs the question of who we would assign to such a task,” Insikir asked. “Do any of us have underlings who would be competent enough to track even one of the Beast Fragments while being expendable as well since we shall definitely lose at least a few.”

“No need for that,” I said. “I can track them.”

Was that more of Malgenia’s madness? I framed it like it was, but I had a few different ideas on how I could make it work for me.

“You said you weren’t able to work out how to control them though?” Vitor said.

“I wasn’t looking to control them,” I said. “I was looking for how to kill them. I know they can die, it’s already happened, I just need to discover how their master is able to make that occur.”

“Well that was rather a lot of grace Kurst had stored up. Fortunate that we were all here to portion it out. I’d hate to think what it might have done if his contracts had killed him when no one was around to deal with the fallout.”

“Oh, that would have been simple Vitor. If we hadn’t been able to collect the grace he had stored the planet would have been erased.”

“Erased Helgon? What do you mean erased?”

“Well, as you know, the aetheric potentiation point of matter has a non-defined but probabilistic upper boundary so therefor…”

“Therefor the destruction would have been immense. Thank you Helgon but we do not need a full technical treatise on the subject. Suffice it to say that we cannot allow anyone who has amassed the levels of grace Kurst did to lose control of it. At least not without several of us around to collect the freed energy before it runs wild.”

“But that would be all of you, would it not Vaingloth?”

“And you as well Helgon? Certainly you have collected as much grace from the fallen and your population as we have?”

“Certainly, certainly, Vitor, though I have my experiments to think of as well. As I was saying about the aetheric potentiation point, it’s very important to ensure that one does not concentrate grace too much. Hoarding makes yields imbalances which are very hard to account for. Much simpler to keep things at a lower burn as it were.”

 “It seems rather fortunate that we got wind of the Grand Contract Kurst was trying to implement then! Either it was going to go well for him, in which case we all would have been bound to serve him, or he was going to blow up the world. I suppose we all owe you a debt of gratitude there Vaingloth.”

“I suppose we do, though to be accurate, there was no world in which a Grand Contract the likes of which Vaingloth described was going to work out well for Kurst. The structure he was theoretically putting together could not have held the grace from everyone and so the only result would have been the nullification of the planet.”

“And this from our Master of Divine Contracts. Poor fool got quite ahead of himself, really should have known better.”

“Yes. You’d expect he would have.”

– Vitor, Helgon, and Vaingloth discussing the aftermath of Neoteric Lord Kurst’s overthrow while Helgon also planted the seeds for his own ‘demise’.

Vaingloth wasn’t dead. Malgenia knew death. If he’d been dead I would have felt it. He was simply gone and the echo of that was reverberating around the world.

“Well, that’s not exactly what I expected,” Meluna said.

“What’s not? And why is Insight flickering?” Responsibility.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, pulling myself back fully into the material world. “A Neoteric Lord is gone.”

“Vitor!?” Clarity asked, hopeful relief poised behind her teeth.

“Vaingloth.” His absence was like a missing tooth. A missing rotten tooth which suddenly no longer hurt, but the absence was still a little maddening in its own right.

“He’s dead? Who killed him?” Responsibility asked.

“Little,” Meluna said. “I believe I owe her congratulations. I truly wasn’t sure if her plan to kill Vaingloth was feasible or not. Of course that assumes she survived the confrontation. I do hope so. Zeph and Sola will be despondent otherwise.”

“No,” I said, still a bit addled. Was there more than just Vaingloth missing? 

A Neoteric Lord being destroyed like Vaingloth had was unthinkable, but something else was wrong. Something had changed. Something as wrong as the Sunfall? No, it wasn’t like that. It was profound though and the more I probed at the absence the more unreasonably irritated I grew.

“No? Little didn’t survive?” Meluna asked.

“Little? Oh, Sola’s Blessed? I don’t know,” I said, almost completely distracted as I reached out with Malgenia’s power searching for what appeared to be nothing at all.

“Hey, Insight, are you okay?” Responsibility asked.

In the past when she took that tone with me, my choices were either answer or get clobbered into answering. I wasn’t sure that a good whack to the side of my head wouldn’t knock loose the obsession that had grabbed me, but that wasn’t what Responsibility was offering anymore.

At some point I think we’d both realized that just because the injuries we’d inflicted on each other could be healed didn’t mean that we were at all healthy afterwards. I certainly didn’t want to hurt her anymore, and the fact that she didn’t want to hurt me meant more than I could ever articulate.

“Yeah, yeah I am,” I said, laying my hand over the hand Responsibility had placed on my shoulder. “Okay. Wow. That’s…”

“Yes. I suspect the other Neoterics are experiencing a similar amount of consternation as well. We shall have to see how they react to this,” Meluna said as she began to grow indistinct in the shadows which hadn’t been there a moment earlier.

“Or we can shape how they react to it,” I said, which drew Meluna back into sharp focus.

“What do you have in mind?” she asked through narrowed eyes.

“You said Little planned to kill Vaingloth, but that’s not what she did,” I said. “He isn’t dead. He’s gone. Erased. He and all the power he was personally holding. He went from existing to not existing in the blink of an eye, and I think we both know what had to be responsible for that.”

“She drew him to one of the Beast’s fragments? But, no, she survived that herself, she wouldn’t have…” Meluna said, looking confused for what might have been the first time in centuries.

“However she survived it, she must have known that Vaingloth wouldn’t be able to replicate her feat,” I said.

“Assuming she did, how would you shape the Neoterics reaction to it?” Clarity asked.

“In theory, we’re out here for two reasons,” I said. “I’m supposed to be training you both for the Assumption Ritual but that’s mostly you studying and practicing. The primary reason we’re here, or the primary reason Vitor thinks we’re here, is because I’m investigating how to kill one of the Beast fragments.”

