“I’m bored, when are we going to put the world back together Vitor?”

“We have put the world back together Malgenia. It is ours now, we can do with it as we wish.”

“I can make a diorama out of Vaingloth and Wepan then?”

“Well, no, clearly not. They are our fellow Lords. We cannot afford for there to be animosity between people like us, or the world truly will end.”

“That sounds delightful too! Let’s do that!”

“Come now Malgenia I know you do not mean that.”

“How? How do you know that. Maybe I do. I could end the world. We did it once already and it wasn’t even hard.”

“Precisely. If you wanted to end the world, you would be busy doing it. So, come, tell me what it is that is troubling you. Is it your new sculpture?”

“No. That wasn’t really a problem. I just needed to repair its vocal chords so it could scream again.”

“Well there then, you’ve completed another masterpiece, you should feel proud!”

“There’s no frozen keeberry custard.”

“Frozen…keeberry? When did you ever have frozen keeberry?”

“All the time.”

“You did? Who made it? I don’t recall father ever allowing the servants to make plebian sweets for us like that?”

“He didn’t.”

“Then where did you…oh, the church acolytes?”

“No…or, yes. But not them. They just showed me where the stands were. In the market.”

“Did they…did they give you a recipe perhaps?”

“What? No. They gave me keeberry custard. Why would I want a recipe?”

“So that we might know how to make it ourselves? Or, have one of our people make it for us. One of your Deaths perhaps? They are endlessly willing to please you after all. I’m certain they would make keeberry custard for you if you told them to.”

“They can’t.”

“Why ever not? We can get them all of the kitchen supplies they’ll need.”

“There’s no more keeberries. They were all destroyed in the Sunfall.”

“Well, then conjure some up? It can’t be that hard, berries are simple little things aren’t they? And you can pull almost anything from death!”

“I didn’t say they died. I said they were destroyed. The stupid Beast ate them. They’re gone forever.”

– A pair of Neoteric Lords beginning to understand exactly what they’ve inflicted on themselves.

I was going to kill each and every last Neoteric Lord in the world. It was a delightful notion. Malgenia would have been so proud of me. You know, if I hadn’t killed her first.

Hmm, actually on reflection, she probably would have been proud of me for that too. I mean, she was a horrible, terrible monster, but she did appreciate efforts that produced fatal results. In fact, the more I thought about it, and the more of her memories that came back to me, the less sure I was that she’d really been fighting me as hard as she could have.

Had I done her a favor?

You did the whole world a favor, Diyas said. I’m just saddened that we have to ask you to do several more of them.

I’m not sure there’s anything to be sad about there. Ridding the world of monsters is rather uplifting if my spat with Malgenia is anything to go by.

There was, however, just one tiny problem.

“Assuming you can kill them all…” Theia started to ask.

“She can.” Clarity cut in to stifle any doubts there, which surprised me a little. I mean, I understood the power I’d taken from Malgenia, but she didn’t have the same personal experience with it. Then she met my gaze and I saw that it wasn’t her belief in Malgenia she’d built her conviction on.

Which was kinda scary.

It was a lot easier to believe in Malgenia after all. Everyone was, quite rightly, terrified of her. I was just…

The one who killed her, Diyas reminded me.

“Assuming over the last couple centuries the nigh-omnipotent world destroyers haven’t worked out any defenses against the one person they all agree could murder them with a thought,” Theia said, “Assuming that then there’s the obvious question of how are you going to get them all in one place? Because you only get one shot at this right?”

“We do,” Responsibility said. “It’s possible to perform the Assumption Ritual multiple times but, after the first, any remaining Neoterics will understand what we’re up to and avoid us at all costs.”

“So we’ll need to draw them all together,” Clarity said. “At a time when they are at their most paranoid.”

“Several of them have lost all of their divine fragments from the raids you staged though haven’t they?” Jilya asked. “Could we leave them out of this and handle them separately?”

“Of the remaining Neoterics, we were able to reclaim the divine fragments horded by Hanshel, Tallgrim, Grosh, and Wepan. We couldn’t find a path into the hoards for Insikir, Vitor, or Malgenia,” Little said. “The four lords we did pilfer from however are arguably more dangerous at the this point than the ones we missed.”

“That gives us five hoards to their two,” Jilya said. “Do we need to go to war on them and bring them all together at the negotiating table.”

“Four hoards,” I said. “You didn’t find a path into Malgenia’s hoard because she doesn’t have one.”

“Wait, but that’s not possible. She claimed a lot of domains, didn’t she?” Theia asked.

“She did, but she wasn’t like the other Neoterics. They claimed the divine fragments, but the domains were still held by the bits of the gods they possessed,” I said, watching for when each of them would piece together what I was saying.

Responsibility and Clarity already knew. It hadn’t come as a surprise to them when I’d confirmed the catechism we’d been taught our whole lives. The same was true for Beauty, Inhibition, and Reason, though I hadn’t needed to confirm it for them since they lived it like I did.

“How, exactly, did Malgenia get access to the domains themselves?” Little asked. She’d grasped what I was saying, she just didn’t want it to be true.

But of course it was.

