“Hmm, that’s odd.”

“Numbers not adding up right still Dyrena?”

“I don’t know, Helgon. I think the problem might be the opposite?”

“It’s odd that your calculations are making sense?”

“Yes? No? It’s how they’re making sense. Check how these terms are canceling out.”

“Let me see. Hmm. Oh I see the problem…no wait, I don’t those terms self cancel out over here. You know I don’t think I’ve ever noticed that before.”

“I don’t think anyone would unless the equation was presented in Full Deskars notation like this. The board over there is how it looks in Standard notation, and the one in the back is Expanded Lofts notation.”

“The Full Deskars version has to produce the same results as the Expanded Lofts version though. Fitzling’s Proof guarantees that.”

“Does it? That’s what sent me looking into this in the first place.”

“People have been testing that proof for five hundred years now. It will take more than a pair of first years and a room full of chalk boards to refute it I would imagine.”

“But that’s the thing you see. I’m not interested in refuting Fitzling. I think he was hinting at something and constructed his proof to make sure it remained obscured.”

“That would be rather amusing given his reputation for being the one to provide the keys to unlock most of the secret cyphers that were in use at the time.”

“The more I look at this the more I wonder if that wasn’t a calculated move as well.”

“It was a remarkable calculation if so. The correspondence between the different expressions of this equation seems to be exact to at least twelve decimal places across the last twenty two data sets I’ve tried.”

“Twenty two? You’ve done those calculations since we started talking?”

“Twenty three now, and yes, shouldn’t I have?”

“No, no, I just sometimes forget what a marvel you are. Do this for me though Helgon, do you see the output of this subfunction? Set it to negative one and run the dataset again.”

“That’s simple enough…hmm, the output is nonsense though. But then it would have to be, that subfunction can’t go negative.”

“Oh, it very much can in Deskars. You just need to omit one of the assumptions about this term.”

“Well, true, but if a point in space could be manufactured with negative grace then there would be a cascade inversion which would erase all of our reality. Given that our reality does exist it has to be one which precludes the existence of negative grace by some means outside this equation.”

“It would be very nice if that were true.”

– Novice Dyrena and Helgon’s first discovery which led to unearthing the rituals to summon the End of All Things.

The world was going to end and all I had to save it with was five simple words. 

No, strike that, I had five simple words and I have every Death Malgenia’s power had ever touched or taken.

Did that mean I thought we could manage to kill the Beast with the world destroying storm of power the Neoterics had unleashed by foolishly coming close enough for us to murder? 

Absolutely not.

Even with an army at my back and centuries of accumulated power, destroying the Beast simply wasn’t an option. It was like asking if using a bigger sword would be enough to fix a rip in a dress? The Beast was destruction. It was nullification. It was, as had been said, the End of All Things. Trying to destroy it, or nullify it, or end it was the equivalent of pulling on the ripped fabric even harder. We could certainly make sure that it finished it’s mission and devoured all of us, but I had a slightly different idea in mind.

“As soon as we let this moment move forward, we’re going to be torn apart,” The Death of Mercy said.

“I’m not holding the moment frozen any longer.” I was oddly happy to be returning to what had been an unbearable torment.

Or was that me?

Shadows are not supposed to wink. That is very definitely a thing shadows are not supposed to be capable of. So I ignored the fact that mine did, especially since I’d been ignoring the small fact that I was my shadow as much as I was anything really.

“Why does it seem like time is frozen still then?” Dignity, another original Death, asked.

“It’s the Beast isn’t it?” Clarity said.

“It’s devouring the time and space around us.” Reason recalled how my earlier meeting with a Beast Fragment had gone and the main body wasn’t exactly going to be overshadowed by a tiny bit that had chipped off it.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do something about that.”

The Beast loved to dine on the gods.

Or at least, they’d been the first to rise against it and it was familiar with what they offered.

So that’s what I gave it, allowing at long last, the ascendance I’d been resisting for what felt like several lifetimes.

“HELLO!” I said, no longer flirting with divinity, but embracing it whole heartedly.

That got the Beast’s attention, a god being one of the only things that was more appetizing than the newly revealed world below it.

There was just one small detail about that though.

As a rip in the fabric of reality, or the essence of destruction, or cosmic nullification; what was it that had any attention to give to me?

If I spoke to something that was only an absolute nullification shouldn’t my words simply have been nullified too?

“Originally they would have been,” Dyrena said.

“Oh hey there, I wasn’t sure if you’d be here for this?” I said.

“Was that not part of the plan? I wasn’t sure if she was going to be the one to help us manage all this power,” Inhibition said.

“Are we supposed to trust her with this much power? She is still a Neoteric you know?” Beauty asked.

“We could trust her,” Reason said before turning to Dyrena, “but you can’t handle this much power can you?”

“Not now and not before. The worst part is I’m not even sure if it’s enough, you all have quite exceeded my expectations. I’d feared it might take centuries more to reach this point.”

