“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?”

“It’s rather surprising with the collection of individuals we’ve recruited for this endeavor that we don’t have any concerns about internecine strife undermining our efforts, wouldn’t you say Vaingloth?”

“I wouldn’t say anything of the sort Helgon. What I would say is that our current state of detente has required a great deal of design and orchestration, and that I, for one, will be all too glad once our ‘endeavor’ as you called it concludes.”

“Oh? Will we be in a more stable state then?”

“Of course, of course! We’ll be immortal by then after all.”

“Well, somewhat immortal. It will only be conditional immortality, correct?”

“Conditional? Bah. We’ll have the powers of the gods. Who will there be to oppose us at that point?”

“Well, each other I imagine. Isn’t that the problem we were discussing?”

“Ah, but by then we will have no need to oppose each other you see Helgon.”

“Do I?”

“Yes, you do. We will each have our own domains, separated from one another across the face of the world. What you chose to do in your domain will be of no concern to any of the rest of us. Just as nothing we do will be of concern to you.”

“I suppose projecting power outside our domains will be difficult, so that should offer some security. Still though if several of us agreed to work together…”

“If we agreed to work together against another, surely it would only be after all diplomatic options had been exhausted and that too is important. We need to be able to, collectively, keep one another in check. Can’t allow one of our number to do anything too terribly foolish when we have the power to destroy the world after all.”

“And the threat of censure by the rest will act as a natural guardrail against such behaviors I take it?”

“Excactly. With none of us able to menace the rest independently, we shall all enjoy a peaceful eternity together.”

“None of us except Malgenia.”

“What?”

“None of us will be able to menace another, except Malgenia, who could menace us all if she choose. She’s part of the reason I say we’re only conditionally immortal.”

“Well, yes, that’s true. But she’s not interested in such things. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

– Helgon almost getting Vaingloth to admit the obvious flaws in his long term plans.

You would think it would be difficult to feel an overwhelming love for someone and simultaneously want to throttle them. 

Or you would if you weren’t me gazing on Responsibility.

Part of me was happy really. The urge to strangle her told me that this was my Responsibility sitting beside me. My beloved Responsibility. My beloved, idiotic, infuriating Responsibility.

“We, as I believe I just explained, cannot perform the Assumption Ritual,” I said, exercising Supreme Divine Patience, which was not in fact a gift of Malgenia’s portfolio, and which I did not in fact truly possess.

“We can, and we will,” Responsibility said, as resolute as I had ever known her to be.

Seriously, having all this power sucked. Why couldn’t I just be me again? Punching her until she shut up or made sense, or knocked me out, that was always a significant possibility, would just have been so much simpler.

“The Assumption Ritual can’t work if we’re not willing to fight. If we attempt it, one of two things will happen…”

“One of three things,” Responsibility cut me off to point out. “And we can determine which of those three it will be.”

“Three? No. If we’re not willing to fight it out properly, then one or the other of us will hold the claim to all of Malgenia’s power, or, far worse, neither of us will, and then it will destroy pretty much everything.”

“Or, and hear me out on this, we fight.” She had that smug look on her face that said she’d figured something out that I was being an idiot for missing.

Oh! Oh, yeah, she is good, Beauty said.

Is she? I mean I think she’s missing…oh, OH! I see, yeah, she is good, Reason said, being careful I was sure to give me not one damn clue of what she and all the rest of the them had figured out.

Take a moment, you’ll get it, Diyas said, which was just wonderful. Even my god was toying with me.

“You’re cute when you frown,” Responsibility said.

“I look like Malgenia,” I grumbled.

“Yeah, but I know it’s you in there,” Responsibility said.

And, as predicted, I got it.

I hate you all, I said to my inner chorus.

“I don’t know if that’s going to work,” I said, mostly to be difficult since it felt like the kind of thing that might be possible, and might be our only hope.

“It might not.” Responsibility was only agreeable when she knew she’d already convinced me.

Ugh. Had we already gotten married at some point? How did she know me that well!

“You really think fighting FOR each other instead of against each other is something we can do?” I asked, failing to suppress any of the whininess or uncertainty in my voice.

“Kiss me again and we’ll see,” she said.

It was a fair point.

And I was very stupid.

How had I not seen this as an option before?

Because that would have required admitting that you actually liked her? Beauty said.

And believing that she loved you enough to fight for you like you would fight for her, Inhibition said.

And they were both right.

Which was exactly as hard to accept as I’d have imagined it to be, if I’d let myself imagine it at all.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “We’re still working on translating the original version of the ritual. There might be another answer.”

“Are you withdrawing your proposal?” Responsibility asked already knowing the answer.

I paused.

I should, shouldn’t I? If I really loved her, and my earlier protests aside, I did, I couldn’t really deny that, but if I really loved her, shouldn’t I have wanted to protect her from the insanity of the Assumption Ritual? I knew how bad it was, and she didn’t.

Also, forget the danger to the world, and to myself, could I really do that to someone who was  important to me?

“I still want you forever, whether or not we do this,” I said. Because I was greedy.

“I think this is the only way we get to have forever,” Responsibility said. “Or even much longer at all if what you’ve said is true. You put performing the Assumption ritual off as long as you could already haven’t you?”

“It wasn’t needed at first, Malgenia’s power was diminished a bit after I, you know, tore her to pieces. After that? Well just getting a handle on all this is kind of still a work in progress.”

“That’s going to be true for the Assumption Ritual too. It’s usually a month of preparations right? Can you make it that long?”

I got up and started pacing in response. It was a question where I knew what the answer had to be but that didn’t mean I was at all certain what the answer was.

“I can, mostly because I have to,” I said. “I’ve got some assistance there that I can fall back on.”

“Diyas? She can help you with that?”

Of course I can! I’m a god! Diyas wasn’t actually offended, you could tell by lack of Divine Smiting, but her point was a valid one.

“Does that seem weird?” I asked. “Early on, my ability to hold things together was almost entirely her.”

“She’s not all that she was though, right?”

Well. No. Grumbly gods are delightful. Seriously I highly recommend connecting with one. I believe Smiting was suggested as an option. Happily, they don’t often smite their Blessed, especially not the ones who luv them so, so much.

{Divine grumbling}

“She’s a bit more limited. We’ve been working on that though,” I said, letting Diyas grumble without commenting on it.

“Working on it how?” It was weird that talking about something as intimate as my secret faith was somehow easier that a publicly acknowledge ritual which had been going on for lifetimes now.

“We’ve been collecting Diyas’ other fragments from the wasteland and putting her back together as much as we could.”

“How?”

“It’s pretty easy. Each fragment is her and they all want to be together, so we just…”

“No, I mean how are you finding fragments in the wasteland?”

“Oh. That’s the ghost’s job.”

“The…ghost’s job?”

“Yeah, when Malgenia said she was the Neoteric Lord of the Dead, she was not kidding. Some of her power is bound up in the literal army of the dead she has on call. Or that I have on call now I guess. Anyways, they’ve been a lot of help.”

“Why haven’t we never seen them? A lot of the Deaths spend time watching the wasteland?”

“We’re nowhere close to the other Neoteric and the wastelands are so much vaster than what we can see,” I said, casting my thoughts to the visions I’d seen both in Malgenia’s memories and through through the sense of the ghosts I’d sent out.

“Aren’t those areas claimed by the other Neoterics though? Or was Malgenia’s claim that the Neoteric had taken all the corners of the world under the protection another lie?” She didn’t sound angry about that, just curious, but that was largely because we’d all learned to hide our true feelings lest we risk the ire of the overseers or, unimaginable worse, Malgenia herself.

“It’s not going to surprise you when I say that was a titanic lie is it? I think the Neoterics claimed the areas as ‘their cities’ and enormous buffer areas around them.” 

It was something I was not entirely unhappy about since the distance the Neoterics had enforced between themselves (Vitor and Malgenia excepted) meant that they didn’t casually drop in on each other. The prospect of someone like Vaingloth or Sasarai visiting me, ever, was spectacularly unappealing. I would have tried setting up my own domain if a.) it wouldn’t have given me away in a heartbeat and b.) run into the issue of where the land would have come from (not to mention the population that I needed to support the Deaths) (I’d considered using the citadels that Dyrena or Helgon had been given but it turned out that, technically, those areas had been divided up between the other Neoterics already).

“That’s why there were still fragments to be found, wasn’t it?” Responsibility asked.

“Yeah. Malgenia didn’t believe in keeping any of the fragments, and apparently the other Neoterics weren’t interested in them enough to brave the dangers out there. Or, that’s not right. They were interested, but the number of remaining fragments outside their hoards weren’t worth the effort, especially since it would leave them vulnerable to each other.”