“She gathered all of the fragments of the death gods to herself,” I said. “And then she slew them. There are no more fragments of the gods of death left in this world. There’s only Malgenia…or I supposed me now.”

“And the other gods? The other fragments she claimed?” Jilya asked, horror creeping around the edges of her words.

“There were a few where she collected all the remaining fragments. Those gods died too. The ones where she only found some of the pieces though? Those she just turned over to Vitor.”

“If she’s holding onto the domains themselves though, then would she be…?” Theia asked, denial preventing her from completing the thought.

“And that’s why Insight needs to do the Assumption Ritual. Soon,” Beauty said.

“Malgenia, more than any of the other Neoterics, was always teetering on the edge of expressing the godhood she’d stolen,” Inhibition said.

“It’s why the other Neoterics never struck against her, despite their fear of her,” Reason said.

“But killing gods was kind of their thing wasn’t it? Why would they be more afraid of Malgenia as a god than they were of her as a godkiller?” Theia asked.

“Because we never killed any of the gods ourselves,” Helgon said. “I reviewed quite a few of our early papers which tried to argue that we could and each and every one of them showed that it was impossible. Mathematically, doctrinally, fundamentally impossible.”

“So what did Malgenia do then?” Jilya asked.

“Ignored Helgon’s research,” I said. “To be fair though, when people consulted with her on whether it was possible, she would always say something like ‘well of course’ and then offer, from what I can tell, zero justification or support for the statement.”

“I am afraid that none of us took her quite as seriously as we should have,” Helgon said. “She had a very silly air about her though, or at least that was what the others said. We never worked together much, she and I. I can’t imagine why?”

“She thought you were afraid of her,” I said, a stray Malgenia memory floating into my awareness.

“I was. Terribly so. But then I was afraid of all of them really,” Helgon said.

“Even Dyrena?” Little asked.

“Especially her. She was a true terror. A laughing, mean terror. Just the most cruel I must say.”

Ah, right. I’d almost forgotten that Dyrena still had someone who kept her at the center of their heart. Wouldn’t have guessed a ghost would count, but apparently a heart is a heart and death doesn’t change that.

You are mean, I said to absolutely no one in particular.

And cruel and terrible, no one in particular answered.

Ready to admit that you do have a worshipper? I asked.

It is…it is more complicated that that.

Because of course it was.

I hugged Responsibility and Clarity. Literally everything in my life was complicated, so I suppose I owed Dyrena at least a little compassion there. She might have wrecked the world, but my world had been born out of that wreckage, and at this point I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

“I don’t think we want to complicate things with a war if we can avoid it,” Little said. “We might have more divine fragments, but how many of the new Blessed are we willing to send to their death fighting even one of the Neoterics?”

“It’s worse than that,” I said. “I mean, clearly we don’t want anyone to die in general, but it’s probably worth pointing out that everyone who dies adds to the grace Malgenia is holding. Regular people, Blessed, even whatever we all are, any of us dying will make it ever more likely that I lose my hold on Malgenia’s power and ascend.”

“And then Night won’t be able to cloak you, and the Beast will come and devour us all for good,” Theia said, speaking as the representative of Night in our little gathering.

“That is the central problem yes,” Reason said. “But we also just don’t want any of you dying.”

“The new Blessed are our best chance to bring the world back to life. Losing even one of them, or one of you, would leave us that much more diminished when we may not have enough pieces left to work with as it is,” Inhibition said.

“And, you know, we’ve died, so we can say that living as good a life as you can is worth it,” Beauty said. “You’ve all got eternity to see what comes next, the time you’re here is precious because it’s so limited.”

“So, no dying, sounds good to me,” Theia said. “But that does leave us with the problem of assembling the Neoterics for your ritual.”

“In the past we would simply call a conference if we needed everyone to attend to something,” Helgon said.

“They did that when Vaingloth was destroyed,” I said. “But even with only one Neoteric down they were still too paranoid to come in person. Everyone simply projected themselves into Vitor’s conference room. And then they projected themselves into my house when I was ‘working on studying the Beast Fragments’. I have to wonder if they’re talking at all now given Sasarai’s, uh, demotion, and what everyone except Insikir and Vitor lost.”

“If I know my co-conspirators, and to be honest I’m not sure I ever really did, but I would nonetheless guess that Insikir and Vitor are working out how to divide the world between them, while the other four are conspiring on how to hold off Insikir and Vitor,” Helgon said before frowning and considering further. “That will be what they’re telling themselves. What they will actually be doing is working what the most effective means of betraying each other will be.”

“Seems like they’d be wiser to just try and get the divine fragments they lost back,” Little said.

“They know Draconia is back in play. And they can probably guess what happened to Sasarai – not the being made into the God of Worms thing, but how he lost all his divine fragments first and would never be able to retrieve them.”

“Can we put Insikir and Vitor onto an even playing field with the other four somehow?” Theia asked.

“That’s unlikely. We couldn’t identify anyone who could get into their vaults and none of them have had to expend the grace they have stored up yet,” Little said.

“Maybe we don’t need to push Vitor and Insikir down,” I said. “How many divine fragments do we have that don’t have Blessed yet?”

