“Vitor, do we really need the others?”

“Need them for what Malgenia?”

“Exactly! I’ll go see them now!”

“No! No! Wait, apologies sister, I was distracted there. Let’s try this again; what, specifically, are you referring to?”

“The others, Vaingloth, Sasarai, Helgon and the whole lot of them. I was just thinking wouldn’t we be able to end the world without them? I mean you’re talented, I’m talented. We could just do all this on our own couldn’t we?”

“They’ve asked you to write another report didn’t they?”

“No. I mean yes. But do we really need them?”

“We do dear sister. Weren’t you just saying that Dyrena helped you with one of the wards you were working on? They all have areas of speciality where they excel beyond us.”

“But we don’t need them.”

“Okay, which one of them, exactly, do you think we don’t we need?”

“Any of them!”

“Even Dyrena?”

“No. She’s fine. She can stay.”

“What about Helgon? His automatons have been helpful haven’t they?”

“They’re cold and pointless, but, yes, they’ve been okay.”

“Then whom among them would be the first to go?”

“I don’t know. All the rest of them. We don’t need Kurst do we? What has he ever done for us?”

“Aside from visit you yesterday? If I remember correctly I was busy with Helgon or I would have joined that meeting. What was it you two spoke about?”

“What else? Contracts.”

“That it was Kurst does. Let me guess, he asked for your input, written input, on how the non-aggression contracts could be formulated such that long term Necromantic effects were covered as well?”

“He’s a jerk.”

“Yes he is. And also a fool. He seems to think that his little bindings would be able to hold sway over you as you are now. Imagine the surprise he’s in after our ascendance should he ever give you cause to show him where the limits of his little contracts fall short.”

“Oh. Oh yes. That could be a delight!”

– Malgenia and Vitor plotting what would become the second death of a Neoteric Lord.

I’d expected Responsibility to be shattered by awe. Quaking in her slippers. Ghostly pale. Trembling head to toe. 

I had been the first time I’d met Diyas and it seemed only fair that Responsibility should have the same, full experience that I’d received.

Instead she simply waved to my goddess.

“Oh, hello,” she added and moved over a bit so that Inhibition and Reason shuffled as well making space for Diyas to sit beside them if she wanted to.

“Once upon a time, I’m guessing no one would have sat down in the presence of a god?” Beauty said without rising from beside me.”

“No. Once upon a time, appearing like this would only have been possible at a moment of Divine Revelation, and those come only when a mortal is ready to receive them.” Diyas took the offered seat and slumped against the backrest as though she was embodiment of laziness rather than the Avatar of Life.

“How are you able to appear like this now then?” Responsibility asked, when the question should have been how Responsibility herself was so calm about meeting an actual deity!

I was about to burst out with those exact words when the answer hit me. 

Or answers.

First, Responsibility wasn’t calm. She was fried. Hitting her with “Malgenia’s gone and your greatest rival is wearing her body” pretty much broke her ability to react to absurd, world-altering revelations. 

Second, apart from her initial proclamation to establish who and what she was, Diyas was not wearing her Divine Essence as a “Mantle of Awe”. Diyas looking casual and relaxed was perfectly intentional, and thinking for a moment (which, honestly, how often do any of us bother with that?) was enough to show me why. We didn’t need Responsibility awed. We needed her on our side of her own volition. Forcing her to do what we wanted, even if that coercion was subtle and divine in nature would strip away any chance of success.

“I’m not what I once was,” Diyas said. “Still a god, despite the rumors of our death to the contrary, though there’s some truth to those as well.”

“So you are or are not a god then?” Responsibility asked with the simple curiosity of someone who knew what they were seeing wasn’t, couldn’t be, real and so didn’t actually matter enough to be worried about.

“She’s a piece of herself,” I said since gods needed to be careful of explaining themselves too much. 

From the hints Diyas had given me, they were sort of like ideas, only more independent. The problem was if they said something about themselves, it was all too possible for that to become true, or worse, the only truth. In that sense, I was the less malleable of the two of us, though changing who Diyas was hadn’t been something an apocalypse had been capable of doing so I was pretty sure I had some of the nuance wrong there.

“Quite a lot of pieces in fact,” Reason said. 

“We’ve spent most of the time since Insight freed us finding as many of Diyas’ other pieces as we could,” Inhibition said.

“Pieces?” Responsibility was coming dangerously close to believing what was right in front of her.

“The Sunfall happened,” I said, offering it as a reassurance that not everything we learned was a lie. “Malgenia, Vitor and the other Neoteric Lords – there were twelve of them, not nine by the way – they stole the grace they were supposed to be sending to the gods and summoned the End of All Things. It attacked the gods first, and almost all of them were destroyed fighting it. Or, why do we ‘destroyed’ or ‘killed’? Wouldn’t ‘broken’ be more accurate?”

“Not necessarily,” Diyas said, and, like always, offered no further information.

Was it because we were all clever little beasts and could figure it out for ourselves?

Yes. Let’s go with that. Diyas shared with me alone.

“The battle against the Beast changed them,” Beauty said. “The gods we have now are fundamentally different from what they were before.”