“How long did it take you to figure that out?” Responsibility asked, wearing her ‘I’m calculating something important, so keep talking I need more info for the equation’ expression.

“A while, figuring out Malgenia’s life, even with some of her memories has been a full time job. The good news is, I haven’t really had anything else to do for the last couple of years.”

When I put it like that it sounds like my life as Malgenia was constant struggle and peril. Which was pretty much exactly accurate. I still felt terrible vocalizing it though, like I was asking for sympathy that I hadn’t really earned. It wasn’t like Responsibility’s life had been all that delightful either.

“Do you think you’d be able to give me a crash course in what you’ve learned then?” she asked, the equations still turning in her head.

“I can try, but there’s an obvious problem with that.”

“If you name me as the next Assumption candidate, I’ll have to do a months worth of ‘Final Training’ with the overseers to prepare me, and after that we’ll be expected to perform the Ritual right away.”

“Yeah. Malgenia had the ceremonies around the Ritual down to an old tradition. I could try to meet with you at night, but…”

“But it wouldn’t be enough time, and it would attract a lot of attention. Malgenia normally doesn’t spend any time with the candidate, and if she does Vitor would definitely spy on what we were saying.”

“We could use the garden to enjoy some privacy,” I said, enticed by the idea of spending time together.

“That would definitely attract suspicion though.” She wasn’t wrong about that, but something she’d said earlier came back to me.

“You know, there is one other place it would be perfectly reasonable for me to keep us cloaked.”

I conjured a vision of the two of us venturing out into the wasteland, overlaying it with all of the monsters which I knew to be out there. Monsters even the Neoterics feared. Monsters I suspected we needed to go meet.

“Well that was unpleasant, and messy. We’ll need to spend a fair bit of grace to clean this up properly.”

“And you’re sure that Accessor Polono was going to betray us Vaingloth?”

“His correspondence to the Summerest Council was rather explicit on that score Wepan.”

“Was it envy that drove him? I know we rejected the idea of offering him a place in our cabal, but I cannot fathom why he wouldn’t have used the evidence he’d procured to blackmail a spot for himself among our number?”

“Do you imagine any of us would have reacted positively to a blackmail attempt?”

“Of course not, but ours isn’t an alliance based on mutual appreciation. We’ve chosen who is a part of our number based the qualities we possess which are required to ensure our plan comes to fruition, and he was a talented Accessor.”

“That is certainly a significant element of how our members were chosen, but there is a quality which we also share, one which rather transcends the individual contributions we are capable of offering to the endeavor.”

“Is there? We are so diverse, I am curious what quality you might be referring to?”

“When I approached you with this proposal, what was your first thought?”

“Hmm, I suppose I couldn’t see how we would focus the influx of grace sufficiently. I must confess, I thought you were quite mad to even suggest such a thing might be possible.”

“I believe you spent, an hour was it?, explaining in great detail how the original theory I presented wasn’t viable.”

“Well, yes, no offense, but so many of the assertions in that original paper were just incorrect. I mean, full marks for the overall structure, but even the first transformation would have failed cataclysmically if we’d pursued that path.”

“And what did you do next?”

“Well, I got back to my own work. Yours had been an unexpected interruption after all.”

“And that night?”

“I, yes, well I was curious you see. Your plan, it was madness, but to your credit, it was madness hung on the scaffolding of genius. I thought for sure the equations would never balance, but isn’t that the real joy in life? We push at the impossible and through the labor of our minds we surpass what could have been before. That’s our who aim here is it not? To be the ones to make a new world, a world that without us could never come to be!”

“Exactly.”

– High Accessor Vaingloth illustrating what the other High Accessors in the their cabal most cared about, as well as what (and whom) they didn’t.

I had spent literally days worrying myself sick. Well, not sick, but as physically unwell as it was possible for Malgenia’s body to get. Days, I say! I’d struggled with what I wanted to say, how I should say it, the arguments I could marshall in my favor, the arguments that I didn’t want to make because they were unfair, the arguments that I absolutely couldn’t make.

It had been a lot.

I’d put so much thought into the moment I saw Responsibility again.

It’s worth noting here that you hadn’t exactly reached any actual words you were going to say though. I think that’s an important point, Beauty unnecessarily observed.

I think that’s better, Inhibition said, speaking from the heart can cut through a lot of the nonsense.

Is that an observation from personal experience? Reason asked.

Well, no, not as such. Inhibition, like all of the rest of us, was a much better dispenser of wisdom than practitioner of it, which was oddly comforting.

“Y-you’re in?” I asked, even divine power proving insufficient to keep the stammer out of my voice.

“Yes.” Responsibility looked entirely composed. “I’m in.”

“In to what?” I asked. 

I’m not stupid.

I knew what she was saying.

But did I really?

I mean…just…what?

“Your plan.” Responsibility hadn’t moved. “The whole thing.”

“But…” 

But…everything. How could…why would? 

You two need to use more words, like a lot of them, Beauty said.

“Did…did you change your mind? Do you…” Responsibility asked, her composure fracturing just a little.

“What? No. That’s…”

“Oh for the love of…” Beauty said, manifesting in between us. “You,” she pointed at me. “Tell her how you feel.”

“What? Why me?” I asked. It wasn’t very divine and certainly not at all like Malgenia to shy away from the ghost girl who was stabbing a finger at me, but I make no apologies.

“Because she was brave enough to tell you how she felt already and you owe her, you git,” Beauty said.

I could have fled.

I want it recorded that I could have fled.

And to my credit, I did not.

“I…I…” I managed to squeak out.

“You. What.” Beauty’s demand didn’t help, but what really made me want to be literally anywhere else was seeing the emotions that swirled behind Responsibility’s eyes.

Responsibility was waiting on my reply.

She cared what I said.

Dammit.

She cared.

I blew out a long breath.

“Go away,” I say dismissing Beauty’s projection with a wave of my hand.

I’m pretty sure she only went because I knew she was right.

See. You are definitely not stupid, Beauty said.

“Can I sit down?” I asked, pointing to a space on the bench beside Responsibility.

“Of course,” she said and started to rise.

“No…with you. I’m not Malgenia remember.”

“I…I know,” Responsibility said as she dropped back into her seat.

I gathered the robes I was wearing and plopped down onto the seat beside her, leaving a hand’s width of space between us. It felt familiar, but also more comfortable since I wasn’t locked into full eye contact with her.

“I…thank you,” I said, because it felt like she deserved that first and foremost. “You were right. I…wow, this is a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

“What’s harder?”

“Everything,” I said. “I thought I had everything figured out. I thought my plan would make everything work out.”

“It still could!” Responsibility said. “I can hate you. We can make this work.”

“Nope. It won’t.”

“Do I need to stab you again? I can do it. You know I can do it.”

“It won’t work, and it never would have worked. Even if you did hate me, and, well, I’ll get back to that. But even if you hated me, even if you hated Malgenia, it wouldn’t have worked.”

“Why?” The disappointment in Responsibility’s voice cut me worse than any blade she’d ever held before.

“Because I’m an idiot.”

“Why would that matter?” The fact that Responsibility didn’t feel the need to correct me was all the proof I would ever need that she truly believed I was the Insight she knew.

“Because if one person in the mix loves the other, they’d never be able to fight for Malgenia’s power enough to split it in half.”

“But…I don’t have to love you. I…I just said that, I…” It was only then that it occurred to me how the last few days must have been for Responsibility.

I had the other Deaths and Diyas to talk to. 

She had no absolutely no one she could have asked to share the burden I’d laid on her.

Worse, she couldn’t even have given the slightest hint that she was carrying a burden.

No wonder I’d found her alone and isolated.

“I hope that’s not true,” I said. “But it wouldn’t matter if it was, because I love you to.”

The urge to kiss her was sending lightning through my body.

Those damn lips.

Ugh.

But.

No.

That had to be her decision. She had to have the choice to say no, despite the desperation of the situation and the Divine Power that was wrapped around me.

With how I’d attained my “divine state” was it any surprise that being worshipped, especially involuntarily was the absolutely last literally-goddamned thing I wanted?

There was an upside to fighting my urge to kiss her too.

If I’d sunk into her lips like I desperately wanted to, I would have missed the completely gobsmacked expression she was wearing.

“Y-you…?”

“Love you. Not like ‘I love all the Deaths’. Like I. Love. You. Like I was planning to spend eternity with someone and you were the one I thought of. Like living without you for the last two years has been miserable. Like…like I love you.”

“No. No. No, you can’t,” she said, burying her face in her hands and folding forward to bury them both in her lap.

That was not the response I’d expected, but something in her tear-stained voice made me think I wasn’t being quite as rejected as it seemed.

