“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.

“This is unacceptable Vaingloth.”

“And yet, accepting it is what we will do Vitor.”

“No! This is not what we wanted!”

“Of course it is not. Someone’s calculations were incorrect.”

“Calculations? Vaingloth, there is a fragment of the Beast not a hundred miles from my city.”

“A hundred? Consider yourself lucky. Insikir has one within ten miles of his domain.”

“Lucky? No. I will not consider myself lucky Vaingloth. This is unacceptable. That thing could wake at any time and decide to stroll right through my domain and what would I be able to do to stop it? Nothing. Literally nothing.”

“Well there is always your sister, is there not?”

“Pfff, I asked Malgenia and her answer was that she didn’t want to do anything about them. Or she wants to study them. Or she thinks they’re a charming part of the landscape. Or, or, or. You know how she is.”

“Not so well as you do, but her answer doesn’t surprise me.”

“It doesn’t? Don’t tell me you’re in favor of these things? Our reigns can hardly be as ‘eternal’ as they were promised to be if we can run afoul of one of these things whenever they decide they need a snack!”

“Oh, I am terribly wroth with the existence of the fragments. More so than you are I would imagine. I simply do believe they are an issue we are currently equipped to deal with.”

“Not currently? Certainly you mean ‘not ever’? These are not finite entities. Even were we to bring all the force we have gathered to bear on them, we couldn’t erase a single one of the pieces of the Beast.”

“Lost one of your divine fragments finding that out did you?”

“Several.”

“Take heart, I believe we all have, and we’ve all come to the same conclusion.”

“That we are doomed?”

“Far from it. Has it not occurred to you that the creation of the Beast fragments was a predictable effect of the divine battles.”

“No. There was no indication that we might face a problem of this scope. I don’t recall reading a single report which mentioned we might have to deal with the Beast we summoned. That was very much not supposed to be how things were resolved.”

“Indeed. And who wrote those reports?”

– Neoteric Lord Vaingloth planting seeds for Dyrena’s eventual execution.

I was Malgenia. I had to be when I answered the door. Whoever was out there, Malgenia had to be who they were expecting, and there were at least eight terrible possibilities for who might want to meet with Malgenia looming in my head as I waved the door open. 

Only to find a Crow waiting for me.

“She’s in,” the Crow said. Or Crowkin I guessed. I hadn’t seen one before but Malgenia was familiar with them.

“Excellent. Perhaps she’ll also invite us in?” The woman who stepped from the shadows behind the Crowkin had not been there a moment earlier. Malgenia’s near deific senses were convinced of that. I, however, was sure they were wrong.

“How lovely. Visitors!” Channeling Malgenia wasn’t a muscle that had atrophied all that much after a month of being myself but I was still concerned with my performance. As far as I knew Malgenia’s expected response to visitors could have been to turn them into some of her ‘artwork’ with a snap of her fingers.

“Are we?” the woman was harder to make out than she should have been. I had the sense that she was a Blessed, but was she? 

In fact I wasn’t even certain she really there. All I felt confident in saying was that she was dangerous.

And I had Clarity and Responsibility in the house with me. That would have been enough for me to at least slam the door in their faces, except for lightest of brushes on my hand and some gentle laughter I heard as though from across the other side of the world.

I think we need to speak with them, Diyas said.

Yes, you really do, the woman said!

I have a really solid grip on my facial expressions. My Malgenia mask is harder than diamond and stronger than steel. Gaping in shock and surprise though was the only answer I could make to that aside from waving the two in.

“It’s okay Insight, you don’t have to pretend to be her if you don’t want to,” the Crowkin said and I nearly teleported myself and everyone I cared about back to Malgenia’s sanctum.

“We’ve got guests?” Clarity asked from behind me, rather than staying hidden away like I’d asked her to.

“Apparently ones who know a lot more than they should?” Responsibility said.

“Thank you Kalkit, would you like to get back to what you were doing?” the woman asked.

“They will need me, we’re almost at the crisis point I think,” Kalkit, the Crowkin said and with a wave of the woman’s hand, the Crowkin vanished.

“You’re not a Neoteric,” I said, adjusting to interpose myself between the woman and my…hmm, we hadn’t really put a name on what we were had we? My Deaths I guess?

“Delightfully, neither are you,” the woman said. “If you were this conversation would be very different.”

Night, stop teasing my Blessed, Diyas said.

“I said she was delightful,” the woman said with a pout. “None of you ever let me have my fun.”

“Wait, Night? As in the God of Night? As in…” I was still verbal. That was such a supreme accomplishment I feel I deserve unending praise and recognition.

Yay, all hail Insight, the word worker, Beauty said.

Foresoothe! Surely her questions shall lead us to something we haven’t already been told, eventually, Inhibition said.

Be nice you two, this isn’t a casual visit, Reason said, sobering them up and centering me.

“A representative, you may call me Meluna.”

“Your friend mentioned a crisis, does Night face a crisis?” Clarity asked.

“Not as such,” Meluna said.

“Does the crisis concern us?” Responsibility asked.

“It needn’t,” Meluna said.

Just dropping by to say ‘hi’ after all this time are you Night? Diyas asked, a strong note of reprimand in her tone.

“I am instructed to extends Night’s regrets for not speaking with you sooner Beautiful and Bountious Diyas.” Meluna sketched a small bow as punctuation to her words. “She is however rather absorbed in her present task.”

Extend my gratitude to her for her efforts, and let her know, assuming she’s not already aware, that Sola has taken a new Blessed.

“Yes! I met her! Singularly interesting I must say, especially given what she’s become.”

“Does she need shelter?” I asked, trying to work out why Night would be visiting Malgenia, or me since apparently she somehow knew that.

“I…you know, I am quite honestly not sure how to answer that. It may be we who need shelter from her, though I am willing for the present to accept the Foxwind’s judgement of the Blessed’s state.”

There’s a Foxwind as well! I could feel Diyas nearly dancing with delight. Oh! Sola must be so happy!

“She would be except for the small issue where she is currently bound by Vaingloth’s spells and cannot communicate or act through her Blessed or her Foxwind.” Meluna gestured to one of the chairs, asking permission to sit, which I granted with a nod.

As we all took seats around the central table, I conjured an extra in case my inner Deaths wanted to join us.

