“Vitor, I must ask, has your sister been like that her whole life?”

“Like what Helgon?”

“Well, dead.”

“She’s not dead Helgon. You spoke with her yesterday.”

“Yes. That was when I confirmed her, umm, state.”

“Her state? Helgon, you are aware that we have actual work to be doing here are you not?”

“Oh I am, I am. I was simply curious. It’s not often that one sees a dead woman walking around after all. Or, is she a woman?”

“Yes Helgon. My sister is a woman. She has been since the day she was born and, so far as I am aware, has embraced that designation whole heartedly.”

“A woman since she was born? Wouldn’t she have been a child when she was born? I mean, I suppose it was up to her, but I would have thought appearing as a full grown woman might have given away the illusion rather quickly.”

“You know Vaingloth tried to warn me about this. I hate to give him any credit, but in this at least, he was correct.”

“Correct about what? Your sister being odd for being a woman from birth.”

“She will kill me if I let that stand. But it’s like talking to a rock.”

“Is there a talking rock here? You seem to be distracted.”

“No, sorry Helgon. Not distracted. Just considering enlisting my sister’s aid with certain necromantic procedures.”

“Quite understandable. Being dead like she is certainly provides her with a fluency with the Divine Words needed for our necromantic rituals which none of us can match.”

“Oh why today. Why any day. Helgon, my dear compatriot. Please explain why you believe my sister to be dead. In your explanation consider the fact that dead people do not, as a rule, walk around and talk, as you yourself have personally witnessed her doing.”

“But she doesn’t. Didn’t you know? What we see and interact with, that’s a construct. We had to take some readings of our Elemental Affinities last week. Here, look at the results for Malgenia. She is nearly pure Death aligned. There are undead with more traces of life than she has.”

– High Accessors Helgon and Vitor discovering that their Aetheric Sensors have limitations they were unaware of, whereas Malgenia might not.

She stabbed me. It was a reflex, and it left me on knees crying an unmitigated flood of tears.

Responsibility had stabbed me. With the special blade from her arm sheath. The one she’d stabbed me with the first time.

I was so, so happy.

Also laughing.

Which, you know, I can see in hindsight was not the most comforting reaction I could have had.

Not to make excuses for you, or any of us, Beauty said, but this has all been a lot more than we should have been capable of dealing with.

And to her credit, Responsibility, didn’t run away, Inhibition said.

Responsibility, of course, could not hear them. The other Deaths who proceeded me were speaking only in my head.

We could change that, but maybe talk to her first, Reason suggested.

I dried my eyes.

Empty heavens I loved her.

Stabbing me right away!

So perfect.

My second favorite Death, despite her perfection, was having a rough time it turned out though.

“My Lady! My Lady! No! Wait. What have I…”

I raised my left index finger to quiet, if not entirely calm her.

“What you always do when I piss you off, Responsibility.” I drew the blade out of my heart. Damn that had been a good shot. She really was talented. “And what I very much needed you to do.”

“I don’t…no…I don’t…”

Was she overwhelmed? Of course. Malgenia was the foundation the lives of the girls raised as her “Deaths of whatever” were built upon. My revelation was going to force her to recontextualize everything she’d ever been told and everything she believed. That was not a fun process, and it took so much longer than felt at all reasonable.

We’re still working on it too you know, but it gets more manageable, Beauty said.

“Come here. There is a lot we need to talk about,” I said and with a wave grew two park benches up from the dead and thorny vines around us. 

I could have left the benches covered in thorns – Malgenia’s body didn’t care about them anymore than it had cared about the stab wound – but I made them cushiony and smooth. Responsibility was having a bad enough day. She did not need any minor torture to go along with it.

Taking her by the hand – again not a thing Malgenia ever did with us – I directed her to one bench while I took the one opposite her.

“I can think of a thousand questions that are storming around in your mind,” I said. “Let me answer some of the quick ones. First, this is not a test of your faith. Second, you can trust me exactly as much as you ever have, which is to say not at all and entirely, and I believe you can tell which situations each of those apply to. Lastly, I cannot say I will do you no harm, because I clearly already have. What I can say is that I will honor your choices and that you do not need to fear me.”

“Because fear does not save us from what we cannot change or resist,” Responsibility said, eyes downcast. It was a mantra we learned as children when we woke with night terrors. I’m not sure who the mantra ever helped, I suspect no one, but it did teach us not to bother our instructors at night and to hide those emotions away as tightly as we could.

“Because I need you,” I said, wishing I had Malgenia was still around so I could throttle her a bit more.

“Why?” she managed to whisper the word through the tears that were threatening to flood down her face.

“Because I’m an abomination and I need your help to stop this cycle we’re all caught in,” I said, offering the simplest explanation I could think of.

You didn’t need to call yourself an abomination, Insight said.

Technically you’re an aberration, Reason added, ever-so-helpfully. We all are. 

“You can’t be Insight,” Responsibility said. “Insight descended. She’s a demigod now.”

Yeah.