“Quite a few,” Little said. “What are you thinking to do with them?”

“I thought we might give them back,” I said, taking a page from Jilya’s playbook.

“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.”

“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.

“The Beast Fragment wards seem to have settled into the resonance we were looking for Vaingloth.”

“And they’ll be self-sustaining even if a Beast Fragment tests them Helgon?”

“More than self-sustaining. Credit to Insikir there, but if a Beast Fragment does try to pass between the micro-portals, its presence will enlarge the portals and provide greater deterrent the closer it approaches.”

“But the enlargement will still remain microscopic?”

“Oh, indeed. That was the spot in the formulae I had difficulty with. Insikir’s assistance was invaluable with working out the snarls in the equations. Thanks to him, we’ve got a multiply tangled function between the size of the wormholes and the depth they penetrate. Mathematically, as portals approach infinity their size grows as an asymptotic function, while their depth grows logarithmically.”

“And there’s no concern about what they might punch through to with that much force behind them?”

“There would be, but the even if a Beast Fragment were to physically interact with one of them, their presence would not have be able to push the depths outside the realms we have data for, and while there are theoretically inimical forces below the seventh devolution of reality, a Beast Fragment shouldn’t be able to drop a portal below the the third devolution.”

“Shouldn’t?”

“From our calculations, the main body of the Beast wouldn’t be capable of dropping below the fourth devolution, and even accounting for any inaccuracies in the values Dyrena gave us, we can establish a hard boundary that the main Beast would only barely breech the fifth devolution. So a fragment would at worst, reach the fourth.”

“Have you had anyone beside Insikir confirm those calculations?”

“I hadn’t thought to. His work is generally solid and the results align with the baseline projections? Do you think we need a formal review panel?”

“No. Not a formal review panel. Consider however that the baseline projections for this sort of thing are based on Insikir’s published research.”

“Oh, I see. You think if he made a mistake on his earlier research, he might make the same mistake on these more specific ones?”

“A mistake or an intentional oversight.”

“But we’re all at risk if these are incorrect. How could it be intentional?”

“Would we necessarily notice if Insikir installed his wards with different tuning values?”

“Certainly. Our walls would fall and his would not…oh, I see.”

– Helgon and Vaingloth a few days before discovering long standing flaws in several foundational texts of Aetheric Boundary Setting and Breeching.

I didn’t cry for that long. Not a million years at least. 

Had I been that scared? That lonely? That desperate?

I mean, it was a perfectly reasonable decision to march out across the Wasteland taking the shortest possible route to where my loved ones were, wasn’t it? 

And worrying about whether they still loved me was also perfectly reasonable. 

I mean, it had been months. And I was different. And, really had I ever been all that lovable…

Do you really want to go there? Beauty asked. Because we can have the conversation, and I promise you, Responsibility and Clarity will pummel you with affection mercilessly.

Uh, was that supposed to be a bad thing? Was that something I didn’t want?

They’ll also be worried for you, Inhibition said. And a little hurt that you doubted them.

“She needs you two to prove you love still love her,” Reason said, bypassing our private little mind space, and giving me no time to hide my insecurities at all.

“No she doesn’t,” Responsibility said pulling away from the group hug they’d all buried me in. “She needs to believe she’s still the woman that she knows we love.”

“And of course she’s not,” Clarity said, sitting back with a smile that was far kinder than her words. “Just like we’re not.”

“We’re not?” The words tumbled from a numb mind over numb lips.

“We’ve changed, all of us,” Clarity said. “All different people. Not the same in the slightest. First time we’re meeting in fact. So we get to fall in love all over again.” Between Clarity and Responsibility, I’d somehow missed all along that Clarity was the one with the greater gift for being So Incredibly Mean!

What I hated most though was that it worked.

She wasn’t teasing me. She was somehow teasing my insecurities directly.

And it was working!

Would it have worked on anyone else? No. No one is broken like I am, at least as far as I know. And no one else has the relationship with me that Clarity did.

“Maybe I won’t this time,” I said. “Perhaps I shall be cold and cruel. Devoid of love and light. I’ll wander off into the wasteland cursed to bear my loneliness until my faltering grip on mortality slips, ever, so, slowly out of my grasp. Look, the dark horizon calls me now, and I must go!”

“You try to stand up and I will break your knees,” Responsibility said. “You’re not leaving us again.”

“Oh? I’m a prisoner now, am I?” Not an idea that I hated.

“You could probably escape us, but do you think we’d stop looking for you?” Clarity asked, heat and intention scorching her words.

“No,” and for a moment I was not thinking about my plans for vengeance on the Neoterics. Or my impending fall into divinity. Or even the fact that we weren’t exactly alone.

“Good. Now get up and come see us properly. Projecting like this is like hugging you through fifteen layers of robes,” Clarity said and I had my marching orders.

Literally.

It was another two days of walking through the wastelands before I got to Mt. Gloria. Various things should have blocked my passage, malevolent spirits, wandering Beast Fragments, scrying probes from the Tallgrim, Wepan, and the other Neoterics (though not Vitor interestingly). Wrapped in a shadow that wasn’t my own, I slipped past them all offering no violence, no death, and no sign of my existence.