“Is that what you’re here for? I’m not Malgenia, but I do hold her power and I could probably break any spell Vaingloth could cast. Also, just out of idle curiosity, how in the ten thousands hells did you find out who I was?” I might have stood up then, and the candles which lit the room maybe flared with a deep purple light. I wasn’t being intimidating or threatening though. I was just a little curious you see.

Meluna is trustworthy, you needn’t worry, Diyas said in a calming, and amused, voice.

“Not at all. Though, sadly, Diyas is quite correct. In this, you may rely upon my discretion. As to how I came by the knowledge of your identity, you may take heart that it is quite safe. My associate Kalkit, whom you met, is the Blessed of Secrets.”

“Does that mean Insight’s identity is still a secret or that it was a secret and isn’t anymore?” Responsibility asked.

“It is, so far as I know, quite secure,” Meluna said. “With the current issue that is unfolding, I checked to see what the disposition of the Neoterics was only to discover that Malgenia was missing from her domain. That raised several important questions which is why I sought out Kalkit. He was able to locate where Malgenia’s power was secreted away but was quite as surprised as I to learn that it was no longer Malgenia’s.”

Which told me that the Blessed of Secrets didn’t know all of the world’s secrets all the time, otherwise I would have been discovered years ago.

“And so you thought you’d drop by an introduce yourself to make sure we weren’t going to foul up whatever undertaking Sola’s new Blessed is pursuing?” I asked.

“To be quite truthful when I learned that Malgenia was no more I was quite compelled to make your acquaintance on that basis alone,” Meluna said. “As you might imagine, Night is aware of nearly everything which transpires on this world, and yet you came as a surprise to both of us. I believe Night would have me shower you with accolades and praise as Malgenia represented a singular challenge amongst the Neoterics. Her removal is as welcome as it is unexpected.”

“You do want something though,” Clarity said.

“Of course. Many things in fact. At present however I believe learning about you three may be a critical priority. Whatever brought you out into Wastelands? This isn’t a safe area even for one who bears Malgenia’s power.”

“Kalkit couldn’t tell you that?” I asked, not at all showing that I was slight irritated that there was someone capable of knowing my most dangerous secrets.

“Didn’t. They didn’t. I can’t speak to whether it was knowledge they possessed or whether it was outside their domain. We traveled here rather swiftly and I’m afraid I did not have time for thorough research on you or your aims. For instance, I would gather that these two young women were once Malgenia’s Deaths?”

“The Death of Clarity.”

“The Death of Responsibility.”

Their introductions were accompanied by small nods.

“As I imagine you are important to the Death of Insight, I extend Night’s recognition to you as well. Call my name in dark places and I shall hear your words. I am not always free to act, but to the extent Night can assist, aid will be rendered.”

That was not at all what I’d expected her to say and the implications of having the last unbroken god on our side spread out faster than my imagination could follow.

“Thank you,” Clarity said. “I understand the need to limit information overflow, but it also sounds like something is occurring which we might be able to offer assistance with. You said it wasn’t anything we needed to be involved in, and I can understand at least some of the issues with Insight acting in her guise as Malgenia, but is this a situation where Responsibility or I could tilt the balance in the favor of Sola’s new Blessed?”

Meluna blinked at that and looked from Responsibility to me and then back to Clarity.

“That is an unexpected but welcome offer,” she said. “Alas, I can think of no means you might possess to effect the outcome of the events which are currently transpiring.”

“So we can’t do anything for you or for Sola’s Blessed?” Responsibility asked.

“By remaining here, you are doing everything which is needed of you,” Meluna said. “My primary objective in this visit was to ensure that you did not become involved and I see that was likely wise.”

I wanted to ask why, but I felt the shift in the world’s power all too clearly.

Vaingloth was moving.

And he was furious!

“Are you sure?” I asked her. “There is still time. I can stand against Vaingloth. He can’t overcome me.”

“That is why we need you to remain here,” Meluna said. “If you entered this conflict, Vaingloth would either withdraw or he would assault you.”

“He would not win that fight,” I said.

“No he wouldn’t,” Meluna said. “But…”

And I felt it.

Void.

Emptiness.

Vaingloth wasn’t just dead.

He was gone.

“We’re doomed.”

“We’re not doomed. It is simply 2:00 in the morning and you haven’t eaten anything in the last forty eight hours.”

“I haven’t had time to eat because we are doomed, Helgon. Completely and utterly doomed.”

“Drink this my dear Dyrena.”

“What is it?”

“Hydration.”

“I have water spells for that.”

“This hydration comes in the form of a chocoberry float, with freshly made ice cream.”

“Freshly made? By who?”

“My calculations were done early and I needed a new skill to work on.”

“You…thank you Helgon. Oh my, this is delicious!”

“I’m going to attribute that mostly to your hunger. There is a tray of loaded Dorit Chips as well. Nibble on those and tell me what has you stymied.”

“The summoning ritual. We know it can be pierce the outer veils of our cosmos, but there’s no means to mend the rift once it’s been made.”

“I see, so we can summon the god-killer that we need but we’ll be leaving the door open for an endless parade of similar creatures to follow it?”

“Far worse than that. Once the rift begins to form, it will continue to grow, exponentially.”

“And of course the others won’t believe that.”

“They’ve already rejected the papers I provided on dynamic grace oscillations as being based on ‘conservative estimates’. If even one of those estimates is correct though, a cascade failure it inevitable.”

“Based on your previous work, I feel it’s safe to assume all of your estimates are likely to be correct. I do wonder at the direction of the cascade failure though.”

“The direction? Oh. Hmm. Yes. Yes! We might be able to influence that. Let me see, ah, here it is. Yes! If we invert roughly half the ritual we have designed so far, it will fail, catastrophically, but, but!, it will fail towards the rift closing itself after the briefest of moments. Helgon you are a demon and a delight!”

– High Accessors Helgon and Dyrena discovering anew that ritual magics are ‘non-trivial’ to develop and work with.

A month is a long time to be out in the Wastelands. A lot of things will try to kill you in that time. Silly things. Foolish things. Things that really didn’t deserve what I did to them, but after the first week of failures, I had a lot of frustrations to work out.

“Is it possible that this idea isn’t going to work?” Responsibility asked, giving voice to the thought that had been growing on all of us for at least two weeks.