“Ah. True. They’re grounded in this world rather than existing solely on the divine plane,” Reason said.

“I don’t recall mentioning that?” Diyas said.

“You didn’t have to oh Divine One. We are clever little beasts after all,” I said. 

One should always and at every opportunity, tease one’s god.

Yes. Clearly the wisest course of action, Diyas quipped to me alone (I think?)

I was being completely sincere on that though! 

I am fully aware of that, Diyas said. Without smiting me, I would like to point out.

“I have to confess, I’m still lost,” Responsibility said. “Am I actually dead? Is this a special hell you’ve put me in? Oh no! No! Insight! No more lying. Malgenia killed me and dumped my soul into your keeping didn’t she!?”

“Responsibility. I need you to look at me, look directly into my eyes, and try to make the claim that I am smart enough to come up with ANY of this? Go ahead. Try. I dare you.”

I leaned forward and regarded her with as honest and open an expression as I knew how to make. I had the advantage of having zero to hide from her at this point.

Can I mention how good that felt? How after two years of pretending to be the worst monster in the world who I’d love more than my own blood, I was finally, FINALLY, able to drop the damn act and talk to someone who I could not only trust but who would not worship me in the slightest?

I mean, yes, I had the other Deaths, and Diyas. None of them were in the ‘worship Insight’ camp, but we were bound so close together that I sometimes lost a sense of where I ended and where they began.

Responsibility though? She was wholly and completely her own creature. Not only capable but also entirely willing to stab me when the need arose.

Was it weird that I wanted Clarity here just so we could fight over her again?

Yeah. That’s weird.

Whatever.

“Oh frozen hells, you’re not kidding,” Responsibility said and glanced over at Diyas again, taking the god in a bit more completely this time.

“Haven’t been this whole time,” I said. “Need to stab me again?”

It was an honest offer but not the stress valve I’d hoped it would be.

“Okay, no, wait, no, you said you needed me. Why? Why in all this would you need me? Me of all the Deaths?” Responsibility said, looking from Beauty sitting beside me to Inhibition and Reason sitting beside her.

“Do you want the short form or the full explanation?” I asked.

“Both,” she said, breathing in a long, controlled inhalations and exhalations to center herself.

“The short form is that we’re all stuck in a cycle. Malgenia eating the Deaths that were raised for her was entirely of her own volition, at least at first, but if I choose to not continue that trend, the whole world dies. I don’t mean the people on it. I mean the base physical materials of the world. All of it. Gone. With you though, maybe we can fix that.”

“I think I am going to need the long form,” Responsibility said and glanced back at Diyas as though to make sure the god hadn’t just been a hallucination.

“The Neoteric Lords are all ‘immortal’. It’s a limited form of immortality – they’re not unkillable, they’ve proven that on three separate occasions already, but their lives are essentially unlimited. Disease, poison, most kind of wounds, even a lot of spells just simply don’t affect them. I pulled some of that from Malgenia’s scattered memories and some of it from her notes so I’m pretty sure it’s universally true for the other Neoterics. Malgenia herself was a special case though.”

“Can we come back to the Malgenia’s memories part of things?”

“Definitely. We’ll get there pretty soon in fact. As I was saying though, the other Neoteric Lords all harvest the grace their people generate for them. The surviving ones have various individual schemes which augment that, but for all practical purposes they have the power to exist for as long as they want to.”

“Malgenia’s not weaker than them though. We’ve seen how Vitor treats her.”

“You’ve seen it. I’ll wager you a weeks worth of suppers that about half the Deaths haven’t paid enough attention to see anything about Vitor except what we’re told to see.”

“Fair. Also, do you still need supper?”

“Sadly no. Malgenia’s form of immortality is different from the rest. Where they all have a population they keep, she only had us Deaths, and our grace wasn’t useful for her.”

“But I…we, we were so devout! What are the other peoples like?”

“Far less devout, but first there’s far too few of us to sustain a Neoteric Lord, and second, Malgenia couldn’t use our grace because her essence was almost perfectly death-aligned. The other needed to gather power over centuries to masquerade as the gods they can pretend to be today. Malgenia didn’t need to do that because when the Sunfall happened, she was the one who absorbed all the energy from the deaths that followed.”

“Why would she need us then? We couldn’t be anymore than the tiniest of drops compared to everyone and everything that died?”

“You would be surprised. Every life is holds worlds of possibility,” Diyas said. “Balancing eternities was something even we deities found challenging.”

“Also, we had something Malgenia couldn’t get from any of the dead things she laid claim to,” I said. “We lived. We were, or are for you, a part of this world. Malgenia absorbed so much power, and she was so strong in Necromancy before the Sunfall that she was always teetering on the edge of an actual divine Ascension.”

“I thought she had become the God of Death?”

“She could have, but that would have destroyed her. Remember, they summoned the Beast of the End of All Things? It’s still there, prowling the Divine Realms. Malgenia didn’t need us to extend her life. She’d kind of never had a life. She needed to take our lives to keep her mortal enough to exist here.”

“But you said she’s gone now. Why do you need me?”

“Because someone needs to give me back my mortality.”