Happily though, I didn’t walk alone. Projection may have been unfulfilling but the others took turns keeping my company and making sure I wasn’t wandering off course or into the jaws of some hitherto unknown monstrosity.

Which was silly.

I was the hitherto unknown monstrosity.

I didn’t have problems. I was the problem other things had.

 Since sleeping and eating were optional, we spent the time my purely conventional mode of travel required discussing plans and bringing me up to speed on what they’d been working on.

The good news was that my ‘death’ had put the Neoterics into something of a holding pattern. With the loss of Vaingloth being certain, the loss of Malgenia seemed at least possible, but our spies (We had spies! Such a handy thing!) reported that none of the Neoterics seemed willing to gamble on it being the truth.

Vitor wasn’t an exception but he was exceptional in that he seemed to be the least interested in pretending that I might still be alive. He’d taken control of my estates, though he hadn’t broken the seals on my inner sanctums yet (somethings even he’s not quite stupid enough to do). 

It sounded like the other Deaths were being mostly confined, though they had been told that they were going to be evaluated at the next Sunfall Festival in six months time, which I knew was code for ‘Vitor was going to find something else to do with them as soon as he could be certain his sister was actually gone.

Closer to home, Helgon had actually proved to be useful and had helped Clarity and Reason make significant breakthroughs in understanding the Assumption Ritual. There was still some fundamental issues that they were working on but they were at least able to pretend they were in good spirits about the progress they’d made.

The Assumption Ritual wasn’t the only thing they’d been working on for me though.

“You’re heisting parts of Diyas from the other Neoterics?”  It wasn’t something they’d led with mostly, I suspect, because it was the kind of plan that I should have been yelling at them about. I’d lost all ‘complain about people doing stupid things’ privileges thanks to getting myself eaten by the Beast though, but the impulse was still there!

“Not personally!” Beauty said. That she was manifested beside me and holding my hand meant I could only roll my eyes in disbelief rather than punching her in the shoulder like she deserved.

“Who else would be interested in going up against the Neoterics?” No one else had my advantage that if the Neoterics could manage to kill me they’d be ending the world, and we all knew it.

“You didn’t get a chance to meet her. Her name is Theia and she’s a Blessed like you.”

“Diyas has another Blessed?” As welcome news went that was just about the most. I’d heard of people being jealous of others receiving Blessing, but they obviously weren’t Blessed themselves. Knowing that my god had someone else to love and support them? That was a relief I’d barely suspected I needed.

Sorry, but you’re it for me, for now, Diyas said. Theia’s blessed by one of Night’s aspects, Umbrielle. Which made her much better for this mission than one of my Blessed would have been.

It wasn’t exactly hard to see why that was true. I mean, sure, I could probably waltz into a Neoterics lair and take back the fragment of Diyas they held – assuming it wasn’t hidden too well for me to find, and that the Neoteric tried to face me head on (which literally none of them would), and I didn’t mind revealing that I wasn’t actually Malgenia or that they would immediately all team up on me.

A Blessed of Night though? Based on Meluna’s performances, I was pretty sure Theia could be standing behind me right that moment and I wouldn’t have a clue.

“So who is she targeting?”  If it was Vitor, I was going to feel compelled to help out. He had the knack for appearing to be the dimmest of all the Neoterics but he was Malgenia’s twin and there were times that showed.

“Sasarai. Meluna found a paper Dyrena had left behind about Sasarai burying his treasure vault beneath his big tree, far from where any of his people roamed. We figured burgling one that people weren’t around would be easier than one that’s under constant guard.”

A paper Dyrena had left behind? How ‘convenient’.

I thought about calling out to her, but, no, she’d stayed hidden for some very good reasons. Also, whatever she was, I was sure she had even fewer options for manifesting before someone than Diyas or the other proper gods did.

She says ‘thank you’, Diyas said, confirming my suspicions.

“Out of curiosity, why did you send Theia and not Meluna herself? I mean Sasarai’s kind of a shrub when it comes to intelligence, but he will notice when one of his divine fragments goes missing.”

“It was Theia’s idea. She can hide herself well enough to move about a Neoterics lair, which we proved because she knew what our bedrooms looked like.”

“She what?” I’d been kidding, somewhat, when I said she could be right behind me. Malgenia’s defenses on her rooms were second to none though. I definitely should have been aware if someone was creeping around in there.

“The Death’s rooms,” Beauty amended. “She’s got the sense not to mess with the Neoterics directly. Also Kalkit was able to let us know that Sasarai doesn’t visit his hoard of god souls. He just draws on their domains indirectly because he thinks if he never enters the vault no one else will know its there. Kalkit called it ‘security through obscurity’ and kind of spit on the notion.”

“So she’ll be able to get in and out quietly then? And Sasarai won’t noticed the fragment is missing until the next time he goes to heal someone?” Which could mean he’d never notice since the Neoterics as a whole weren’t in the practice of using the powers for the benefit of anyone except themselves, and avoiding injury was one of their highest priorities.

“That’s the plan!” Beauty said almost as though she was cueing Inhibition to appear.

