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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I tried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It needs to be us, Responsibility said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh? Have they?”

“Yes. As you are well aware.”

“Enlighten me if you would.”

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

“And this threat would be?”

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

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

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

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

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

“About whom my dear Kurst?”

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

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

“And if the capricious devil changes her mind?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trying to stay in character? Diyas asked.

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

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

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

We all do, Inhibition said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But none of them cared about their people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or at least not the magic of grace they knew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What? No!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That seems statistically unlikely though does it not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And of course Tallgrim noticed precisely none of that.

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

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

Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes though…

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

Tallgrim should have died then and there.

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

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

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

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

And it wouldn’t be better in all ways.

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

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

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

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

Because of course he had a throne.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s when it hit him.

The safest place in his dominion. 

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

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

And we were conversing in it.

Not as projections.

Just Tallgrim and I.

Because his defenses meant nothing to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There’s no frozen keeberry custard.”

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

“All the time.”

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

“He didn’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

“They can’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Had I done her a favor?

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

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

There was, however, just one tiny problem.

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

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

Which was kinda scary.

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

The one who killed her, Diyas reminded me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But of course it was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Even Dyrena?” Little asked.

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

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

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

And cruel and terrible, no one in particular answered.

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

It is…it is more complicated that that.

Because of course it was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Does that make a difference?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So no funeral then?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He always was,” Helgon said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theia rolled her eyes but also kept her silence.

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

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

“Our deaths,” Clarity said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And we did,” Reason said.

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

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

I really wanted to kiss her.

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

“I know protecting those we choose to shelter in our cities will be completely viable, we’ve discussed the plans for that ad nauseum. What I am suggesting here is that it may be practical to keep a separate population as well.”

“To what end Tallgrim? And why should it be a shared one?”

“Excellent questions Grosh. I propose to use this population as a resource. I believe keeping a stable of mixed peoples secured in a site unrelated to any of our cities will allow us a far wider range of experimental opportunities than we would be able to indulge in with the populations we will require to provide us with grace.”

“That will create a potential point of friction between us will it not though?”

“Potential, yes Hanshel, but I am certain we can agree on procedures and priorities to ensuring those frictions are properly lubricated.”

“I imagine the absence of half our number will be the primary one of those frictions Tallgrim. Is there a reason you did not choose to include Dyrena, or Vaingloth, or even Helgon? You know he is an experimentalist of the first order.”

“Yes, that was exactly what concerned me. My vision is to create a population any of us can draw from, for whatever ends we desire. Helgon would insist on his idea of ‘proper experimental protocols’ and endless reviews, Dyrena would object, I am sure, to many of the experiments we could envision, and Vaingloth would insist upon a percentage of any return the experiments provide.”

“And the twins?”

“Can you imagine Vitor having the capacity to design an experimental trial worth pursuing?”

“That is unkind Tallgrim.”

“Perhaps it is unkind Grosh, but can you say it is untrue?”

“I believe the silence in the roam answers that question most eloquently. But there is the matter of Malgenia. She is, unique in the experiments she pursues, and, as we know, she pursues them with vigor.”

“And that is my concern with including her Wepan. I fear if we brought her into the fold of this wrinkle in our project, she would be likely to make use of the entirety of whatever population we could preserve.”

“Her experiments do tend to have a certain finality to them. Very well then, count me in. There are, as you say, many experiments to pursue which will better our world, but which will need distance and discretion, and so long as we remain in agreement, we should be able to easily maintain a quite sizeable population of subjects between us.”

– The High Accessors of the cabal responsible for the creation of Lab Zone Zero and, within less than a dozen year, also its complete destruction due to the entirely predictable internecine squabbling over which inhuman experiments would be run first.

The plan had failed. I’m not even sure why that was a surprise once I heard the full details of it.

