“What do you mean we can’t risk the wasteland?”

“I’m unclear what part of that statement is confusing to you Vaingloth?”

“That was not in our plan. That was not how we had ordained things to be. This world is supposed to be ours, Helgon. That is the part that is confusing me!”

“The world is ours. What’s left of it at any rate. We all have our cities, do we not?”

“That’s not the point Dyrena. We are supposed to have everything. We were supposed to be the Lord of a New World, not a dead one.”

“Well, things didn’t go exactly according to plan, did they. I’m still working on the calculations to explain what happened but…”

“What happened, Helgon, was that the God Devourer we summoned was too big. It was supposed to fall with the last of them. They were supposed to rid the world of each other so it could be ours!”

“They mostly did.”

“Mostly is not good enough Sasarai!”

“Isn’t it though? What did we really wish to attain from this? Power? We hold so much power we’re having to shunt it off into other venues lest it deify us to the point where the End of All Things notices us. That has to be the practical limit of the divine power that we could have gathered.”

“I see Vaingloth’s point. Power cannot truly measured as pure divine force, but rather our ability to exert our will on the world around us. With the wastelands closed and too perilous to travel, at least for ourselves, I imagine we can spare trade caravans of our peoples since the losses will be easily replenished, but with passage denied to us there are practical limits to the power we can exercise. Sasarai, you’ve spoken of your grand garden, but it will be forever constrained by your hedges, don’t you wish to expand it someday?”

“I don’t believe so Insikir. Endless expansion would, after all, eventually lead to an overlap between our realms, and no one wants that.”

“So we must all subsist on the miserable allotment of our own cities? Can we not devise a means of combatting the shattered spirits and fragments of the Beast? Malgenia, certainly she is capable of that?”

“Yes, but I do not wish to. I rather enjoy this world we have. It feels like home at last.”

– Dissension forms between the Neoteric Lords in their first post-Sunfall council, with violence mitigated by the practicality that none of them are physically present to be summarily murdered.

So we were lost in the Wastelands. The three of us.

Yep. Three.

How did we get here? Responsibility insists that it’s my fault, but, really, Vitor is to blame.

I mean, I suppose she’s not entirely wrong. It was my idea after all, and talking her into it wasn’t exactly easy.

“I’m not insane.” That had been the proper start of my arguments and, to be fair to Responsibility, it wasn’t the one I could offer a whole lot of support for.

I mean, you do hear voices, Beauty said.

Smart, helpful voices though, Inhibition countered.

She can see us too, but she could brush that aside as us being hallucinations, except for the small fact that Responsibility can see us as well, Reason said, smartly and helpfully.

“You know if we die in the wasteland, it’s the same as dying here right?” Responsibility had looked at me like it wasn’t a question of determining if I was broken but rather in how many different places and whether there was any chance I could be put back together.

“Technically, dying in the wasteland could be a whole lot worse than dying here,” I said, proving that I was entirely sane because I could acknowledge the issues we would face.

From Responsibility’s expression however it was clear my claim proved nothing.

“Also, we’re not going to die out there,” I said. “Out there I can use Malgenia’s power to cloak us both and no one will question it.”

“Yes. You’ve said that,” Responsibility said, not a single note of agreement in her tone. “The question though is; will any cloak you can raise actually keep out the things in the Wasteland.”

“With Malgenia’s power…?” I started to ask, but she cut me off.

“Yes, even with her power. She never ventured out into the Wastelands and none of the other Neoterics do either – unless that’s a lie too?” Her question at least showed she was still considering what I was suggesting.

“From what I’ve gathered, it’s not a lie. The Neoterics really don’t risk the Wasteland at all. They could, but they’re all faced with the wager of eternal life against whatever they’d want out there. Or almost all of them.”

“Almost? Oh. Malgenia’s different wasn’t she?”

“For a few important reasons. First, yes, her eternal life was different from theirs. There was a cost to her eternity which the rest didn’t have to pay. She didn’t care too much about that, but, she also didn’t care about exploring the wastelands either.”

“But she was always so curious, wasn’t she?” Responsibility had adapted to using the past tense with Malgenia rather well I thought. 

Given that she’d accepted Malgenia was, in fact, quite gone, I was tempted to resculpt the ‘body’ I was wearing to look like myself, but I didn’t trust the gossamer veil I’d cast over us to hold up long enough for me to change back in time if Vitor poked at it. I was pretty sure he wasn’t watching us, in part because Malgenia had always been a stickler for her privacy and in part because he wasn’t exactly the most subtle of the Neoterics. That gave me a feeling of security that I was certain would last right up until I discovered that he was more subtle than I wanted him to be.

“She was endlessly experimenting, the catch was that even a couple hundred years wasn’t long enough to run her out of things she could try from the comfort of her own domain.”

“And she was nothing is not lazy.”

“Heresy!” I feigned outrage, which earned me the eyeroll I deserved.

