“I have to confess, I don’t really see the point of this. I mean, yes, the screams were entertaining, but it’s a momentary thing. Over and done and then what? I suppose there’s repetition but they were all so, so similar?”

“Vitor did you kill all of Class 3? I told you they weren’t ready yet.”

“Excuse me Malgenia, I distinctly recall you saying that they would be ‘ripe’ at sunrise. I waited until a hour after the morning devotionals but it was you who chose to sleep in.”

“I always sleep in. Dreams are so delightful don’t you think?”

“So people say. You know I only rarely remember mine.”

“Something you should work on.”

“While I’m asleep? Is father’s ghost possessing you now, thinking that even in sleep I’m not allowed to free of the crushing requirement to be productive?”

“No, no, good brother. There is nothing productive about dreaming. It is the mind at play. Careful madness dancing with the deepest of bodily relaxation. Quite wonderful I assure you.”

“And when you are screaming in your sleep? That is deeply relaxing too I suppose?”

“Oh, those are the best dreams. Too often they shatter but if you are truly lucky you can find one that you can’t awaken from. To trade comfort for such exquisite experience is sublime!”

“You claimed this would be sublime too, but my hands seem to have turned it to disappointment and more than a little bit of mess.”

“Well of course you did. You are but a novice  to the devotions of the gods of mortality. But, as with everything, practice perfects the mastery of the art.”

“So I have heard.”

“And yet?”

“And yet, it is such a terrible bother assembling and sustaining the subjects of the ritual. Not to mention that it will take the better part of the day to clean the cells and it’s not a duty which can be entrusted to anyone else now is it?”

“No, it is not. Discovery would yield us no end of headaches, and the thin comfort it would provide those who learned the result of the our working would lessen the impact of it tremendously. But did you feel no thrill of anticipation in the collection of the subjects? Or in watching their slow degradation?”

“There was some entertainment in that yes, but it was drawn out over so long and miserly a stretch of time, and then all over so quickly once it came to the ritual itself. I admire your devotion sister, but I fear my interests are held by more lively concerns.”

“Well that is fine too. This will keep us from being in competition with one another for resources.”

– Vitor and Malgenia discovering that despite being twins, and both being prodigies with manipulating and mishaping grace, they had markedly different interests in some areas.

I walked through the cold and lonely wastes of the world, unseen and unheard, but I was not as alone as I appeared to be.

When you said you were going to walk to see the others, I assumed you were going to ask Meluna to cloak you for the trip, Diyas said.

Don’t need to be cloaked, I said, letting my mind drift in the nothingness I felt around me.

I can see that. I’m not exactly sure why though? I can still sense you, so everything else should be able to as well and there are definitely things out here that lack the awareness to be sensibly afraid of what you could do to them. For that matter there are spirits not far off that would more welcome being fully destroyed in a battle than they would enjoy winning it.

You’re the only one who can sense me, I said, keeping my thoughts tranquil and wrapped in the embrace of the nothingness. Well, you and Reason for sure, probably Beauty and Inhibition as well, since we’re bound together more deeply than a little thing like the Beast can severe.

You’re not cloaking yourself though? Why aren’t the spirit fragments nearby swarming us? Diyas didn’t understand because some things are completely outside her domain and as ‘Life’ tends to cover quite a lot, the sensation had to be rather odd for her.

I pondered a moment before offering an explanation. Would she be horrified with what I was doing? Probably. It was a rather stark violation of the fundamentals of reality.

Or it had been.

What was real had changed though.

I had changed.

Dyrena had warned me I would, but I hadn’t understood exactly what she’d meant, and I don’t think there was any way I could have.

It did make sense though. The Beast Fragment had been a piece of the End of All Things. When it swallowed me, I had to, in some sense, end there. Thanks to Diyas, that ending hadn’t been the end of all of me, or even most of me. I had my memories, I had the bonds that made hanging onto this world worth it, and I had a future I wanted to see more than anything. 

What I’d lost was a disturbing bit of my mortality and with it a worrying bit of my entirely rational fear of embracing things which weren’t supposed to ever have been a part of the world.

That might sound like a good thing. Who wants to be afraid after all? Survivors. Survivors are the ones who were smart enough to be afraid. We (generally) don’t like our fear, and it can be detrimental to be overwhelmed by it, but at its root level, our fears exist for several excellent reasons, not the least of which being cautioning us away from actions where the consequences are both unknown and potentially cataclysmic.

In my case? Doing what I was? I most certainly should have been afraid and it definitely had the potential to go cataclysmic in a heartbeat.

Which was why I spent the moment pondering. Not because Diyas was going to yell at me. She had every right to do that and she would be inarguably correct to do so. No, my concern was more about whether it was safe for my god to let her know what I was doing, or if that might trigger the cataclysm I was afraid of.

Did you notice the Beast wasn’t around when we came back? I asked her. Was it wise to share what I knew? I couldn’t tell, but trusting my god was sort of a fundamental part of our relationship.