Which Inhibition immediately did.

“The plan’s failed! We have a problem!”

“I have to confess, I don’t really see the point of this. I mean, yes, the screams were entertaining, but it’s a momentary thing. Over and done and then what? I suppose there’s repetition but they were all so, so similar?”

“Vitor did you kill all of Class 3? I told you they weren’t ready yet.”

“Excuse me Malgenia, I distinctly recall you saying that they would be ‘ripe’ at sunrise. I waited until a hour after the morning devotionals but it was you who chose to sleep in.”

“I always sleep in. Dreams are so delightful don’t you think?”

“So people say. You know I only rarely remember mine.”

“Something you should work on.”

“While I’m asleep? Is father’s ghost possessing you now, thinking that even in sleep I’m not allowed to free of the crushing requirement to be productive?”

“No, no, good brother. There is nothing productive about dreaming. It is the mind at play. Careful madness dancing with the deepest of bodily relaxation. Quite wonderful I assure you.”

“And when you are screaming in your sleep? That is deeply relaxing too I suppose?”

“Oh, those are the best dreams. Too often they shatter but if you are truly lucky you can find one that you can’t awaken from. To trade comfort for such exquisite experience is sublime!”

“You claimed this would be sublime too, but my hands seem to have turned it to disappointment and more than a little bit of mess.”

“Well of course you did. You are but a novice  to the devotions of the gods of mortality. But, as with everything, practice perfects the mastery of the art.”

“So I have heard.”

“And yet?”

“And yet, it is such a terrible bother assembling and sustaining the subjects of the ritual. Not to mention that it will take the better part of the day to clean the cells and it’s not a duty which can be entrusted to anyone else now is it?”

“No, it is not. Discovery would yield us no end of headaches, and the thin comfort it would provide those who learned the result of the our working would lessen the impact of it tremendously. But did you feel no thrill of anticipation in the collection of the subjects? Or in watching their slow degradation?”

“There was some entertainment in that yes, but it was drawn out over so long and miserly a stretch of time, and then all over so quickly once it came to the ritual itself. I admire your devotion sister, but I fear my interests are held by more lively concerns.”

“Well that is fine too. This will keep us from being in competition with one another for resources.”

– Vitor and Malgenia discovering that despite being twins, and both being prodigies with manipulating and mishaping grace, they had markedly different interests in some areas.

I walked through the cold and lonely wastes of the world, unseen and unheard, but I was not as alone as I appeared to be.

When you said you were going to walk to see the others, I assumed you were going to ask Meluna to cloak you for the trip, Diyas said.

Don’t need to be cloaked, I said, letting my mind drift in the nothingness I felt around me.

I can see that. I’m not exactly sure why though? I can still sense you, so everything else should be able to as well and there are definitely things out here that lack the awareness to be sensibly afraid of what you could do to them. For that matter there are spirits not far off that would more welcome being fully destroyed in a battle than they would enjoy winning it.

You’re the only one who can sense me, I said, keeping my thoughts tranquil and wrapped in the embrace of the nothingness. Well, you and Reason for sure, probably Beauty and Inhibition as well, since we’re bound together more deeply than a little thing like the Beast can severe.

You’re not cloaking yourself though? Why aren’t the spirit fragments nearby swarming us? Diyas didn’t understand because some things are completely outside her domain and as ‘Life’ tends to cover quite a lot, the sensation had to be rather odd for her.

I pondered a moment before offering an explanation. Would she be horrified with what I was doing? Probably. It was a rather stark violation of the fundamentals of reality.

Or it had been.

What was real had changed though.

I had changed.

Dyrena had warned me I would, but I hadn’t understood exactly what she’d meant, and I don’t think there was any way I could have.

It did make sense though. The Beast Fragment had been a piece of the End of All Things. When it swallowed me, I had to, in some sense, end there. Thanks to Diyas, that ending hadn’t been the end of all of me, or even most of me. I had my memories, I had the bonds that made hanging onto this world worth it, and I had a future I wanted to see more than anything. 

What I’d lost was a disturbing bit of my mortality and with it a worrying bit of my entirely rational fear of embracing things which weren’t supposed to ever have been a part of the world.

That might sound like a good thing. Who wants to be afraid after all? Survivors. Survivors are the ones who were smart enough to be afraid. We (generally) don’t like our fear, and it can be detrimental to be overwhelmed by it, but at its root level, our fears exist for several excellent reasons, not the least of which being cautioning us away from actions where the consequences are both unknown and potentially cataclysmic.

In my case? Doing what I was? I most certainly should have been afraid and it definitely had the potential to go cataclysmic in a heartbeat.

Which was why I spent the moment pondering. Not because Diyas was going to yell at me. She had every right to do that and she would be inarguably correct to do so. No, my concern was more about whether it was safe for my god to let her know what I was doing, or if that might trigger the cataclysm I was afraid of.

Did you notice the Beast wasn’t around when we came back? I asked her. Was it wise to share what I knew? I couldn’t tell, but trusting my god was sort of a fundamental part of our relationship.

It had been months, are you saying it didn’t move on? Diyas asked with the familiar tone in her voice I’d so often heard in my own when I realized I’d been missing something blisteringly obvious.