“So, the sum total of it was ‘let’s go and have a look around and maybe we’ll stumble on a pile of divine fragments’?” I would have been stabbed if I’d come up with something like that. Seriously, Responsibility would have stabbed me in a heartbeat. Clarity might have joined her, except, no, Clarity would simply have given me a disapproving look and asked ‘why’ and that would have been worse than the stab wound.

“Pretty much,” Jilya said as she loomed over me. To be fair, given her size, it wasn’t intentional looming so much as simply being a bit too tall for the small room I was hidden away in.

“That’s not fair, I had some idea how to find the divine fragments, and I wasn’t planning to take more than one of them,” Theia said. Theia didn’t loom, despite being somewhat taller than me, but that was largely because the she was content to merely watch us moving pieces around the board which was in between us.

Malgenia had memories of many planning sessions where a world map was stretched across a table with tokens to indicate the disposition of various forces. In our case the tokens fell into two categories; black disks which stood in for the positions of the various beast fragments we knew of around the world, and small figurines for the remaining Neoteric Lords. Our location was marked with two, one for Malgenia (which wasn’t strictly speaking accurate, but it was close enough) and one bit of squiggly wire to represent the God of Worms which Sasarai had become.

I had to suppress a chuckle again.

God of Worms.

Oh, that was just beautiful.

I didn’t hate Sasarai more than the rest of the Neoterics but then I hadn’t liked any of them except Malgenia when I was being raised and meeting them after I’d usurped her position had soured me even further on them.

That one of them had tried to kill me with a Beast Fragment wasn’t something I was going to be forgetting any time soon either. I had special plans in mind for whoever that turned out to be.

“All in all, I think it worked out well though,” Little said. 

She loomed as well, though she was much smaller than I was. Physically smaller. Spiritually was another matter. I carried the Beast Fragment I’d been devoured by with me, but it was just another part of the growing  constellation of peoples I was accumulating. Little was something else though. She was Blessed like Theia and I were, but she was something else too. I think where I carried the Beast Fragment, she’d become one.

An interesting observation, Diyas said. She’s still a part of my realm, still one of the living, but, yes, there is something different there too.

It was strange at first, but it’s oddly comforting now, Sola said.

I still find it strange, but you both have been as secure a refuge as we could ask for, Draconia said.

The picky lizard says someone offers real security? That is high praise indeed, Umbrielle said.

Shut up you brat, Draconia said.

Make me, Umbrielle said.

“They really are becoming more like us, aren’t they?” Little said as we watched the gods squabble playfully with each other.

It’s been a long time since there were this many of us together, Diyas said.

And an age since we had this many Blessed, Sola said.

“Yeah, can I just say thank you again for that.” Jilya’s leafy-dragon-person-sized form was not designed to look bashful but she pulled it off remarkably well.

“Hey, you took down one of the Neoterics,” Theia said. “I think we all owe you thanks for trimming the number of those worthless monsters down. No offense to our present company.”

“None taken because you are not wrong at all. I am fully onboard with trimming their number down. All of them. That’s why I asked you all to cram in here with me.” My room was tiny largely because it was one of the most densely warded ones in all of Mt Gloria, and as of yet the other Neoterics didn’t seem to know that I had survived. That little surprise I was looking forward to springing on them one-by-one and the thought of how I would reveal myself to each of them filled my cold black heart with such delicious glee that I had to wonder if I hadn’t absorbed a bit more of Malgenia than I’d been aware of. We do resemble our parents though I suppose, so that vicious delight was probably all me.

“I don’t believe we’re too crammed,” Helgon said. “I find it rather cozy.”

“You’re a ghost, Helgon, you could inside one of my shoes with room to spare if you wanted to,” Little said. “You’re not wrong about it feeling cozy though. It’s nice. Kinda like a being in a Nest again.”

“Or a pod,” Jilya said. “Leaving our comfort aside though, how are we supposed to get rid of any additional Neoterics? I don’t think the rest are going to be foolish enough to chase us into a Beast Fragment, and my approach nearly destroyed the world.”