“But that’s not possible,” Meluna said.

“That’s not possible for the rest of you,” I said. “It’s not entirely predictable what Malgenia can and cannot do. I think Vitor assumed that if it truly was impossible that I would simply be wasting some time in the Wastelands, which is far from the strangest thing Malgenia has done.”

“You want him to think what happened to Vaingloth was your fault then?” Responsibility said, guessing the overall shape of the plan I was trying to pull into sharper focus.

“I want all of them to think that this was my fault,” I said.

“They will definitely move against you if so,” Clarity said.

“Better me than Mt. Gloria,” I said. “I know they’re already planning how to divide it up.”

“If I may suggest an alteration,” Meluna said. “The other Neoterics have, historically, been concerned about Malgenia being more powerful than any one of them. Rather than adding to that, you might instead use her reputation as a lever to buy Little’s people the time they need.”

“She’s right,” Clarity said. “If you claim to have been unable to either save Vaingloth or influence the Beast that destroyed him, but are certain that it was being controlled by someone…”

“That will give them even more reason to attack,” Responsibility said. “Or it would if they felt personally threatened.”

“I doubt Little will move against any of them. She grew up in Mt. Gloria so I imagine her rage was primarily directed at Vaingloth,” Meluna said.

“I like that idea, let me talk to Vitor and see how it goes,” I said.

“Now?” Responsibility asked.

“I think she’s right. If it appears to be Malgenia’s immediate reaction it will ring more true than if we let any time pass,” Clarity said.

And so I vanished.

I’d set up our home in the Wasteland far enough away that we wouldn’t encounter any caravans and isolated enough that the other Neoterics would neither feel threatened nor curious enough to stop by for a visit. Distance was largely irrelevant when a Neoteric really wanted to travel though.

“Sister?” Vitor said, looking away from the map he was standing in front of.

He hadn’t been in one of his isolated labs or his sanctum so I’d taken the liberty of transporting myself directly to, what turned out to be, his war room.

“Oh good, you still exist,” I said, holding a flower I’d conjured and sticking a petal back onto it.

“Exist? What do you mean? What happened?” he asked, flustered more than I’d ever seen him over anything.

“I didn’t study enough,” I said, and plucked a different petal off, twisting it between my fingers to inspect it. “So sad.”

“Study? Wait, is that what we all felt?” he asked. “Mal, tell me you had nothing to do with whatever happened to Vaingloth? We’re looking but we can’t find him anywhere. Did you kill him?”

“Why would I kill Vaingloth? Also he’s not dead, unfortunately,” I said.

“Not dead? I don’t know if that a relief or even more concerning. He shouldn’t be able to hide from the scrying spells we’re using.” Vitor said, gesturing to the map he’d been staring at. 

Had his scrying spell been working, Vaingloth’s general position would have shone forth like a tiny bonfire. Instead the entire map was cold and empty.

“He’s not hiding. He’s just not there,” I said

“You said he wasn’t dead though?” Poor Vitor, he had all the power in the world (or a eighth of it I suppose) and yet any of the Deaths could run laps around him when it came to mental acuity (and Responsibility and Clarity could do so at a leisurely stroll, but I might have been biased).

“He’s not dead,” I said with a cheerful nod. “He doesn’t exist.”

Keep an eye out, Beauty said, I’m pretty sure he plays dumber than he really is.

I’m not sure he’s playing, Inhibition said. I think he’s easy to underestimate because he simply doesn’t care about a great many things. When he does care though he is dangerously observant. 

Inhibition’s right, he wouldn’t have been pushing another Assumption on us for at least three more years. That he noticed the trouble Insight is having with Malgenia’s power is likely something he chalked up to the difficulty ‘Malgenia’ experienced with Insight’s assumption.

I’d say I’ll tread carefully, but I think embodying Malgenia’s carelessness is going to be a lot safer for all of us.

Then it’s up to us to watch for you, Diyas said, which was the kind of support I suspect few people throughout history had to rely on.

“When you say he doesn’t exist, what, EXACTLY, do you mean Mal?” Vitor was giving me his full and undivided attention. I should have been terrified of that. For all that I have Malgenia’s power, I’m not truly a Neoteric Lord and if he decided to lash out of me when I wasn’t ready I could wind up twisted, truly dead, or, worst of all, controlled before I knew what hit me.

“Doesn’t exist. Obliterated. Gone. Vanished permanently. Playing hide and seek with existence and losing. Exactly all that,” I said, still smiling as though I was playing the cleverest game ever with my silly brother.

“No. That’s not possible. How?” Vitor slumped down into a chair, no longer looking at me, no longer looking at anything in the world around us.

“Oh, come on. You know how,” I said.

“He wouldn’t though!”

“I know. It was very silly of him,” I said. “But then it wasn’t entirely his idea I guess.”

“Did…did you…?” Vitor’s gaze snapped back to me, naked fear of what I might have learned to do clear in his eyes.

“Oh what a delight that would be!” I said, radiating chipper joy at the idea. “But no, I tried. I did try. You know me. You know I would have tried right? I mean Vaingloth didn’t matter much, but I did try to save him. Or at least pull loose what I could have. There had to be some good bits in him somewhere. His heart maybe? I would have kept it in a nice jar I think.”

“You tried to save him? You saw what happened?”

“I saw what happened and I saw who made it happen. Quite vexing that she can do what I can’t. Yet.”

“There is someone out there who is stronger than you?”

“I’m not sure? Should we bother them and find out!”

The remaining Neoterics were all listening and the collective “NO” they screamed to us warmed my heart almost as bright as the newborn sun which blossomed into the sky far away.