“But it seems to me that the fragments of Beast – the smaller ones – represent a prime opportunity for us.”

“A prime opportunity to meet our former gods Helgon? Because I for one am not eager to make their acquaintance again.”

“Don’t be silly Vitor, the old gods are gone. Not just dead, your sister would have them if they were merely dead. No, we shall never see them again.”

“And likely no one would ever see one of us again should we flirt with actually encountering the Beast’s offspring.”

“But don’t you see Vaingloth? That’s the point. These aren’t offspring. The predator we summoned isn’t capable of having offspring. It’s not capable of having anything at all.”

“Ugh. Philosophy. Helgon what is your point. Find it sometime today, please.”

“My point Vitor is that the fragments of the Beast which are scattered about the world are not creations of the Beast-Which-Yet-Looms-on-the-Divine-Plane. They are the Beast-Which-Yet-Looms-on-the-Divine-Plane. I can hear your objections, and yes, I acknowledge that there are no causal links between the fragments and the greater whole. Any experiments we run on a fragment will have no effect on their source, but that’s the joy! Don’t you see it!”

“I see nothing but peril Helgon. Let us imagine the best case scenario you propose; some foolish number of us turn our attention to discovering the form and limits of a fragment of the Beast. Let us imagine as well that we bend our efforts to understanding where those extents would provide us a means with which to erase the fragment rather than allowing it to erase us. What would be the point and purpose of such an exercise when, by its very nature, the result could not be guaranteed to apply to even one other fragment, much less the greater threat on the divine plane?”

“Vitor is correct, we would risk ourselves for an outcome which is uncertain at best and cataclysmic at worst. Also, and this may have escaped you Helgon as I believe you were not paying attention to Insikir’s presentation at our last gathering, but we have no means by which to direct or contain even the smallest of fragments, so your proposed experiments must fail on the grounds of insufficient practicality.”

“Oh? How odd. You are quite correct, and I must apologize Insikir, Vaingloth is correct, I wasn’t listening closely enough I guess. There was a theorem I was working on. You can see it here, it covers directing the movements of the Beast fragments and the sort of micro-portals we can open to keep them warded away from a roughly city-sized area. Again, my apologies, but the idea you mentioned was quite captivating, and I thought it might prove to be something useful. It would seem not though?”

– The Neoterics meeting wherein Insikir joined Vaingloth’s growing faction for the murder of Helgon.

I wasn’t alone. I’m not sure why people had imagined I would be.

I think it was always the nature of the gods to fade from people’s moment-to-moment awareness in the course of their days, Diyas said. I feel we may have worked best when people turned to us for guidance in our domains or when they were seeking direction in their lives.

Giving thanks and the festivals sounded like they were pretty fun parts of the package too back then, or was Malgenia right that people didn’t have any fun on the Holy Days? That had seemed like it was probably only a ‘her’ thing?

I wasn’t as close to the world then as I am now, so I’m not certain I can say. The Holy Days were always accompanied by great swells of grace, so they seemed delightful to me. It was only with the Sunfall that I really understood how there could be a disconnect between the grace people gave to us and their own happiness. 

Hearing Diyas, the god I had pledged myself to, Diyas, the reason I was alive and not eaten by the worst monster the world had ever seen (and yes, I am including the god-eating End of All Things in that list), Diyas, the first person who told me I was even worth saving at all, hearing the sadness in her voice was heart breaking.

But I let it break.

Reaching out to her with any sort of soothing offering of grace was not only be a step towards the divine I could not afford, it was also exactly the problem which had wounded her in the first place.

“You’ve mentioned a couple of times how the Neoterics poisoned you and the other gods. I don’t think I’ve ever understood how they did that though? Or why?” 

I flipped the book I’d been reading closed. Part of the aetheric geometries it spoke of were starting to make sense, but I had a lot of work to do there and offloading it to my subconscious wasn’t necessarily a terrible move.

Diyas was with me – she’s always with me – that’s how gods work – but I folded my hands and looked to the chair opposite me at the table I was sitting at as an invitation.

Her appearing there wasn’t exacting a manifestation or an incarnation. I wasn’t in the midst of a divine revelation – not the ecstatic kind that allowed for a god’s observable presence in the world. Being Blessed just came with a few perks, like being able to see and speak with one’s god when the current moment wasn’t pulling ones attention away from the god onto more material matters.

“I’m not sure poisoning us is strictly accurate, but it’s close,” Diyas said, accepting my invitation. “Back then, Malgenia and the others who eventually claimed the title of Neoteric Lords were our High Accessors, not pledged to any one of us but rather to the management of several temples at once. As gods were weren’t always in harmony and we had little reason to prioritize each other over our domains since we were, we thought, endless and infinite.”

“So the High Accessors acted as coordinators between competing gods then?” I could imagine it, but that felt foreign to me. To be fair though, a world of more gods than just Diyas was almost unimaginable and I’d even met, hmm, I wasn’t sure how to count how many I’d met.