“Killing them isn’t a problem,” I said. “Malgenia could have done that whenever she wanted to. The problem, as you found, is that each and every one of them has amassed so much grace that if it goes out of control it’ll erase the substrate of the world and we won’t be any better off than if Night flung back her cloak and let the Beast finish gobbling us up.”

“Sola can handle the grace,” Little said. “Or she did for me.”

That’s somewhat true, Sola said. I can handle any grace which is of my domain or sufficiently close that I can lay claim to it.

And therein lies the problem, Diyas said. The Neoterics claimed as many domains as they could. When Vaingloth pursued Little into the Beast Fragment he was fully vested in the grace he was carrying and only his reserves remained in Mt Gloria.

“Reserves which he’d purchased from the Lord of the Fires, which made them close enough for Sola to handle, gotcha,” Little said.

“Which was why feeding all of the grace from the Holy Tree to Sola wasn’t an option,” Jilya said. “Fortunately we have, what, about ten thousand new Blessed who were able to shoulder the load too.”

“I wish I could have helped with that,” I said, my toes curling at the thought of how close we’d come to the apocalypse I’d spent the last couple years fighting to avoid with all my strength.

“You are the probably the one Blessed who most couldn’t risk it,” Theia said. “Plus you definitely wouldn’t still be hidden if you had.”

“Just to flesh out our ideas, does she need to be?” Jilya asked. “I get that the element of surprise is a useful thing, but wouldn’t having her here, openly, help keep the other Neoterics away more or less permanently?”

“I’m afraid not,” Helgon said. “If I know my former colleagues, what that would do is unite them in moving against the Blessed here. There would be no concern about the division of the grace which was harvested, all they would care about is eliminating ‘Malgenia’ before she came for them. If that required falling over into godhood, I suspect its a bargain they would take. We were all petrified of the End of All things once we understood what it was, all of us except Malgenia, and I think we were terrified of her more.”

“So they’re willing to lose the world if they need to, but to stop them, we would need to lose the world too?” Theia asked. “There’s another way. I’m sure of it.”

“There is one obvious option,” I said. Obvious and hateful.

No. Diyas could hear the plan echoing in my mind and invoked her divine right to order me away from it. Normally that would be absolute. No question, just drop it.

But…there is an exception to the absolute authority the gods have.

It could save you, I said, only to her.

No, she repeated, which wasn’t exactly a solid base for an argument.

“I don’t want to do it either,” I said aloud, deciding that the others deserved to be part of this debate too, “but you know you’re more important than I am. Everyone here is more important than I am. If we can’t come up with any other options, or some means to handle the grace of seven Neoterics, then giving myself up to them might be the only option.”

“Seven? I thought there were only six left?” Jilya said. “Hanshel, Tallgrim, Insikir, Grosh, Wepan, and Vitor? Who am I missing?”

“Me,” I said. “This can’t end with me as the last Neoteric, or even just carrying the power of one.”

“You know, we had a feeling you were going to say that,” Reason said, manifesting on the small space of seat that was open beside me.

“Which is why we’ve got a better plan,” Beauty said, manifesting in my lap.

“And, since we have you all here, perhaps you make sure that our calculations for the new Assumption Ritual are correct?” Inhibition said, opening the door to the room like a civilized person.

“The Beast Fragment wards seem to have settled into the resonance we were looking for Vaingloth.”

“And they’ll be self-sustaining even if a Beast Fragment tests them Helgon?”

“More than self-sustaining. Credit to Insikir there, but if a Beast Fragment does try to pass between the micro-portals, its presence will enlarge the portals and provide greater deterrent the closer it approaches.”

“But the enlargement will still remain microscopic?”

“Oh, indeed. That was the spot in the formulae I had difficulty with. Insikir’s assistance was invaluable with working out the snarls in the equations. Thanks to him, we’ve got a multiply tangled function between the size of the wormholes and the depth they penetrate. Mathematically, as portals approach infinity their size grows as an asymptotic function, while their depth grows logarithmically.”

