“I know protecting those we choose to shelter in our cities will be completely viable, we’ve discussed the plans for that ad nauseum. What I am suggesting here is that it may be practical to keep a separate population as well.”

“To what end Tallgrim? And why should it be a shared one?”

“Excellent questions Grosh. I propose to use this population as a resource. I believe keeping a stable of mixed peoples secured in a site unrelated to any of our cities will allow us a far wider range of experimental opportunities than we would be able to indulge in with the populations we will require to provide us with grace.”

“That will create a potential point of friction between us will it not though?”

“Potential, yes Hanshel, but I am certain we can agree on procedures and priorities to ensuring those frictions are properly lubricated.”

“I imagine the absence of half our number will be the primary one of those frictions Tallgrim. Is there a reason you did not choose to include Dyrena, or Vaingloth, or even Helgon? You know he is an experimentalist of the first order.”

“Yes, that was exactly what concerned me. My vision is to create a population any of us can draw from, for whatever ends we desire. Helgon would insist on his idea of ‘proper experimental protocols’ and endless reviews, Dyrena would object, I am sure, to many of the experiments we could envision, and Vaingloth would insist upon a percentage of any return the experiments provide.”

“And the twins?”

“Can you imagine Vitor having the capacity to design an experimental trial worth pursuing?”

“That is unkind Tallgrim.”

“Perhaps it is unkind Grosh, but can you say it is untrue?”

“I believe the silence in the roam answers that question most eloquently. But there is the matter of Malgenia. She is, unique in the experiments she pursues, and, as we know, she pursues them with vigor.”

“And that is my concern with including her Wepan. I fear if we brought her into the fold of this wrinkle in our project, she would be likely to make use of the entirety of whatever population we could preserve.”

“Her experiments do tend to have a certain finality to them. Very well then, count me in. There are, as you say, many experiments to pursue which will better our world, but which will need distance and discretion, and so long as we remain in agreement, we should be able to easily maintain a quite sizeable population of subjects between us.”

– The High Accessors of the cabal responsible for the creation of Lab Zone Zero and, within less than a dozen year, also its complete destruction due to the entirely predictable internecine squabbling over which inhuman experiments would be run first.

The plan had failed. I’m not even sure why that was a surprise once I heard the full details of it.

“So, the sum total of it was ‘let’s go and have a look around and maybe we’ll stumble on a pile of divine fragments’?” I would have been stabbed if I’d come up with something like that. Seriously, Responsibility would have stabbed me in a heartbeat. Clarity might have joined her, except, no, Clarity would simply have given me a disapproving look and asked ‘why’ and that would have been worse than the stab wound.

“Pretty much,” Jilya said as she loomed over me. To be fair, given her size, it wasn’t intentional looming so much as simply being a bit too tall for the small room I was hidden away in.

“That’s not fair, I had some idea how to find the divine fragments, and I wasn’t planning to take more than one of them,” Theia said. Theia didn’t loom, despite being somewhat taller than me, but that was largely because the she was content to merely watch us moving pieces around the board which was in between us.

Malgenia had memories of many planning sessions where a world map was stretched across a table with tokens to indicate the disposition of various forces. In our case the tokens fell into two categories; black disks which stood in for the positions of the various beast fragments we knew of around the world, and small figurines for the remaining Neoteric Lords. Our location was marked with two, one for Malgenia (which wasn’t strictly speaking accurate, but it was close enough) and one bit of squiggly wire to represent the God of Worms which Sasarai had become.

I had to suppress a chuckle again.

God of Worms.

Oh, that was just beautiful.

I didn’t hate Sasarai more than the rest of the Neoterics but then I hadn’t liked any of them except Malgenia when I was being raised and meeting them after I’d usurped her position had soured me even further on them.

That one of them had tried to kill me with a Beast Fragment wasn’t something I was going to be forgetting any time soon either. I had special plans in mind for whoever that turned out to be.

“All in all, I think it worked out well though,” Little said. 

She loomed as well, though she was much smaller than I was. Physically smaller. Spiritually was another matter. I carried the Beast Fragment I’d been devoured by with me, but it was just another part of the growing  constellation of peoples I was accumulating. Little was something else though. She was Blessed like Theia and I were, but she was something else too. I think where I carried the Beast Fragment, she’d become one.

An interesting observation, Diyas said. She’s still a part of my realm, still one of the living, but, yes, there is something different there too.

It was strange at first, but it’s oddly comforting now, Sola said.

I still find it strange, but you both have been as secure a refuge as we could ask for, Draconia said.

The picky lizard says someone offers real security? That is high praise indeed, Umbrielle said.

Shut up you brat, Draconia said.

Make me, Umbrielle said.

“They really are becoming more like us, aren’t they?” Little said as we watched the gods squabble playfully with each other.

