“You have a pet Beast Helgon.”

“I have no such thing Vaingloth.”

“There is a Beast fragment not two hundred yards outside your city walls. It is sitting there and it is not moving.”

“Aren’t most pets ones that people keep inside their dwellings? I would think being outside the city walls would make the Beast Fragment more akin to livestock?”

“Are you serious Helgon? You’ve captured a Beast Fragment and running who knows what sorts of experiments on it and your quibbling over the things nomenclature?”

“But I’m not running any experiments at all Vitor. We discussed that, was it last year? Or the year before? They sort of run together. Always have. Hmm, perhaps achronal magics would make a good area of study next. Might be what we need to unsnarl this whole mess. Or make it worse I suppose.”

“Helgon. The Beast Fragment. Why do you have it?”

“I don’t Vaingloth. As I just told Vitor, I am not keeping it as a pet or livestock, nor am I running experiments on it. Those would be far too dangerous and would yield little concrete data in isolation.”

“Then explain why you’ve allowed one so close to your city when you were the one who designed the warding rituals to ensure they can’t rampage through our strongholds as they wish.”

“Well that’s very simple Vaingloth, I can’t.”

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

“Can’t. Did I mumble that? My apologies. But no, I cannot explain why the Beast Fragment is where it is. I did move my wards in when it approached but that was really more an experiment on the wards, not the Beast Fragment itself, which as we discussed is much too dangerous to conduct experiments on and the experiments would not yield definitive results.”

“So let see if I understand this right, you claim you have no idea why a Beast Fragment has decided to camp on the edge of your city, and you are not undertaking any experiments related to it at all?”

“Well, I mean, I did invite it, and I have a whole host of experiments related to the Beast going on as we speak, but it’s not a pet you see, and I’m not doing any experiments directly on it, more ‘around it’ if you want to be exact.”

– Helgon almost managing to get himself executed by the other Neoterics sooner rather than later, and in the process convincing them that there were no viable avenues for attacking the Beast Fragments, and no avenues at all for controlling one.

So I didn’t have any means by which to survive and that turned out to be oddly comforting.

Had anything else come crashing through my wards to destroy half my house I would have been caught in a terrible quandary. Staring into the maw of a Beast Fragment however meant the urge to draw on Malgenia’s power was non-existent. The Neoteric had some highly specialized spells which could keep the Beast Fragments away from their cities, but those spells took months to prepare, a tremendous amount of power to maintain, and largely functioned by shunting the Beast Fragments elsewhere rather than blocking them. 

And that was the absolute best answer the Neoterics had for dealing with the Beast Fragments. In a direct confrontation their only answer was to not be in a direct confrontation, and that worked right up until a Beast Fragment was focused on you. 

If I’d been willing to use Malgenia’s power I could have teleported anywhere I wanted to, but the Beast’s relationship with space and distance was patchy at best and so it following me would have been an inevitability.

“Don’t try to run,” Dyrena said, still sitting at my table with Diyas.

“I’m not sure she can,” Diyas said. “There’s an interdiction field in place.”

“You two have slowed time down?” I asked, feeling an odd weightlessness in place of the gnashing teeth tearing through which the next second or two was sure to hold.

“No. This is familiar though,” Diyas said.

“You faced this before when the sun fell,” Dyrena said. “Its part of being devoured.”

I’m sure she could have picked less comforting words to say. I have no idea what those words could possibly be, but there’s probably something worse to hear than that.

“If we’re being devoured, that why is it over there and we’re a good arm’s length away from it still?” I asked, not panicking largely because there was simply no point to it.

“What we see as a fragment of the Beast is only a part of it,” Dyrena said. “Even a small piece of it is still massive enough to swallow the whole world.”

That it was close enough that I could extend an arm into it if that appendage had offended me somehow made Dyrena’s words less than thrilling to consider.

“So it slows us down so that we can’t get away?” I asked, grumpy at the idea that a cosmic void could somehow still hold cruelty inside it.

“Not at all, it’s slowing down time because it’s eating time as much as space,” Dyrena said. “I thought that was a particularly clever expression of its nature, though I will admit that it’s also as annoying as I imagined it would be.”

“Your talking like this is your fault – like personally, more than just as one of the Neoterics,” I said, wondering why I didn’t hate her completely yet.

“There aren’t many other people I can confess to,” she said. “Or commiserate with.”

“And we would have sympathy for you why exactly?” I asked. I was about to be destroyed, so the answer didn’t really matter, but as last moments went it was better than thinking about Responsibility and Clarity and how I wasn’t going to see them again.

Also, and this was irrational then, and probably mostly stemmed from Dyrena’s greeting, I didn’t think I was facing a hopeless situation. I couldn’t see any reason to hope mind you, but the tone she had taken told me there was something important I wasn’t aware of yet.

“Because she’s largely the reason we’re all still here,” Diyas said, who, notably, was also not fleeing from the every-so-slowly closing maw of the Beast Fragment.

