“This was a mistake. This was a terrible mistake. It’s…it’s too much.”

“Yes. Yes it was and yes it is and yes it will be, Helgon.”

“There’s not going to be a ‘will be’ Dyrena. You can see what’s missing up there. It’s…the nullification of our reality is tearing everything apart. It’s far too potent. We didn’t plan for this.”

“We did Helgon. This is exactly what it’s supposed to be. Exactly what it has to be.”

“But our shields? The constraints…”

“Those couldn’t be allowed to stand. They wouldn’t have worked for long, but of the sense of false security we would have been swallowed by would have destroyed us before any hope of salvation could be born.”

“Swallowed like the gods are being swallowed? They’re the only defense the concepts they hold dominion over have, and what we summoned is not going to stop with the gods. It is going to unmake us.”

“Yes. That is exactly what the others need to see. That is the doom which must hang over our head every moment of every day from here onwards.”

“But rest of the cabal, they’ll go insane. They’ll destroy the world to be rid of this terrible dread.”

“Look around Helgon. We’ve already destroyed the world. The gods are dying, and will fall, but the greatest mass of lost souls in history will act as their heralds into the domains of the dead.”

“But we saved so many!”

“We saved no one. Those who we preserved are not saved. Their old lives are just as lost as those who’ve died. If anything, those we’ve preserved are those who are the most cursed of all. Their old lives are gone and now they’re tasked with creating new ones from the ashes of a world grown strange and hostile to them at every step.”

“And they’ll have none of the divine guidance or aide their forebears were granted. None save what we offer them.”

“There I can offer you one small bit of solace.”

“I will take anything you can part with.”

“The others will offer no grace to the survivors they have gathered under their banners. They will reign over their peoples and extract ever more power from them. For those we have sheltered though, another path can be opened.”

“What paths are worth traveling in a dead world?”

“We have opened a door for the End of All Things to enter our world, what I have not shared with the others is that a door may be opened for egress as well as ingress. Our peoples need not share the fate of this world. That falls to us since I have made certain that no one who has claimed lordship over this realm will ever be able to pass though such a door without attracting the attention of our new jailer.”

– Helgon and Dyrena towards the end of the Sunfall.

I wasn’t dying! Yay! Sounds good right? Problem though. Dying, over and over and over, was the only thing keeping me from flashfrying as the fulcrum of all the power that was trying to funnel though me and without Malgenia around to keep reopening the door to the domains of the dead, the power I’d claimed was more than happy to make me so alive all of my cells exploded.

Even better, since the Assumption Ritual had Responsibility, Clarity and I fused together, all of their cells were going to explode too!

That would take roughly a billion-billion-billion-billionth and so on of a percent of the total power swirling into us, so there would be plenty left over to shatter the aetheric binding of the atoms in the floor we were standing on, and the house we were in, and continental plate the land rested on, and all of the continents, and the subterranean realms beneath them, and the core itself. We weren’t going to be blown to dust only because dust was still made of material components. 

It would have been a merciful end for the world. Everything living converted to a cloud of insensate, ever expanding energy on too short a time scale for anyone to even perceive, much less react to or worry about.

Fortunately, with great power comes great power, including the ability to share what was supposed to be my last instant with the ones I loved.

“That didn’t exactly go according to plan,” Responsibility said.

“Did we really expect it to?” Beauty asked.

“Please tell me you all have learned from our mistakes,” Dignity, one of the oldest Deaths, asked.

“Do you imagine she taught us about you?” Clarity asked, emphasizing how history needs to be taught if we to be help accountable for not repeating it.

“And remember, we’re extremely capable of making our own mistake,” Inhibition said.

“Though I’m not sure this was necessarily a mistake,” Reason said. “We knew our plan wasn’t going to go off exactly as we expected, but we might have the answer that we need here already.”

“Do we?” I asked, I knew what the answer needed to be, it hinged on five words, but I was scared as hell of it and if Reason had a better idea I was all for it.

“Do we have time to be debating this?” Mercy, another one of the original Deaths, asked.

“No,” Clarity said, “But then time is no longer flowing for us.”

“Stopping the clock isn’t possible, but with this much power ‘possible’ becomes a sort of fuzzy issue,” I said. I couldn’t freeze the moment we were in forever, but I had what I felt were several excellent reasons to avoid rushing into the wrong answer.

“All of us except for those three have died,” Reason said, pointing at Responsibility, Clarity, and I.

Which was technically incorrect. I had died a countless number of times in Malgenia’s embrace, and arguably before that as well when the Beast Fragment enveloped me.

“You’re thinking that we can act as the gateways for all this power?” Beauty asked.

“Better us than them,” Reason said.

“There are a lot of us,” Inhibition said gesturing to the army of Death who had assembled around us.

“You won’t survive this anymore than we would though,” Responsibility said, voicing the first and least important of my concerns. 