“And there’s no concern about what they might punch through to with that much force behind them?”

“There would be, but the even if a Beast Fragment were to physically interact with one of them, their presence would not have be able to push the depths outside the realms we have data for, and while there are theoretically inimical forces below the seventh devolution of reality, a Beast Fragment shouldn’t be able to drop a portal below the the third devolution.”

“Shouldn’t?”

“From our calculations, the main body of the Beast wouldn’t be capable of dropping below the fourth devolution, and even accounting for any inaccuracies in the values Dyrena gave us, we can establish a hard boundary that the main Beast would only barely breech the fifth devolution. So a fragment would at worst, reach the fourth.”

“Have you had anyone beside Insikir confirm those calculations?”

“I hadn’t thought to. His work is generally solid and the results align with the baseline projections? Do you think we need a formal review panel?”

“No. Not a formal review panel. Consider however that the baseline projections for this sort of thing are based on Insikir’s published research.”

“Oh, I see. You think if he made a mistake on his earlier research, he might make the same mistake on these more specific ones?”

“A mistake or an intentional oversight.”

“But we’re all at risk if these are incorrect. How could it be intentional?”

“Would we necessarily notice if Insikir installed his wards with different tuning values?”

“Certainly. Our walls would fall and his would not…oh, I see.”

– Helgon and Vaingloth a few days before discovering long standing flaws in several foundational texts of Aetheric Boundary Setting and Breeching.

I didn’t cry for that long. Not a million years at least. 

Had I been that scared? That lonely? That desperate?

I mean, it was a perfectly reasonable decision to march out across the Wasteland taking the shortest possible route to where my loved ones were, wasn’t it? 

And worrying about whether they still loved me was also perfectly reasonable. 

I mean, it had been months. And I was different. And, really had I ever been all that lovable…

Do you really want to go there? Beauty asked. Because we can have the conversation, and I promise you, Responsibility and Clarity will pummel you with affection mercilessly.

Uh, was that supposed to be a bad thing? Was that something I didn’t want?

They’ll also be worried for you, Inhibition said. And a little hurt that you doubted them.

“She needs you two to prove you love still love her,” Reason said, bypassing our private little mind space, and giving me no time to hide my insecurities at all.

“No she doesn’t,” Responsibility said pulling away from the group hug they’d all buried me in. “She needs to believe she’s still the woman that she knows we love.”

“And of course she’s not,” Clarity said, sitting back with a smile that was far kinder than her words. “Just like we’re not.”

“We’re not?” The words tumbled from a numb mind over numb lips.

“We’ve changed, all of us,” Clarity said. “All different people. Not the same in the slightest. First time we’re meeting in fact. So we get to fall in love all over again.” Between Clarity and Responsibility, I’d somehow missed all along that Clarity was the one with the greater gift for being So Incredibly Mean!

What I hated most though was that it worked.

She wasn’t teasing me. She was somehow teasing my insecurities directly.

And it was working!

Would it have worked on anyone else? No. No one is broken like I am, at least as far as I know. And no one else has the relationship with me that Clarity did.

“Maybe I won’t this time,” I said. “Perhaps I shall be cold and cruel. Devoid of love and light. I’ll wander off into the wasteland cursed to bear my loneliness until my faltering grip on mortality slips, ever, so, slowly out of my grasp. Look, the dark horizon calls me now, and I must go!”

“You try to stand up and I will break your knees,” Responsibility said. “You’re not leaving us again.”

“Oh? I’m a prisoner now, am I?” Not an idea that I hated.

“You could probably escape us, but do you think we’d stop looking for you?” Clarity asked, heat and intention scorching her words.

“No,” and for a moment I was not thinking about my plans for vengeance on the Neoterics. Or my impending fall into divinity. Or even the fact that we weren’t exactly alone.