“I can’t accept that,” Clarity said, having more patience and stubbornness than both Responsibility and I combined it turned out.

“I could, but Clarity was right from the start. The two person version of the Assumption Ritual was never going to enter a stable balance. I thought we could fight and divide Malgenia’s power but any use of it we made at all would skew the division we came up with.” I didn’t know that for sure, but I had plenty of evidence leading me in that direction.

Clarity smudged the Holy Circle we’d been practicing in for the last two hours, breaking us free from its constraints, which Responsibility used as an excuse to wander into the kitchen to pour glasses of ice water for each us.

“Okay, so where are we then?” Responsibility asked, offering each of us one of the beverages.

“Back at square one?” Clarity was more testing the idea out than suggesting it.

None of wanted to admit that. Not after all of the time we’d spent trying to adapt the Assumption Ritual to support a third participant. Especially given that Vitor was expecting we were going ahead with the normal Assumption Ritual which Responsibility should have just about been ready to undertake.

Obviously I hadn’t been “training” Responsibility for the proper version of the ritual. I’d barely survived the “training” I’d been given and I had no interest in inflicting the kind of damage on anyone else.

“There’s got to be something else, something we’re overlooking,” Responsibility said.

“After weeks of review? What else is left to try changing?” Clarity asked.

And that was the right question.

Or I’d gone nuts.

Probably that.

“No arguments on that here,” Beauty said. She, Inhibition and Reason were lounging on one of sofas I’d conjured for our house in the wastelands. 

“Is she thinking silly things again?” Clarity asked.

The meeting with the other Death’s had been a welcome surprise for Clarity. We hadn’t known them that well before their Assumptions, but the promise they represented, that the Deaths who’d gone before us weren’t wholly lost, was a more than welcome one.

Since then they’d stayed manifested most of the time. It was a nice change of pace, and it meant they had more than just me to interact with. Also, usually, they didn’t listen in on my thoughts quite as much when they were interacting with the living world.

“We do when they’re particularly interesting,” Inhibition said, paging through one of the books I’d summoned from Malgenia’s estate.

“Want to fill us in?” Responsibility asked.

“I don’t know, maybe someone else wants to share my ideas for me?” I said, not at all like the brat I hadn’t been able to indulge myself in being for far too long.

“No, this is a good one I think, you should take the credit for it,” Reason said.

“Thank you,” I said with a nod to Reason. “So, what if we didn’t go back to Step 1? What if we went back to Step 0?”

“What’s Step 0? Give up?” Responsibility asked.

“Sort of,” I said, percolating the idea I was working on a little bit more to make sure there weren’t any glaringly obvious flaw with it.

Aside from all the ones I could easily see that is.

“You’ve said that Malgenia’s power is growing out of control, do you have some other idea for balancing it, or limiting it maybe?” Clarity asked, her expression one of furious calculations to work out what I was talking about.

“No. I still think you were right. Having the three of us each bearing a part of Malgenia’s power will provide so much more stability. When any one of us needs to call on it, we won’t tip over to having the majority of it under our control and we’ll have a much greater distance from rising as deities too. We definitely all need to be a part of it.”

I’d wanted to argue against Clarity risking herself to take part in the Assumption Ritual for about ten seconds when she’d declared she would fight with us.

I mean, the kind of things that could happen to her? In an Assumption Ritual? No. Not even a little no, like all the “NO” everywhere, everywhen.

Then, I’d seen that she had to be a part of it.

With three of us, it wouldn’t be a fight at all. It would be all of us working together. Like a dance. If any of one of us stumbled into a moment of weakness, the other two would be there to lift us up. What no one of us could handle, all three of us were far more than a match for.

So we’d set out to see how to make Clarity a part of the ritual.

And we’d failed.

We could have kept working at it of course, a month of failures was nothing compared to what Malgenia had gone through for some of the “experiments” she’d run.

But a month had been enough.

I’m not the quickest of studies, but sometimes I can stumble forward rather than back.

“You want to start over,” Responsibility said as both she and Clarity worked out the beginning of what I was saying.

“We have to.” I had to grin. This was how things were supposed to be.

“Oh why didn’t we see that. Of course the ritual isn’t going to work,” Clarity said.

“Are you sure? You three came pretty close with the last few iterations,” Beauty said.

“The last few dozen,” Reason said in a tone that highlighted the problem.

“Close is all we’d ever manage working with the Assumption Ritual,” I said.

“It’s baked into the core of the ritual itself,” Responsibility said.

“The Assumption Ritual’s whole purpose it to feed a Death to Malgenia,” Clarity said. “What Insight accomplished was the fulfillment of the ritual insofar as it was designed for one of the participants to overthrow the other one. We’ve been trying to work around the safeguards that prevent the Death from escaping, the core of the ritual is designed around the need for there to be a victim who is sacrificed to the victor.”

“And the original designer obviously never considered that someone would be more powerful than Malgenia and make her the victim,” Responsibility said.

“Or more realistically, that Malgenia would make the mistake of trying to use a Blessed in the ritual. That we’re here today is entirely thanks to Diyas,” I said.

Not entirely, Diyas said. I couldn’t have overcome even a fraction of Malgenia’s power on my own, you did a lot of the heavy lifting there too.

With strength you gave me, I said. I know I’m the least appreciative Blessed ever sometimes, but I will never forget what you’ve done for me. Even if I die right here and now, I’d still be grateful beyond my capacity for words to express.

“So what’s the alternative you’ve come up with?” Inhibition asked.

“Step Zero,” I said. “We make our own Ritual. Rather than trying to turn the Assumption Ritual into something it is explicitly designed to not be, we work from the base of what we do want the ritual to do and go from there.”

“That sounds fantastic but there is one rather glaring problem with that approach,” Reason said, and I already knew what she was going to say.

“None of us have ever designed a ritual from scratch, and certainly not one that needs to manage this much power.” It was the weak point in my plan, and I could admit it easily enough because I knew we could work past it.

I had no idea how we’d work past it, but I had five of the smartest people I could ask for to help me find that path and the best god of them all to help us.

Praise only really counts when it’s accurate, Diyas said.

It is accurate! You were part of destroying a Neoteric Lord! No one has ever done that. Even the first three that fell were killed by a bunch of the others working together! 