It’s been a long time since there were this many of us together, Diyas said.

And an age since we had this many Blessed, Sola said.

“Yeah, can I just say thank you again for that.” Jilya’s leafy-dragon-person-sized form was not designed to look bashful but she pulled it off remarkably well.

“Hey, you took down one of the Neoterics,” Theia said. “I think we all owe you thanks for trimming the number of those worthless monsters down. No offense to our present company.”

“None taken because you are not wrong at all. I am fully onboard with trimming their number down. All of them. That’s why I asked you all to cram in here with me.” My room was tiny largely because it was one of the most densely warded ones in all of Mt Gloria, and as of yet the other Neoterics didn’t seem to know that I had survived. That little surprise I was looking forward to springing on them one-by-one and the thought of how I would reveal myself to each of them filled my cold black heart with such delicious glee that I had to wonder if I hadn’t absorbed a bit more of Malgenia than I’d been aware of. We do resemble our parents though I suppose, so that vicious delight was probably all me.

“I don’t believe we’re too crammed,” Helgon said. “I find it rather cozy.”

“You’re a ghost, Helgon, you could inside one of my shoes with room to spare if you wanted to,” Little said. “You’re not wrong about it feeling cozy though. It’s nice. Kinda like a being in a Nest again.”

“Or a pod,” Jilya said. “Leaving our comfort aside though, how are we supposed to get rid of any additional Neoterics? I don’t think the rest are going to be foolish enough to chase us into a Beast Fragment, and my approach nearly destroyed the world.”

“Killing them isn’t a problem,” I said. “Malgenia could have done that whenever she wanted to. The problem, as you found, is that each and every one of them has amassed so much grace that if it goes out of control it’ll erase the substrate of the world and we won’t be any better off than if Night flung back her cloak and let the Beast finish gobbling us up.”

“Sola can handle the grace,” Little said. “Or she did for me.”

That’s somewhat true, Sola said. I can handle any grace which is of my domain or sufficiently close that I can lay claim to it.

And therein lies the problem, Diyas said. The Neoterics claimed as many domains as they could. When Vaingloth pursued Little into the Beast Fragment he was fully vested in the grace he was carrying and only his reserves remained in Mt Gloria.

“Reserves which he’d purchased from the Lord of the Fires, which made them close enough for Sola to handle, gotcha,” Little said.

“Which was why feeding all of the grace from the Holy Tree to Sola wasn’t an option,” Jilya said. “Fortunately we have, what, about ten thousand new Blessed who were able to shoulder the load too.”

“I wish I could have helped with that,” I said, my toes curling at the thought of how close we’d come to the apocalypse I’d spent the last couple years fighting to avoid with all my strength.

“You are the probably the one Blessed who most couldn’t risk it,” Theia said. “Plus you definitely wouldn’t still be hidden if you had.”

“Just to flesh out our ideas, does she need to be?” Jilya asked. “I get that the element of surprise is a useful thing, but wouldn’t having her here, openly, help keep the other Neoterics away more or less permanently?”

“I’m afraid not,” Helgon said. “If I know my former colleagues, what that would do is unite them in moving against the Blessed here. There would be no concern about the division of the grace which was harvested, all they would care about is eliminating ‘Malgenia’ before she came for them. If that required falling over into godhood, I suspect its a bargain they would take. We were all petrified of the End of All things once we understood what it was, all of us except Malgenia, and I think we were terrified of her more.”

“So they’re willing to lose the world if they need to, but to stop them, we would need to lose the world too?” Theia asked. “There’s another way. I’m sure of it.”

“There is one obvious option,” I said. Obvious and hateful.

No. Diyas could hear the plan echoing in my mind and invoked her divine right to order me away from it. Normally that would be absolute. No question, just drop it.

But…there is an exception to the absolute authority the gods have.

It could save you, I said, only to her.

No, she repeated, which wasn’t exactly a solid base for an argument.

“I don’t want to do it either,” I said aloud, deciding that the others deserved to be part of this debate too, “but you know you’re more important than I am. Everyone here is more important than I am. If we can’t come up with any other options, or some means to handle the grace of seven Neoterics, then giving myself up to them might be the only option.”

“Seven? I thought there were only six left?” Jilya said. “Hanshel, Tallgrim, Insikir, Grosh, Wepan, and Vitor? Who am I missing?”

“Me,” I said. “This can’t end with me as the last Neoteric, or even just carrying the power of one.”

“You know, we had a feeling you were going to say that,” Reason said, manifesting on the small space of seat that was open beside me.

“Which is why we’ve got a better plan,” Beauty said, manifesting in my lap.

“And, since we have you all here, perhaps you make sure that our calculations for the new Assumption Ritual are correct?” Inhibition said, opening the door to the room like a civilized person.