“Do you ever wonder, Vitor, how our world will end?”

“I believe we’ve lain rather meticulous plans so that we can be sure of exactly how the world will end.  Wait, have we missed something? What are the dead saying Malgenia?”

“Nothing, nothing. The restful spirits remain as restful as ever and the restless ones natter on about whatever little issues which keep them clinging to this world.”

“Thank…well, not the gods I suppose. Thank you, yes, that seems appropriate in this regards. You had me worried that somehow one of those beyond the veil had caught wind of what we’re doing and was poised to spoiler the entire endeavor, not to mention our immediate futures.”

“Really there is no veil, you know this. I’ve told you multiple times now I’m sure.”

“And I accept that is true for you, dear sister. The rest of us, you might have noticed, cannot negotiate the division between the living and the dead with quite the ease you possess.”

“As if any of you have ever bothered to try.”

“But you shall always be there for us to turn to and even your modesty must admit that no one will ever be your equal in that regards.”

“Always? Oh I don’t think it will be always.”

“Of course it will be, that’s the point of all this. Once we claim dominion over this world, we will be the ones with the power to reign over it eternally which the gods have kept hoarded for themselves.”

“They have.”

“So you see there is nothing to worry about. Once they fall and this world is put out of its misery, we shall rise and forge one to chart a course to eternity from.”

“Because we’ll have the power of the gods.”

“Yes, exactly. Their power and, for you, the power of all the departed. Where we shall collect the grace which today goes to waste to do with as we please.”

“The power which grants the gods eternal life.”

“Indeed!”

“And you see no potential issues with this?”

“We have foreseen all of the potential issues. We have plans for every failure case. Whatever unforeseen events may rear their ugly heads, the gods will fall and we shall rise in triumph.”

– Malgenia confirming that her brother was only capable of looking towards the immediate future, and might be missing the larger issues she could foresee.

There’s a thing about asking someone to do the impossible. Most people, to be fair the sensible ones, will inform you by some means that your request is beyond them. Others, let’s call them the more energetic sorts, will agree immediately despite have no idea whatsoever what is being requested of them.

Responsibility chose neither approach.

Instead she leaned in and engaged with the idea just as I had hoped she would.

“And how exactly am I to give you back your mortality?” she asked, her eyes locked onto me. That she was at last unconcerned about the god sitting on the bench with her was probably a good sign too since she would have to work with Diyas a lot in the coming weeks.

“You’re going to fight me,” I said, supremely confident that she would find the prospect as delightful as I did.

“No.” 

That was not the answer she was supposed to give.

“No? No what?” I asked.

“No, I won’t fight you,” she said.

Which..

What…?

We always fought!

She’d stabbed me! We had to fight!

“Why? You hate me! You have to fight me!” Did I sound a spoiled five year old? Shut up. That’s your answer.

Oddly, Responsibility looked surprised at my outburst.

“Hate you? I’ve never hated you. I love you,” she said, which, sure, whatever.

“Yes, yes, and I love you too. All the Deaths love each other. I don’t need love though. I need someone who can break what I’ve become.”

“And what is that?” Responsibility asked, somehow the far less flustered of the two of us.

How was that possibility. She’d been falling apart in shock like a minute earlier. How could she move to ‘calm and reasonable’ so quickly?

Oh she’s still falling apart, Beauty said privately to me and the other spirits in our little group.

Yeah, she’s dealing with all the things we’ve dropped on her by not dealing with them, and I can’t blame her, Inhibition said.

It’s not the definition of healthy but then I don’t think any of us can claim to be in the same kingdom as healthy when it comes to things like this, Reason said.

“I’m not sure Insight is capable of fully answering that question,” Diyas said in response to Responsibility. “I believe what you are seeing is Malgenia’s power which is now very much Insight’s in all senses save for its origin. Insight, who is perhaps failing to explain herself fully enough, since you are correct and an attempt to overcome Malgenia’s power with the gifts you now possess would be an exercise is not only futility but annihilation.”

“Oh give me some credit! I would not annihilate her! I don’t even want to win!” Other, smarter Blesseds, since technically I was also the Blessed of Life, probably would have spent at least a half second or so processing their god’s words.

Not me though!

Nope.

Open mouth, spew thoughts out.

On the positive side though, it did give my god a chuckle, and amusing the goddess of life had to count for something, right?

It does. It always does, she said.