“So because she only broke a few billion dishes, or one twelfth of a few billion, we should be grateful that she left us with, what a a couple million or so?” Was I being fair? No, not in the slightest. Did ANY of the Neoterics deserve the benefit of the doubt? I don’t know, let’s ask the billions of dead people they are directly responsible for? Or how about the remaining few million who get the joy of living under Neoteric tyranny?

“I see why you were drawn to her,” Dyrena said, throwing a smile in Diyas’ direction.

“You’re allowed to defend yourself,” Diyas seemed capable of doing that for Dyrena but also not exactly happy with the notion.

“I’m really not sure I should,” Dyrena said. “I mean, she’s not in the slightest bit wrong there.”

“Yes, but she needs to at least listen to you, and it’s unfair to hide things from her. You saw how it went last time did you not?” My god is the best god. It’s not a competition of course, but if it was, she would have already won it.

“You raise a valid and reasonable point,” Dyrena said before turning back to me. “I was never sure exactly what suspicions Malgenia had of me. She was disturbingly insightful sometimes, and cataclysmically oblivious otherwise. Tell me though, have you gleaned anything from her memories as to why I joined the Neoterics? Or why they really killed me?”

“Did they? Kill you I mean. You seem remarkably not dead at the moment,” I asked, unwilling to go probing around in the remnants of Malgenia’s thoughts as my last action before I was erased.

“Oh they most certainly killed me. There is, sadly, nothing mortal left to me at all. Which, I should confess, was also a part of my plan.”

As plans went that seemed like one that probably sucked, but I refrained from point it out. It just gave me a new benchmark to measure my own against. The others were going to be simply *delighted* with that, I was sure.

“They killed you so that you could attain godhood freely,” I said, her actual plan clicking into place and putting a scowl on my face. I needed to surround myself with people whose plans were worse than mine, not actual clever schemers.

“I’m not a god,” Dyrena said. “Though the difference is admittedly subtle.”

“I do have Malgenia’s senses you know. I can tell what you are.” Why she would lie to me at this point was puzzling in the extreme.

“Look deeper,” Dyrena said. “Look for my domain. Look for where I touch the world. Look for even one worshipper who could send me grace.”

And so I did.

And, huh, she hadn’t lied.

“Your domain isn’t…it isn’t a part of the world? And neither are you? What the…? And you’ve only got one worshipper?” It was confusing largely because I had Malgenia’s memories of what the gods were like to compare to and Dyrena had none of the standard elements, just the same aura and presence and well of divinity within her.

“Yes, exact…wait, what?” she said. “Are you losing your senses? The Beast isn’t supposed to be that close to us yet.”

“My senses are fine,” I said, which was true apart from the bit where all they felt from the Beast was a violation of everything that made up existence.

“Look again then, I don’t have any worshippers either. Like I said, I’m not a god. I’m more of a celestial janitor now.”

“Well you’re a celestial janitor with someone who’s holding you in their heart,” I said, ever more certain of what I was sensing.

“That’s not…no, wait, it’s not important now. What is important is that I make myself clear to you,” Dyrena said. “I’m not a god, I can’t be one. The Sunfall and what came to pass afterwards was largely my creation. I’m taking more credit than I should since there were a lot of people whose work went into realizing and defining the plans I’d put together, but the overall scheme is something I have to take responsibility for and no one whose done what I did deserves to be revered by anyone.”

“And what, exactly, was it that you did,” I said, feeling like it was not exactly a good moment for lengthy and inexact explanations.

“She put together crafted the plan which allowed the Neoterics to summon the End of All Things and overthrow the gods,” Diyas said. “She did so largely on her own, and certainly without any divine assistance, but she did so in a manner which ensured the world and the gods would exist afterwards.”

“How?” Again, no sense wasting time.

“The short form? I shaped the plans the others came up with to ensure we got exactly the End of All Things that we needed. The rituals to do what we Neoterics did have existed since the gods came into their dominions. They are literally how the world is meant to end, and they kept being rediscovered throughout the ages. Each time the discoverers either tried to hide them, and eventually failed, or tried to enact them and came perilously closer to success each time.”

“So you made sure they succeeded this time, but only enough so that people would see they should never be attempted again?” That didn’t sound right to me, but the next alternative that came to mind was even harder to believe.

“No. There’s no lessons you can teach to one generation that a later one will not forget or ignore. The rituals carried the ultimate lure you see; the one who ends the world can use its remains to create a new one.”

“But with twelves of you…oh. Oh, seriously??” It didn’t matter that there were twelve of them. That had been a smokescreen too, the part of the plan which hid its real goal.

“The world can never be what it was,” Dyrena said, sounding both mournful and proud of that fact. “In destroying what was, this Beast, our Beast also destroyed what could be and shattered the rules that allowed those rituals to work in the first place. It is both the first end of the world and the last. I sacrificed what was to ensure that what will be is no longer doomed to the ending its architects foresaw. This is your world, not theirs.”