Could a god be too humble? If Diyas wasn’t going to own up to being the badass I knew she was, then yes, yes they could.

That was a case where Malgenia was straying into my domain. In trying to extinguish your life, she opened herself up to my interface.

And we extinguished her. That was no small feat no matter how much credit you want to give me for it.

It wasn’t, but in this case it’s not power you need, it’s knowledge. I will certainly be with you in whatever you choose, but if you want to craft a new ritual, one of the many gods of magic would stand you in far better stead.

Which, I had to give her credit for was probably true. Just because she was a god, didn’t mean Diyas could do anything and everything. Quite the reverse really. What I’d learned over the years was that she could support me in matters relating to her domain and could occasionally sneak in help from either related domains or, as she described them, lost domains (one’s there weren’t any other gods managing I gathered), but that in many senses I had more freedom in the choices I could make and how I used her power than she did.

“So, all we need to do is find someone who does know how to design rituals then, right?” Beauty said.

I was about to point out that we were in the middle of the Wasteland and ‘people’ weren’t really a resource we had ready access to when someone knocked on the door to my mansion.

The mansion I’d conjured in the Wasteland.

Where no one else was capable of surviving.

The one I’d hidden beneath a veil even another Neoteric Lord couldn’t penetrate.

“Should we get that?” Inhibition asked looking at confused as everyone else felt.

“We’re only three days away from Mt Gloria troops. We’ve got it in the bag from here!”

“We’ve lost so many people though. What if we get attacked again?”

“Listen here Olan. Caravan work isn’t for the weak. You knew there was no guarantee of safety when we started out.”

“Unsafe? We lost six guys on day one! Jammy got turned inside out and then he exploded! There’s ‘not safe’ and there’s ‘inside-out-explosion’. No one said anything about inside-out-explosions!”

“There’s an upside to it through.”

“Don’t you dare say our shares are bigger.”

“They’re not bigger. They’re a lot bigger!”

“They’re not going to be anything at all if we don’t make it to the city gates.”

“We’ll be fine. We’re only three days away. Easy roads all of them.”

“And if they’re not? If there’s, I don’t know, a piece of a wagon spirit that decides we’re roads and it just has to run over us back and forth for a couple of hours? Do we have any plans at all for how to handle nonsense like that? Anything? At all?”

“Oh sure. Of course, we do.”

“Really? Cause we didn’t seem to have any plans for how to handle the crow fragment that decided Tyrbor’s eyes were ‘shiny’, did we? Or what about…”

“Relax Olan. Relax. Getting all flustered about the few minor setbacks we’ve had is not going to help at all.”

“Well doing nothing isn’t going to help either.”

“But there’s nothing we need to do. Don’t you see?”

“See what? All I see is…”

“All you see is?”

“Why is it so dark?”

“What did you mean Olan, I can see you just fine.”

“I…I thought I could…but everything is gone…wait, who are you? You’re not the Quartermaster…”

“I’m not? Well, who am I then Olan?”

“I don’t know…I don’t…where’s the caravan?”

“I don’t know Olan. I know where they were three days ago though.”

“We were three days away from Mt Gloria.”

“You still are.”

– The perils in the wastelands are not always obvious nor are they merciful or quick.

I dropped my fork. 

And my jaw.

And I damn near dropped the shroud that was over us.

“I’m sorry, but what…” I wasn’t going to challenge Clarity’s accurate accusation, but, seriously, what?

“You’re Insight. Not Malgenia. I’m guessing you were probably worried about me finding out so I thought I’d resolve that dilemma for you.”

“Uh…” Responsibility was just as gobsmacked as I was.

Which was encouraging.

“How…?” It was the most central question I could come up with but a zillion more lurked beyond it.

Yeah, ask her if it was because of something that Vitor might have picked up on, Beauty suggested.

Ask her how long she’s known too, that could affect how likely it is other people have worked it out, Inhibition said.

“I know you,” Clarity said. “For what it’s worth I’m glad too, though I guess that doesn’t matter?”

“You…?” Responsibility managed to sputter that much and I was proud of her for it. As questions went it was a bit unspecific but I wasn’t managing any better.

Clarity responded to it with that smile of hers and waited, patiently, like a saint.

I don’t often want to strangle Clarity.

I’ve certainly never done so, and would quite legitimately have murdered anyone else who tried, up to and including Malgenia based on my performance a couple of years ago.

And yet!

“You knew?” Responsibility said.

“Well, yes, obviously,” Clarity said. “Oh my, the dark honey goes so well with the Bloomberry scones. You two really should try them while they’re still warm!”

The little curl at the ends of her lips gave her away.

She was laughing.

At us.

I couldn’t even say I hated her.

The meanie!

She was laughing at me and I still loved her for it.

Why! How! She…

“You knew and you didn’t tell me!” Responsibility was properly wroth with Clarity and yet no knives were in her hand. Heck her hands weren’t even balled into fists yet.

“Well I only worked it out a few minutes ago, so I didn’t keep it hidden for long,” Clarity said and took another bite of her scone. “Not like you two did.”

Oww. That one hit home.

For both of us.

“We…” Responsibility started and failed to find the words to continue.

“We didn’t want this for you,” I said, not finding the right words so settling on the wrong ones.

“Hmm, that’s mean,” Clarity said. “I should probably finish the scones without you.”

“How did you know?” Responsibility said, still as boggled as I was.

“She stopped pretending,” Clarity said and glanced towards me, “You’re very good at it by the way.”

“Thank you?” I honestly wasn’t sure where the compliment ended there and the recrimination began.

“What do you mean ‘she stopped pretending’?” Responsibility asked, which was an excellent question since, as far as I could remember I hadn’t let my Malgenia  guise waver in the slightest.

“I mean she stopped pretending she didn’t care for you,” Clarity said. “And me, which, yes, thank you for that too. I have missed you terribly Insight.”

“Wait, yes, I missed you too, but wait, what…?” Coherency is overrated. Babbling is just as effective don’t you think?

“She stopped…but we didn’t do anything?” Responsibility said.

“Oh. OH! Oh, I’m so happy for you!” Clarity said.

Hehe, I really like this one, Reason said, in on whatever private joke Clarity was enjoying with herself.

“Happy for us?” I asked.