“Why don’t you explain a little better then,” Responsibility said.

I wanted to punch her.

Why we she always so much better than me!

I love how stupid she is, Beauty said and I scowled at her. 

She was right, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

She’s not right, Inhibition said, meaning Beauty though it took me a second to get that. You’re not stupid and Responsibility isn’t better than you. You both are just under what people in Malgenia’s time might have called a mountain of stress.

Thanks, I said, to Inhibition specifically, and tried to suppress the mental grumbling that went with it.

“Okay. Let me start over there,” I said and gathered my thoughts.

I’d spent so long thinking about this though that I had no idea where to start for a moment.

“I’m not Malgenia.” It wasn’t the best beginning, but I felt it was important. “I’m not but I have all the power she ever collected. And some of her memories. And the powers she had well before the Sunfall. And I watched her for my whole life, the same as all of us did.”

“Not all of us,” Responsibility said. “There was a reason she choose you for the last Assumption. There are definitely Deaths who aren’t as tuned in to Malgenia as you were.”

“Fair. Though I think what drew her to me might have been Diyas’ presence or the Blessing she’d given me.”

“Can we go back to that later, because I don’t understand that either.”

“Sure.”

“So you’re not Malgenia, but you have all of the pieces of her that you’d need to become a near perfect copy of her if you wanted to.”

“Yes, which means I am absolutely capable of being the same monster she was. Maybe even worse because I know what its like to not be her.”

“And that scares you?” Responsibility’s comforting tone was not what I’d been expecting, but I didn’t mind it.

“I wish it did. At first, yes, but the longer I have these powers, the more I wonder about them. And the longer I have Malgenia’s memories, the more I want to poke around in them.”

“And that’s a bad thing because?”

“Once you see the things she’s done, you can’t unseen them. And the more that you see, the more numb you grow to it. I’m….”

I did not want to give voice to that thought because I knew it was far more true than I wanted to admit.

“She thinks she’s becoming like Malgenia, she thinks she’s going to flirt with unforgivable things and with no one to stop her and no consequences there’ll be nothing to stop her from descending into the same depths Malgenia plumbed,” Beauty said and bonked the side of her head against mine.

“Yes. I understand,” Responsibility said without flinching away from me at all. “So exactly what can I do to help with that?”

“When I said ‘fight me’ I meant it, but ‘me’, not ‘Malgenia’.”

“You and Malgenia’s power are inseparable though, are you not?” Responsibility leaned back and steepled her hands in front of her face. She always did that when she was thinking seriously about something, which sparked an erg of hope in me.

“At the moment, yes. Sort of,” I said. “Technically I could sever myself from her powers, and I think even her memories and basic abilities, but that would unless everything she has stored up and obliterate the word. So, obviously, we’re not doing that.”

“Obviously. If you want to destroy the world, my presence or absence would be immaterial.”

“There is a moment when I can be separated from Malgenia’s powers though,” I said. “I know because its when I destroyed her.”

“During an Assumption,” Responsibility said, guessing the answer because she is, as I’ve mentioned, smarter than me.

She’s not, and I will smack you if you need me to help remind you of that, Beauty offered.

Hey! I wasn’t saying I was stupid that time, I was just acknowledging that Responsibility is brilliant.

Then say that, Beauty said. No one gets to beat you up, not even you yourself.

“During an Assumption,” I confirmed. “How it’s supposed to work is that we, the Deaths who are partaking in the ritual present our world and supernatural gifts to Malgenia, laying them before her and opening ourselves to receive an infusion of her divinity in the process.”

“But instead she devours us?”

“In a manner of speaking. What the ritual really does is create a state of communion between Malgenia and the Death into which Malgenia pours not a drop of her divinity but an ocean of it. Far more than we can handle, enough so that when she reclaims it, because it is still her divinity, not ours, she’s able to claim our mortality along with it. Some of her divinity is lost in the process, it’s what kept Beauty, Inhibition, Reason and the rest around after they were consumed. That’s an intentional feature of the ritual though since having too much divine grace within her is what was constantly pushing Malgenia  towards tipping over into full godhood, which would then get her consumed by the Beast of the End of All Things.”

“So, let me get this straight then,” Responsibility said. “You want me to be the next Assumption candidate, we perform the ritual and then, while the communion is open between us, we fight? What would that bring us? Would one of two of us wind up in the same state you’re in now?”

