“It worked!”

“Do I detect a note of surprise there my dear Helgon?”

“More than just a note! You yourself said our odds of success were only ‘fair’ at best.”

“And I stand by that appraisal.”

“Yes, we might have overdone it on the Apocalypse summoning didn’t we?”

“Shall I tell you a secret Helgon?”

“I usually enjoy learning secrets, though at this juncture I’m more impressed that we have any left to keep.”

“Oh a few still remain. Just unimportant little things though.”

“Well I should still like to hear this one, given that it occurs to you in what everyone will assume is our moment of triumph.”

“That will be the assumption, though in fact that moment remains lifetimes distant still.”

“It cheers me to hear you speak of lifetimes. I was afraid we would have far less time to enjoy our newly exalted states.”

“I know. And you will. Not so many perhaps as you might like I would venture to guess, but I believe you’ll find plenty of quiet days to pursue your dreams.”

“Dyrena, you must know, my dreams, they are all of…”

“The Beast is small.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“The Beast we summoned. The End of All Things. It is small.”

“I confess I am not understanding you, and I feel I often do. Leaving aside the measurements we’ve taken, there is the matter of its demonstrated might. At a minimum, the Beast lies at or beyond the outer edges for our calculations. In what manner is it ‘small’.”

“Our calculations were based on assumptions about universal cosmic laws. Ones which we presumed must apply elsewhere given that reality as we know it requires their precise structure. We didn’t calculate for alternate cosmic laws because we had no means of winnowing down a field of multiple infinities.”

“But you did. No, wait. You didn’t perform the calculations for all possible laws. You built a cosmos with different laws than our own?”

“Only a very tiny and very brief one. I had to validate the hypothesis that different laws were possible.”

“And you discovered that they were. Why keep that a secret though? We survived this Beast through good fortune and a clever scheme by Night. If we’d known this was as good a result as we might have achieved the others might have been persuaded to abandon this plan.”

“That is why. Our plan needed to go forward. It was the one chance to break the forbidden rituals.”

“That’s not something we can ever allow the others to become aware of. They would destroy you almost immediately if they learned you’d led us so close to disaster that we wound up reliant on the last remaining god.”

“Oh, but that’s something they must discover, and, though I know this is cruel, you must be the one to tell them.”

– Helgon attempting to celebrate the Neoterics’ success in the Sunfall while Dyrena toppled another domino in the plans for her own destruction.

Sasarai hadn’t gone anywhere it turned out. Which wasn’t terrible surprising. He had become a god after all, and where else would one expect to find a god than in a temple?

“You seem convinced that he’s still here, but when you burned up, he took the brunt of that blast,” Theia said, searching around inside the temple with me. “Night was able to save me, because, well darkness and light have that kind of relationship. Sasarai didn’t have that to fall back on though. All he had was that divine fragment you’d given him.”

“Believe it or not than was part of the plan too,” I said.

And what part was that? Diyas asked. 

She was lingering around to inspect the work she’d done on my new body I think. It had been quite a while since there’d been any Sentinels in the world, and I would guess relatively few of them chose to adopt a hybrid Dragon-Sylvan form like the one that felt both convenient and comfortable to me.

“With you as his only fallback, I presumed he’d try to make use of your healing domain if  anything happened to him,” I said. “Granted I’d been expecting it to be one of the other Neoterics that was ‘going to happen to him’ but this works too.”

And you would have seen him healed so that he could suffer further? Diyas asked, sounding intrigued at than idea rather than disapproving.

“If that was how it worked out, I wouldn’t have shed any tears, but your Blessed was able to give and deny access to your domain, which made it the safest one by far to let fall in Sasarai’s hands.”

“Even with the possibility that he might use it to make himself immortal?” Theia asked, continuing to search for our missing Neoteric.

She didn’t need to, I’d already found him, but I was enjoying our conversation so I didn’t interrupt her.

“He was already powerful enough that it was going to take impossible levels of effort to kill him,” I said. “Adding a bit of self-healing to that wasn’t going to make much difference.”

“But he did die, right? I can’t smell any of that gross Neoteric magic left here anymore.”

I gave the air a sniff. My sense of smell, especially in a hybrid form, wasn’t even vaguely close to Theia’s and even my full divine senses probably weren’t up to snuff in comparison to her. As far as I could tell though, she was right. There wasn’t any of the twisted, narcissistic Neoteric magic present at all.

“Nope. He’s not dead. He’d right here in fact,” I said and gestured to the small spot on the ground I was kneeling beside.

“There? But there’s nothing there? Just a worm,” Theia said.

I gave her a moment.

Theia’s a quick girl.

I like that about her.

And her ears.

What? The world wasn’t ending anymore, I was allowed to acknowledge how cute she was.

“Oh. Uh. Hold on…” she said, eyes going wide as she saw the slimy little critter wriggling blindly in the dirt.