Oh, the survival, such as it was, of the other Deaths was important, but the fact was if we didn’t deal with this power somehow, it wasn’t just the earth that was going to burn. Everything in our reality, conceptual and physical was going to vanish. So there wasn’t a trade to be made there.

“But you would,” Reason said.

And I wished she was right.

She was so smart. She saw so much. Her and Clarity. Brilliant geniuses, but only one of them could see as far as I could in this particular instance.

“We wouldn’t,” Clarity said. “We’re a part of this ritual, the same as you are, if you all channel all the power that’s gathered out there, it will have to come through this space. We’ll be just as obliterated as you will be.”

“But I thought that was the point of the ritual?” Mercy said. “To carry all this power safely to the domains of the dead?”

“The last Neoteric was supposed to be here too. They would have been obliterated the same as we’d be, but the original plan was to kick them from the ritual as the energy began to pour through them,” Responsibility said.

“So kick us from the ritual then,” Dignity said.

“We can’t,” Clarity said. “We’re all bound together by our shared histories. Something the Neoteric wouldn’t have held with any of us.”

“None of the Neoterics except for Malgenia,” Beauty said with an understanding sigh.

“Right. With her in the mix, she could have taken control of the ritual, and even with the changes we made, she still would have understood it better than we do,” I said. “Even if was possible to have used you all though, I couldn’t let that happen.”

“I know that we’ve meant a lot of each other Insight, but for something like this, you have to be able to let us go,” Inhibition said.

“I’d let all of us go,” I said, crushed by the truth of it. “But it wouldn’t be enough.”

“There’s a lot of us here, and we can do a lot more than you might think,” Dignity said.

“Oh.” Reason looked crestfallen as she caught up to what I’d seen.

“I believe in us,” I said. “All of us. If we gave it everything that we are, maybe we could do the impossible and carry all this power into the domains of the dead, but think what happens after that. Think what happens when the overwhelming weight of the world’s grace is all concentrated into reinforcing death itself.”

“Everything dies,” Mercy said, her crest, so to speak, falling as well.

“Or death unravels completely and the world burns with it,” Reason said. “The gods of death were never intended to hold all this grace after all. It’s supposed to flow into and out of the domains of the dead as death gives way to new life.”

“So there’s nowhere we can turn then?” Dignity asked. “Nothing that can withstand the hoard the Neoterics assembled? We’ve lost?”

“There’s nothing that can withstand all this force,” I said, breathing out to find acceptance of that fact and what it meant. “And that’s why we haven’t lost.”

Responsibility and Clarity were bound with me. They already knew my heart and my thoughts, but the declaration came as a surprise to the others and I saw a whole lot of heads rise in disbelief and confusion at my declaration.

“I want you all to hold tight to each other,” I said. “I don’t know that this is going to work. It shouldn’t. This should be the end, and if it is, maybe all we can do is try to hold on so that we’ll find each other next time, wherever and whenever that is, even if its past the end of eternity. Can you do that for me?”

“What do you mean? What are you going to do?” Mercy asked.

“Something that’s going to destroy her,” Inhibition said.

“Which is why she’s not doing it alone,” Beauty said.

“She thought that she was though,” Reason said.

“Yeah, she’s kind of an idiot like that,” Responsibility said. “But she’s our idiot.”

“No..!” I didn’t mean for it to come out like a whimper but I knew what this was going to cost. I’d been through endless dissolution before and I couldn’t….they couldn’t suffer like that. No!

I tried to leave. I cast my eyes to the heaven and I tried to leave.

Because Responsibility is right, and I am an idiot.

But then Clarity laid a hand on my shoulder, and her head against my arm.

“Go,” she said. “But never think you can leave us behind.”

And so I turned to the blank and empty sky and I spoke to it.

“NIGHT. IT’S TIME. YOU CAN REST AT LAST. PUT DOWN YOUR BURDEN AND GIVE US BACK THE STARS.”

I spoke not with my voice but with the power I…no, the power we carried.

WHAT YOU PLAN IS MADNESS. IT IS DEATH. 

Night’s voice wasn’t Meluna’s. It held the power of a full and unbroken god. The one who’d been powerful and clever enough to shelter an entire world and all the souls and god remnants within it from the End of All Things.

And she was not happy with me.

“It’s okay. She’s right. This task I left to you, it was never an endless punishment. You have held them safe until this final day,” Dyrena said. “You can rest Night. Rest and let the day we could never foresee dawn.”

I CANNOT. THIS HAS TO BE MY DEATH AS WELL IF OUR WORLD IS TO DIE.

“No one is dying today,” I said, clutching onto my mortality with the help of a gloriously familiar friend.

SHE’S RIGHT, Diyas said as our bond forged itself anew, snapping back into place like a band that was stronger than steel.

I CANNOT, Night said, and I understood.

LET ME HELP YOU, I said as I and the women I loved cast forth a barrage of supreme light and shattered the dome which had held our world safe for centuries.

In the sky above, for the first time since the sun fell, stars blazed and an emptiness greater than our world woke and met my gaze.