Moved on is a euphemism people have used for it in the past, I said.

What do you…wait…no. That’s not possible. And there was the creeping horror which a god should not have been capable of experiencing.

But Diyas wasn’t what she’d once been either. She was capable of a lot of things she that once hadn’t been part of her existence. Being able to feel fear probably didn’t seem like much of an upside to the changes she’d experienced, but she was far more of a survivor than I was and it kind of came with the territory.

I am Insight, I said, but I’m also the holder of most of the domains of Death.

But the End of All Things can’t die. It’s not part of the cycle of life and death. It’s not anything at all.

And there were the five words I could never say just waiting on offer as an explanation.

I should be a god by now. I’ve put off the Assumption ritual for far, far longer than I had the strength to hold out against it. I guess I was sort of lucky there? Melting endlessly for a million years let all that grace just boil over with no where to go. So I’ve got some margin now. I think I’m maybe about as close to deification as I was a few months before the Beast swallowed us? Sadly, I can feel the grace returning faster than ever.

Was I changing the subject? Yes. Obviously. Was Diyas still stuck between disbelief and a horrified understanding of the peril we were in? Yes, also obviously. If she hadn’t been, she would have dragged the conversation back to the objection she’d raised.

But she knew she couldn’t. I’d told her what she needed to know without telling her, which was how it had to be.

I hadn’t killed the Beast which had swallowed us. Malgenia herself couldn’t have managed that. I was, in some senses though, Death, and I’d accepted the Beast Fragment. Little had done something similar, but where she’d gained a companion, I had not separated quite that far from the Beast Fragment that swallowed me. 

The spirits around us couldn’t sense that, no one could since, technically, there wasn’t anything to sense. If you knew what to look for though, I was pretty sure someone would be able to notice that my shadow wasn’t the absence of light but a far deeper void, and that was something that pushed all of the spirits away, even the ones who thought they were seeking their own destruction.

Your reprieve from godhood will hopefully be enough. The others have had six months, and I know they’ve been working on modifications to the Assumption ritual with Helgon extensively, Diyas said, accepting that we couldn’t speak of what we knew about some topics even in the sanctity of our holy link.

With Helgon? They’re working with one of the Neoterics? I knew I’d sent them to meet with him but I’d pictured the encounter being a somewhat limited and partially adversarial event.

What had happened to my girls?

I think they will surprise you, Diyas said, some of her usual amusement returning to her tone.

After the last million years we’ve had, I’m not sure I like surprises anymore, I said, though the sense of having spent any time being dissolved by the Beast Fragment was fading faster and faster as the days and miles passed under my feet. It still felt like I’d been gone for a long, long time, but my memory of the ones I loved was as clear as it had ever been. 

Six months though? With each step I had to wonder how close my memory would be to their new reality. And how close their memories would be to mine.

Ah, there’s the nervous fretting we know and love, Beauty said, appearing beside me as though we had been parted for a couple of minutes rather than an age and a half.

Give her some time, Inhibition said, she’s been through a lot.

“Wait…can you be here? Are we…can they sense this?” I asked the question aloud because it seemed like the least obvious thing the other Neoterics would be looking for.

And laughter answered me back.

Reason’s laughter.

You don’t need to worry, she said, we’re not speaking through the web of Malgenia’s power that binds us together. We’ve learned a lot while you were, let’s call it on vacation, no one’s going to looking for that.

Then how…? I was expecting Insikir or Sasarai or one of the other idiots to descend on me any second and my plans very much did not allow for that.

The Blessing, Reason said. We know you’re still connected to Diyas through the one you share with her, so now we’re all connected to you through the one you share with me.

But..huh…is it a real Blessing then? I had been very much winging things when I set it up, but with six months of experience to draw on it made sense that Reason would understand our ‘new’ bond a lot better than I did.

It’s different than the one Solas and Little share, and from what we’ve been able to put together it’s different from any Blessing that’s been given before on some important points. Reason was in her element and I, for one, was all to glad to let her expound on all the discoveries she’d made since we’d last spoken.

There was just the small little problem that I was completely overwhelmed by emotion.

Somewhat annoying that.

I mean, it wasn’t like I’d been struggling on my own for ages against a fate that was beyond horrifying and that I’d had absolutely no basis for hoping that I would ever see any of them again. 

Seriously, how hungry could one person be just for the sound of another’s voice?

And shouldn’t despair shattering feel good? Not like shards of glass finally raining down you?

Crying was stupid.

I was stupid.

Everything was stupid.

And they were hugging me.

And even the comfort felt impossible.

Like how could it be real?

My shadow made a funny warble, as if to say this whole ‘being comforted’ idea was foreign, and new to it, and unwelcome, and weird. 

And it wanted more.

And so did I.

“Maybe we can help with that?” Responsibility asked, appearing near me just like Beauty had.

“I know this is a particularly odd question coming from me, but should you really be buried in research stacks on a day like this Dyrena?”

“A day like this? What sort of day is this Helgon?”