“Good. Now get up and come see us properly. Projecting like this is like hugging you through fifteen layers of robes,” Clarity said and I had my marching orders.

Literally.

It was another two days of walking through the wastelands before I got to Mt. Gloria. Various things should have blocked my passage, malevolent spirits, wandering Beast Fragments, scrying probes from the Tallgrim, Wepan, and the other Neoterics (though not Vitor interestingly). Wrapped in a shadow that wasn’t my own, I slipped past them all offering no violence, no death, and no sign of my existence.

Happily though, I didn’t walk alone. Projection may have been unfulfilling but the others took turns keeping my company and making sure I wasn’t wandering off course or into the jaws of some hitherto unknown monstrosity.

Which was silly.

I was the hitherto unknown monstrosity.

I didn’t have problems. I was the problem other things had.

 Since sleeping and eating were optional, we spent the time my purely conventional mode of travel required discussing plans and bringing me up to speed on what they’d been working on.

The good news was that my ‘death’ had put the Neoterics into something of a holding pattern. With the loss of Vaingloth being certain, the loss of Malgenia seemed at least possible, but our spies (We had spies! Such a handy thing!) reported that none of the Neoterics seemed willing to gamble on it being the truth.

Vitor wasn’t an exception but he was exceptional in that he seemed to be the least interested in pretending that I might still be alive. He’d taken control of my estates, though he hadn’t broken the seals on my inner sanctums yet (somethings even he’s not quite stupid enough to do). 

It sounded like the other Deaths were being mostly confined, though they had been told that they were going to be evaluated at the next Sunfall Festival in six months time, which I knew was code for ‘Vitor was going to find something else to do with them as soon as he could be certain his sister was actually gone.

Closer to home, Helgon had actually proved to be useful and had helped Clarity and Reason make significant breakthroughs in understanding the Assumption Ritual. There was still some fundamental issues that they were working on but they were at least able to pretend they were in good spirits about the progress they’d made.

The Assumption Ritual wasn’t the only thing they’d been working on for me though.

“You’re heisting parts of Diyas from the other Neoterics?”  It wasn’t something they’d led with mostly, I suspect, because it was the kind of plan that I should have been yelling at them about. I’d lost all ‘complain about people doing stupid things’ privileges thanks to getting myself eaten by the Beast though, but the impulse was still there!

“Not personally!” Beauty said. That she was manifested beside me and holding my hand meant I could only roll my eyes in disbelief rather than punching her in the shoulder like she deserved.

“Who else would be interested in going up against the Neoterics?” No one else had my advantage that if the Neoterics could manage to kill me they’d be ending the world, and we all knew it.

“You didn’t get a chance to meet her. Her name is Theia and she’s a Blessed like you.”

“Diyas has another Blessed?” As welcome news went that was just about the most. I’d heard of people being jealous of others receiving Blessing, but they obviously weren’t Blessed themselves. Knowing that my god had someone else to love and support them? That was a relief I’d barely suspected I needed.

Sorry, but you’re it for me, for now, Diyas said. Theia’s blessed by one of Night’s aspects, Umbrielle. Which made her much better for this mission than one of my Blessed would have been.

It wasn’t exactly hard to see why that was true. I mean, sure, I could probably waltz into a Neoterics lair and take back the fragment of Diyas they held – assuming it wasn’t hidden too well for me to find, and that the Neoteric tried to face me head on (which literally none of them would), and I didn’t mind revealing that I wasn’t actually Malgenia or that they would immediately all team up on me.

A Blessed of Night though? Based on Meluna’s performances, I was pretty sure Theia could be standing behind me right that moment and I wouldn’t have a clue.

“So who is she targeting?”  If it was Vitor, I was going to feel compelled to help out. He had the knack for appearing to be the dimmest of all the Neoterics but he was Malgenia’s twin and there were times that showed.