“That’s one possibility,” I said. “But I think we can do better than that. You and I specifically. Because you hate me. If we begin the Assumption ritual, establish a communion and then fight with all we’ve got, then within the Assumption the one who wins will be able to claim Malgenia’s power, but if they let the loser live too, that power will be shared between them. Neither of us will be as powerful as Malgenia was, and we’d have each other to keep us in check.”

“So you would go into the Assumption and chose to lose it, putting yourself in my hands when you think I hate you?” Responsibility asked.

“Not exactly. If I go into planning to lose, Malgenia power won’t come with me. I need to fight for real, and you need to as well.”

“What if we destroy each other in the process?”

“Malgenia’s power will fall to whoever is destroyed last or destroyed less and it will be more than enough to restore the victor to full.”

“So I could wind up in your state, or I could wind up dead and you’ll still be trapped like this?”

“Possibly? Yes. Practically though I don’t think so. If you’re willing to destroy me, you’ll definitely be able to win, and then it’ll be up to you what happens next.” Was I trust my arch-rival with my life? Yes. Did I have much to lose if she decided she didn’t want to share power? Nope. Either way I wasn’t going to become a monster.

“There’s only one small problem with that,” Responsibility said, rising from her seat.

I thought she was going to leave (I have no idea why, it just seemed like a thing she would do) but instead she knelt down in front of where I was sitting.

And placed her hands on either side of my head.

And gave me a surprisingly deep and passionate kiss.

“I meant it when I said that I love you.”

“Vitor, do we really need the others?”

“Need them for what Malgenia?”

“Exactly! I’ll go see them now!”

“No! No! Wait, apologies sister, I was distracted there. Let’s try this again; what, specifically, are you referring to?”

“The others, Vaingloth, Sasarai, Helgon and the whole lot of them. I was just thinking wouldn’t we be able to end the world without them? I mean you’re talented, I’m talented. We could just do all this on our own couldn’t we?”

“They’ve asked you to write another report didn’t they?”

“No. I mean yes. But do we really need them?”

“We do dear sister. Weren’t you just saying that Dyrena helped you with one of the wards you were working on? They all have areas of speciality where they excel beyond us.”

“But we don’t need them.”

“Okay, which one of them, exactly, do you think we don’t we need?”

“Any of them!”

“Even Dyrena?”

“No. She’s fine. She can stay.”

“What about Helgon? His automatons have been helpful haven’t they?”

“They’re cold and pointless, but, yes, they’ve been okay.”

“Then whom among them would be the first to go?”

“I don’t know. All the rest of them. We don’t need Kurst do we? What has he ever done for us?”

“Aside from visit you yesterday? If I remember correctly I was busy with Helgon or I would have joined that meeting. What was it you two spoke about?”

“What else? Contracts.”

“That it was Kurst does. Let me guess, he asked for your input, written input, on how the non-aggression contracts could be formulated such that long term Necromantic effects were covered as well?”

“He’s a jerk.”

“Yes he is. And also a fool. He seems to think that his little bindings would be able to hold sway over you as you are now. Imagine the surprise he’s in after our ascendance should he ever give you cause to show him where the limits of his little contracts fall short.”

“Oh. Oh yes. That could be a delight!”

– Malgenia and Vitor plotting what would become the second death of a Neoteric Lord.

I’d expected Responsibility to be shattered by awe. Quaking in her slippers. Ghostly pale. Trembling head to toe. 

I had been the first time I’d met Diyas and it seemed only fair that Responsibility should have the same, full experience that I’d received.

Instead she simply waved to my goddess.

“Oh, hello,” she added and moved over a bit so that Inhibition and Reason shuffled as well making space for Diyas to sit beside them if she wanted to.

“Once upon a time, I’m guessing no one would have sat down in the presence of a god?” Beauty said without rising from beside me.”

“No. Once upon a time, appearing like this would only have been possible at a moment of Divine Revelation, and those come only when a mortal is ready to receive them.” Diyas took the offered seat and slumped against the backrest as though she was embodiment of laziness rather than the Avatar of Life.

“How are you able to appear like this now then?” Responsibility asked, when the question should have been how Responsibility herself was so calm about meeting an actual deity!

I was about to burst out with those exact words when the answer hit me. 

Or answers.

