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

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

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

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

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

“Oh. Well, no.”

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

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

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

“No! No! I’ll never find them again!”

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

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

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

“Hmm, perhaps a garden. For my art.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or rather a divine commandment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I still believed in her.

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

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

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

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

“We need to regroup,” Beauty said.

“We can hardly ungroup,” Inhibition said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could.

I didn’t want to.

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

Instead I kept my eyes quite normal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were giving me space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the Beast? 

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

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

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

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

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