“I can go,” I said. “I know none of this is fair to you and if you need some time to…”

And I was drowning in her kiss again.

I wasn’t any more ready for it this time than last, but I was not about to let her get away as quickly this time either.

Fortunately she didn’t seem to have any inclination to leave me like she had before.

“I hate you,” she said, when we finally cooled enough to separate by about the width of my pinky finger.

“You should,” I said, still pretty delirious from the kiss.

“I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. You are just…” she said, touching her forehead to mine.

“The worst?” I suggested, because, seriously, she knew me and it’s true.

Ehem, Beauty disagreed.

“Mine,” she said. “I don’t care what the other Deaths think. They can have Malgenia, but I want you.”

I kissed her and asked, “Are you sure.”

“The last two years sucked for me too,” she said. “I didn’t really know why though. I mean, I was happy for you. Or I thought I was.”

“What else were we ever allowed to be?”

“Ugh. Two years! Two years and you never told me. You’re right. I do hate you. You’re the worst.”

“Still want me then? I can’t promise it gets any better than this?”

“I don’t want better. I want my Insight back.”

“If we do this, you’ll have me. I…uh…I only kind of noticed afterwards that my plan is basically like a wedding proposal.”

“Was it now?” And there was my Responsibility. Dangerous and scheming. Maybe about to stab me. Why the hell had it taken me so long to figure out that I loved her?

“Well, I was asking you to be stuck with me forever as my equal partner. I think that’s what marriages are supposed to be right?”

“And are you still?”

“Still what?”

“Asking me to marry you?”

“I mean, do you want to?”

“That depends on whether you’re asking me or not.”

Oh yeah. There was my Responsibility. Mine!

I felt a divine echo in that claim and Diyas’ suddenly near presence.

Insight’s mine, hands off Dragon.

I had no idea what all that was about.

An old friend. No worries. She’s not into stealing. Diyas wasn’t usually cryptic which suggested this wasn’t something I needed or wanted to pry into too much.

“I am definitely asking you. Death of Responsibility will you be mine, my partner, my equal, my love, if I will be yours?

“No,” she said, because she is So Damn Mean! “No, I’ll be all that even if you’re not mine. Even if you can’t put me first.”

And then we both cried out a lot of the misery we’d been carrying for so, so long.

Eventually though we pulled back, to just marvel at each other.

“We wasted a lot of time,” I said.

“It’s not our fault,” Responsibility said.

And it wasn’t.

“Well, I know who it would be easy to blame,” I said, gesturing at myself though Responsibility took my meaning.

“Her and eleven others.”

“Well, eight others. I think the other three were ancient history by the time we showed up.”

“True, but they did help create the whole mess of a world we have, right?”

“They did, and judging from the one other one we have evidence of, I suppose it’s hard not to see how broken everything is as a reflection of what they must all have been like,” I said. “The problem of course is that regardless of how it got like this, we’re still stuck with dealing with it all, and I have no idea how we’re going to do that.”

“That’s not true,” Responsibility said. “You already know how to fix our current problem. We’re going to perform the Assumption Ritual.”

“You really are not thinking of attending a collegium Malgenia? Even though father has promised to sponsor you to any you might choose?”

“I’ve already chosen my course of studies.”

“I’m not certain the Temple Aspirants have a curriculum. I gather they are more devoted to, well, devotion to their gods, are they not?”

“Devotion is not required. So long as you act to direct the outpouring of grace, they will let you do as you wish.”

“If that is true then why do the Aspirants always prattle on so. It’s always ‘divine mission’ this and ‘purity of heart’ that?”

“Words.”

“Yes, exactly, so many tiresome words. Repeated ad nauseum. It’s as though…oh.”

“Exactly. Words have power. With enough repetition they can shape people’s beliefs, beliefs other people have about them…”

“And the beliefs they have about themselves? What a fascinating insight you have stumbled upon dear sister.”

“I did not stumble.”

“No. Of course not. You never do. I do notice that you have not been availing yourself of the power of Words much however?”

“I speak when I need to.”

“You speak to me. You occasionally speak to father. Is there anyone else you speak to?”

“Of course. I speak to my patients.”

“Correct me if I have misapprehended something, but are you not an Aspirant in the Mortuary Services?”

“Technically, yes.”

“I would think your…patients? It would seem as though they lack the ability to hear any words you might have to share with them.”

“Oh I know. My words aren’t for them.”

– Vitor missing a rare opportunity to understand the association his sister possessed with the Gods of Death

Malgenia wasn’t nervous. A visit to  the Deaths was not a particularly notable event for her. It was the high point of the Death’s month, but it tended to be something she did as much by accident as by any particular design.

So I couldn’t be nervous. 

And I couldn’t treat the visit as though it mattered.

Unfortunately the other thing I couldn’t do was put it off any longer.

Vitor’s visit the day before had been an unsubtle nudge to get the Assumption ritual started, and he wasn’t wrong. My hold over Malgenia’s power was growing by not quite as fast as the power itself was.

Diyas was helping me with that, but apparently she’d made it back to me mostly because I’d recalled her, however unwittingly. Having a link to the God of Life when you were suffused with enough death energy to slay a planet turns out to be an unstable state, who could have imagined that?

I won’t leave you, Diyas’ assurance was heartfelt, I could feel that clearly, but I was also keenly aware that neither of us might have a choice in the matter she was drawn away from me for too long.

I wanted to investigate that more, since wrestling with Divine problems seemed ever so much more appealing that the course of action I was undertaking but I’d put off talking to Responsibility for too long as it was. She deserved better than that.

The plan to investigate the ritual was still in play, Reason was searching for where Malgenia had hidden the original codex which contained her notes, but even once we found the book we needed it seemed unlikely we’d have an answer in time (assuming there even was one). Based on the documents we found, Malgenia’s notes tended towards the horrifically opaque and cryptic, more fragmentary reminders for herself than anything which might illustrate the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the processes she’d practiced.

“My Lady! You bless us once more!” Overseer Ka dropped herself into a deep bow.

“Am I a blessing? Can I give blessings? What sort of Blessing would you desire?” I asked, engaging ‘random Malgenia babble mode’ as the most convincing response I could make to potentially any and every situation I found myself in.

“To see you is to be Blessed. To stand in your presence doubly so!” Ka said.

The overseers were, as a rule, fantastically loyal to Malgenia. In Ka’s case she took the fanaticism quite a bit more seriously than the others. It wasn’t always a cruel sort of mania, not always. Often she was quite loving, spending time with the Deaths, regaling us with tales of Malgenia’s many virtues and compassions. It was only when we stepped out of line, or stepped out of line in a manner Ka disapproved of, when she would injure us.

Thinking about it now, that’s really wrong isn’t it? Beauty said.

It always seemed wrong to me, Inhibition said.

Did it? Beauty asked. You were never on her bad side? Not that I could remember.

I wasn’t, but I watched what she did to you. There was a deep anger underlying her words. Deep enough that I was tempted to act on it.

Don’t smite her, Reason said. Vitor just showed us that he’s watching the Deaths through the Overseers. If we kill Ka, or act against her, he’ll start questioning why.

Would he though? Beauty asked. I mean who ever questioned what Malgenia did? Especially if it involved randomly killing someone?

Reason’s right, I said unhappy about that but accepting it. The last thing we need at this point is any extra attention or questions. Also, I’m guessing that doing a murder wouldn’t exactly strengthen the bond between Diyas and me?

The Blessed of Life does not typically murder people, this is true, Diyas said, her statement notable in the lack of an absolute edict against doing so.

“I shall triply bless you then with a task, so you may think of me even when I am gone,” I said. There were all sorts of things I could set her to do which would assuage Inhibitions anger, but requests like ‘lick all of the rest facilities clean’ would be a trifle too obvious, to Vitor at least, as a malicious punishment, which would raise suspicions.

Malgenia was many things, but well before she reached ‘malice’ her anger would usually be expressed in a more terminal manner.

“What would you have me do, Dearest Lady!” Ka’s eyes were practically alight with holy fervor.

“I should like a comprehensive report on my Deaths,” I told her, wondering if I might do some good under the cloak of the Assumption Ritual. “I do not wish you to interview them. I wish you to fill as many pages as you can with your memories of the events of their lives up until this moment. Tell me what harms have befallen them each, whether those harms be accidental or intentional, misfortune or warranted. To me what you perceive their joys to be and include detailed plans specific to each one on how we may increase those joys while also raising them to conscientious of their fellow Death’s time and happiness.”

Ka was speechless at that and for a long moment I was forced to suppress a wave of panic spawned by the idea that maybe I’d been a little too coherent.

I needn’t have worried though, Ka was having her own melt down of ecclesiastical glee.