“This wasn’t part of the plan, but I feel it does show why we should have faith,” I said, feeling smug.

Does it now? Draconia asked, an echoing smugness in her voice.

“So how long did you spend imagining this?” I asked her.

Seeing Sasarai brought low? Since about five minutes after he captured me. This particular fate however? Credit for that must go to Diyas.

It was a shared project, Diyas said. My domains reknit the physical form, but it was several of us who collaborated on ensuring he was gifted with the godhood he’s always coveted.

“Godhood? I mean, but….what? How? WHY?” Theia asked, her claws flexing in and out of her fingertips.

“He was too powerful to destroy. Talking with Little showed me that. Heck, meeting you showed it to me too. Night is powerful enough to hide our whole world from a Beast that destroyed the gods, and yet she’s hasn’t dealt with Sasarai or any of the other Neoterics. Not directly at least.”

“Night’s not usually a direct sort of person,” Theia said, “but I see where you’re coming from. You needed a trick.”

“More than a trick. I needed to give him something he wanted. I thought that would be access to Diyas’ healing domain, but they did so much more with it.”

Yes, he wanted godhood and with the return of all the grace his silly shrub was holding there was plenty available to add to the power he already possessed, Draconia said. Not to mention so many vacant positions he could fill.

“So what is his domain?” Theia asked.

“Worms. Mindless, common, worms.”

So many cycles of the world have been broken, Diyas said. Life cannot sustain itself outside the few havens the Neoterics erected. The worms will play a role in rejuvenating the soil so it can bear life once more.

“So we’re going to let him rebuild the world? Wasn’t that his plan in the first place?” Theia asked.

It was, which was made it so easy to lure him into his current role, Draconia asked.

“And how does he feel about it? Is he sitting in the heavens somewhere cackling about all this or is be being petty about getting stuck with a minor role like this?” Theia pointed at the worm which was futilely trying to dig through the stone it was laying on.

“He’s not in the heavens,” I said. “He’s right here.”

“Yeah, I know the gods are present everywhere their domains are. I’m talking about the part of him that remembers being an Neoteric Lord.”

“Yeah, so am I,” I said and gestured at the worm again. “That’s him. That’s all of him. A little god, wiggling away in the dirt.”

“No. Really? So if I step on him?” she asked.

Then he’d be the god of crushed worms as well, Diyas said. Probably best not expand his domains even that far.

“Would that make him more dangerous?” I asked, wondering what sort of calamity we were leaving for future generations to deal with.

Not especially, Draconia said. There might be someone more worthy of that domain though.

“So what’s he scheming up as a worm?” Theia asked, her gaze hard locked onto the hapless god at our feet.

He is his domain, Umbrielle said. Right now he’s scheming how to dig and find nourishment. Tomorrow he will be scheming how to dig and find nourishment. The day after that, the month after that, and all the years after than he will be eating dirt, forever in search of food to stave off starvation.

“And he’s not going to grow to be some building sized monster, right?” I felt it was a valid question given how much of a problem the Holy Tree had become.

That would be the domain of Giants, and it has been newly claimed by its first Blessed in this age, Umbrielle said.

“I thought you gods were supposed to be conceptual entities only? That the whole point of us Blessed was that we could manifest your powers in the material world,” Theia asked, a note of suspicion in her voice.

You are, Umbrielle said, and that is how it was. Perhaps one day we will return to the divine realms, but we won’t return unchanged, we can’t. We are what we’ve become here. 

Yes. What we were before? Even if we retrieved all our missing pieces, they wouldn’t fit back together as they once did, Draconia said. That doesn’t make us lesser. If anything, knowing this world as we do now, knowing you, who we were always so distant from, has made us more than we were.

“And Sasarai is going to get to enjoy that too?” I asked, unsure how I was feeling about his fate after all.

He will enjoy it or suffer it to the full capacity of a common worm, Umbrielle said.

Well, for now at least, Draconia said. He is something of an experiment after all.

“An experiment?” Theia asked, her voice as dubious as mine would have been.

The chance that we can regain all of our missing pieces is nonexistent, Umbrielle said.

The End of All Things destroyed so much of what we were, Draconia said with an unexpected tone of satisfaction in her voice.

What you’ve shown us is that among the things we’ve lost are the restrictions our earlier natures imposed on us, Umbrielle said.

The gods had been speaking amongst themselves it seemed, and while I was still fairly sure the broad strokes of what had happened hadn’t been either of their schemes, that didn’t mean they weren’t capable scheming on their own.

“He’s a new sort of god isn’t he?” I asked. “I can sense the divinity in him, but he’s bound in a material form.”

Exactly so, Draconia said. We cannot carry the weight of our domains alone anymore. We must shoulder the burden with you, and so with you is where we wish to be. A part of this world which we fell for, and which has brought us to a new life once more.