“Yes! You’ve finally confessed to each other, haven’t you?” Clarity said, possessing telepathy or something apparently.

Nope, Reason said, smugly smug in knowing everything apparently.

She doesn’t know everything, trust me, Beauty said.

Should we put in an appearance too? Inhibition  asked.

Not yet, Reason said. Let’s let them work things out, we can complicate the story later.

Because it wasn’t complicated enough sharing my head with three other people

Three? Diyas asked

I share my heart with you my goddess.

I have the best Blessed.

“Have you kissed yet?” Clarity asked, leaning forward and entirely too eager for the answer.

“Have we…?” Responsibility asked.

“Kissed?” I asked, and failed to suppress the flash of guilt that flickered across my face.

Officially, the Deaths were all pledged to Malgenia. Relationships with each other weren’t unheard of but were, officially at least, forbidden. In practice as long as it wasn’t obvious and wasn’t held higher than the Deaths’ relationships with Malgenia the overseers tended to ignore whatever the Deaths got up to on their own time. 

“Yes! Oh you have! And I missed it!” Clarity looked crestfallen.

“No…just, I…” Responsibility, my beautiful, brilliant Responsibility was speaking for the both of us as she failed to achieve any sort of clear dialog.

“We should start over,” I said, recognizing that the situation I thought we were in didn’t bear the vaguest resemblance to the actual situation before us.

“Please don’t!” Clarity said. “I don’t want you two to throw away all the progress you’ve made!”

“Progress? No, she doesn’t mean like that,” Responsibility said. “She means you seem to be about twenty steps ahead of us, and we need to catch up.”

“More or less.” I tossed Responsibility a glance to ask if she wanted to lead the conversation only to be met with a shake of her head.

This was all my fault, so I was the one who got to make things make sense again.

Step one of that process was to cast off my Malgenia disguise.

Could Vitor have pierced the shroud I had cast around us this time? No. I wasn’t being prideful there, he simply couldn’t. I’d made it strong enough to keep out anything short of the Beast of the End of All Things and outside of his domain, Vitor couldn’t have summoned up enough power to contest with me (a contest he would have lost, to be at least a little prideful) without alerting the rest of the Neoterics and leaving them eager to aid whichever side of the fight they thought might win (and from Malgenia’s memories, I was pretty sure most of them would be betting on her).

It was unbelievably relaxing to wear my own shape again. I hadn’t noticed how much I missed it, even when I’d resumed wearing it with Responsibility in the Malgenia’s garden.

What I didn’t expect was the tears it brought to Clarity’s eyes.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

What was I sorry for? Everything I guess? I could have switched back to Malgenia’s form but that didn’t seem like the kind of tears Clarity was crying.

“No. No, it’s okay. It’s just…” and it was Clarity’s turn to be at a loss for words! 

Yay!

Sort of?

“I didn’t think I’d ever get to see you again,” Clarity said in a small voice as she rubbed the tears out of her eyes.

“Yay, right there with you,” Responsibility said and shifted her chair closer to Clarity to give her a hug.

“I wanted to tell you both, so, so many times,” I said, fearful of breaking something by joining their hug.

“But you couldn’t,” Clarity said. “You couldn’t or we all would have died. Vitor would have killed all us, wouldn’t he?”

“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t have let, I WON’T let anyone hurt you.”

“But we all would have died, right?”

“Yeah, probably. If Vitor had tried to hurt you, I would have killed him.” I was not lying or exaggerating. Malgenia had left me more than just power. I had the knowledge she’d spent her not-quite-eternal lifetime developing. I hadn’t assembled it all, but searching for the means to kill other Neoterics had been one of the first things I’d sought after, found, and discovered the folly of possessing. “The problem is that if I kill him, the world is going to burn since all the power he holds will have nowhere to go.”

“Couldn’t you just take it in?” Clarity asked.

“Yes, and no,” I said. “Claming his power would be easy. Claiming and not becoming a god is possible – the Neoterics have done it three times already, but each time they had specific plans in place, and they divided the stolen power between them. I could replicate those plans, but Vitor would see it coming long before I could get the vessels in place.”

“And what could he do about it?” Clarity asked, as wonderfully cold as I remembered her being.

“Alert the other Neoterics. Together they could oppose Malgenia’s domain, though no one would enjoy that. Alternatively, since Grace Overflow Manipulation wasn’t Malgenia’s prime area of focus, he might simply be able to sabotage the vessels in some manner I wouldn’t be able to detect.”

“That’s a bother,” Clarity said. “We’ll need to work out some other means to remove him then. I presume that’s why we’re out here?”

“We have a more pressing, and personal, issue to deal with,” I said.

“Insight needs to perform another Assumption Ritual,” Responsibility said.

“But it’s not time for that yet, is it?” Clarity asked.

“It’s been time for a little while,” I said. “Malgenia was better at managing her power. It’s growing a bit faster than I can manage though.”

“So you need one of us to die for you? Me? I mean, I’m willing, but I had hoped… ” Clarity said before I cut her off.

“No. Absolutely not. Never. No one is dying for me, most especially not either of you. Ever. Am I perfectly clear about that?”

“But isn’t the Assumption a death sentence?” Clarity asked.

“You knew that too?” Responsibility asked.

“No. But I’ve always suspected it, and with Insight back, what else could it be?” Clarity asked.

“It’s worse than death,” I said, giving a mental hug to the Deaths who were inside me. “But we think we have an approach that can change things.”

“We’re going to share it,” Responsibility said. “Instead of fighting against each other, we’re going to fight for each other.”

“You’re damn right we are,” Clarity said and I saw what had been wrong with my plan all along.

“What do you mean we’ve run out of Blood Gem extract? Did Insikir renege on his monthly commitment just because our shipment of Graktite Dermal abrasives was only C-grade?”

“Not at all Lord Vitor. No complaints regarding the quality of the Graktite were filed. Our shipment was accepted without question. It’s the caravan Lord.”

“It’s what about the caravan? Don’t tell me that we’ve lost another one? We should be able to track their location anywhere on the surface of the planet and anywhere within the Under Realms. I know those trackers work! I designed them myself! And they could just pray to me if they didn’t!”

“Well, you see, that’s the thing Lord. We do know where they are. Or perhaps ‘where they were’ would be more accurate.”

“Were?”