“Many sorts I suppose. It is, for example, our first day of pleasant weather after what was reportedly the most beastly winter in living memory. Also it is notably the first day of our week long school break when we are encouraged to seek out experiences our studies do not normally provide. Then there is the minor point that the research stacks have been closed for twenty hours now and access to the library is forbidden to anyone in the absence of the library staff.”

“Oh? Well that would explain a few things I suppose.”

“Such as?”

“I was rather curious why there were no guards stationed at the arch to the Forbidden Lore crypts.”

“I believe the vault doors and the sealing spells are meant to serve in lieu of an active guard presence.”

“Are you sure? The sealing spells were quite rudimentary. And the lock on the vault was, as you can see, rather easy to circumvent.”

“I believe they did not account for someone of your considerable talent to take an interest in gaining the access you presently have.”

“And you as well. I didn’t disturb the seal spells or the lock after all.”

“It is far easier to follow someone else’s lead than work out solutions from first principals.”

“And you followed my lead why?”

“I wished to prevent you from encountering any difficulties such as expulsion were you to be discovered.”

“I am reasonably sure they will wish to expel me regardless of any discovery of today’s work.”

“They are fools, but to expel the best student they have? Is the faculty truly that dim?”

“I doubt I am the best…”

“You are. Unquestionably.”

“Even if that were true, I can’t imagine they will prove to be tolerant about the rituals I’ve discovered here.”

“Why would they wish to expel you over simply learning a ritual? Learning is what we’re here to do isn’t it?”

“Yes, but we’re not supposed to learn how to end the world.”

– Dyrena discovering the insufficiently flawed and misleading version of the rituals she would eventually refine and put before the High Accessors who became the Neoteric Lords.

It should have been somewhat crushing to learn that my world only existed, only could exist, because of the destruction of the world that came before it. I, however, was about to be gobbled up by a blob of non-existence, and, more importantly, the world that had existed was something I had no interest in restoring.

It had made Malgenia after all.

Granted it was also a world where Diyas had been fully herself, and that I would like to see, but…

But I’ve changed too. The communion between the Blessed and the Divine was far more impersonal before we fell. We were literally not the part of your world that we are now, Diyas said with a sign that was equal parts sorrowful, resigned, and grateful.

“One other question then,” I said, addressing it to Dyrena. “While it’s good to know what you did and why, the Beast is about a hand’s width away from swallowing me whole, so, how does that help me?”

“Mostly I’m hoping it helps you believe I’m being honest here and that what I’m about to suggest won’t sound entirely mad, or at all hostile.” Dyrena folded her hands on the table in front of her, preparing to offer what I knew was going to be the worst possible idea there could be in this situation.

And the most terrible part was, I knew what it was going to be.

“I’m supposed to sit here and get eaten aren’t I?” I asked, not even vaguely uncertain as to whether that was the plan or not.

Dyrena nodded.

“That implies that there is some other options I could choose to take?” I asked, knowing what they were as well, and why I couldn’t take them.

“Two other options,” Dyrena said. “You could fight or your could flee.”

“But to flee, I’d need to use Malgenia’s power,” I said.

Dyrena nodded again before adding, “And even if you managed to avoid godhood again, the Beast Fragment would simply follow.”

“And the defenses around Malgenia’s sanctum?”

“Wouldn’t slow it at all. You would be able to ensure that the other Deaths joined you though.”

“And fighting won’t work either.”

“I couldn’t beat it when I had my full self. I don’t think beating it is even possible in any meaningful sense,” Diyas said.

“And being eaten by it?” I asked, horror beginning to creep up my fingers as windows of possibility closed before me one after the other.

“It will change you,” Dyrena said. “All experiences do, but this one more than most.”

“I’ll survive it though?” I asked and then understood what was truly scaring me. “Wait, no, will Diyas survive?”

I wasn’t being brave. I was broken. I’d been raised to believe in ascension through death. I just didn’t have it in me to be properly afraid of dying. I’d dreamed about becoming a proper acolyte to Malgenia from the moment I could say her name. Even with how I felt about her, that part of me was still a dream my mind clung to.

Losing Diyas was a different story though.

I’d heard the echoes of her pain. I knew what she was the to the world. What she was to me. I could burn, that was fine, but Diyas was another matter.

“I didn’t last time,” Diyas said. “But last time I didn’t have you.”

“She’s right,” Dyrena said before a mountain of doubt could crush me beneath it. “She’s not what she was, and the communion you two share is something outside the design of this Beast.”

“You made it so it couldn’t hurt Blessed like me?” I asked.

“No, no, but I made never accounted for what Blessings would be like when the gods were part of the world. You are a problem the Beast can hurt, can destroy, but the hurts it inflicts can’t define you, and the destruction you endure is one you can recreate yourself from.”

“That doesn’t sound easy,” I said.

“It won’t be,” Dyrena said with an apologetic frown as the Beast’s maw finally descended over me.

The world went away.

I went away.

I was nothing.

Except…

There was that “I” sitting there.

If “I” was nothing, then nothing was a quality I could possess? And if “I” could possess qualities, then “I” was something, and if I was something…

That particular bit of nonsense cost me a million years to work out. 

But I did work it out.

