“It’s rather surprising with the collection of individuals we’ve recruited for this endeavor that we don’t have any concerns about internecine strife undermining our efforts, wouldn’t you say Vaingloth?”
“I wouldn’t say anything of the sort Helgon. What I would say is that our current state of detente has required a great deal of design and orchestration, and that I, for one, will be all too glad once our ‘endeavor’ as you called it concludes.”
“Oh? Will we be in a more stable state then?”
“Of course, of course! We’ll be immortal by then after all.”
“Well, somewhat immortal. It will only be conditional immortality, correct?”
“Conditional? Bah. We’ll have the powers of the gods. Who will there be to oppose us at that point?”
“Well, each other I imagine. Isn’t that the problem we were discussing?”
“Ah, but by then we will have no need to oppose each other you see Helgon.”
“Do I?”
“Yes, you do. We will each have our own domains, separated from one another across the face of the world. What you chose to do in your domain will be of no concern to any of the rest of us. Just as nothing we do will be of concern to you.”
“I suppose projecting power outside our domains will be difficult, so that should offer some security. Still though if several of us agreed to work together…”
“If we agreed to work together against another, surely it would only be after all diplomatic options had been exhausted and that too is important. We need to be able to, collectively, keep one another in check. Can’t allow one of our number to do anything too terribly foolish when we have the power to destroy the world after all.”
“And the threat of censure by the rest will act as a natural guardrail against such behaviors I take it?”
“Excactly. With none of us able to menace the rest independently, we shall all enjoy a peaceful eternity together.”
“None of us except Malgenia.”
“What?”
“None of us will be able to menace another, except Malgenia, who could menace us all if she choose. She’s part of the reason I say we’re only conditionally immortal.”
“Well, yes, that’s true. But she’s not interested in such things. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”
– Helgon almost getting Vaingloth to admit the obvious flaws in his long term plans.
You would think it would be difficult to feel an overwhelming love for someone and simultaneously want to throttle them.
Or you would if you weren’t me gazing on Responsibility.
Part of me was happy really. The urge to strangle her told me that this was my Responsibility sitting beside me. My beloved Responsibility. My beloved, idiotic, infuriating Responsibility.
“We, as I believe I just explained, cannot perform the Assumption Ritual,” I said, exercising Supreme Divine Patience, which was not in fact a gift of Malgenia’s portfolio, and which I did not in fact truly possess.
“We can, and we will,” Responsibility said, as resolute as I had ever known her to be.
Seriously, having all this power sucked. Why couldn’t I just be me again? Punching her until she shut up or made sense, or knocked me out, that was always a significant possibility, would just have been so much simpler.
“The Assumption Ritual can’t work if we’re not willing to fight. If we attempt it, one of two things will happen…”
“One of three things,” Responsibility cut me off to point out. “And we can determine which of those three it will be.”
“Three? No. If we’re not willing to fight it out properly, then one or the other of us will hold the claim to all of Malgenia’s power, or, far worse, neither of us will, and then it will destroy pretty much everything.”
“Or, and hear me out on this, we fight.” She had that smug look on her face that said she’d figured something out that I was being an idiot for missing.
Oh! Oh, yeah, she is good, Beauty said.
Is she? I mean I think she’s missing…oh, OH! I see, yeah, she is good, Reason said, being careful I was sure to give me not one damn clue of what she and all the rest of the them had figured out.
Take a moment, you’ll get it, Diyas said, which was just wonderful. Even my god was toying with me.
“You’re cute when you frown,” Responsibility said.
“I look like Malgenia,” I grumbled.
“Yeah, but I know it’s you in there,” Responsibility said.
And, as predicted, I got it.
I hate you all, I said to my inner chorus.
“I don’t know if that’s going to work,” I said, mostly to be difficult since it felt like the kind of thing that might be possible, and might be our only hope.
“It might not.” Responsibility was only agreeable when she knew she’d already convinced me.
Ugh. Had we already gotten married at some point? How did she know me that well!
“You really think fighting FOR each other instead of against each other is something we can do?” I asked, failing to suppress any of the whininess or uncertainty in my voice.
“Kiss me again and we’ll see,” she said.
It was a fair point.
And I was very stupid.
How had I not seen this as an option before?
Because that would have required admitting that you actually liked her? Beauty said.
And believing that she loved you enough to fight for you like you would fight for her, Inhibition said.
And they were both right.
Which was exactly as hard to accept as I’d have imagined it to be, if I’d let myself imagine it at all.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “We’re still working on translating the original version of the ritual. There might be another answer.”
“Are you withdrawing your proposal?” Responsibility asked already knowing the answer.
I paused.
I should, shouldn’t I? If I really loved her, and my earlier protests aside, I did, I couldn’t really deny that, but if I really loved her, shouldn’t I have wanted to protect her from the insanity of the Assumption Ritual? I knew how bad it was, and she didn’t.
Also, forget the danger to the world, and to myself, could I really do that to someone who was important to me?
“I still want you forever, whether or not we do this,” I said. Because I was greedy.
“I think this is the only way we get to have forever,” Responsibility said. “Or even much longer at all if what you’ve said is true. You put performing the Assumption ritual off as long as you could already haven’t you?”