“Yes Lord. The trackers are still functioning, but the bio-monitors built into them recorded an, an event Lord.”

“What sort of event? The caravan route was carefully divined for its safety was it not?”

“Absolutely. I made sure to check the records and I have them here. The nearest encounter the caravan was meant to have was a Class 2 Peril, an encounter with a fragment of the Cricket God. Well within the capabilities of the guardians who were assigned to the detail.”

“And yet they encountered an ‘event’? Let me see those reports.”

“Yes Lord. Here they are Lord.”

“Good. Good. Yes. This looks comprehensive. What event was able to evade this level of detection then?”
“We do not know my Lord. The caravan was approaching the midpoint of the return journey when they encountered something we have no readings for.”

“No readings? That shouldn’t be…oh.”

“You know what the event was my Lord?”

“Yes. Yes, I believe I do.”

“Can the caravaners be rescued?”

“They can neither be rescued nor recovered. In fact, inform Insikir’s people that we are discontinuing that caravan line entirely. Also all other caravan routes will proceed through Class 3 perils at a minimum. No more low peril routes are allowed. And all patrols must not return directly here. I want an outpost well outside our city limits they stop at first. We cannot have one of those things lured here.”

– Neoteric Lord Vitor discovering that fragments of the End of All Things prowl the wastelands.

Winding up in the Wastelands had been my idea, but that didn’t mean I was entirely happy with it. I knew from Malgenia’s memory exactly what waited and lurked within them. Vitor did too and I’d thought for sure that when I proposed my mad idea of killing the Beast, he’d more or less explode. Then I would agree and drop the idea, and then when I disappeared with Responsibility, he’d know that I was simply being flakey and had changed my mind without telling him. All of which was perfectly in keeping with how Malgenia interacted with her brother and the world at large.

Instead of blowing up though, he got a strange look in his eyes and went thoughtful for a moment.

Then he started pacing.

“Will one Death be enough?” he asked at last, which was not at all the question I’d been expecting.

“You think I need more?” I asked, which was also not at all the question I should have asked. I was on a roll it seemed

“What you are proposing it fantastically dangerous, even for one of us, or especially for one of us,” Vitor said, the wheels still turning in his head.

“You think I shouldn’t go? But I want to try!” I said, lying in Malgenia’s voice with the words I knew she would have chosen.

“Oh, you very much shouldn’t go, but I know you will, just as I know you will likely succeed,” he said, his gaze turning on me with a certainty that was by no means comforting.

Also, wait, he thinks I can kill the Beast of the End?

Can’t you? Beauty asked.

Yeah, this is Malgenia, we’re talking about, even if it’s beyond us, would it have been beyond her? Inhibition spoke from pretty much all of us. We’d believed in Malgenia’s might before we died, and from her memories I had the sense that we were underestimating if anything.

It would have, and it is, Diyas said. The End of All Things is more than you imagine it to be. No power, no matter how vast can slay it as you suggested. 

Well good thing that’s not actually my goal then, I said. Would Vitor know that though? About the Beast?

That probably depends on how much he knows about what his sister became, Reason said. The other Neoterics were afraid of her for good reason after all.

“If you believe I will succeed, why would I need another Death along?” I asked, trying to understand the game he was playing.

“You are singular in your power, and you always have been. Your Deaths however are quite mortal, even if they’ve been well trained. If you bring only one you’ve selected for the Assumption Ritual and she dies before you can complete your hunt you could be left exposed.”

Which was, unfortunately, a true statement. At least from his point of view. That I would die before I allowed harm to befall Responsibility was neither something he could be aware of nor something I could share without completely revealing that I was not even slightly Malgenia anymore.

Vitor’s demand raised an interesting question too; did I want to spirit away all of the Deaths? 

It wasn’t a terrible idea, especially if Responsibility and I choose to simply not return. If I took all of them with me, I could save them all couldn’t I?

I don’t think so, Reason said.

Cloaking that many people will be a lot harder than cloaking just yourself and Responsibility, Inhibition correctly observed.

And, he’s not going to let you take them all, Beauty said. If you try to take more than half, he’s going to claim you need to leave enough behind as reserves.

Does it matter what he says though? He’s as terrified of Malgenia as the rest of them are? Inhibition wasn’t wrong about that either, but Beauty had a response ready for her.

Oh, he’d let us take them all, but do you believe he wouldn’t be scrying as hard as he could to see what you were up to? Beauty said.

Couldn’t we block his scrying? We have access to a lot more grace than he does? Inhibition asked.

We do, but managing a spell strong enough to cloak all the Deaths and cut Vitor off from seeing what we were doing would definitely alert the other Neoterics, I said, feeling like I’d bitten off far more than I could chew and was on the verge of taking an even bigger bite.

Also, we need to consider that there is a difference between ‘cloaking’ and ‘protecting’, Reason said. If we really do run into a fragment of the Beast, cloak or no cloak, we’ll need to be able to flee and the gods themselves had trouble with that.

How many could we realistically expect to carry with us if we needed to flee from a Beast fragment? Inhibition asked.

“Two,” I said. “I’ll take two if you think one is not enough. Having a spare should be more than enough shouldn’t it? If two of them die on me, I can always just come back and grab another one.”

“I suppose more than that would create a different set of problems,” Vitor said, entirely distracted from the mental conference I’d been a part of.

“Good, good,” I said. “I’ll go tonight then!”

“Won’t you need, no, I imagine you wouldn’t. Do you know where…no, no sense asking about that either,” he said.

“We are having quite the conversation,” I said confident and correct that Vitor was paying no attention to me at all anymore.

What other Death will you take? Diyas asked and I felt a collective eyeroll from the Deaths I shared Malgenia’s form with.

So.

Yeah.

That was how Responsibility and I wound up in the Wastelands with Clarity.

What? Of course Responsibility wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy either. Neither of us could deny that there was any other choice for who would go with us though.

I couldn’t take more Deaths because I couldn’t protect more than two of them.

Or, if I’m being honest, I wasn’t sure how many of them I could protect but there were two who I was willing to break the world to ensure the safety of.

Clarity had been all too easy to convince to come along on our trip, something which neither Responsibility, nor I, was pleased with.