“YES MY LADY!” she said, practically vibrating in place, torn between her obvious desire to remain in Malgenia’s presence and the overwhelming urge to get started on the Holy Project assigned to her.

“You may begin as soon as you are ready. I shall look for results in a year? No, too long. A month? Yes, a month perhaps. See that you have a comprehensive draft available in a month!” 

I didn’t bother to watch how she took the news since I already knew that she would be heads down with barely any sleep or food for the next thirty days exactly. That would, I hoped, give her a chance to reflect on the virtues of the women in her care. At the worst it would at least keep her out of their business until the Assumption Ritual was complete and I could circle back (or my successor, depending on how things went) to see whether her outlook had changed at all.

Did I proceed from there directly to Responsibility? As a responsible near-godling that was the course of wisdom and compassion the moment required. Responsibility needed to hear my answer to her, well whatever it was she’d left me with, and I needed as much time as possible to formulate a new plan for dealing with the Assumption. 

I was not going to go through with a full, regular Assumption. I hadn’t ever planned to but the one thing my spiraling thoughts had shown to me was that I simply couldn’t conduct a normal assumption ritual even if there’d been a Death, or anyone else, I could bear to sacrifice.

The gift of my Blessing from Diyas was more fragile than I’d known. I thought as long as I kept faith in her, we would be inseparable. Tearing Malgenia apart had seemed to confirm that, but when Little had needed to call on Diyas’ power, she’d also exposed the fact that my Blessing was only anchored so deep in me. 

Performing a full Assumption ritual would be one of the worst violations against Life’s domain that I could commit and even if Diyas and I were both in agreement on it, fundamentally rejecting the core essence of Life on a level like that would definitely shatter the Blessing I carried.

Which would in turn me I would lose control of Malgenia’s power.

Which would mean the world would end.

Which I was opposed to.

So, no Assumption.

But no Assumption meant the power would grow beyond my control, and the world would end.

All I had to do to avert all of that was speak with Responsibility and then pick another Death to stand in her place (not Clarity). Putting another Death in the right frame of mind would be challenging – Responsibility had taken my story inexplicably well and it had still nearly broken her, if my read on her emotional state was correct.

Which meant speaking with Responsibility and at least bringing her into a vow of silence on the matter was my only path forward (though a part of me held out hope that she would be willing to act as an advisor, and maybe speak with the Death I chose in case I failed to make the right impression).

Responsibility wasn’t hard to find. None of the Deaths were. They were spread out but if anyone was going to stand out to Malgenia’s senses, the women who’d developed themselves as her highest acolytes were the easiest to spot by far.

That, of course, let me avoid Responsibility and seek out Clarity instead.

You say that like it wasn’t obvious that’s where you were going? Beauty voiced an opinion that I’m certain none of the rest shared.

No, Beauty’s right.

It’s where we would have gone too.

Inhibition and Reason choosing to betray me wasn’t a surprise either.

It’s not betrayal if we’re right, no matter how much you don’t want to admit it, Inhibition said.

The sight of Clarity dispelled all thoughts of betrayal, because, well, Clarity is a delight.

Clarity was also in the midst of reading one of Malgenia’s myths to a group of the younger Deaths.

I could have watched that for days. I could have listened to her forever. 

The moment any of them saw me however, it would all end. The children would be over-awed to see me in their midst. Clarity would close up into the formal propriety and deference the Deaths inherently showed to our god.

I could be with Clarity as much as I wanted, but she was never again going to be with me.

Leaving them wasn’t hard. Moving unseen and unheard was among the most trivial of Malgenia’s inherent abilities. Leaving them was, as always, the hardest thing of all.

That was what it took for me to find Responsibility though.

Sitting alone in one of the observation rooms which offered a view into the wasteland.

I closed the door behind me both in a physical and a mystical sense. The Overseers weren’t going to report our conversation back to Vitor. If he was looking, he might notice the veil I’d draped over the room, and was certainly capable of piercing it. I didn’t dare make one of any serious consequence as that would absolutely raise questions I didn’t want to answer, but the small, gentle one I wove in place was sufficient to dissuade mortal inquiries.

I was, it seemed, a little clumsy with it though as Responsibility noticed the veil’s arrival.

“Hi,” I said, my voice sounding shy even to me. It was as non-Malgenia a greeting as I could possibly have given.

“I’m in.” Responsibility said, without preamble or any convincing at all.

“Do you imagine I’ll need two or three rooms for guests Vitor?”

“Guests? Those rooms are for guests? I thought you were making spare butchery rooms?”

“Abattoirs. Though technically that term should be applied to rooms for livestock, not people. And, I won’t have any of those. Abattoirs. Not people. I shall quite a few people!”

“I’m sorry, I must have heard you incorrectly. I could swear I just heard you say that you won’t have any rooms in your abode dedicated to taking people apart for your various little games?”

“I never play games. Games are something you can lose. If you can’t lose then it’s a pastime. Also, why would I limit only a few rooms to that purpose? That seems wasteful.”

“Ah. Yes. Right, your entire abode will…you know, I don’t know why I would have thought anything else.”

“I agree. Most foolish of you Vitor. But you still haven’t answered my questions. I want to make sure I will have enough room for guests to be comfortable.”

“I believe the last thing you will need to worry about will be making guests uncomfortable my sister.”

“Oh? You like what I’ve done with the spaces which have already been constructed?”

“Your style is resolutely your own.”

“Yes. The architects said I should express myself in the design and decor.”

“That would be the architects who are now a part of the decor would it not?”

“Yes, though I’m not sure if that’s an expression of me or an expression of them.”

“I doubt they would be wearing the expressions you left them with of their own accord, so I would say the sculptures in question are distinctly a part of your voice.”

“And my guests will see it as you do?”

“Do you know who these guests will be? It would be easier to gauge their reaction if I had a clue as to who might be visiting you?”

“I am quite uncertain myself. I suppose it will depend on the children you select for me.”

“Children? You want me to pick out children for you?”

“If you want something done properly, you must do it yourself, correct? Which means I shall need to raise them properly if they are to serve as proper vessels for me – or perhaps I can employ a college of overseers? Yes. That might be preferable. I believe I lack the talent for growing things, small people especially.”

“Can we go back to the bit about these children serving as vessels for you?”

“Well, how else am I supposed to live forever?”

– Neoteric Lord Vitor discovering that Malgenia is not quite the same sort of Neoteric Lord as he is.

It’s funny how a day can pass and bring you no answers whatsoever. I had made progress but that progress consisted of making it out from under my covers and wandering aimlessly around a new expansion of the garden. Progress however does come with some drawbacks.

“You haven’t remodeled in so long I thought you’d sworn it off for eternity sister.” Vitor had found me because that’s what he does when life in general hates me.

“Why would I swear at remodeling? I don’t want to make any pacts with a building?” I asked, gambling that Malgenia’s brand of aggravating stupidity might drive Vitor away sooner.

Or if not at least he’d be as annoyed as I was.

“I recall making quite a few pacts with different restrooms during my stint of collegiate studies.” He sounded wistful about that but I wasn’t sure I followed what he meant. 

Could he have been sickly often in college? Vitor? Sickly? No, those two ideas could not coexist. For one thing he was far too proficient with bodily augmentation via applications of grace. If anyone could ever have been immune to the illnesses of the ancient world it would have to have been Vitor, given what he managed to become.

Although.

The image of Vitor absolutely miserable with the sniffles flashed through my mind. Not a memory, sadly, just a silly dream, but it was so cruelly delightful I couldn’t help but smile.

“Since you seem to be in a good mood today, perhaps I may ask if you’ve made a selection yet?” Vitor asked, completely misreading me.

And like that my smile faded.

Yes, I had made a selection.

No, it was not a good one.

Yes, the Death I’d chosen was the right one.

No, I was not going to proceed with her.

Yes, I needed to find a new one.

No, I did not want to.

The impression of Responsibility’s lips flitted vividly back through my mind.

Which did not help!

I was so doomed.

Probably, Beauty said.

That’s also not helpful. Reason backing me up was nice but I knew Beauty was being honest.

“I have never removed your capacity for asking questions,” I said, not intentionally meaning it as a threat, but not NOT meaning it as one either.

“And yet they all love her,” Vitor whispered to himself so quietly that a distracted Malgenia wouldn’t have noticed. I, who did not have the option of allowing herself a moment’s lapse in awareness in the presence of Vitor or any other Neoteric Lord, heard his complaint all too clearly.

It did my heart good.

Vitor was the sort of person who deserved an eternity of suffering, but maybe not the sort Malgenia could have inflicted. Unspeakable agony was perfectly justified for any of the Neoterics based on the cataclysmically evil choices they’d made, but in Vitor’s case I felt that an eternity of unending irritation and frustration was the proper fate. He needed to never quite figure out how miserable he really was.