“Sasarai. Meluna found a paper Dyrena had left behind about Sasarai burying his treasure vault beneath his big tree, far from where any of his people roamed. We figured burgling one that people weren’t around would be easier than one that’s under constant guard.”

A paper Dyrena had left behind? How ‘convenient’.

I thought about calling out to her, but, no, she’d stayed hidden for some very good reasons. Also, whatever she was, I was sure she had even fewer options for manifesting before someone than Diyas or the other proper gods did.

She says ‘thank you’, Diyas said, confirming my suspicions.

“Out of curiosity, why did you send Theia and not Meluna herself? I mean Sasarai’s kind of a shrub when it comes to intelligence, but he will notice when one of his divine fragments goes missing.”

“It was Theia’s idea. She can hide herself well enough to move about a Neoterics lair, which we proved because she knew what our bedrooms looked like.”

“She what?” I’d been kidding, somewhat, when I said she could be right behind me. Malgenia’s defenses on her rooms were second to none though. I definitely should have been aware if someone was creeping around in there.

“The Death’s rooms,” Beauty amended. “She’s got the sense not to mess with the Neoterics directly. Also Kalkit was able to let us know that Sasarai doesn’t visit his hoard of god souls. He just draws on their domains indirectly because he thinks if he never enters the vault no one else will know its there. Kalkit called it ‘security through obscurity’ and kind of spit on the notion.”

“So she’ll be able to get in and out quietly then? And Sasarai won’t noticed the fragment is missing until the next time he goes to heal someone?” Which could mean he’d never notice since the Neoterics as a whole weren’t in the practice of using the powers for the benefit of anyone except themselves, and avoiding injury was one of their highest priorities.

“That’s the plan!” Beauty said almost as though she was cueing Inhibition to appear.

Which Inhibition immediately did.

“The plan’s failed! We have a problem!”

“I have to confess, I don’t really see the point of this. I mean, yes, the screams were entertaining, but it’s a momentary thing. Over and done and then what? I suppose there’s repetition but they were all so, so similar?”

“Vitor did you kill all of Class 3? I told you they weren’t ready yet.”

“Excuse me Malgenia, I distinctly recall you saying that they would be ‘ripe’ at sunrise. I waited until a hour after the morning devotionals but it was you who chose to sleep in.”

“I always sleep in. Dreams are so delightful don’t you think?”

“So people say. You know I only rarely remember mine.”

“Something you should work on.”

“While I’m asleep? Is father’s ghost possessing you now, thinking that even in sleep I’m not allowed to free of the crushing requirement to be productive?”

“No, no, good brother. There is nothing productive about dreaming. It is the mind at play. Careful madness dancing with the deepest of bodily relaxation. Quite wonderful I assure you.”

“And when you are screaming in your sleep? That is deeply relaxing too I suppose?”

“Oh, those are the best dreams. Too often they shatter but if you are truly lucky you can find one that you can’t awaken from. To trade comfort for such exquisite experience is sublime!”

“You claimed this would be sublime too, but my hands seem to have turned it to disappointment and more than a little bit of mess.”

“Well of course you did. You are but a novice  to the devotions of the gods of mortality. But, as with everything, practice perfects the mastery of the art.”

“So I have heard.”

“And yet?”

“And yet, it is such a terrible bother assembling and sustaining the subjects of the ritual. Not to mention that it will take the better part of the day to clean the cells and it’s not a duty which can be entrusted to anyone else now is it?”

“No, it is not. Discovery would yield us no end of headaches, and the thin comfort it would provide those who learned the result of the our working would lessen the impact of it tremendously. But did you feel no thrill of anticipation in the collection of the subjects? Or in watching their slow degradation?”

“There was some entertainment in that yes, but it was drawn out over so long and miserly a stretch of time, and then all over so quickly once it came to the ritual itself. I admire your devotion sister, but I fear my interests are held by more lively concerns.”

“Well that is fine too. This will keep us from being in competition with one another for resources.”

