“We’re doomed.”

“We’re not doomed. It is simply 2:00 in the morning and you haven’t eaten anything in the last forty eight hours.”

“I haven’t had time to eat because we are doomed, Helgon. Completely and utterly doomed.”

“Drink this my dear Dyrena.”

“What is it?”

“Hydration.”

“I have water spells for that.”

“This hydration comes in the form of a chocoberry float, with freshly made ice cream.”

“Freshly made? By who?”

“My calculations were done early and I needed a new skill to work on.”

“You…thank you Helgon. Oh my, this is delicious!”

“I’m going to attribute that mostly to your hunger. There is a tray of loaded Dorit Chips as well. Nibble on those and tell me what has you stymied.”

“The summoning ritual. We know it can be pierce the outer veils of our cosmos, but there’s no means to mend the rift once it’s been made.”

“I see, so we can summon the god-killer that we need but we’ll be leaving the door open for an endless parade of similar creatures to follow it?”

“Far worse than that. Once the rift begins to form, it will continue to grow, exponentially.”

“And of course the others won’t believe that.”

“They’ve already rejected the papers I provided on dynamic grace oscillations as being based on ‘conservative estimates’. If even one of those estimates is correct though, a cascade failure it inevitable.”

“Based on your previous work, I feel it’s safe to assume all of your estimates are likely to be correct. I do wonder at the direction of the cascade failure though.”

“The direction? Oh. Hmm. Yes. Yes! We might be able to influence that. Let me see, ah, here it is. Yes! If we invert roughly half the ritual we have designed so far, it will fail, catastrophically, but, but!, it will fail towards the rift closing itself after the briefest of moments. Helgon you are a demon and a delight!”

– High Accessors Helgon and Dyrena discovering anew that ritual magics are ‘non-trivial’ to develop and work with.

A month is a long time to be out in the Wastelands. A lot of things will try to kill you in that time. Silly things. Foolish things. Things that really didn’t deserve what I did to them, but after the first week of failures, I had a lot of frustrations to work out.

“Is it possible that this idea isn’t going to work?” Responsibility asked, giving voice to the thought that had been growing on all of us for at least two weeks.

“I can’t accept that,” Clarity said, having more patience and stubbornness than both Responsibility and I combined it turned out.

“I could, but Clarity was right from the start. The two person version of the Assumption Ritual was never going to enter a stable balance. I thought we could fight and divide Malgenia’s power but any use of it we made at all would skew the division we came up with.” I didn’t know that for sure, but I had plenty of evidence leading me in that direction.

Clarity smudged the Holy Circle we’d been practicing in for the last two hours, breaking us free from its constraints, which Responsibility used as an excuse to wander into the kitchen to pour glasses of ice water for each us.

“Okay, so where are we then?” Responsibility asked, offering each of us one of the beverages.

“Back at square one?” Clarity was more testing the idea out than suggesting it.

None of wanted to admit that. Not after all of the time we’d spent trying to adapt the Assumption Ritual to support a third participant. Especially given that Vitor was expecting we were going ahead with the normal Assumption Ritual which Responsibility should have just about been ready to undertake.

Obviously I hadn’t been “training” Responsibility for the proper version of the ritual. I’d barely survived the “training” I’d been given and I had no interest in inflicting the kind of damage on anyone else.

“There’s got to be something else, something we’re overlooking,” Responsibility said.

“After weeks of review? What else is left to try changing?” Clarity asked.

And that was the right question.

Or I’d gone nuts.

Probably that.

“No arguments on that here,” Beauty said. She, Inhibition and Reason were lounging on one of sofas I’d conjured for our house in the wastelands. 

“Is she thinking silly things again?” Clarity asked.

The meeting with the other Death’s had been a welcome surprise for Clarity. We hadn’t known them that well before their Assumptions, but the promise they represented, that the Deaths who’d gone before us weren’t wholly lost, was a more than welcome one.

Since then they’d stayed manifested most of the time. It was a nice change of pace, and it meant they had more than just me to interact with. Also, usually, they didn’t listen in on my thoughts quite as much when they were interacting with the living world.

“We do when they’re particularly interesting,” Inhibition said, paging through one of the books I’d summoned from Malgenia’s estate.

“Want to fill us in?” Responsibility asked.

“I don’t know, maybe someone else wants to share my ideas for me?” I said, not at all like the brat I hadn’t been able to indulge myself in being for far too long.

“No, this is a good one I think, you should take the credit for it,” Reason said.

“Thank you,” I said with a nod to Reason. “So, what if we didn’t go back to Step 1? What if we went back to Step 0?”

“What’s Step 0? Give up?” Responsibility asked.

“Sort of,” I said, percolating the idea I was working on a little bit more to make sure there weren’t any glaringly obvious flaw with it.

Aside from all the ones I could easily see that is.