First, Responsibility wasn’t calm. She was fried. Hitting her with “Malgenia’s gone and your greatest rival is wearing her body” pretty much broke her ability to react to absurd, world-altering revelations. 

Second, apart from her initial proclamation to establish who and what she was, Diyas was not wearing her Divine Essence as a “Mantle of Awe”. Diyas looking casual and relaxed was perfectly intentional, and thinking for a moment (which, honestly, how often do any of us bother with that?) was enough to show me why. We didn’t need Responsibility awed. We needed her on our side of her own volition. Forcing her to do what we wanted, even if that coercion was subtle and divine in nature would strip away any chance of success.

“I’m not what I once was,” Diyas said. “Still a god, despite the rumors of our death to the contrary, though there’s some truth to those as well.”

“So you are or are not a god then?” Responsibility asked with the simple curiosity of someone who knew what they were seeing wasn’t, couldn’t be, real and so didn’t actually matter enough to be worried about.

“She’s a piece of herself,” I said since gods needed to be careful of explaining themselves too much. 

From the hints Diyas had given me, they were sort of like ideas, only more independent. The problem was if they said something about themselves, it was all too possible for that to become true, or worse, the only truth. In that sense, I was the less malleable of the two of us, though changing who Diyas was hadn’t been something an apocalypse had been capable of doing so I was pretty sure I had some of the nuance wrong there.

“Quite a lot of pieces in fact,” Reason said. 

“We’ve spent most of the time since Insight freed us finding as many of Diyas’ other pieces as we could,” Inhibition said.

“Pieces?” Responsibility was coming dangerously close to believing what was right in front of her.

“The Sunfall happened,” I said, offering it as a reassurance that not everything we learned was a lie. “Malgenia, Vitor and the other Neoteric Lords – there were twelve of them, not nine by the way – they stole the grace they were supposed to be sending to the gods and summoned the End of All Things. It attacked the gods first, and almost all of them were destroyed fighting it. Or, why do we ‘destroyed’ or ‘killed’? Wouldn’t ‘broken’ be more accurate?”

“Not necessarily,” Diyas said, and, like always, offered no further information.

Was it because we were all clever little beasts and could figure it out for ourselves?

Yes. Let’s go with that. Diyas shared with me alone.

“The battle against the Beast changed them,” Beauty said. “The gods we have now are fundamentally different from what they were before.”

“Ah. True. They’re grounded in this world rather than existing solely on the divine plane,” Reason said.

“I don’t recall mentioning that?” Diyas said.

“You didn’t have to oh Divine One. We are clever little beasts after all,” I said. 

One should always and at every opportunity, tease one’s god.

Yes. Clearly the wisest course of action, Diyas quipped to me alone (I think?)

I was being completely sincere on that though! 

I am fully aware of that, Diyas said. Without smiting me, I would like to point out.

“I have to confess, I’m still lost,” Responsibility said. “Am I actually dead? Is this a special hell you’ve put me in? Oh no! No! Insight! No more lying. Malgenia killed me and dumped my soul into your keeping didn’t she!?”

“Responsibility. I need you to look at me, look directly into my eyes, and try to make the claim that I am smart enough to come up with ANY of this? Go ahead. Try. I dare you.”

I leaned forward and regarded her with as honest and open an expression as I knew how to make. I had the advantage of having zero to hide from her at this point.

Can I mention how good that felt? How after two years of pretending to be the worst monster in the world who I’d love more than my own blood, I was finally, FINALLY, able to drop the damn act and talk to someone who I could not only trust but who would not worship me in the slightest?

I mean, yes, I had the other Deaths, and Diyas. None of them were in the ‘worship Insight’ camp, but we were bound so close together that I sometimes lost a sense of where I ended and where they began.

Responsibility though? She was wholly and completely her own creature. Not only capable but also entirely willing to stab me when the need arose.

Was it weird that I wanted Clarity here just so we could fight over her again?

Yeah. That’s weird.

Whatever.

“Oh frozen hells, you’re not kidding,” Responsibility said and glanced over at Diyas again, taking the god in a bit more completely this time.

“Haven’t been this whole time,” I said. “Need to stab me again?”

It was an honest offer but not the stress valve I’d hoped it would be.

“Okay, no, wait, no, you said you needed me. Why? Why in all this would you need me? Me of all the Deaths?” Responsibility said, looking from Beauty sitting beside me to Inhibition and Reason sitting beside her.