– Vitor and Malgenia discovering that despite being twins, and both being prodigies with manipulating and mishaping grace, they had markedly different interests in some areas.

I walked through the cold and lonely wastes of the world, unseen and unheard, but I was not as alone as I appeared to be.

When you said you were going to walk to see the others, I assumed you were going to ask Meluna to cloak you for the trip, Diyas said.

Don’t need to be cloaked, I said, letting my mind drift in the nothingness I felt around me.

I can see that. I’m not exactly sure why though? I can still sense you, so everything else should be able to as well and there are definitely things out here that lack the awareness to be sensibly afraid of what you could do to them. For that matter there are spirits not far off that would more welcome being fully destroyed in a battle than they would enjoy winning it.

You’re the only one who can sense me, I said, keeping my thoughts tranquil and wrapped in the embrace of the nothingness. Well, you and Reason for sure, probably Beauty and Inhibition as well, since we’re bound together more deeply than a little thing like the Beast can severe.

You’re not cloaking yourself though? Why aren’t the spirit fragments nearby swarming us? Diyas didn’t understand because some things are completely outside her domain and as ‘Life’ tends to cover quite a lot, the sensation had to be rather odd for her.

I pondered a moment before offering an explanation. Would she be horrified with what I was doing? Probably. It was a rather stark violation of the fundamentals of reality.

Or it had been.

What was real had changed though.

I had changed.

Dyrena had warned me I would, but I hadn’t understood exactly what she’d meant, and I don’t think there was any way I could have.

It did make sense though. The Beast Fragment had been a piece of the End of All Things. When it swallowed me, I had to, in some sense, end there. Thanks to Diyas, that ending hadn’t been the end of all of me, or even most of me. I had my memories, I had the bonds that made hanging onto this world worth it, and I had a future I wanted to see more than anything. 

What I’d lost was a disturbing bit of my mortality and with it a worrying bit of my entirely rational fear of embracing things which weren’t supposed to ever have been a part of the world.

That might sound like a good thing. Who wants to be afraid after all? Survivors. Survivors are the ones who were smart enough to be afraid. We (generally) don’t like our fear, and it can be detrimental to be overwhelmed by it, but at its root level, our fears exist for several excellent reasons, not the least of which being cautioning us away from actions where the consequences are both unknown and potentially cataclysmic.

In my case? Doing what I was? I most certainly should have been afraid and it definitely had the potential to go cataclysmic in a heartbeat.

Which was why I spent the moment pondering. Not because Diyas was going to yell at me. She had every right to do that and she would be inarguably correct to do so. No, my concern was more about whether it was safe for my god to let her know what I was doing, or if that might trigger the cataclysm I was afraid of.

Did you notice the Beast wasn’t around when we came back? I asked her. Was it wise to share what I knew? I couldn’t tell, but trusting my god was sort of a fundamental part of our relationship.

It had been months, are you saying it didn’t move on? Diyas asked with the familiar tone in her voice I’d so often heard in my own when I realized I’d been missing something blisteringly obvious.

Moved on is a euphemism people have used for it in the past, I said.

What do you…wait…no. That’s not possible. And there was the creeping horror which a god should not have been capable of experiencing.

But Diyas wasn’t what she’d once been either. She was capable of a lot of things she that once hadn’t been part of her existence. Being able to feel fear probably didn’t seem like much of an upside to the changes she’d experienced, but she was far more of a survivor than I was and it kind of came with the territory.

I am Insight, I said, but I’m also the holder of most of the domains of Death.

But the End of All Things can’t die. It’s not part of the cycle of life and death. It’s not anything at all.

And there were the five words I could never say just waiting on offer as an explanation.

I should be a god by now. I’ve put off the Assumption ritual for far, far longer than I had the strength to hold out against it. I guess I was sort of lucky there? Melting endlessly for a million years let all that grace just boil over with no where to go. So I’ve got some margin now. I think I’m maybe about as close to deification as I was a few months before the Beast swallowed us? Sadly, I can feel the grace returning faster than ever.

