“Sasarai? How have you been doing? Did you need something?”

“Not as such Vitor, I am simply checking in with all of our number. It has been a while since we’ve spoken and it occurred to me that some of us may have made breakthroughs on the issue of the End of All Things which would yield greater results were the findings to pooled together.”

“It hasn’t been that long certainly, has it? Why we just met…we just met…hmm, when was our last convocation?”

“It has been five years since our last formal meeting. I believe Vaingloth met with Insikir and Tallgrim on trade matters last year but otherwise I believe we have simply let half a decade pass us by.”

“That may be a good sign Sasarai. Five years of peaceful coexistence is something we worked quite hard to engineer before hand.”

“Yes, all those ‘boring and blatantly obvious’ meetings as I recall you characterizing them.”

“In hindsight I must say that I stand by my insight then. We spent hours, no, days, locked in a room considering eventualities which not only never came to pass but never could come to pass. So much time spent and nearly all of it wasted.”

“Perhaps, or perhaps the time that wasn’t wasted was what ensured that the rest of the matters which were discussed never became realities.”

“Whichever is true, those days are burnt up and gone, while our future stretches endlessly onwards. So perhaps spending a bit more of it together will not be a problem. Five years though you say? I can’t believe it has been so long.”

“Sadly that does not seem to have been a sufficient length of time for the others to produce any results regarding either the Beast we summoned or the Beast Fragments which litter our world. I presume the same is true of you and your sister?”

“I haven’t had any breakthroughs or insights which I would risk against even the smallest of the fragments, and as for Malgenia? I’m reasonably sure my sister hasn’t given the matter of the Beast a single thought at all.”

– Sasarai and Vitor’s early plotting of a scheme which Sasarai would not see the completion of.

The Neoterics lost their damn minds, and it was one of the most delightful things I’d ever seen.

“What will happen to Vaingloth’s holdings?”

“What if his power runs amuck? No one was there to claim it!”

“Who will govern his city? We haven’t had a population survive the loss of their Neoteric Lord before?”

“Do we really know that he was destroyed? Maybe this is some trick he has spent all this time contriving?”

“Is the Beast moving? Has anyone checked on the Beast? I think we should send someone to check on the Beast.”

The most terrifying thing they’d been able to imagine was being overthrown like Dyrena, Kurst, or Helgon had been. Vaingloth’s destruction pushed that fear decidedly into second place though. The prospect of their fellow Neoterics doing them in, while all too possible, was one they believed they could mitigate and couple of centuries had proven them to be largely correct. The Beast killing them was worse, but the prospect that someone had been able to turn the Beast against them was unfathomable.

“Why are we still here then, if this master of the Beast can turn it against us?”

None of them really wanted the answer to that question, and all of them were willing to pretend to believe that Vaingloth’s death had been a fluke as proven by their continued existence since, if they could control the Beast they knew exactly what they would do with that power.

“We’re sure I can’t go poke the fragment that took Vaingloth? We could learn so much!” That was my contribution, knowing before I asked exactly what the answer would be.

“We can’t risk it Malgenia. We just can’t,” Vitor said.

“You’re brother is correct,” Sasarai said, his illusionary presence in Vitor’s conference room nodding in fervent agreement as he conjured a map of the world and overlaid it with glowing purple arrows to show the known location of the Beast Fragments. “So far as we knew, there was no Beast Fragment where Vaingloth…umm, had his mishap.”

“But our intelligence on the Beast Fragments location has always been suspect,” Tallgrim said. 

Tallgrim was the Neoterics accountant. Not of material wealth but of the value of the souls they held under their sway. He’d been essential to the original scheme by helping them determine which people could be turned into near mindless worship batteries as well as evaluating how much grace each of the populations they’d preserved was likely to generate. The experiments the Neoterics had performed trying to manufacture their own Blessed had relied either on his direct assistance or works he’d published, works which I lacked any of the foundations required to understand. Even Malgenia’s memories had little to offer there as her evaluations of someone’s potential were made along starkly different, and often post-mortem, lines from Tallgrim’s.

“We know there are none within a day’s travel of any of our cities,” Vitor said. “We each have wards in place for that, do we not?”

“It depends on what you consider a day’s travel,” Insikir said. 

He was the Neoteric’s expert on the limitations of the Aetheric medium and how those limitations could be overcome. From Malgenia’s memory I saw that he was their lead researcher on the spells which summoned the Beast in the first place, as well as being responsible for allowing them to breech into the halls of the divinities during the Sunfall and steal away the grace the gods hadn’t committed to the fight against the Beast.

He was an unpleasant man, unconcerned with anyone and anything’s boundaries well before his assault on the gods. Even Malgenia had disliked him and had suggested more than once to Vitor that she should dispose of him during the Sunfall if not sooner.

Vitor had talked her out of that largely by persuading her to wait until they were certain that his part of the scheme would work, which kept Insikir alive until the Sunfall, after which the distance between the Neoterics had served to accomplish the same effect.