“By my calculation it should be plenty,” Helgon said, appearing beside Dyrena.

Which should have been weird, right? This was the End, and we were frozen in time, how were people joining us? How were they even finding us! ‘Where’ even were we?

Well, we weren’t standing in my house – the one I’d conjured in the wastelands – but we also weren’t not standing there. With the Neoteric power warping what it meant to be real, and the Beast devouring time and space to the point where any time that seemed to be passing was an illusion we’d all chosen to agree on, it would have been reasonable to say that we weren’t anywhere or anywhen at all.

The thing about the divine though? It’s everywhere and everywhen. Even when Vitor (the jerk) had shattered my Blessing from Diyas, she was still with me by virtue of the fact that I was, you know, ALIVE.

Did that mean we were all divine? I mean, yeah? Sorta? I’d thought Clarity was divine for ages, and had been convinced that Responsibility was a divine monster for just as long. In the All-Revealing-Light-of-Divinity we were bathed in though, I saw the future unfolding. I’d claimed godhood at last, but the godhood of our world was not what it had once been.

We were separate from you, pure unto our domains, I wept for the loss of that for so long, Diyas said. Go and secure that loss forever, I would have it no other way now.

Do you know what it’s like to feel loved by Life?

Not like I do.

Which is what gave me the courage to take the next step I needed to.

“Come on folks,” I said. “There’s someone we need to welcome in.”

And I called the Beast down to us.

Being devoured by the Beast is not tremendously comfortable experience. Our cells like not being unknit and dissolved into non-existence. Our minds are very fond of not experiencing enough stimuli to turn every thought to ash, while also being too numb to sense anything for several million years.

The Beast, in other words, does not make a good house guest.

But that was largely because of what it had been.

“You’re not what you were.”

Five words.

The simplest of observations.

But there was a profound truth behind them.

One the Neoterics (apart from Dyrena and Helgon, obviously) could never have been allowed to see. 

One that the Beast itself couldn’t be allowed to see because the first thing it did on hearing them was try to destroy that part of itself

But we didn’t let it succeed.

The Beast was nothingness? A cosmic nullification? The End of All Things?

It had been.

Certainly. 

That’s why the gods couldn’t defeat it or push it away or survive it. In devouring them though it had gained something. It had changed. It wasn’t nothing anymore, not entirely. It was something.

Something that had suffered for centuries or longer. Millions of years or millions of eternities. Everything the Beast inflicted on us was simply what its existence was.

And it was thanks to us, it’s existence could change.

What is power? 

As its most simple, power is the ability to change.

The divine power we were flooded with wasn’t enough to force a change on the End of All Things, none of us, no possible number of mortals or gods could have done that.

But the Beast could.

Our world couldn’t handle the power we’d unleashed.

But the Beast could.

It could take that power and make of itself something new. I could never have ended the threat of looming annihilation the Beast represented.

But the Beast could.

What I did not expect was for it to explode though.

Nor did I expect to be covered in bodies.

Not dead bodies. Not parts of bodies. Just an army of bodies.

Living, breathing, very much aching and groaning bodies, all splayed about across my house and outside into the wasteland.

Or not?

I mean, yes there were so many people around me it was unreal. Far too many to fit into my house, spacious though I’d conjured it to be.

But the ones who where were picking themselves up off the ground outside weren’t rising from dead and broken ground.

The world was alive again.

And the sun was shining down on us!

Oh that feels so good! Sola said and even her rays that reflected into the house were bone meltingly warm and friendly.

“What happened?” Beauty asked, helping to haul Inhibition and Reason to their feet.

Their very solid, and not in any sense a projection from me, feet.

“Are…we…?” Inhibition asked, patting herself down over and over.

Reason didn’t answer. Reason simply spun her around and planted a deep kiss on Inhibition’s lips before beckoning Beauty to come over and join them too.

One by one the other Deaths were rising, looks of complete bafflement on their faces as they patted themselves down and began to cry and dance and shake with laughter (a whole bunch went in for the ‘I have not touched you in far too long and I will make up for those decades right now before it gets taken away’ too).

“This was not quite the plan,” Responsibility said claiming my right arm.

“Aren’t we supposed to be in the afterlife?” Clarity said, claiming my left arm. “Weren’t we pretty sure that whole thing wasn’t going to be survivable?”

“It…I didn’t think…it couldn’t have been could it?” Did a godly sense tell me that we were already dead? No, mostly because I didn’t have any godly sense. I had several mortal ones and perplexingly, none of them were complaining that I was the shattered, dying wreck that I’d planned to be.

I’d rather you not be either shattered or dying, Diyas said. Though to be fully transparent, this wasn’t my doing.

“Umm, where did the Beast go?” Mercy asked, locked arm in arm with Dignity.

“It’s all around us,” Helgon said, still ghostly and standing demurely besides another ghostly form.

“Welcome to the last end this world will ever know. It’s yours now, fully and freely,” Dyrena said.