“Do you want the short form or the full explanation?” I asked.

“Both,” she said, breathing in a long, controlled inhalations and exhalations to center herself.

“The short form is that we’re all stuck in a cycle. Malgenia eating the Deaths that were raised for her was entirely of her own volition, at least at first, but if I choose to not continue that trend, the whole world dies. I don’t mean the people on it. I mean the base physical materials of the world. All of it. Gone. With you though, maybe we can fix that.”

“I think I am going to need the long form,” Responsibility said and glanced back at Diyas as though to make sure the god hadn’t just been a hallucination.

“The Neoteric Lords are all ‘immortal’. It’s a limited form of immortality – they’re not unkillable, they’ve proven that on three separate occasions already, but their lives are essentially unlimited. Disease, poison, most kind of wounds, even a lot of spells just simply don’t affect them. I pulled some of that from Malgenia’s scattered memories and some of it from her notes so I’m pretty sure it’s universally true for the other Neoterics. Malgenia herself was a special case though.”

“Can we come back to the Malgenia’s memories part of things?”

“Definitely. We’ll get there pretty soon in fact. As I was saying though, the other Neoteric Lords all harvest the grace their people generate for them. The surviving ones have various individual schemes which augment that, but for all practical purposes they have the power to exist for as long as they want to.”

“Malgenia’s not weaker than them though. We’ve seen how Vitor treats her.”

“You’ve seen it. I’ll wager you a weeks worth of suppers that about half the Deaths haven’t paid enough attention to see anything about Vitor except what we’re told to see.”

“Fair. Also, do you still need supper?”

“Sadly no. Malgenia’s form of immortality is different from the rest. Where they all have a population they keep, she only had us Deaths, and our grace wasn’t useful for her.”

“But I…we, we were so devout! What are the other peoples like?”

“Far less devout, but first there’s far too few of us to sustain a Neoteric Lord, and second, Malgenia couldn’t use our grace because her essence was almost perfectly death-aligned. The other needed to gather power over centuries to masquerade as the gods they can pretend to be today. Malgenia didn’t need to do that because when the Sunfall happened, she was the one who absorbed all the energy from the deaths that followed.”

“Why would she need us then? We couldn’t be anymore than the tiniest of drops compared to everyone and everything that died?”

“You would be surprised. Every life is holds worlds of possibility,” Diyas said. “Balancing eternities was something even we deities found challenging.”

“Also, we had something Malgenia couldn’t get from any of the dead things she laid claim to,” I said. “We lived. We were, or are for you, a part of this world. Malgenia absorbed so much power, and she was so strong in Necromancy before the Sunfall that she was always teetering on the edge of an actual divine Ascension.”

“I thought she had become the God of Death?”

“She could have, but that would have destroyed her. Remember, they summoned the Beast of the End of All Things? It’s still there, prowling the Divine Realms. Malgenia didn’t need us to extend her life. She’d kind of never had a life. She needed to take our lives to keep her mortal enough to exist here.”

“But you said she’s gone now. Why do you need me?”

“Because someone needs to give me back my mortality.”

“Vitor, I must ask, has your sister been like that her whole life?”

“Like what Helgon?”

“Well, dead.”

“She’s not dead Helgon. You spoke with her yesterday.”

“Yes. That was when I confirmed her, umm, state.”

“Her state? Helgon, you are aware that we have actual work to be doing here are you not?”

“Oh I am, I am. I was simply curious. It’s not often that one sees a dead woman walking around after all. Or, is she a woman?”

“Yes Helgon. My sister is a woman. She has been since the day she was born and, so far as I am aware, has embraced that designation whole heartedly.”

“A woman since she was born? Wouldn’t she have been a child when she was born? I mean, I suppose it was up to her, but I would have thought appearing as a full grown woman might have given away the illusion rather quickly.”

“You know Vaingloth tried to warn me about this. I hate to give him any credit, but in this at least, he was correct.”

“Correct about what? Your sister being odd for being a woman from birth.”

“She will kill me if I let that stand. But it’s like talking to a rock.”

“Is there a talking rock here? You seem to be distracted.”

“No, sorry Helgon. Not distracted. Just considering enlisting my sister’s aid with certain necromantic procedures.”

“Quite understandable. Being dead like she is certainly provides her with a fluency with the Divine Words needed for our necromantic rituals which none of us can match.”