The Deaths all love Malgenia. She is literally divine in our eyes.

Was.

She was divine.

Responsibility still does better with getting the tenses right than I do. Maybe it’s seeing her memories from time to time that make her seem more ‘present’ in the present, if that makes any sense?

Anyways, we all loved Malgenia, but even from the few interactions we had with her, we all knew she had her own little foibles.

Honestly, it helped me love her more.

Sure, she was a goddess, a divinity made flesh, but she was also so, so happy when we made birthday sweets for her. She cooed over them like a little kid and twitched her toes each time we put a new one in front of her.

And she was killing us every couple years or so.

Which had sort of curdled a bit of the milk of love and kindness it was true, but I’d spent a long time knowing a different side of her, or imagining one, and it wasn’t terribly easy to let that go.

Anyways, she was lazy, most of us, or most of us who were paying attention, noticed that. She had her fixations and fascinations but if it involved real effort, well, that’s what the overseers, or other minions, or, in a pinch, Vitor were for.

“Doesn’t that present a problem though? If she hasn’t gone out into the Wasteland in all this time, how are you going to explain her sudden desire to risk a trip to the one place which all of the Neoterics are afraid of going?”

“Oh, that’s easy, I’m not planning to explain anything,” I said. “I mean, when was the last time Malgenia was forthcoming with any explanations for her ideas? Like ever?”

Sometimes the manner in which my former Lord and Mistress lived her life was extremely convenient, which on reflection made a lot sense given that she had the power several gods and an aversion of inconvenience.

“Fair. In theory that would mean that you could just cloak us here though, oh, or, I see. If you did that it would raise questions that Vitor or one of the others might feel like going to the trouble to get answers to.”

Responsibility couldn’t read my mind, but it was so refreshing to have someone who understood how I thought.

We understand how you think, Beauty said.

We just don’t always agree with you, Inhibition said.

Consider how often we don’t say anything. At least half that time it’s because we agree with you. Reason was being mean. Because she liked teasing me. I could only imagine what a nightmare she’d been for Beauty when they were both alive.

Picture you and Responsibility but about five times worse, Beauty said.

Hey!

What? I’m being nice! I didn’t say ten times!

“So the plan is you and I sneak off alone, head to the Wasteland, we train for the right way to do the Assumption Ritual and then…what? Let’s say it goes right and we manage it, then what do we do?”

“Oh there will be so many possibilities then,” I said. “Simplest one. I come back and say I tried a variation of the ritual which didn’t seem to make a difference. You come back and simply cloak yourself so that you can move around and live as you like. Or we just don’t come back.”

“Not sure how well that would work, but, okay, we’d have to power to figure things out then. Sounds like we might have a plan.”

We did not have a plan.

Vitor, happily, had not been spying on us. He was however increasingly paranoid that I wasn’t going to perform the Assumption Ritual and so, of course, was waiting in Malgenia’s foyer as soon as I returned.

“You seem cheerful,” he said, with the sort of guarded caution any living being should have on seeing Malgenia smiling.

Since telling him “I’m in love with one of my Deaths are we’re going to run away together and live happily ever after” wasn’t even vaguely an option, I had to scramble to come up with some other excuse.

I could have told him I’d found a new method of killing things, but while that would have delighted Malgenia I was also reasonably sure I couldn’t possibly manage to devise anything that wasn’t old hat for her. So I had to slide closer to the truth.

“I’m going to be taking a trip,” I told him, freezing the delight on my face and silently commanding him to not inquire any further.

“Where?” he asked, growing visibly more concerned.

“The Wastelands!” I said. Was it the right answer? Better question, was there anywhere else I could name that wouldn’t immediately be revealed to be a lie the moment I ventured into the wastelands? Right, so the bad answer was the only answer.

“What? Why?” Vitor might have been asking out of concern as a brother, he might have been asking out of worry as a Neoteric Lord, but I think he was mostly asking out of sheer disbelief.

Which made sense.

What reason could I possibly have for doing something as unhinged as risking the wastelands?

“I want to find something to kill,” I said, a half baked, truly idiotic idea forming in my head.

“Everything living is here though? There’s nothing to kill out there!” He wasn’t wrong about that, but he wasn’t entirely right either.

“I know. That’s why I’m going to go kill it,” I said. It was a lot easier to lean into Malgenia’s unique brand of madness when I was contemplating something truly mad.

“Mal, this doesn’t make sense. Are you just trying to put off the Assumption Ritual? I know it was rough last time, but that was a fluke. I’m sure it’ll be better this time.”

“Oh, it will, and no, I’m not running from the ritual at all. I picked a Death and I’m going to bring her with me. She’s going to be my reserve if I need one during the hunt.”

“Hunting what? There’s nothing to hunt out there!”

“Exactly! We’re going to hunting Nothing. What did Vaingloth call it? The End of All Things? It’s time that dies too, don’t you agree?”