“Would you care to join us?” I’d used five whole words. Malgenia probably would have used one. I’d been (relatively speaking) verbose to give Clarity a choice in the matter, all while knowing how nonexistent that choice was.

Clarity’s answer was written for her the moment she was adopted as one of the Deaths. 

Which brought up the next most terrible choice I had to make; whether to tell her who I really was or not.

Again, it was almost not a choice at all. In a physical sense I could have continued the deception. I could even have trained Responsibility at times when Clarity wasn’t with us. Deception is not challenging when you have the sort of power Malgenia does. Granted Malgenia herself rarely bother to use her power to deceive anyone since she rarely bothered to care what anyone else thought or did, but that was her and my needs were noticeably different than hers had been.

“She’s never going to forgive me,” I said, huddled in a bedroom in the small house I’d called up out of the stones on our first night in the wasteland.

“This is Clarity. You have met her right?” Responsibility asked.

“She shouldn’t forgive me,” I said. “You shouldn’t either I suppose, but I don’t want to give you up, so, please?”

“It’s not getting any less weird to hear you talk like that wearing her face.” Because Responsibility knew Malgenia was not built for anxiety – I’d literally never seen a memory of hers that had even the slightest hint of it. “Also does that mean that you want Clarity to give up on you.”

I really like this one, Beauty said.

“I hate you,” I said and hugged my knees to my chest.

“I’d miss you if you didn’t,” Responsibility said and kissed me on the forehead.

I could feel Clarity coming up stairs from the kitchen where I’d summoned food for us. 

Which should have been a giveaway.

Malgenia loved receiving food but had not, in any of our recollections, every made any for herself or for us. It wasn’t unbelievable that she would be able to call forth a feast but with two Deaths to attend her, she definitely would have waved up some ingredients and had her darlings do all the culinary work.

“So you think I should tell her now?” I asked, rising from the floor and dropping into the head seat at the table, where Malgenia would obviously be lounging.

Or, maybe not. It wasn’t like she shared meals with us. It might have been more in character for her to let the Death eat together while she, I don’t know, star gazed at the pitch black empty sky? 

Listen, I loved her but Malgenia was weird, okay?

“I could do if you want?” Responsibility said. “But we both know who she needs to hear it from.”

And we did. 

I just…

She was going to hate me.

For what I’d done to Malgenia.

For abandoning them all.

For bringing her along without telling her the truth.

For picking Responsibility.

Oh, it was going to hurt.

And I deserved it.

“My Lady, dinner is served,” she said, depositing three plates heaped with various dishes we’d made for Malgenia over the years and sliding into the last open chair.

“Clarity,” I said, gathering all my courage and stealing as much from Beauty, Inhibition, and Reason as they were able to give. “There’s something I have to explain…”

I struggled to find the verbal rope I was going to hang myself with only for Clarity to speak up without prompting.

“You’re Insight. I know. Try the Bloomberry scones, they’re amazing!”

“What do you mean we can’t risk the wasteland?”

“I’m unclear what part of that statement is confusing to you Vaingloth?”

“That was not in our plan. That was not how we had ordained things to be. This world is supposed to be ours, Helgon. That is the part that is confusing me!”

“The world is ours. What’s left of it at any rate. We all have our cities, do we not?”

“That’s not the point Dyrena. We are supposed to have everything. We were supposed to be the Lord of a New World, not a dead one.”

“Well, things didn’t go exactly according to plan, did they. I’m still working on the calculations to explain what happened but…”

“What happened, Helgon, was that the God Devourer we summoned was too big. It was supposed to fall with the last of them. They were supposed to rid the world of each other so it could be ours!”

“They mostly did.”

“Mostly is not good enough Sasarai!”

“Isn’t it though? What did we really wish to attain from this? Power? We hold so much power we’re having to shunt it off into other venues lest it deify us to the point where the End of All Things notices us. That has to be the practical limit of the divine power that we could have gathered.”

“I see Vaingloth’s point. Power cannot truly measured as pure divine force, but rather our ability to exert our will on the world around us. With the wastelands closed and too perilous to travel, at least for ourselves, I imagine we can spare trade caravans of our peoples since the losses will be easily replenished, but with passage denied to us there are practical limits to the power we can exercise. Sasarai, you’ve spoken of your grand garden, but it will be forever constrained by your hedges, don’t you wish to expand it someday?”

“I don’t believe so Insikir. Endless expansion would, after all, eventually lead to an overlap between our realms, and no one wants that.”

“So we must all subsist on the miserable allotment of our own cities? Can we not devise a means of combatting the shattered spirits and fragments of the Beast? Malgenia, certainly she is capable of that?”

“Yes, but I do not wish to. I rather enjoy this world we have. It feels like home at last.”

– Dissension forms between the Neoteric Lords in their first post-Sunfall council, with violence mitigated by the practicality that none of them are physically present to be summarily murdered.

So we were lost in the Wastelands. The three of us.

Yep. Three.

How did we get here? Responsibility insists that it’s my fault, but, really, Vitor is to blame.

I mean, I suppose she’s not entirely wrong. It was my idea after all, and talking her into it wasn’t exactly easy.

“I’m not insane.” That had been the proper start of my arguments and, to be fair to Responsibility, it wasn’t the one I could offer a whole lot of support for.

I mean, you do hear voices, Beauty said.

Smart, helpful voices though, Inhibition countered.

She can see us too, but she could brush that aside as us being hallucinations, except for the small fact that Responsibility can see us as well, Reason said, smartly and helpfully.

“You know if we die in the wasteland, it’s the same as dying here right?” Responsibility had looked at me like it wasn’t a question of determining if I was broken but rather in how many different places and whether there was any chance I could be put back together.

“Technically, dying in the wasteland could be a whole lot worse than dying here,” I said, proving that I was entirely sane because I could acknowledge the issues we would face.

From Responsibility’s expression however it was clear my claim proved nothing.

“Also, we’re not going to die out there,” I said. “Out there I can use Malgenia’s power to cloak us both and no one will question it.”

“Yes. You’ve said that,” Responsibility said, not a single note of agreement in her tone. “The question though is; will any cloak you can raise actually keep out the things in the Wasteland.”

“With Malgenia’s power…?” I started to ask, but she cut me off.

“Yes, even with her power. She never ventured out into the Wastelands and none of the other Neoterics do either – unless that’s a lie too?” Her question at least showed she was still considering what I was suggesting.