It was a millionth of a second after the Beast swallowed me that I upgraded the statement to be much more powerful.

Not “I am.” but “We are.”

We. 

Diyas and me. The Beast could dissolve my body, but Diyas was the God of Life. Making a new body for me was trivial for her. Or why even bother with that? She wanted my body to stay alive so alive is what it stayed.

The Beast could have erased Diyas as well of course. It had in the past after all, and among all the other things it didn’t have, a compunction against erasing gods was definitely at the top of the list.

Small problem there though. Where the gods existed on a mostly conceptual plan, I was solid. That wouldn’t have been enough to save me on its own but in conjunction with Diyas, where I protected her and she protected me? It was all too easy to see what Dyrena had meant about the two of us being a problem the Beast simply wasn’t built to handle.

Not that we escaped unscathed exactly.

Or alone.

Or quickly.

“The second time through was a little easier than the first, but I still owe you both a rather severe apology,” Dyrena said.

We were back in my house. Or the remains of it. The one the Beast had destroyed.

“Who am I?” I asked, since it had been about a million years since I’d had a name to work with.

“Mine, you are mine,” Diyas said, which was delightful because she’d been my companion for those million years and I still knew her name.

“Give her a moment,” Dyrena said. “I think I learned a bit from Little’s ordeal, so I’m hoping that this time wasn’t quite so rough, but I had to be very careful of alerting anyone about what was actually happening.”

“What actually happened?” I was tasting the words more than asking a question. It felt like someone had punched my memories in the face repeatedly.

I think I might have undersold what being eaten by the Beast was like.

It wasn’t fun.

And if Little had a worse time than I did?

Could I make someone a Saint?

Oh!

Wait!

I’d made someone a Blessed! 

Reason!

I went to cast my awareness out to her by Dyrena grabbed my hand first.

“Don’t!” she said. “You are in a precious instant, don’t waste it. Reason’s fine. All of them are fine.”

“They’re still alive?” I asked as my memories dragged itself up off the ground and started coughing up the names and faces I desperately needed to remember.

“Your time got a little frayed but it didn’t snap,” Dyrena said.

“It felt like a million years,” I said. “We were lost in there for a million years.”

“I think it was less than a second,” Diyas said.

“I’d hoped it would be less than a second, but that was the time I had to work with, out here, six months have passed.”

“Six months? Six months! I was lost in there for six months! What did the others…,” I couldn’t even finish the question. What could the others have thought? How mad with grief would they be? 

Oh, hmm, mad, yeah. They were going to be mad. 

Like really mad.

Maybe crawling back into the Beast wouldn’t be so bad?

“They know we’re okay,” Diyas said.

“They do?” That seemed like an unreasonable thing to hope for, much less find to be real.

“Apparently a perk of being separated as I am,” Diyas said. “I was there with you, but I was also with the fragments of me that they found.”

“So why can’t I talk to them?” I asked, the entirely irrational fear that they all had decided they hated me while I was away feeling unquestionably real.

“Because you’re dead,” Dyrena said. “Not really of course, but as far as anyone who is not part of your immediate family knows, ‘Malgenia’ was consumed by Beast Fragment six months ago. Malgenia being who she was, no one has quite given up on the idea that she might still be around, so the Neoterics are still outwardly counting you as among their number but privately they’re making plans based on you no longer being part of the balance of power between them.”

“So they think there might still be eight of us but they’re scheming like there are only seven?” I asked, happy for the momentary distraction from worrying about where my people were and how much they hated me.

“They’re scheming like Malgenia, specifically, is missing. The threat of her wrath was one of the great stabilizing forces in our little cabal,” Dyrena said. “It’s why I insisted we have her. Also, with her around it was much more likely that they would kill me.”

“You are strange, you know that don’t you?” I asked, feeling more and more the weight of the six months that I’d lost closing in on me.

“You’re not the first or the thousandth person to observe that,” she said.

“So, why can’t I talk to my family?” I asked, coming back to the most important question in the world.

“To talk to them from here, you’d need to use Malgenia’s power and, while they think she’s gone, every one of the remaining Neoterics is focused on little more than finding you and Vaingloth’s power.”

“Why would they think weren’t just erased by the Beasts? I mean that’s definitely what happened to Vaingloth and what should have happened to me.”

“They might have found a paper in my old journals concerning ‘the circuitous route power lost to a fragment might return to the world’. Searching for that route and the power they could claim has kept them just a tiny bit distracted.”

“And we want to keep them distracted. Got it,” I said and got up at last. Without wasting a second I began scouting around the house. I didn’t need food or water, thanks to Diyas, but clothes and travel supplies like a tent seemed useful to have.

“You’re going to find them, aren’t you?” Diyas asked.

“Yeah. They deserve the chance to throttle me themselves. Then we’ll turn our attention to taking out the right person.”

“The Neoteric who tried to kill you?” Dyrena asked.

“Them too, but I was thinking more it would be whichever Neoteric was the last one standing. Whoever tried to kill me needs to go, obviously, but just because they beat the other six to the punch doesn’t mean the rest won’t try to do the same or worse if we give them a chance. So they have to go. All of them.”