“You’ve said that Malgenia’s power is growing out of control, do you have some other idea for balancing it, or limiting it maybe?” Clarity asked, her expression one of furious calculations to work out what I was talking about.

“No. I still think you were right. Having the three of us each bearing a part of Malgenia’s power will provide so much more stability. When any one of us needs to call on it, we won’t tip over to having the majority of it under our control and we’ll have a much greater distance from rising as deities too. We definitely all need to be a part of it.”

I’d wanted to argue against Clarity risking herself to take part in the Assumption Ritual for about ten seconds when she’d declared she would fight with us.

I mean, the kind of things that could happen to her? In an Assumption Ritual? No. Not even a little no, like all the “NO” everywhere, everywhen.

Then, I’d seen that she had to be a part of it.

With three of us, it wouldn’t be a fight at all. It would be all of us working together. Like a dance. If any of one of us stumbled into a moment of weakness, the other two would be there to lift us up. What no one of us could handle, all three of us were far more than a match for.

So we’d set out to see how to make Clarity a part of the ritual.

And we’d failed.

We could have kept working at it of course, a month of failures was nothing compared to what Malgenia had gone through for some of the “experiments” she’d run.

But a month had been enough.

I’m not the quickest of studies, but sometimes I can stumble forward rather than back.

“You want to start over,” Responsibility said as both she and Clarity worked out the beginning of what I was saying.

“We have to.” I had to grin. This was how things were supposed to be.

“Oh why didn’t we see that. Of course the ritual isn’t going to work,” Clarity said.

“Are you sure? You three came pretty close with the last few iterations,” Beauty said.

“The last few dozen,” Reason said in a tone that highlighted the problem.

“Close is all we’d ever manage working with the Assumption Ritual,” I said.

“It’s baked into the core of the ritual itself,” Responsibility said.

“The Assumption Ritual’s whole purpose it to feed a Death to Malgenia,” Clarity said. “What Insight accomplished was the fulfillment of the ritual insofar as it was designed for one of the participants to overthrow the other one. We’ve been trying to work around the safeguards that prevent the Death from escaping, the core of the ritual is designed around the need for there to be a victim who is sacrificed to the victor.”

“And the original designer obviously never considered that someone would be more powerful than Malgenia and make her the victim,” Responsibility said.

“Or more realistically, that Malgenia would make the mistake of trying to use a Blessed in the ritual. That we’re here today is entirely thanks to Diyas,” I said.

Not entirely, Diyas said. I couldn’t have overcome even a fraction of Malgenia’s power on my own, you did a lot of the heavy lifting there too.

With strength you gave me, I said. I know I’m the least appreciative Blessed ever sometimes, but I will never forget what you’ve done for me. Even if I die right here and now, I’d still be grateful beyond my capacity for words to express.

“So what’s the alternative you’ve come up with?” Inhibition asked.

“Step Zero,” I said. “We make our own Ritual. Rather than trying to turn the Assumption Ritual into something it is explicitly designed to not be, we work from the base of what we do want the ritual to do and go from there.”

“That sounds fantastic but there is one rather glaring problem with that approach,” Reason said, and I already knew what she was going to say.

“None of us have ever designed a ritual from scratch, and certainly not one that needs to manage this much power.” It was the weak point in my plan, and I could admit it easily enough because I knew we could work past it.

I had no idea how we’d work past it, but I had five of the smartest people I could ask for to help me find that path and the best god of them all to help us.

Praise only really counts when it’s accurate, Diyas said.

It is accurate! You were part of destroying a Neoteric Lord! No one has ever done that. Even the first three that fell were killed by a bunch of the others working together! 

Could a god be too humble? If Diyas wasn’t going to own up to being the badass I knew she was, then yes, yes they could.

That was a case where Malgenia was straying into my domain. In trying to extinguish your life, she opened herself up to my interface.

And we extinguished her. That was no small feat no matter how much credit you want to give me for it.

It wasn’t, but in this case it’s not power you need, it’s knowledge. I will certainly be with you in whatever you choose, but if you want to craft a new ritual, one of the many gods of magic would stand you in far better stead.

Which, I had to give her credit for was probably true. Just because she was a god, didn’t mean Diyas could do anything and everything. Quite the reverse really. What I’d learned over the years was that she could support me in matters relating to her domain and could occasionally sneak in help from either related domains or, as she described them, lost domains (one’s there weren’t any other gods managing I gathered), but that in many senses I had more freedom in the choices I could make and how I used her power than she did.

“So, all we need to do is find someone who does know how to design rituals then, right?” Beauty said.

I was about to point out that we were in the middle of the Wasteland and ‘people’ weren’t really a resource we had ready access to when someone knocked on the door to my mansion.

The mansion I’d conjured in the Wasteland.

Where no one else was capable of surviving.

The one I’d hidden beneath a veil even another Neoteric Lord couldn’t penetrate.

“Should we get that?” Inhibition asked looking at confused as everyone else felt.