“Not so much competing as inconsiderate,” Diyas said. “Oh, some of us got along quite well. We had relationships which mirrored mortal ties, certainly including rivalries and real animosity, but for the most part we simply didn’t consider each other all that much. Solas and I, for instance, met often since her light was one of the core requirements for the life which flourished on the world’s surface. I’d like to think we were friends, but if a year or two went by between conversations, I’m not sure either of us would have noticed.”

“And the Neoterics took advantage of that somehow?” I was both curious as to what sort of scheme Malgenia had come up with, especially since it hadn’t involved just directly killing the gods herself, and, more importantly, how I could make sure to never hurt Diyas in the same way ever again.

“I think our separation may have been the first thread they pulled on to unravel us,” she said and rose to wander into the kitchen. I could hear her without trouble so I let her go, having a strong inkling she would be returning with a meal for me since I hadn’t really been paying attention to food much lately.

What?

Reason was off being my Blessed, helping shepherd Beauty and Responsibility safely to Mt. Gloria, while Clarity and Inhibition were escorted to meet Helgon by this Theia person I’d never met. 

So I was worried.

I mean, sure, the Blessing had been a success. A surprisingly quiet and simple affair in fact. I’d wondered for a moment if Reason taking the spark of blessing I offered had even worked, but when she opened her eyes and they were filled with stars it was hard to deny that she was something a little more than she had been.

And then she’d left.

Because we, both, needed, not ‘wanted’ by Needed, to make sure the others were safe.

Spending more than two weeks alone after that had not been my definition of fun. Especially since there was another two weeks left before either party arrived at their destinations! 

(Maybe the world was too big).

In theory I could have dropped in on Reason as easily as Diyas dropped in on me – no divine power needed, just a reflection of the new bond we shared – but I really, really did not want any of the other Neoterics discovering what I’d done.

For one thing, it would make Reason an immediate target. For another I needed them to think I was still hard at work on ‘discovering the how to destroy the Beast fragments’, although after several weeks of my ‘focused study’ even Vitor seemed to accept that I wasn’t going to make any progress radical enough to warrant daily visits. Most of all though, I didn’t want them to think of trying the same things themselves. 

The world needed more Blessed.

Desperately.

Even one Blessed pledged to an actual Neoteric however was far, far too many, and was probably the other reason which would convince me to draw on Malgenia’s power again.

“In the end it really came down to power,” Diyas said. “One of the principal roles the High Accessor’s held was to direct and shape the grace offered by the peoples they oversaw and ensure that it flowed to the proper deities. The festival for High Summer Stars for example was one of the great periods of worship each year and the grace generated was shared among perhaps a thousand or more gods. Ensuring that each god received their proper share was something no divinity could do because we all saw our proper share as being ‘every bit from each person who venerated us’, and so it was left in mortal hands to make fair and equitable divisions.”

“Wasn’t the problem that they gave you too much though? Malgenia had said the gods demanded more and more and the people couldn’t keep up, but it doesn’t sound like you were demanding at all?”

“We didn’t demand, but we did accept. And yes, the High Accessors presented us with more and more grace each year, as they ‘grew out flocks’ and ‘brought people closer to our doctrines’.”

“I’ve met the Neoterics. There’s no chance that’s what they were really doing.”

“They were not. As best as I can tell, they had converted some of our followers into little more than prayer machines. Beliefs as rigid as iron, with a monomaniacal need to be ‘Pure’ and ‘True’ and always, always under the control of those ‘above them’. It destroyed those worshippers lives and flayed their souls, but in the short term it generated such an intense swell of grace that we were sated and beyond, and that was our undoing.”

“They were fattening you up like festival geese?” I’d read about those as part of a ritual the day before and the practice seemed so bizarre that it could only have come from the world before the Sunfall.

“Yes. Drunk and swollen on the power they’d fed us, we fought first for ourselves, each defending nothing more than our own domains, when the Beast began to tear away at us. Maybe if we’d fought for each other instead? Maybe if some of us had been willing to lose everything so that the rest could achieve victory…? I don’t know. That part of the past was lost with all the pieces the Beast devoured. Perhaps there was never a chance that we could have defeated it. It could have been that the grace the Neoterics fed us was merely to keep us from noticing the trap they were building. In the end though, the Neoterics poison dulled our senses and our sense of self and that was all that was required for their victory to be assured.”

“I can tell you it took quite a bit more than that,” Dyrena said.

Manifesting before me in the seat to the side of Diya’s and mine.

Manifesting before me…

“Yes. We have some important things to talk about, but at the moment there is a slightly more pressing concern,” she said gazing up and to the side as though she was listening for something.

“What concern?” I asked, not feeling anything amiss.

And then half my house disappeared.

“That concern,” Dyrena said, pointing at the Beast Fragment who had penetrated the barrier around my house and was consuming more than half of it.