Powerlessness was important too though of course. That had to be a given for any of the Neoterics, myself included. I was horrible for what I’d done to Malgenia, but give me centuries with no accountability and I would…well probably not be worse than her, but the world didn’t need even the lesser plague that a copy-Malgenia would represent.

“So, who is she?” Vitor asked, undeterred from ensuring that his sister was going to take care of herself.

Charming. Very brotherly. That none of the other Neoterics could handle the power Malgenia had accumulated and her failing to take the next Assumption would mean the end of all of them sort of soured any feelings of sibling affection I might have mistaken him for having.

To be fair, I’d also seen Malgenia’s memories of the few attempts on her life she was certain he was behind. They’d been tentative assassinations, more probing tests to see if containing Malgenia’s unique quantity and style of grace was possible. When the “experiments”, to use the ‘gentler’ term Vitor labeled them as, proved to all be disastrous failures the efforts to make Malgenia the fourth Neoteric to fall dwindled away.

Dwindled but did not depart entirely. The need to remove her was an inevitability in the minds of the other Neoterics, since each was convinced that if twelve could be reduced to nine then their number could and should be reduced to one.

Malgenia believed that too, in a sense. Rather than plotting the demise of the rest of the Neoterics though, she simply waited. Her brother and the rest spoke of being immortal, but Malgenia understood the promise of mortality far better than any of them could. Given time, they would all find their ends, and all she had to do was wait (or so she’d thought).

“You know the names of my Deaths? Have you been carousing with them?” I asked, both buying time with a non-answer and genuinely curious to discover how much Vitor already knew. The phrasing and tone were intentional. Again, not a threat, but Malgenia did not tolerate the other Neoterics visiting her Deaths, and only made occasional exceptions for Vitor for reasons that seemed to escape everyone, including Vitor.

“Of course not dear sister. It would not do to disrupt your careful cultivation. I do inquire as to their progress from your overseers however. They say that you spoke with the Death of Clarity and allowed her to draw a portrait of you yesterday.”

Killing Vitor was wrong.

Not in a moral sense.

In a “I don’t know how I’d handle all the grace he has on top of the impossible ocean of Malgenia’s and I’d like not to erase the world” sense.

On the other hand though…

Woah! Inhibition said. 

Yeah, let go of that mantle there, Beauty said.

Or smite him, but make it count, Diyas said.

I’m not sure if anyone had ever believed the gods were good influences on our lives, but I have to assume they’d never met a collection of fragments that had been blasphemed against quite like Diyas had.

Better idea, pout, Reason said.

I had no idea why that was a better option, not at first, but I did it anyways.

“I’m sorry, was that supposed to be a surprise?” Vitor asked, slightly flustered by the flair of divine power he’d sensed from me.

“I can’t get you anything,” I said, grasping what Reason’s play was.

“You were…for my celebration? A picture of you?”

“Well not anymore,” I said, leaning into the pout. 

“No. Please. I would enjoy that very much,” he said, a long dead echo of actual brotherly affection sounding in his voice

“It won’t be a surprise though.”

“It already was!”

“Fine. But not till she’s done with it. And if you don’t like it, I get to keep it.” I said.

“What would you do with a picture of yourself?” he asked, as though his castle wasn’t adorned with well over a thousand portraits of him.

“Make a statue,” I said, channeling the most horrible idea I could come up with – or in other words making certain I sounded like Malgenia.

Vitor looked at me quizzically and then frowned remembering in an instant exactly what, or rather whom, Malgenia preferred to use as clay for her ‘statues’.

If that left him with the impression that Clarity was of no importance to me and that she couldn’t be used as any sort of tool or lever against me, then the disturbing notion came with the bonus that I could hold off on smiting him to oblivion for a little while longer.

Disappointing, Diyas said.

“They also tell me you spoke with the Death of Responsibility? Even singled her out for personal attention?”

The urge to smite him wasn’t quite the same, but it was there. 

Can we hold her back if we need to? Beauty asked.

Not for something like this, Inhibition said.

And Reason was quiet.

Probably because she already knew I wasn’t going to smite Vitor.

Which was impressive because I had not at all come to that conclusion.

I mean, would I end the world for Responsibility’s sake? A few days ago, probably not?

Or was that a lie?

I’d picked Responsibility out for what was not a marriage proposal but something disgustingly similar to one.

And she’d kissed me, but I very much had not refused the gesture.

Would I burn the world for her? 

But she’d stabbed me!

That should have bothered me, shouldn’t it?

If anyone else had stabbed me, my response wouldn’t have been subtle or kind, even given the fact that a stab wound was essentially meaningless to me.

So why didn’t it matter than Responsibility had done so.

I loved her, but…

But that word didn’t mean what it was supposed to.

I loved all the Deaths.

I loved Malgenia.

I loved Clarity.

But Clarity was different.

And so was Responsibility.

I’d been dancing around and over the thought for a day already and it still settled in my stomach like a block of stone.

“She was entertaining,” I said, dissociating into my best Malgenia impression, or at least the best one I could manage in that moment.

“So you’ve made your choice then?” Vitor sounded delighted, because in the end that was all that he cared about. 

If he’d actually paid attention to the relationship between Malgenia and her Deaths, he might have been noticed that I wasn’t exactly as faithful as I appeared to be. He might have saved her from me. 

And he might have been able to save Responsibility from me.

Except the Neoterics never saved anyone beside themselves. The rest of us they’d kept around to toy with and terrorize away the boredom of the eternity before them.

If anyone was going to save Responsibility from me, it was going to have to be me.

“I have a present for you Malgenia, though I’m not sure if you’ll want it or not.”

“What do you mean? I love presents. Give me what you brought Dyrena, I want to see it.”

“Well, it occurred to me that we’ve tasked you with collecting the lost grace from all of those who will perish when we change the world. That’s a significant amount more grace than any of us has ever handled before.”

“It won’t be a problem.”

“Oh, don’t mistake me. I’m certain you’re capable of it. I asked Helgon for some calculations and he’s close enough to resolving them that I feel confident saying that.”

“And what would you have done if the calculations suggested I couldn’t manage my new underworld?”

“Asked you where Helgon’s numbers were wrong. Either you could have corrected a poor factor in the starting assumptions or we would know that you abilities require external augmentation.”

“Clearly they do not. So what present have you brought me?”

“External augmentation for your abilities.”

“You know, I believe I know how Vitor feels when I torment him now.”

“My intention is not to torment. Not is it to cast any aspersions on your talents. You, of all of us, are the closest to our eventual goal and gap between you and the next strongest of our number is profound.”

“Then why should I need any external augmentation?”

“You don’t. ‘Need any’ that is. However, what we need and what we may simply enjoy the benefit of are two different things.”

“Ah. You believe I am weak and will tire of holding the mass of grace I will collect.”

“That will be for you to decide. I am inclined to provide you with this in the case where you come to find you desire an evening’s reprieve.”

“And what would give me this reprieve you speak of?”

“A ritual I have extrapolated from your writings. It is intended to allow you to share the burden of your power with another, temporarily, so that they will shoulder as much of the load as you choose to forego.”

“And if I should forego it all?”

“If they had your prowess? You would returned to what you are currently, until the ritual’s duration expired.”

“And if they didn’t?”

“I expect they would not last long at all unless you were to intervene and whatever the results of that might be I cannot imagine much would remain of them.”

– Dyrena handing Malgenia the core elements which Malgenia would corrupt into the Assumption Ritual, just as Dyrena knew she would.

I’d never stood in sunlight before. Theoretically I had no proof that the illumination Sola was giving off was sunlight but what else could the God of the Sun be emitting?

“Uh…hello?” I am eloquent. A master of verbal wordplay. That’s me, for sure.

“A pleasure of meet you Insight,” Sola said. “Or do you prefer your full titles?”

“No. No. Insight’s fine,” I said, trying to figure out why the literal sun, unseen for lifetimes, was standing in my room?

“Sola’s has reemerged at last. She’s taken a Blessed!” Diyas looked pleased with this, so I guessed it was a good thing.

“It wasn’t my intention to stay hidden away until now,” Sola said. “But perhaps the timing is fortuitous?” The Sun God looked at me like I was something unique in all the world.

Which, technically I was, but I had enough expectations on me for pretending to be Malgenia, I didn’t want to have to pretend that I was someone who was actually important in her own right too.

“Fortuitous how?” I asked.

“Four of the Neoterics have fallen but they only know of three,” Diyas said. “This might the moment she planned for.”

“She who?” I asked, since they seemed to be resuming on a long conversation that I hadn’t ever been even slightly a part of.