“It wasn’t needed at first, Malgenia’s power was diminished a bit after I, you know, tore her to pieces. After that? Well just getting a handle on all this is kind of still a work in progress.”
“That’s going to be true for the Assumption Ritual too. It’s usually a month of preparations right? Can you make it that long?”
I got up and started pacing in response. It was a question where I knew what the answer had to be but that didn’t mean I was at all certain what the answer was.
“I can, mostly because I have to,” I said. “I’ve got some assistance there that I can fall back on.”
“Diyas? She can help you with that?”
Of course I can! I’m a god! Diyas wasn’t actually offended, you could tell by lack of Divine Smiting, but her point was a valid one.
“Does that seem weird?” I asked. “Early on, my ability to hold things together was almost entirely her.”
“She’s not all that she was though, right?”
Well. No. Grumbly gods are delightful. Seriously I highly recommend connecting with one. I believe Smiting was suggested as an option. Happily, they don’t often smite their Blessed, especially not the ones who luv them so, so much.
{Divine grumbling}
“She’s a bit more limited. We’ve been working on that though,” I said, letting Diyas grumble without commenting on it.
“Working on it how?” It was weird that talking about something as intimate as my secret faith was somehow easier that a publicly acknowledge ritual which had been going on for lifetimes now.
“We’ve been collecting Diyas’ other fragments from the wasteland and putting her back together as much as we could.”
“How?”
“It’s pretty easy. Each fragment is her and they all want to be together, so we just…”
“No, I mean how are you finding fragments in the wasteland?”
“Oh. That’s the ghost’s job.”
“The…ghost’s job?”
“Yeah, when Malgenia said she was the Neoteric Lord of the Dead, she was not kidding. Some of her power is bound up in the literal army of the dead she has on call. Or that I have on call now I guess. Anyways, they’ve been a lot of help.”
“Why haven’t we never seen them? A lot of the Deaths spend time watching the wasteland?”
“We’re nowhere close to the other Neoteric and the wastelands are so much vaster than what we can see,” I said, casting my thoughts to the visions I’d seen both in Malgenia’s memories and through through the sense of the ghosts I’d sent out.
“Aren’t those areas claimed by the other Neoterics though? Or was Malgenia’s claim that the Neoteric had taken all the corners of the world under the protection another lie?” She didn’t sound angry about that, just curious, but that was largely because we’d all learned to hide our true feelings lest we risk the ire of the overseers or, unimaginable worse, Malgenia herself.
“It’s not going to surprise you when I say that was a titanic lie is it? I think the Neoterics claimed the areas as ‘their cities’ and enormous buffer areas around them.”
It was something I was not entirely unhappy about since the distance the Neoterics had enforced between themselves (Vitor and Malgenia excepted) meant that they didn’t casually drop in on each other. The prospect of someone like Vaingloth or Sasarai visiting me, ever, was spectacularly unappealing. I would have tried setting up my own domain if a.) it wouldn’t have given me away in a heartbeat and b.) run into the issue of where the land would have come from (not to mention the population that I needed to support the Deaths) (I’d considered using the citadels that Dyrena or Helgon had been given but it turned out that, technically, those areas had been divided up between the other Neoterics already).
“That’s why there were still fragments to be found, wasn’t it?” Responsibility asked.
“Yeah. Malgenia didn’t believe in keeping any of the fragments, and apparently the other Neoterics weren’t interested in them enough to brave the dangers out there. Or, that’s not right. They were interested, but the number of remaining fragments outside their hoards weren’t worth the effort, especially since it would leave them vulnerable to each other.”
“How long did it take you to figure that out?” Responsibility asked, wearing her ‘I’m calculating something important, so keep talking I need more info for the equation’ expression.
“A while, figuring out Malgenia’s life, even with some of her memories has been a full time job. The good news is, I haven’t really had anything else to do for the last couple of years.”
When I put it like that it sounds like my life as Malgenia was constant struggle and peril. Which was pretty much exactly accurate. I still felt terrible vocalizing it though, like I was asking for sympathy that I hadn’t really earned. It wasn’t like Responsibility’s life had been all that delightful either.
“Do you think you’d be able to give me a crash course in what you’ve learned then?” she asked, the equations still turning in her head.
“I can try, but there’s an obvious problem with that.”
“If you name me as the next Assumption candidate, I’ll have to do a months worth of ‘Final Training’ with the overseers to prepare me, and after that we’ll be expected to perform the Ritual right away.”
“Yeah. Malgenia had the ceremonies around the Ritual down to an old tradition. I could try to meet with you at night, but…”
“But it wouldn’t be enough time, and it would attract a lot of attention. Malgenia normally doesn’t spend any time with the candidate, and if she does Vitor would definitely spy on what we were saying.”
“We could use the garden to enjoy some privacy,” I said, enticed by the idea of spending time together.
“That would definitely attract suspicion though.” She wasn’t wrong about that, but something she’d said earlier came back to me.
“You know, there is one other place it would be perfectly reasonable for me to keep us cloaked.”
I conjured a vision of the two of us venturing out into the wasteland, overlaying it with all of the monsters which I knew to be out there. Monsters even the Neoterics feared. Monsters I suspected we needed to go meet.