“Do you think we should have a funeral Vitor?”

“A funeral? What good would a funeral possibly do, Malgenia?”

“Well, funerals are supposed provide comfort to the loved ones of the deceased and, as we are now orphans, we must be in need of a great deal of comfort aren’t we?”

“We…what? Orphans? Well, hmm, I suppose we are at that. I’m not sure we necessarily count as ‘loved ones’ of the deceased however.”

“Certainly father always said that he loved us though.”

“Did he? I am trying to recall, did those words ever leave his mouth?”

“He said he was proud of us. Several times.”

“Think back, did he ever tell us that, or were those always as boasts to other people?”

“Does that make a difference?”

“In the end, I suppose it didn’t, but perhaps if he had…? But no, I doubt events could have played out in any manner but the one they did.”

“Well that’s clearly not true. We’ve made many decisions. This is our world because we chose to make it our world, and we’ve done so more purposefully than anyone in history.”

“I was referring to our, um, status as ‘orphans’. Given our gifts, and who our larger family was, I do not see any of the myriad paths we might have followed leading anywhere except to this state we find ourselves in.”

“You mean even if we hadn’t slain the world, we would still have slain father and mother and all our relatives?”

“Perhaps not all of them, but I imagine a large portion always would have fallen to our machinations.”

“Does that mean we don’t get to be orphans?”

“Closer to say we were orphans from the day we were born. Alone in this world save for each other.”

“So no funeral then?”

“You seem distressed by that, but I could only imagine a funeral as a party which we threw for ourselves.”

“Oh! But that’s exactly what it is! Come, let us plan the a year’s worth of funerals where we can dance on the graves of a new family member every night.”

“Won’t we run out well before we’ve filled a year’s worth?”

“We can always add more people to our family.”

– Neoteric Lords Malgenia and Vitor planning their schedules after the Sunfall

Crowded though it was, our conference room felt empty until the two people I needed to see most walked in.

“That’s mine,” Responsibility said, shooing Beauty away from my lap, while Clarity switched places with Inhibition at my side.

Clarity had been right too. Hugging their projections was nothing like cuddling close to them for real.

“Did the latest set of compatibility matrices yield the results we were hoping for?” Helgon asked, reaching for one of the stacks of paper that Inhibition had brought in with her.

“To 57%, well past our base threshold!” Inhibition said.

“Could you bring the rest of us up to speed on this, since it seems like you’ve got an answer for killing Neoterics and I think we’re all in favor of that idea,” Jilya said.

“No problem,” Reason said. “We have two problems here really. One; the Neoterics. Obvious. Been around for a long time. Getting worse the longer we allow them to remain.”

“In fact, if our calculations are correct…” Beauty said.

“And they are,” Helgon interrupted her to confirm.

“Then allowing the Neoterics to continue harvesting grace as they have been is an inevitable death sentence for the world,” Beauty finished.

“They’re managing the grace they’ve collected so far, but their storage devices all have an upper limit,” Inhibition said. “Your Holy Tree Jilya? It was maybe a dozen generations away from a cascade failure that nothing in the world could have stopped. Not even if we had ten times the Blessed that we do now.”

“A dozen generations is a long time,” Jilya said. “But given that Sasarai was claiming to be ‘eternal’, it doesn’t sound like he was thinking time would be up in another few centuries or so?”

“None of them are,” I said, a collage of Malgenia’s memories flickering past my mind’s eye. “Sasarai said his tree would simply grow to accommodate additional grace as needed. Insikir has portioned his stored grace into bounded containers that he claims he could stockpile to the sky if he needed to. Even Vitor thinks he has the answer; he’s been trying to create artificial Blessed since the Sunfall.”

“Well that is rather clever of him. And more ambitious work than I ever saw the poor boy attempt in our time together,” Helgon said. “Of course, if he’d just asked me I could have told him it would never work. He’s trying to create a Blessed without their being in communion with anyone else. That’s where the real power in the Blessing lies. The abilities and magics the Blessed can call on are trivial by comparison.”

“What about Malgenia? What was her plan?” Little asked.

“One that would work,” Reason said. “One that has in fact, been working.”

“Holding it all in herself? Or do you mean the Assumption Ritual?” I asked.

“The Assumption Ritual has been a big part of it, but we missed the most important aspect of it,” Reason said.

“It was the death. Our deaths. That’s what’s been holding Malgenia’s power in check,” Beauty said.

“We knew that though,” I said. “When she absorbed each of you that gave her more, I don’t know the right term, but ‘soul room’ I guess. She was able to hold more and more power because she’s offloaded it onto you until you’re all filled up and then she needs to take another Death.” That I had no useful memories from Malgenia on the matter was probably at least partly deliberate on her end and partly the natural fallout from destroying her in the heart of the Assumption Ritual, so bits of it were the first them she and I lost access to.

“That’s all true, and it’s spelled out pretty plainly in the Ritual. She modified it though,” Reason said.

“Of course she did. That girl,” Helgon said, shaking his head in exasperation. 

“Malgenia doesn’t have a population. She never needed one. She collects the grace from every death in the world. If someone dies in Mt Gloria, their grace comes to her. If someone dies in Sasarai’s Garden…”

“My Garden,” Jilya said, and I heard the echo of a divine claim there, which was intriguing and sent all kinds of wheels turning in my head.