“You would bring her up?” Sola said. “After what she was a part of? After what she did to us? And why?”

“She gave Night the key,” Diya said – still assuming a context which I clearly did not possess, and which Sola clearly did. “We’re only still here because of that.”

“Self-serving behavior does not an angel make,” Sola said.

“Not all of us are lucky enough to have had the Foxwinds to serve us,” Diyas said. “Most of the rest of us lost our assistants completely, without a trace that remains of them.”

“I don’t recall you ever needing assistants.”

“Yes. That’s what happens when something is completely erased.”

“Do you remember them?” Sola asked.

“Not as true memories. Just as a vague longing,” Diya said. “Be grateful there are Foxwinds who remain. The hole that is left behind is…unpleasant.”

“And you don’t hold that against her?”

“No. It’s thanks to her that you don’t have to feel like this and for that I am grateful.” Diyas had rarely spoken of how the Sunfall had injured her but even when she had she’d taken an ironic or vaguely annoyed tone. This was the first time I heard a real echo of the pain she still felt.

“Excuse who is this ‘her’ and what did she do to, or I guess for you?” Someone had hurt my god. I had a lot of power. Those two things did not math out to that person having a good time in the near future.

Which, yes, stupid. Diyas had been hurt before great grandparents were born. 

And I’d already known about it.

But hearing it in her voice?

It was fine that I started calling on Malgenia’s divine mantle. I was with gods. They could take care of themselves.

Or at least any divine commandments I let slip weren’t going to phase them much.

“Oh, this one was a good choice,” Sola said.

“Thank you. I thought she was worth the wait,” Diyas said, sending a calming smile my direction.

“Did I turned invisible? Can I hide from the gods themselves now?” I asked aloud.

In the back of my mind I heard Beauty, Inhibition, and Reason teetering and chuckling at me.

Because they’re mean.

What? No response? Really?

Ah. Right. They also wanted to see what the story was with the Sun God before revealing themselves because, honestly, the Sola probably had every right to want to smite Malgenia and in Malgenia’s absence the bearer of her powers could certainly make a reasonable target for divine wrath.

I mean, it was possible I could survive a divine smiting, so part of me wanted her to just let loose and get it over with, but a far larger part knew that ‘survivable’ was not on the same continent as ‘enjoyable’.

“You’re not invisible my dear Blessed,” Diyas said. “The woman we are speaking of was known as Dyrena and she was, at one time, a friend to the gods.”

I was a little jealous of her.

“She was also a Neoteric Lord, and possibly the one most responsible for our fall,” Sola said.

And then I was a little wrathful towards her.

“And the one we can credit with all of us, and the world, still being here, even if that is only in our mostly-broken current state,” Diyas said.

“That sounds very complicated.” Because what else could I say?

“That describes Dyrena quite well,” Sola agreed. “Always a delight and always on near edge of deserving a good smiting.”

“Wait, you said she ‘was’ a Neoteric Lord?” I asked as a flash of Malgenia’s memories flickered through me. “She was the first one they killed, wasn’t she?”

“Arguably,” Sola said.

“But…I could swear. I…” I struggled to find the right words for the dagger-like shards of memory that were assaulting me.

“Malgenia wasn’t directly responsible for Dyrena’s demise, but she did support the plan,” Diyas said. “If you can recall anything its likely because Malgenia watched from afar, probably hoping to see whether she could claim a Neoterics soul after death.”

“Yeah. Yeah that’s exactly what she was doing,” I said, still lost in the maze of poorly remembered moments. “Except…”

“Except that didn’t work out for her,” Diyas said. “Which in turn bought the next Neoteric more time and the final one still longer before the others tore them down.”

“Kurst and then Helgon,” I said as more memories tumbled in around the edges of my awareness. “Those were the next two to fall.”

“Malgenia was directly responsible for Kurst, though again she wasn’t able to retrieve his soul, and so lost interest in the process I believe,” Diyas said.

“She did. Or, she kept dabbling with it but she never pinned down what was wrong,” I confirmed from the bit of recollection which seemed true.

“The Neoterics aren’t part of Malgenia’s domain,” Sola said. “They’re a part of Dyrena’s.”

“What?” Diyas said.

“What?” I echoed her. “Dyrena has a domain? But that would mean…”

“Yes,” Sola said. “That is exactly what that would mean.”

“But that’s not possible. She would have been eaten by the Beast. That’s why Malgenia never let her power grow to that extent!” I couldn’t claim to be an expert on the divine – Malgenia had for fairly obvious reasons not included anything about the old gods as a part of the curriculum we were taught.

“I really hate her sometimes,” Diyas said with the exact tone of someone who had long ago learned not to be surprised by someone else’s actions.

“And you just know she was counting on that,” Sola said, her tone more or less identical to Diya’s.”

“But, no…” I said, unwilling to accept the Sun God’s claim quite that easily. “If she could do that, then why can’t you?”

I hated the idea.

Diyas couldn’t leave me.

I liked her plopping down on my bed whenever she wanted to.

But…

I mean, she could.

And if Diyas could go back to her heaven then exactly how gross would I have to be to want to deny her that?

Not gross at all, Beauty said.

And Diyas won’t leave you, you know that, Inhibition said.

If she wanted to go back to her heaven, she could have done that already too, Reason said.

They’re all right you know, Diyas said. Since, right, I wasn’t exactly subtle about my worries.

Oh, how interesting, there are more here on our side than I thought, Sola said.

Yikes!

Right.

God.

Speaking as we did was completely hidden from mortal, or even Neoteric, ears. Divine ones though? Apparently not so much.

“Apologies,” Reason said, manifesting fully in the room with us (though thankfully not on the bed, yes, there is room for all of us, Malgenia had the good taste to enjoy a large bed, but I didn’t feel like sharing Diyas at the moment).

“We were eavesdropping because we tend to disturb people,” Inhibition said, manifesting the chair beside the one Reason was sitting in.

“And because you scared the hell out of us,” Beauty said, manifesting in bed on the other side of me from Diyas. She blew me a little kiss which left me contemplating shoving her off onto the floor, but we did have a guest, so I behaved myself.

“I shouldn’t enjoy that, I know, but it’s kind of nice to have that effect. I thought my days of inspiring awe were lost along with everything else that’s gone,” Sola said wistfully.

“Oh come on, you must have inspired at least some awe in your new Blessed, didn’t you?” Diyas asked.

“Little is unique,” Sola said with a fondness that I’d dreamed Malgenia might someday show me.

I’m fond of you! Diyas objected.

Yes, and I love you too, I said. You’re too…I don’t know…real. I can’t worship you like I did Malgenia, and you don’t want me to. That girl could never have been your Blessed.

No, she couldn’t, Diyas said. And I’m glad you see that.

“Can you tell us about her?” Beauty asked.

“Well, she came to me with the blood of murder on her hands and the baptised herself by drowning in a bottomless sunken lake…”

And that’s how I knew that Little was going to be a hard act to follow.

“I know you said you didn’t need a city of your own dear sister, but have you given any thought to the abode you will want to construct?”

“I don’t want to construct anything Vitor. Making things sounds boring, and you know I don’t do boring well.”

“So, you plan to sleep under the stars for the rest of eternity then?”

“It’s not like it would be an inconvenience, would it? I thought we were supposed to be gaining divine powers. And destroying the weather gods. It will only rain on me when I will it to.”

“Yes. Perhaps, but tell me, does that mean that you will have your tomes scattered around the landscape.”

“Oh. Well, no.”

“And what thought have you given to their disposition?”

“They…they shall be housed with your tomes!”

“Delightful! I shall begin cataloguing them into my organization hierarchy.”

“No! No! I’ll never find them again!”

“Nonsense. My system is simplicity itself. First you need only consider which is the thirty seven nomenclature breakdowns their titles fall into and the cross reference that with which if the fifty three primary subject areas they are a part of. From there it’s quite straightforward to verify their position via the twenty nine cross check tables.”

“But they loop back on themselves! And the categories make no sense at all! Your system is terrible. No. I will make my own sanctum. For my books. And my things.”

“I suppose you’ll need an abattoir as well?”

“Hmm, perhaps a garden. For my art.”

“You are intent on taking up art as well?”

“I have always been artistic. People just don’t like the medium I work in.”

“Ah. Yes, I see. So a garden and a library. Will you bother with living areas?”

“I don’t see why I should. I shall be alone there until time itself falls down into death’s embrace.”

– Vitor ensuring that Malgenia had a place to live which was not at the heart of his stronghold, while Malgenia ensured her schemes for obtaining a select cadre of devoted followers went unnoticed.

Someone stole my god! She’d been godnapped! How the hell could someone steal a god?