That’s what I was supposed to be.

Or that’s what we’d been promised.

And Responsibility couldn’t look at me, so I breathed in and called two things to mind; who I used to be and the divine power Malgenia carried.

“Responsibility. Look at me,” I said, wearing the form of my old body once more.

“No. No…this has to be a trick.”

“I wish it was. I wanted so much to a queen of the underworld. But that’s not what Malgenia needed me for.”

“It’s not what she needed any of us for,” Beauty said, no longer speaking only in my head but instead drawing on Malgenia’s power to appear as the ghostly image of  the girl she’d been in life.

Clarity was prettier of course.

It’s not a competition, Beauty said, sharing that one with only me.

“Not everything she told us was a lie…” Inhibition said, manifesting on the bench beside Responsibility.

“But most of it was,” Reason said, manifesting on Responsibility’s other side. “What we knew of her, what we our destiny was supposed to be, what really happened in the Sunfall…”

“Almost none of it was the truth,” I said.

“How?” Responsibility asked.

“How could she? Easily. She had power beyond measure and had never had to face any consequences for the harm she inflicted.”

“No. How could we not have known? This can’t be…we would, someone would…”

“You did. I did too, but a lot later than you.” I wasn’t trying to be reassuring, which was good because my words didn’t seem to comfort Responsibility at all.

“No. NO! I was faithful. I was…”

“You questioned. You watched and you evaluated. You, more than any of the others, actually thought about what we were doing.”

“That’s not true. Clarity is a lot smarter than I am.”

“Well, of course. I mean, that’s Clarity. She’s…Clarity.”

That, surprisingly, earned me a chuckle from her.

“You sound just like her,” Responsibility said.

“Clarity? I have never sounded half as smart as Clarity and you know it!” I said it on reflex and it was the least Malgenia thing I could have said, so, terrible for my disguise, but I think exactly what I needed in that moment.

Yes, yes, you’re brilliant, we all know, Reason chided me privately.

“Empty heavens but you really do. And you look like her too. Insight, is it really…?”

“Yes blockhead. It’s really me. Want me to drown you again?”

That bought me a look of shocked recognition. When the Deaths had little squabbles like that one of our unspoken yet ironclad rules was that we kept it to ourselves. Our instructors were kept out of it as completely as we could and Malgenia was absolutely not allowed to hear even a whisper of our conflicts.

“Okay. This is too much,” Responsibility said.

“I get that. Trust me. It’s been almost two years and I am still processing all this. Feel free to freak out as much and as long as you want.”

“But the others…?”

“Do you think anyone is going to breath a single question to you demanding answers about what Malgenia took you away in secret to do?”

“But Clarity, she’ll be worried.”

“Thousand hells. Yeah. She will be. Okay. We’ll keep this short then. But you do need time. And you need answers. What do you think, maybe we can limit this to an hour today? Malgenia’s whims could last that long right?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Yes! Seriously when was I ever the smart one of the two of us? I’d bring Clarity in on this to but…”

“No. No, she cannot be part of this.”

“I KNOW! Trust me…I know. I know exactly how messed up this is making you feel, and I don’t want that for her, or any of the others.”

“But it’s okay for me?”

“Yes. No. Yes. I need you. And if this makes you hate me then all the better!”

“I don’t understand any of this. I…I’m going to assume you really are the Death of Insight that I knew, and that the story they told us, that we would descend and become Demigods in the Underworld, Queens under Malgenia’s godly rule, was all lies, but that doesn’t make any of it make any sense at all.”

“Let’s start there then. I’ve learned an awful lot but it’s been the other Deaths here who helped me understand it. And kept me however sane I can claim to still be. Ask us the questions that seem the most important to you and we’ll try to answer them so that it all fits together in your head.”

“Okay. Fine. Let’s begin with them, you all, that is. What are you?”

“We’re the part of who we were that Malgenia didn’t consume,” Reason said.

“You could call us Soulforms. I think that’s the technical term she had for us,” Inhibition said.

“We’re bound into the construct of Malgenia’s power,” Beauty said. “She consumed our bodies and our lives, but our memories, our spirits, and our souls weren’t anything she needed.”

“We should have fallen down into her underworld with all the other souls of the dead she has trapped there, but we wound up getting caught in the web of her power,” Inhibition said.

“The other Deaths she’s consumed over the years are trapped here too but most of them are lost in a kind of slumber,” Reason said.

“Just like we were,” Inhibition said.

“Until she came along,” Beauty said, sitting down beside me and throwing a ghostly arm over my shoulders.

“Yeah. I was able to wake them up because we’d met and they knew me,” I said.

“But how were you able to do that? Shouldn’t you be dead too?” Responsibility asked.

“Oh, I’m not like them at all,” I said. “When Malgenia tried to consume me to extend her life again, I had a surprise ready for her.”

“THAT WOULD BE ME,” Diyas said, the dead vines of Malgenia’s Garden surging with life as my god made the kind of entrance that only an incarnate deity can.