“From what I’ve gathered, it’s not a lie. The Neoterics really don’t risk the Wasteland at all. They could, but they’re all faced with the wager of eternal life against whatever they’d want out there. Or almost all of them.”

“Almost? Oh. Malgenia’s different wasn’t she?”

“For a few important reasons. First, yes, her eternal life was different from theirs. There was a cost to her eternity which the rest didn’t have to pay. She didn’t care too much about that, but, she also didn’t care about exploring the wastelands either.”

“But she was always so curious, wasn’t she?” Responsibility had adapted to using the past tense with Malgenia rather well I thought. 

Given that she’d accepted Malgenia was, in fact, quite gone, I was tempted to resculpt the ‘body’ I was wearing to look like myself, but I didn’t trust the gossamer veil I’d cast over us to hold up long enough for me to change back in time if Vitor poked at it. I was pretty sure he wasn’t watching us, in part because Malgenia had always been a stickler for her privacy and in part because he wasn’t exactly the most subtle of the Neoterics. That gave me a feeling of security that I was certain would last right up until I discovered that he was more subtle than I wanted him to be.

“She was endlessly experimenting, the catch was that even a couple hundred years wasn’t long enough to run her out of things she could try from the comfort of her own domain.”

“And she was nothing is not lazy.”

“Heresy!” I feigned outrage, which earned me the eyeroll I deserved.

The Deaths all love Malgenia. She is literally divine in our eyes.

Was.

She was divine.

Responsibility still does better with getting the tenses right than I do. Maybe it’s seeing her memories from time to time that make her seem more ‘present’ in the present, if that makes any sense?

Anyways, we all loved Malgenia, but even from the few interactions we had with her, we all knew she had her own little foibles.

Honestly, it helped me love her more.

Sure, she was a goddess, a divinity made flesh, but she was also so, so happy when we made birthday sweets for her. She cooed over them like a little kid and twitched her toes each time we put a new one in front of her.

And she was killing us every couple years or so.

Which had sort of curdled a bit of the milk of love and kindness it was true, but I’d spent a long time knowing a different side of her, or imagining one, and it wasn’t terribly easy to let that go.

Anyways, she was lazy, most of us, or most of us who were paying attention, noticed that. She had her fixations and fascinations but if it involved real effort, well, that’s what the overseers, or other minions, or, in a pinch, Vitor were for.

“Doesn’t that present a problem though? If she hasn’t gone out into the Wasteland in all this time, how are you going to explain her sudden desire to risk a trip to the one place which all of the Neoterics are afraid of going?”

“Oh, that’s easy, I’m not planning to explain anything,” I said. “I mean, when was the last time Malgenia was forthcoming with any explanations for her ideas? Like ever?”

Sometimes the manner in which my former Lord and Mistress lived her life was extremely convenient, which on reflection made a lot sense given that she had the power several gods and an aversion of inconvenience.

“Fair. In theory that would mean that you could just cloak us here though, oh, or, I see. If you did that it would raise questions that Vitor or one of the others might feel like going to the trouble to get answers to.”

Responsibility couldn’t read my mind, but it was so refreshing to have someone who understood how I thought.

We understand how you think, Beauty said.

We just don’t always agree with you, Inhibition said.

Consider how often we don’t say anything. At least half that time it’s because we agree with you. Reason was being mean. Because she liked teasing me. I could only imagine what a nightmare she’d been for Beauty when they were both alive.

Picture you and Responsibility but about five times worse, Beauty said.

Hey!

What? I’m being nice! I didn’t say ten times!

“So the plan is you and I sneak off alone, head to the Wasteland, we train for the right way to do the Assumption Ritual and then…what? Let’s say it goes right and we manage it, then what do we do?”

“Oh there will be so many possibilities then,” I said. “Simplest one. I come back and say I tried a variation of the ritual which didn’t seem to make a difference. You come back and simply cloak yourself so that you can move around and live as you like. Or we just don’t come back.”

“Not sure how well that would work, but, okay, we’d have to power to figure things out then. Sounds like we might have a plan.”

We did not have a plan.

Vitor, happily, had not been spying on us. He was however increasingly paranoid that I wasn’t going to perform the Assumption Ritual and so, of course, was waiting in Malgenia’s foyer as soon as I returned.

“You seem cheerful,” he said, with the sort of guarded caution any living being should have on seeing Malgenia smiling.

Since telling him “I’m in love with one of my Deaths are we’re going to run away together and live happily ever after” wasn’t even vaguely an option, I had to scramble to come up with some other excuse.

I could have told him I’d found a new method of killing things, but while that would have delighted Malgenia I was also reasonably sure I couldn’t possibly manage to devise anything that wasn’t old hat for her. So I had to slide closer to the truth.

“I’m going to be taking a trip,” I told him, freezing the delight on my face and silently commanding him to not inquire any further.

“Where?” he asked, growing visibly more concerned.

“The Wastelands!” I said. Was it the right answer? Better question, was there anywhere else I could name that wouldn’t immediately be revealed to be a lie the moment I ventured into the wastelands? Right, so the bad answer was the only answer.

“What? Why?” Vitor might have been asking out of concern as a brother, he might have been asking out of worry as a Neoteric Lord, but I think he was mostly asking out of sheer disbelief.

Which made sense.

What reason could I possibly have for doing something as unhinged as risking the wastelands?

“I want to find something to kill,” I said, a half baked, truly idiotic idea forming in my head.

“Everything living is here though? There’s nothing to kill out there!” He wasn’t wrong about that, but he wasn’t entirely right either.

“I know. That’s why I’m going to go kill it,” I said. It was a lot easier to lean into Malgenia’s unique brand of madness when I was contemplating something truly mad.

“Mal, this doesn’t make sense. Are you just trying to put off the Assumption Ritual? I know it was rough last time, but that was a fluke. I’m sure it’ll be better this time.”

“Oh, it will, and no, I’m not running from the ritual at all. I picked a Death and I’m going to bring her with me. She’s going to be my reserve if I need one during the hunt.”

“Hunting what? There’s nothing to hunt out there!”

“Exactly! We’re going to hunting Nothing. What did Vaingloth call it? The End of All Things? It’s time that dies too, don’t you agree?”