Was I changing the subject? Yes. Obviously. Was Diyas still stuck between disbelief and a horrified understanding of the peril we were in? Yes, also obviously. If she hadn’t been, she would have dragged the conversation back to the objection she’d raised.

But she knew she couldn’t. I’d told her what she needed to know without telling her, which was how it had to be.

I hadn’t killed the Beast which had swallowed us. Malgenia herself couldn’t have managed that. I was, in some senses though, Death, and I’d accepted the Beast Fragment. Little had done something similar, but where she’d gained a companion, I had not separated quite that far from the Beast Fragment that swallowed me. 

The spirits around us couldn’t sense that, no one could since, technically, there wasn’t anything to sense. If you knew what to look for though, I was pretty sure someone would be able to notice that my shadow wasn’t the absence of light but a far deeper void, and that was something that pushed all of the spirits away, even the ones who thought they were seeking their own destruction.

Your reprieve from godhood will hopefully be enough. The others have had six months, and I know they’ve been working on modifications to the Assumption ritual with Helgon extensively, Diyas said, accepting that we couldn’t speak of what we knew about some topics even in the sanctity of our holy link.

With Helgon? They’re working with one of the Neoterics? I knew I’d sent them to meet with him but I’d pictured the encounter being a somewhat limited and partially adversarial event.

What had happened to my girls?

I think they will surprise you, Diyas said, some of her usual amusement returning to her tone.

After the last million years we’ve had, I’m not sure I like surprises anymore, I said, though the sense of having spent any time being dissolved by the Beast Fragment was fading faster and faster as the days and miles passed under my feet. It still felt like I’d been gone for a long, long time, but my memory of the ones I loved was as clear as it had ever been. 

Six months though? With each step I had to wonder how close my memory would be to their new reality. And how close their memories would be to mine.

Ah, there’s the nervous fretting we know and love, Beauty said, appearing beside me as though we had been parted for a couple of minutes rather than an age and a half.

Give her some time, Inhibition said, she’s been through a lot.

“Wait…can you be here? Are we…can they sense this?” I asked the question aloud because it seemed like the least obvious thing the other Neoterics would be looking for.

And laughter answered me back.

Reason’s laughter.

You don’t need to worry, she said, we’re not speaking through the web of Malgenia’s power that binds us together. We’ve learned a lot while you were, let’s call it on vacation, no one’s going to looking for that.

Then how…? I was expecting Insikir or Sasarai or one of the other idiots to descend on me any second and my plans very much did not allow for that.

The Blessing, Reason said. We know you’re still connected to Diyas through the one you share with her, so now we’re all connected to you through the one you share with me.

But..huh…is it a real Blessing then? I had been very much winging things when I set it up, but with six months of experience to draw on it made sense that Reason would understand our ‘new’ bond a lot better than I did.

It’s different than the one Solas and Little share, and from what we’ve been able to put together it’s different from any Blessing that’s been given before on some important points. Reason was in her element and I, for one, was all to glad to let her expound on all the discoveries she’d made since we’d last spoken.

There was just the small little problem that I was completely overwhelmed by emotion.

Somewhat annoying that.

I mean, it wasn’t like I’d been struggling on my own for ages against a fate that was beyond horrifying and that I’d had absolutely no basis for hoping that I would ever see any of them again. 

Seriously, how hungry could one person be just for the sound of another’s voice?

And shouldn’t despair shattering feel good? Not like shards of glass finally raining down you?

Crying was stupid.

I was stupid.

Everything was stupid.

And they were hugging me.

And even the comfort felt impossible.

Like how could it be real?

My shadow made a funny warble, as if to say this whole ‘being comforted’ idea was foreign, and new to it, and unwelcome, and weird. 

And it wanted more.

And so did I.

“Maybe we can help with that?” Responsibility asked, appearing near me just like Beauty had.