“Oh why today. Why any day. Helgon, my dear compatriot. Please explain why you believe my sister to be dead. In your explanation consider the fact that dead people do not, as a rule, walk around and talk, as you yourself have personally witnessed her doing.”

“But she doesn’t. Didn’t you know? What we see and interact with, that’s a construct. We had to take some readings of our Elemental Affinities last week. Here, look at the results for Malgenia. She is nearly pure Death aligned. There are undead with more traces of life than she has.”

– High Accessors Helgon and Vitor discovering that their Aetheric Sensors have limitations they were unaware of, whereas Malgenia might not.

She stabbed me. It was a reflex, and it left me on knees crying an unmitigated flood of tears.

Responsibility had stabbed me. With the special blade from her arm sheath. The one she’d stabbed me with the first time.

I was so, so happy.

Also laughing.

Which, you know, I can see in hindsight was not the most comforting reaction I could have had.

Not to make excuses for you, or any of us, Beauty said, but this has all been a lot more than we should have been capable of dealing with.

And to her credit, Responsibility, didn’t run away, Inhibition said.

Responsibility, of course, could not hear them. The other Deaths who proceeded me were speaking only in my head.

We could change that, but maybe talk to her first, Reason suggested.

I dried my eyes.

Empty heavens I loved her.

Stabbing me right away!

So perfect.

My second favorite Death, despite her perfection, was having a rough time it turned out though.

“My Lady! My Lady! No! Wait. What have I…”

I raised my left index finger to quiet, if not entirely calm her.

“What you always do when I piss you off, Responsibility.” I drew the blade out of my heart. Damn that had been a good shot. She really was talented. “And what I very much needed you to do.”

“I don’t…no…I don’t…”

Was she overwhelmed? Of course. Malgenia was the foundation the lives of the girls raised as her “Deaths of whatever” were built upon. My revelation was going to force her to recontextualize everything she’d ever been told and everything she believed. That was not a fun process, and it took so much longer than felt at all reasonable.

We’re still working on it too you know, but it gets more manageable, Beauty said.

“Come here. There is a lot we need to talk about,” I said and with a wave grew two park benches up from the dead and thorny vines around us. 

I could have left the benches covered in thorns – Malgenia’s body didn’t care about them anymore than it had cared about the stab wound – but I made them cushiony and smooth. Responsibility was having a bad enough day. She did not need any minor torture to go along with it.

Taking her by the hand – again not a thing Malgenia ever did with us – I directed her to one bench while I took the one opposite her.

“I can think of a thousand questions that are storming around in your mind,” I said. “Let me answer some of the quick ones. First, this is not a test of your faith. Second, you can trust me exactly as much as you ever have, which is to say not at all and entirely, and I believe you can tell which situations each of those apply to. Lastly, I cannot say I will do you no harm, because I clearly already have. What I can say is that I will honor your choices and that you do not need to fear me.”

“Because fear does not save us from what we cannot change or resist,” Responsibility said, eyes downcast. It was a mantra we learned as children when we woke with night terrors. I’m not sure who the mantra ever helped, I suspect no one, but it did teach us not to bother our instructors at night and to hide those emotions away as tightly as we could.

“Because I need you,” I said, wishing I had Malgenia was still around so I could throttle her a bit more.

“Why?” she managed to whisper the word through the tears that were threatening to flood down her face.

“Because I’m an abomination and I need your help to stop this cycle we’re all caught in,” I said, offering the simplest explanation I could think of.

You didn’t need to call yourself an abomination, Insight said.

Technically you’re an aberration, Reason added, ever-so-helpfully. We all are. 

“You can’t be Insight,” Responsibility said. “Insight descended. She’s a demigod now.”

Yeah.

That’s what I was supposed to be.

Or that’s what we’d been promised.

And Responsibility couldn’t look at me, so I breathed in and called two things to mind; who I used to be and the divine power Malgenia carried.

“Responsibility. Look at me,” I said, wearing the form of my old body once more.

“No. No…this has to be a trick.”

“I wish it was. I wanted so much to a queen of the underworld. But that’s not what Malgenia needed me for.”

“It’s not what she needed any of us for,” Beauty said, no longer speaking only in my head but instead drawing on Malgenia’s power to appear as the ghostly image of  the girl she’d been in life.

Clarity was prettier of course.