“Sorry, right, he turned it over to you didn’t he?” Reason asked.

“He did. Also, he’s a worm now,” Jilya said.

“He always was,” Helgon said.

“The point is, Malgenia collects more grace than any other two Neoterics combined, and at that rate, she should have melted the world down decades ago,” Clarity said. “She did not however, because with each death in the Assumption Ritual, she is able to send a large portion of the grace she’d collected into the domains of the dead.”

“How does that make things any better?” Little asked.

“Because that’s where the grace of the dead is meant to go,” Responsibility said. “Malgenia has been artificially continuing the natural flow of the world, even if it was only on her terms.”

“Her approach is practical because she’s not hanging onto the energy, it just has an unfortunate requirement to it,” Clarity said.

“To make the flow happen, she needs to kill someone,” Little said, seeing what Clarity was saying despite being blind.

“Does she though?” Theia asked. “I mean from what I’ve heard of her, killing someone  seems like it would be more of a benefit than a drawback in Malgenia’s eyes.”

“We’ve considered that, a lot,” Responsibility said. “The problem is, touching on the domains of death means, well, you die. That’s kind of their whole thing. If anything the Assumption Ritual is weird because it only calls for one person to die at a time. If it had been wholly Malgenia’s invention it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t have put the number a lot higher.”

“So we need to have the remaining Neoterics kill someone ever few years then and everything will be great? Or the world at least gets to keep going?” Theia asked.

“No.” I said. I didn’t have any more of an answer than that, but I’d rather see the atoms of the world burn than have that be the world we lived in.

“Correct,” Clarity said. “That is not a viable path forward for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Malgenia holds all of the divine domains of Death, so no one else can use anything like the Assumption Ritual and achieve the same ends.”

“Which brings us to the other problem,” Reason said. “Her.” She gestured, of course, to me, though I don’t think it surprised anyone in the room that I was a problem. “She’s teetering on the edge of becoming a god. Which is what the Assumption Ritual is designed to prevent.”

“Oh, yes, that is a problem,” Jilya said. Jilya the one who’d made a divine pronouncement. Jilya who had outwitted a Neoteric (even if it was one of the dimmer ones of their number) and had converted him into both the godhood he craved and a state where he could never be a problem again. “I don’t suppose you’ve discovered a means to hide another god within Night’s veil have you?”

“Nope,” Theia said before any of my family could. “There’s no chance. You made an excellent call with Sasarai since he’s tiny and bound to the dirt, but there’s no way she would become a god anywhere near as small as he is.”

“That’s correct,” Clarity said. “You drained Sasarai of almost all his power when you took the Holy Tree from him. Trying to claim the power that Insight currently holds would not go as well for you since you would, as stated, die.”

“Can she?” I asked, somewhat hesitant to point out the fact that there were three of us in the room who were only borderline mortals, and of that number, only Jilya’s spirit burned with the sort of fire that even the Beast of the End of All Things hadn’t quite been able to snuff out.

She is still borders on my domain, Diyas said. Which means she can also be drawn into yours.

Not that we will be undertaking any plans which would imperil her so, Draconia said.

That should be her choice, Umbrielle said, but I agree that other options would be far preferable.

One might almost believe that other options are nearly inevitable, Sola said, considering the work which has been put into them.

I had the sense of a great silence filling the next moment, as though, I don’t know, a full god who’d been working hard for centuries to keep us all protected and hidden was pointedly not addressing Sola’s evidence-less claim.

Theia rolled her eyes but also kept her silence.

And Helgon, poor Helgon, seemed to hear the silence as well and looked from Little, to Theia, to me and back and forth, face puckered in confusion.

“We do have another answer,” Reason said. “We’d originally thought to balance the Assumption Ritual between the three of us, but one of the critical underpinnings of it was finding a means to achieve that balance and with Helgon’s help we found the piece we were missing.”

“Our deaths,” Clarity said.

“Nope,” I said, rejecting any plan that involved either of women I loved dying for me.

“See, I told you she’d get it,” Responsibility said.

“That was a reflex. She’s not seeing the problem yet,” Clarity said, and so, of course, then I did.

“Oh. The Ritual’s point is the death, if you don’t die then the transfer of power to the domains of death doesn’t happen,” I said feeling trapped, but the two of them were too happy for that to be the end of the story. “And, no, that’s just stupid, oh really?” Clarity and Responsibility nodded in confirmation together, “If you die, we won’t be balanced, because you’ll be in a naturally weaker position than me unless one of you kills me like I killed Malgenia.”

“Now you might think we could simply add more people to the mix, say have a dozen people die and that might balance the one living you, but that won’t work either,” Responsibility said.

“Because it’s the living person the grace transfers through,” Clarity said.

“So we had to find another way,” Responsibility said.

“And we did,” Reason said.

“There has to be one, or more, deaths during the Assumption Ritual, but so long as there is at least one death, grace can flow into the afterlife,” Clarity said.

“Any amount of grace,” Responsibility said, staring into my eyes from only a few inches away.

I really wanted to kiss her.

“We can perform the Ritual,” I said, a future I’d never dared to hope for unrolling before me. “We just need to include all of the Neoterics in it.”