It had been months, are you saying it didn’t move on? Diyas asked with the familiar tone in her voice I’d so often heard in my own when I realized I’d been missing something blisteringly obvious.

Moved on is a euphemism people have used for it in the past, I said.

What do you…wait…no. That’s not possible. And there was the creeping horror which a god should not have been capable of experiencing.

But Diyas wasn’t what she’d once been either. She was capable of a lot of things she that once hadn’t been part of her existence. Being able to feel fear probably didn’t seem like much of an upside to the changes she’d experienced, but she was far more of a survivor than I was and it kind of came with the territory.

I am Insight, I said, but I’m also the holder of most of the domains of Death.

But the End of All Things can’t die. It’s not part of the cycle of life and death. It’s not anything at all.

And there were the five words I could never say just waiting on offer as an explanation.

I should be a god by now. I’ve put off the Assumption ritual for far, far longer than I had the strength to hold out against it. I guess I was sort of lucky there? Melting endlessly for a million years let all that grace just boil over with no where to go. So I’ve got some margin now. I think I’m maybe about as close to deification as I was a few months before the Beast swallowed us? Sadly, I can feel the grace returning faster than ever.

Was I changing the subject? Yes. Obviously. Was Diyas still stuck between disbelief and a horrified understanding of the peril we were in? Yes, also obviously. If she hadn’t been, she would have dragged the conversation back to the objection she’d raised.

But she knew she couldn’t. I’d told her what she needed to know without telling her, which was how it had to be.

I hadn’t killed the Beast which had swallowed us. Malgenia herself couldn’t have managed that. I was, in some senses though, Death, and I’d accepted the Beast Fragment. Little had done something similar, but where she’d gained a companion, I had not separated quite that far from the Beast Fragment that swallowed me. 

The spirits around us couldn’t sense that, no one could since, technically, there wasn’t anything to sense. If you knew what to look for though, I was pretty sure someone would be able to notice that my shadow wasn’t the absence of light but a far deeper void, and that was something that pushed all of the spirits away, even the ones who thought they were seeking their own destruction.

Your reprieve from godhood will hopefully be enough. The others have had six months, and I know they’ve been working on modifications to the Assumption ritual with Helgon extensively, Diyas said, accepting that we couldn’t speak of what we knew about some topics even in the sanctity of our holy link.

With Helgon? They’re working with one of the Neoterics? I knew I’d sent them to meet with him but I’d pictured the encounter being a somewhat limited and partially adversarial event.

What had happened to my girls?

I think they will surprise you, Diyas said, some of her usual amusement returning to her tone.

After the last million years we’ve had, I’m not sure I like surprises anymore, I said, though the sense of having spent any time being dissolved by the Beast Fragment was fading faster and faster as the days and miles passed under my feet. It still felt like I’d been gone for a long, long time, but my memory of the ones I loved was as clear as it had ever been. 

Six months though? With each step I had to wonder how close my memory would be to their new reality. And how close their memories would be to mine.

Ah, there’s the nervous fretting we know and love, Beauty said, appearing beside me as though we had been parted for a couple of minutes rather than an age and a half.

Give her some time, Inhibition said, she’s been through a lot.

“Wait…can you be here? Are we…can they sense this?” I asked the question aloud because it seemed like the least obvious thing the other Neoterics would be looking for.

And laughter answered me back.

Reason’s laughter.

You don’t need to worry, she said, we’re not speaking through the web of Malgenia’s power that binds us together. We’ve learned a lot while you were, let’s call it on vacation, no one’s going to looking for that.

Then how…? I was expecting Insikir or Sasarai or one of the other idiots to descend on me any second and my plans very much did not allow for that.

The Blessing, Reason said. We know you’re still connected to Diyas through the one you share with her, so now we’re all connected to you through the one you share with me.

But..huh…is it a real Blessing then? I had been very much winging things when I set it up, but with six months of experience to draw on it made sense that Reason would understand our ‘new’ bond a lot better than I did.

It’s different than the one Solas and Little share, and from what we’ve been able to put together it’s different from any Blessing that’s been given before on some important points. Reason was in her element and I, for one, was all to glad to let her expound on all the discoveries she’d made since we’d last spoken.

There was just the small little problem that I was completely overwhelmed by emotion.

Somewhat annoying that.

I mean, it wasn’t like I’d been struggling on my own for ages against a fate that was beyond horrifying and that I’d had absolutely no basis for hoping that I would ever see any of them again. 

Seriously, how hungry could one person be just for the sound of another’s voice?

And shouldn’t despair shattering feel good? Not like shards of glass finally raining down you?

Crying was stupid.

I was stupid.

Everything was stupid.

And they were hugging me.

And even the comfort felt impossible.

Like how could it be real?

My shadow made a funny warble, as if to say this whole ‘being comforted’ idea was foreign, and new to it, and unwelcome, and weird. 

And it wanted more.

And so did I.

“Maybe we can help with that?” Responsibility asked, appearing near me just like Beauty had.