It’s not a competition, Beauty said, sharing that one with only me.

“Not everything she told us was a lie…” Inhibition said, manifesting on the bench beside Responsibility.

“But most of it was,” Reason said, manifesting on Responsibility’s other side. “What we knew of her, what we our destiny was supposed to be, what really happened in the Sunfall…”

“Almost none of it was the truth,” I said.

“How?” Responsibility asked.

“How could she? Easily. She had power beyond measure and had never had to face any consequences for the harm she inflicted.”

“No. How could we not have known? This can’t be…we would, someone would…”

“You did. I did too, but a lot later than you.” I wasn’t trying to be reassuring, which was good because my words didn’t seem to comfort Responsibility at all.

“No. NO! I was faithful. I was…”

“You questioned. You watched and you evaluated. You, more than any of the others, actually thought about what we were doing.”

“That’s not true. Clarity is a lot smarter than I am.”

“Well, of course. I mean, that’s Clarity. She’s…Clarity.”

That, surprisingly, earned me a chuckle from her.

“You sound just like her,” Responsibility said.

“Clarity? I have never sounded half as smart as Clarity and you know it!” I said it on reflex and it was the least Malgenia thing I could have said, so, terrible for my disguise, but I think exactly what I needed in that moment.

Yes, yes, you’re brilliant, we all know, Reason chided me privately.

“Empty heavens but you really do. And you look like her too. Insight, is it really…?”

“Yes blockhead. It’s really me. Want me to drown you again?”

That bought me a look of shocked recognition. When the Deaths had little squabbles like that one of our unspoken yet ironclad rules was that we kept it to ourselves. Our instructors were kept out of it as completely as we could and Malgenia was absolutely not allowed to hear even a whisper of our conflicts.

“Okay. This is too much,” Responsibility said.

“I get that. Trust me. It’s been almost two years and I am still processing all this. Feel free to freak out as much and as long as you want.”

“But the others…?”

“Do you think anyone is going to breath a single question to you demanding answers about what Malgenia took you away in secret to do?”

“But Clarity, she’ll be worried.”

“Thousand hells. Yeah. She will be. Okay. We’ll keep this short then. But you do need time. And you need answers. What do you think, maybe we can limit this to an hour today? Malgenia’s whims could last that long right?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Yes! Seriously when was I ever the smart one of the two of us? I’d bring Clarity in on this to but…”

“No. No, she cannot be part of this.”

“I KNOW! Trust me…I know. I know exactly how messed up this is making you feel, and I don’t want that for her, or any of the others.”

“But it’s okay for me?”

“Yes. No. Yes. I need you. And if this makes you hate me then all the better!”

“I don’t understand any of this. I…I’m going to assume you really are the Death of Insight that I knew, and that the story they told us, that we would descend and become Demigods in the Underworld, Queens under Malgenia’s godly rule, was all lies, but that doesn’t make any of it make any sense at all.”

“Let’s start there then. I’ve learned an awful lot but it’s been the other Deaths here who helped me understand it. And kept me however sane I can claim to still be. Ask us the questions that seem the most important to you and we’ll try to answer them so that it all fits together in your head.”

“Okay. Fine. Let’s begin with them, you all, that is. What are you?”

“We’re the part of who we were that Malgenia didn’t consume,” Reason said.

“You could call us Soulforms. I think that’s the technical term she had for us,” Inhibition said.

“We’re bound into the construct of Malgenia’s power,” Beauty said. “She consumed our bodies and our lives, but our memories, our spirits, and our souls weren’t anything she needed.”

“We should have fallen down into her underworld with all the other souls of the dead she has trapped there, but we wound up getting caught in the web of her power,” Inhibition said.

“The other Deaths she’s consumed over the years are trapped here too but most of them are lost in a kind of slumber,” Reason said.

“Just like we were,” Inhibition said.

“Until she came along,” Beauty said, sitting down beside me and throwing a ghostly arm over my shoulders.

“Yeah. I was able to wake them up because we’d met and they knew me,” I said.

“But how were you able to do that? Shouldn’t you be dead too?” Responsibility asked.

“Oh, I’m not like them at all,” I said. “When Malgenia tried to consume me to extend her life again, I had a surprise ready for her.”

“THAT WOULD BE ME,” Diyas said, the dead vines of Malgenia’s Garden surging with life as my god made the kind of entrance that only an incarnate deity can.