“That is an excellent question,” Reason said, her gaze drifting off to the middle distance as her eyes became pools where the last stars twinkled.

“Better question,” Beauty said, “how do we get her back?”

Which is what I should have been wondering about, but, sorry, I’d been having something of a day. Godnapping? Girlfriend? What was next? Giant Monster?

“Best question; how long can Insight hold things together without her?” Inhibition asked.

And she was right. That was the best, or at least the most immediate question.

Managing Malgenia’s power was not what one might call ‘easy’. The things I could do were could broadly be described as ‘yes’, or ‘whatever I felt like’. In practice however there was the small matter of making sure I only did what I wanted to and that was a lot harder than I’d ever guessed it would be.

Simple things like walking and talking? As Insight, I’d been able to do those without being consciously aware of either one.

It would be funny to tease you about including talking without being conscious of it, but you suck the joy right of it by meaning it as a self put-down you know? Beauty complained.

The problem with carrying Malgenia’s power is that it was perilously easy to turn even casual speech into a spell. 

Or rather a divine commandment.

Something innocuous like “I want to go for a walk today” could, if I let Malgenia’s power leak through it become a divine writ. I would be incapable of not wanting to go for a walk. The world would become actively hostile to anything which prevented me from going for a walk. 

Was that a big deal? Yes. Yes, I would say that having your own power backlashing at you and trying to break your arms in a manner which you were then unable to repair if you tried to pull the covers back up for another five minutes of sleep was something of a big deal.

Diyas had recognized how little control I had over Malgenia’s power before that particularly miserable morning. I’d spent a good twelve hours walking before we’d gotten the divine injunction corrected and by then I hadn’t felt like sleeping at all.

As a god herself, Diyas had been familiar enough with shaping grace to protect me from similar future mishaps, and we’d spent a lot of time going over how to work with managing the flow and expression of the divine power I had at my disposal. 

That was one of the reasons I didn’t wear Malgenia’s divine mantle as openly as she sometimes had. I could control the stolen grace I held, but I didn’t want to take any more chances with it than I had to.

“I’m okay,” I said, lied?, no, said. I was okay. Diyas had taught me well.

And I still believed in her.

I should hope so, she said sounding distant and distracted.

What happened! Where are you? Making demands of one’s gods rarely turns out well, and this time was no different.

I am still with you. You need only be patient.

Was I the Death of Patience? No. I think I’d asked that before. Often. And the answer wasn’t changing. But that didn’t really matter, did it? Sometimes patience is just enduring what we don’t have the ability to change.

“We need to regroup,” Beauty said.

“We can hardly ungroup,” Inhibition said.

“Our sanctum. The bedroom,” I said, forming a vague and probably meaningless plan. “If we lock the door, even Vitor won’t bother us there.”

“He’ll knock, but he might still bother us if he catches wind that we took one of the Deaths out of their usual habitats,” Inhibition said.

“True. He’ll want to know if we’ve chosen an Assumption victim yet and when we plan to hold the ritual. Damned busybody,” Beauty said.

“I think he has an inkling of how much power Malgenia holds, and, to be fair, he’s not wrong to be worried about her ability to hold onto it,” I said, though why I had any interest in being fair to Vitor was beyond me.

“The Beast is stirring,” Reason said, her eyes still pools of starlight.

I’d brought that on myself. I really had. I’d taunted the universe with the idea of adding a Giant Monster to my day and so the most giant one of all was on the verge of becoming a “Problem(™)”. Hadn’t even taken a slip of divine power. The universe simply hated me in particular.

“I’m not sure you can claim to be uniquely oppressed,” Reason said. “And I’m pretty sure this has nothing to do with us, for a change.”

“I think, by definition, the End of All Things rousing and getting on with finishing up the work it started would have rather a lot to do with us, since we’d probably be the first to be devoured,” I said, feeling uniquely put upon despite Reason’s very reasonable words.

“Normally I’d say you’re right,” Beauty said, her eyes going to pools of starlight too. “But you might want to see this for yourself.”

I could.

I didn’t want to.

But I could have joined in the same enlightened awareness that the others had invoked.

Instead I kept my eyes quite normal.

Well, Malgenia’s eyes. Walking back to my room as myself, even if my mansion was empty of anyone else was still a larger risk than I was willing to take. Inside the garden and in the bedroom, I could be me, on the rare occasions when that was helpful. Or when I was just too tired of being her. Anywhere else though, I could have been spotted and while Malgenia could have altered her form and appearance at will, I don’t think a reason to do so had ever occurred to.

Why try to fool someone into thinking you were someone else when you could just kill them after all?

The other Deaths released the physicality of their form but remained as projections as we ventured back to the safest of spaces I had. Whatever they were seeing must have been captivating as they didn’t interrupt my thoughts until I was safely ensconced behind a locked door and under my covers.

I’d burned Malgenia’s bed linens and conjured new ones in their image long ago. Mine were comfortable and, importantly, hadn’t touched her.

Was I focusing on unimportant things? Yes. Was I actively refusing to think about what could be another, even greater crisis? Absolutely. Was I going to act like the adult I was supposed to be or regress to childhood and hide away from everything? Ask that to the blanket I had pulled up over my head.

I’d expected some kind of ribbing or feedback from the Deaths, but they were silent. Not absent, I knew we were still in this together. They were simply distracted by whatever the End of All Things was doing.

It wasn’t attacking us. In fact it hadn’t even woken up fully. I knew that because I knew they would be a lot more agitated if either of those was true.

They were giving me space.

Which, huddled under my covers and listening to myself breath out of habit rather than necessity, I saw how much I needed.

Responsibility was a problem. Her feelings for me, and, worse, my feelings for her. I felt really stupid for not seeing that before I laid out my very good and very doomed plans for us both.

Dead gods, I’d all but asked her to marry me.

“Let’s have a ceremony where we’ll be bound together as equals for all of eternity!”

Looking at it with hindsight, that was a hell of a thing to miss.

She’d been smart though. Responsibility had bought us time, and I could figure out something better. I could look into the ritual. Find some other means of dispersing Malgenia’s power and maybe not destroying myself and/or the world in the process.

Diyas was another matter. She wasn’t really a problem either. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, it was voluntary.

I think the impression the pre-Sunfall people had held was that everything the gods did was voluntary but that had been the old, full version of the gods, and that wasn’t taking into account what the Neoterics had proven capable of doing.

Still, Diyas had asked me to be patient, and sometimes that’s the sacrifice that will best serve us. I didn’t have to like it, just have faith in Diyas that it was what I needed to do.

And the Beast? 

What could worry do there? If it woke, it would still find Night holding the world shrouded from its senses. For all that I loved Diyas, I couldn’t help but feel more than a little bit grateful to Night too. She was why I’d never seen the stars outside of the other Death’s eyes but she was why I was here to see anything at all, so, yeah, hard not to have faith in her too.

Faith, in this case, which will quickly rewarded, Diyas said as I felt her plop down onto the bed beside me.

I threw back to the covers to see a smiling god laying on one side with her head propped up on her hand. I’d known she was there but seeing her made it all the better. My soul had ached at the mere suggestion of losing her and it rejoiced at her return.

I was so glad in fact that I almost missed the other god who was in the room with us.

“Insight, I would like you to meet an old friend of mine, or at least a projection of part of her,” Diyas said. “Death of Insight, Blessed of Life and Inheritor of Death’s Mantle may I present Sola, First to Rise and Last to Fall, the God of the Sun.”

“Malgenia, have you been killing your suitors?”

“Is that an option? Oh! Can I have suitors then?”

“No daughter, killing your suitors is not an acceptable response, no matter how far beneath you they might be.”

“What if they were equals though, could I kill them then?”

“No…ugh…Malgenia, why would you want to kill…no, no I’m not even going to ask that question. What I came here to find out is why you do not seem to have anyone who is attempting to court you. Even with your…condition, you should not lack for viable candidates. Not with the prestige of our house behind you.”

“I have plenty of candidates.”

“Not for your experiments. As potential marital partners.”

“What would I need those for?”

“Do you not wish a household of your own to govern?”

“Do I? Mother makes it look like a distracting bother.”

“It would allow you considerable latitude and influence.”

“Over?”

“Our peers.”

“I don’t have any peers.”

“You need only reach out. I am certain there are scores of scions of the other houses who would be delighted to make your acquaintance. They might even share your…interests.”

“Oh. But I already know a group of people who share my interests.”

“Really? And which families do they belong to?”

“None that I know of.”

“They’re part of the rabble? Where did you meet common trash like that?”

“At the High Temple’s mortuary.”

“What in heaven’s name were you doing there?”

“Pledging myself to divine service? What else would I be doing there?”