“I was considering a days travel for one of our caravans but you raise an important point. The Beast Fragments we’ve observed have been generally stationary. We have no idea how quickly one of them might move or what boundaries might halt their passage if they were to become mobile.”

“From what I saw, Vaingloth went to the Beast. It didn’t need to travel at all,” I said. That had the virtue of being largely true and providing a reason for the Neoterics to remain in their cities.

The last thing Little or Mt. Gloria needed was any of the Neoterics (aside from me) out roaming around the world.

For that matter the last thing I needed was for the other Neoterics to be out roaming around the world. Responsibility and Clarity were still hidden in our house out in the Wastelands and if any of the other Neoterics stumbled on them, then I wasn’t at all sure I would care about the consequences to the world of dropping the number of Neoterics by one more.

I mean, I’d try to argue with that but…, Beauty said.

But we really wouldn’t have done any different if we’re being honest, Reason said.

That’s not true, Inhibition said. You were both far more sensible than that when we were alive.

No we weren’t, Beauty and Reason said in perfect unison.

“And how was it you managed to be there Malgenia? That has to have been phenomenally unlikely was it not?” Sasarai asked, earning him one Certified Insight’s Ire point.

“She was studying the Beast,” Vitor said, with a weary sort of dismissal in his voice, less I think because of Sasarai than from having to deal with vagaries of Malgenia’s whims for so long.

“And that was how she knew to be there?” Sasarai’s disbelief at the coincidence was far from hidden and earned him another Ire point. 

What sort of prize will he win if he collects enough of them? Diyas asked.

Enough of them I’ll have to figure out some means of blighting his stupid shrub, more than that and I pay him a visit myself, I said, sharing Malgenia’s distaste for the organic monstrosity that Sasarai had built his city around. 

Outwardly it was certainly impressive but to eyes that could see the fine structure of the aetheric workings inside it, the “Holy Tree” was an ugly, tangled mess. Malgenia hated it because it bound the souls of the devoted away from her keeping. I hated it because it not only bound the souls of the devoted but twisted their spirits into a mockery of the grace they shared with it.

“What makes you think I was there at all?” I asked Sasarai letting a hint of Malgenia’s madness creep around my words.

He was, predictably, less concerned about that than he should have been given that he was safely far away in his deepest sanctum just like the other ‘visiting’ Neoterics were and thus, in theory, protected from any immediate retribution Malgenia might try to inflict on him.

“You said you saw Vaingloth’s destruction. You had to be there.” Sasarai’s boldness wasn’t driven by actual courage. That was a trait the Neoterics largely seemed bereft of, with one or two posthumous exceptions. He was terrified and ‘emboldening anger’ was the one tool he had to fight that with, assuming Malgenia’s scattered bits of memory were anything to go by.

“But of course I was there when he died,” I said, and resisted the urge to add more explanation. Annoying contradictions were too much a part of Malgenia’s repertoire for me to break character despite the urge to club the Neoterics with the failings of their assumptions.

My reward for staying in character was watching Sasarai’s blood pressure spike along with his anger.

“Yes. So you’ve said. But how!” he demanded.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. “You’ve become crippled by tending your plants?”

Tallgrim smirked at that and Vitor sighed.

“Crippled? What…?” Watching Sasarai sputter was delightful but not going to lead anywhere more productive than his picking a real fight with me, which no one wanted to headache of dealing with (including me).

“Any of us could have been there,” Vitor said. “We all felt Vaingloth leaving Mt. Gloria. We all chose to stay in our cities, except for my sister who was, as I’ve pointed out, already in the field.”

“It’s a fascinating field,” I said. “So much still to learn and study.”

“There’s no dead out in the Wastelands though,” Insikir said. “Or are there?”

“Do you think there are living still there?” I asked in a tone of complete sincerity. I hoped it was received and translated as ‘how stupid are you exactly’ and from Insikir’s frown my hope was redeemed.

“Leaving that aside, we need to decide what we will do next. Tallgrim’s right that we don’t know enough about where the Beast Fragments are or where they roam. Do we try to monitor them to understand at least that?” Vitor asked. He wasn’t the leader of the group in any sense other than he was the one who seemed to be able to stick to the topic at hand the best. I suspect that was a skill he’d had to hone thanks to both Malgenia and I.

“That begs the question of who we would assign to such a task,” Insikir asked. “Do any of us have underlings who would be competent enough to track even one of the Beast Fragments while being expendable as well since we shall definitely lose at least a few.”

“No need for that,” I said. “I can track them.”

Was that more of Malgenia’s madness? I framed it like it was, but I had a few different ideas on how I could make it work for me.

“You said you weren’t able to work out how to control them though?” Vitor said.

“I wasn’t looking to control them,” I said. “I was looking for how to kill them. I know they can die, it’s already happened, I just need to discover how their master is able to make that occur.”