– Malgenia’s father learning that his daughter would be rejecting her family’s title and lands to pursue her passions, and later discovering that there was nothing at all he could do to prevent it.

Buh.

What?

No, really.

What?

I had plans.

I had a scheme that would fix everything.

I knew it would work too, because I could absolutely count on Responsibility hating me.

She’d always hated me.

I mean, we loved each other too, but, but that was just a Deaths thing.

I could taste her lips still.

“I’m guessing it’ll take you some time to work out a new plan,” Responsibility said, the faint smile on her lips mocking me for being too flustered to form coherent thoughts, much less words.

Or was she?

Should we go back to the kissing?

What?

Where had that come from?

And why were the other Deaths just rolling their eyes at me.

And WHY was Diyas smiling that secret knowing smile at me!

Responsibility did turn to leave at that point and I jumped to my feet.

I didn’t have a plan. Not anymore. I didn’t have a reason to get up either. I had, in point of fact, no idea what I was doing.

“Come back,” I said. “Not now. I…yeah, tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. We’ll…”

Be able to think straight by then?

Probably not.

I could still feel her lips.

Definitely not.

“You’ll have to come get me again. I can’t exactly chose to come here on my own,” Responsibility reminded me. Because all thoughts of pretending to be Malgenia had flown right out of my head.

“Right,” I said, because she was. “I’ll come get you.”

“Okay,” she said with a quick nod before adding. “I won’t tell anyone. Obviously.”

“Yeah. That would be…”

“Bad for both of us.”

Us.

I liked that word.

No one says anything, Beauty said privately to me and the other dead Deaths. There will be no teasing.

Why would we tease her? Inhibition asked.

Because we teased each other mercilessly, Reason said.

And it sucked. Beauty was adamant about that, which was strangely relieving.

It also distracted me from Responsibilities departure.

Which was good.

I needed to think and obviously having her around was preventing that.

Should I go after her? I asked my Deaths. I could have asked Diyas but the gods tended to be pretty averse to specific advise like that. Or maybe only Diyas was, I hadn’t met many other gods.

I’d suggest not, Beauty said. But it’s a call you’ll need to make.

If you believe there’s something you’re ready to say to her, something that you’ve put enough thought into then, certainly, but otherwise take this as a reprieve to find your balance first. Believe me, blurting out the first things that can tumble out your lips is not going to make the impression you might hope it would.

When did you ever…oh, Inhibition said and I could tell there was a whole lot of history they’d never shared with me in the ‘oh’.

Okay, but…I started to say and ran out of words.

But what?

Did I want to tell her she was supposed to hate me?

Did I want her to hate me?

Did it make any sense that she didn’t?

What if she was just toying with me?

Getting back at me for being so cruel as to bring her into all this!

Yes! That was…

Not at all what that was about, Reason said.

No, sorry, it’s not that simple at all, Beauty added, seeming delighted at the quandary it left me in.

She wasn’t lying, Inhibition said. And she didn’t say that to hurt you.

Well empty heavens, what in Malgenia’s deepest hell was I supposed to do with that?

Whatever you like, Diyas said, as helpful as only a deity could be.

I didn’t bother dignifying her answer with a further reply.

Did you know she was going to do that? I asked, making an immediate liar out of myself.

Mortal choices are always their own. As answers went it wasn’t one, but whatever.

I was still tempted to run after her.

But I didn’t.

Instead I sat there, not exactly alone in my garden, but lost well and truly in my own thoughts.

Responsibility couldn’t love me.

We loved Clarity.

I wasn’t even slightly unsure of that. Responsibility had agreed with me far too readily on the subject far too often, including when I’d mentioned wanting to preserve Clarity from all of whatever it was I was asking Responsibility to be a part of.

So she couldn’t love me.

I screamed, both in my thoughts and audibly in the Garden. It was a generous mixture of confusion, frustration, and exasperation. 

This wasn’t supposed to be simple. I knew what we were proposing was going to be the most difficult thing any of us could possibly do. Maybe even including Diyas. I had no illusions that we might fall and fail. That things could turn out very badly, but the troubles were supposed to begin after we started the Assumption ritual.

Finding a Death I could work with hadn’t seemed all that challenging.

In part because I knew Responsibility was out there.

Had I always planned for it to her? Well, not consciously, but who else could it be?

“There are still, what, thirty of so Deaths at the moment? Even if you don’t want to ask Clarity, that still leaves a lot of options,” Inhibition said.

“No,” I said, bleak dejection washing over me as the reality of the situation thudded into me like the heartbeat of the dead word. “It has to be her.”

“Are you sure?” Reason asked. “It wouldn’t be hard to make one of the other Death’s hate you. You could tell a very careful version of the truth. Paint yourself to her like you do to yourself.”

“I know,” I said. “I could.”

“But that’s not an option, is it?” Beauty said. She gave me a one-armed hug of comfort from my side. “It was always going to have to be her wasn’t it?”

Yes.

But why?

“If I make one of the Death’s hate me, they won’t hold back,” I said. I really wanted to run after Responsibility.

“Isn’t that what you were asking of Responsibility?” Inhibition asked. “If she holds back, if she doesn’t fight you for the power, there’s no chance that you’ll both be able to claim it.”

“There isn’t,” I said. “But if we both go all out, she’ll win, most of them would, and if that’s all that they want, then they’ll destroy me and they’ll be stuck with the same problem I have now. It won’t fix anything.”

Why could I only see that clearly now?

I got up and started walking. I needed to be away from those thoughts. 

The Deaths remained manifest – it was safe for them in my…in Malgenia’s Garden, and I needed their companionship, even if I was fleeing from it. Even Diyas remained, joining our little group on the macabre tour of our surroundings.

“And with Responsibility, it’ll be different,” Inhibition asked, or gave me a chance to confirm what she already knew. I wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t sure I could, or that I could explain why.

“Because she does love you,” Beauty said. “Because you’ve hurt each other before, and you’ve forgiven each other as well.”

“But that was for Clarity’s sake!” And that was true. “She didn’t like to see us fighting.”

“And is that why you forgave Responsibility?” Reason asked.

“I didn’t forgive her. We fought a lot,” I said, and I knew I was lying again.

“Do you hate her then? You said she hated you, but did you put her in this position because you hate her?” Inhibition asked. She sounded honestly curious, but the thought of that being true made me sick.

I didn’t want to punish Responsbility, I didn’t want to hurt her at all. I needed her.

And why was that?

Because.

Because what?

Because.

“We should check the ritual again,” I said. Who was running away from thoughts she didn’t want to think? Me? Couldn’t be. I wouldn’t do that. Definitely not.

“The ritual?” Reason asked.

“Yeah. Do we really understand it fully? None of us are Malgenia, maybe we missed something. We should know what all our options are.”

It was a good, solid plan.

The other Deaths weren’t looking at me skeptically at all.

Definitely not.

“She has a point,” Diyas said, coming to my rescue as only a deity can. “With the Malgenia usurping the dominion of Death, there’s no one in the world who can claim to be her equal. Insight’s original idea still has merit but if a simpler method of safely unraveling Malgenia’s power exists, we would be well served to find it. Doing so would mean we wouldn’t need to put either of our living girls at risk.”

Which…which wasn’t at all unreasonable.

I’d be searching for any other alternative and from Diyas said it seemed like I stumbled into a pretty great one.

More research!

“I’m going to be doing most of the work, won’t I?” Reason said.

“Don’t start with that,” Beauty said. “You know we’ll help you.”

“Yeah! It’ll be like our old study sessions!” Inhibition said.

“But with less stabbing,” Beauty promised.

Which was weird, since Responsibility and I didn’t tend to stab each other during study sessions. We each wanted to do well (to beat the other) and with Clarity leading the session, there was a certain mesmerizing quality to them. I’d thought I loved studying but I was only partially right about that.

So why was Beauty promising…

Oh. OH! 

“Wait you stabbed her?” I asked, remembering their earlier comment about fighting over Inhibition.

“It was mutual,” Reason said.

“Mutual after she started it,” Beauty corrected.

“I made amends!” Reason objected as though it was a long standing point of debate between them.

“She did,” Beauty conceded and took Reason’s hand in her own.

I turned to check with Diyas to see if she knew whether all of the Deaths were as messed up as the group we were stuck with only to feel a tug myself.

It wasn’t on my hand on the back of my shirt.

It felt like someone was pulling at my soul.

Which was disturbing. Not as disturbing as fighting Malgenia had been, so my baseline was a bit out of whack but still not a feeling I was fond of.

Nor was I fond, at all, of the fact that Diyas wasn’t there.

Not “she wasn’t walking beside me”. No. Someone had pulled her away from me and that was very much not supposed to be possible!