“What shall become of us High Accessor?”

“You will survive and, please, I cannot bear that title any longer. I am only Dyrena now.”

“Survive? The world has died! The gods no longer answer us.”

“They have fallen, all but one, and it is Night’s cloaks which allows us time yet upon this world.”

“Can we fix this then? That cannot be. How can we restore a world this broken without the gods?”

“That is not your task. Your burden is simply to survive. What has been done will take far beyond a single lifetime to set right.”

“Can it be right at all though? Can all of this ever be undone?”

“Undone? No, we do not undo our pasts. Nor will things ever again be as they were, for which we must be ever grateful.”

“Grateful? For this ruination? We’ve lost…”

“I know. I saw you holding him in your arms before consigning him to the earth. I saw her take her last breath. I saw each one who was torn from us and I saw how unkindly their ends were. That is why you must survive. To make a future where their loss will not be repeated again. To find comfort from your grief in comforting others.”

“But this world cannot sustain us. And all the memories it holds have turned to ash on our tongues.”

“There, at least, I can provide some respite for you.”

“Our gods are gone and our lands have burned, what respite is left to be found?”

“What has befallen this world is a great and terrible change but that does not mean you must accept the change for what it appears to be. Is what you see intolerable? Then do not tolerate it. Continue to change, become something new if that is what will see you through.”

“Nothing can grow here anymore though.”

“Then we must find you a new place to take root.”

“You said nothing was spared. Everything in the world has suffered as we have.”

“And so it is. Pockets remain but they are closed to us, guarded by the other Neoteric Lords who called this ruin down onto everything in this sphere. To you I offer a different choice than they will offer those they shelter; as this world can no longer sustain you, let us find another where you may flourish.”

“One where you can rule unopposed?”

“I cannot leave this sphere. For my crimes I am bound here and must suffer whatever fate awaits me. I expect I shall not have to wait long for the doom I have engineered to come to pass, but I will have the time to see you all sent to a new beginning.”

“Why would you do this?”

“If I am right, this world will, lifetimes hence, throw off the cloak of Night and flourish once more under the care of new people and new gods. In you though, I would see the best of the world that was preserved. You will change and grow as well. Should we ever meet again, perhaps I will not recognize you, but I would not see your growth twisted by the designs of any Neoteric Lord, not even my own.”

– Dyrena speaking to the thousands she saved from the Sun Fall.

Birdsong. Insect chirps. Wind. 

I was resonating with everyone of them. No supernatural force was at work, no divine grace twisted into a miracle of someone else’s making. The boneshaking hum in my body was a purely natural reaction to being suddenly immersed in the environmental cues my cells had been missing since before I was born. Since before I was even conceived.

My mother had never heard sounds like these.

My father had never felt wind like this.

I didn’t know my parents. I never had. I’d only been told they died when I was very little and Malgenia had taken me in to care for me. I had no conscious memory of either one but walking outside with my family in tow, I could feel them both.

And my grandparents.

And their parents.

A chain of life passed from one generation to the next and tied into every other life in the world.

“How is this possible? How are there birds again so soon?” Responsibility asked.

“There can’t be,” Clarity said. “It would take a miracle beyond any of the divine fragments to wish life back to the world so quickly.”

“It’s taken a little longer than you’re thinking,” Diyas said.

Not in my head.

She was standing right there, in front of us, tall and strong and achingly beautiful.

“You…this is a divine revelation?” I asked, seized by the memory of the limitations on her ability to appear before us and already dreading the moment she would leave.

We’d been separated, and while we’d renewed our bond, the strength of my faith in her wasn’t quite the same as seeing her in person.

“Nope,” Diyas said, with a secretive smile that told me my god was teasing me.

I welcomed that, but I was still perplexed.

“Someone else is going to receive a divine revelation?” Responsibility asked.

“No, that’s not what she’s saying,” Clarity said. “The gods have changed, haven’t they?”

“Of course, I’ve said that all along,” Diyas said.

“This is different though,” I said. “You’re not fractured anymore. You’re not a fragment.”

“That is true. But it is also true that I am not what I was and, as I requested of you, I never shall be again,” Diyas said.

“The celestial realm? Is it there anymore?” Clarity asked.

“It is, though it is quite a bit less populated than it was, just a few of us keeping an eye on it,” Diyas said.

“More than an eye,” Dyrena said, appearing in a form quite a bit less solid than Diyas’.

“Guarding it against another Beast’s arrival?” Beauty asked as she and Inhibition and Reason joined us.

Diyas beckoned us over to a small grove which had somehow sprung up outside the ruins of my house. I didn’t recognize the plants which were growing there, though they looked similar to Shootgrass stalks with broad green leaves at regular intervals which provided shade from the dazzling orb of light which was rising above the horizon.

“There will never be another Beast that comes to end existence,” Dyrena said. “Our cosmos simply has no room for one anymore. That spot is taken.”

“Taken by what?” Inhibition asked.

“By the Beast she called in. It’s a part of everything now, isn’t it?” Reason said.

“Most everything,” Dyrena said. “Night remains untouched.”

“And is as smug as she deserves to be about it,” Diyas said.

“Not just everything,” I said, and glanced towards my shadow.

And noticed Responsibility and Clarity’s shadows give me a thumbs up?

“Oh, you’re far from alone in that,” Diyas said.

“We did touch the Beast with you,” Responsibility said and nudged my shoulder.

“All of us did,” Clarity said, nodding towards the other Deaths who were scattered around grounds of what I suppose was more properly described as an ‘estate’.

I couldn’t begrudge them the choice to gather in groups and simply soak in the world around us. The fact that there was a breeze and that my face was being warmed by sunlight, (sunlight of all things!), was still stirring an unfathomable need in me to drink in everything around me and never, ever stop.

“How long were we gone for?” Inhibition asked. “For us the Assumption Ritual took almost no time at all, and most of that was spent in frozen instants, but that’s not what happened for the rest of you, was it?”

“In a sense, it was just over in an instant,” Helgon said, flickering into view beside Dyrena. “From the moment you entered the ritual to the moment the gathered grace exploded through the Greater Beast and rained down on the world was a timespan far less than a second. Your return to the world however has taken a somewhat longer period of time.”

“What Helgon is trying to say is that a year and a day have passed since you completed your version Assumption Ritual,” Dyrena said. “The life you see around you is not the result of any one miracle but rather the result of thousands, or perhaps millions at this point.”

“Miracles from who?” I asked, wondering if Diyas had been recruiting other Blessed in my absence.

“From you,” Diyas said. “I will be fair and say that many other hands have been lifted that load as well, but it was you, all of the Deaths I believe, who chose to give the Beast the ability to change and the change it made of itself was to become the things it had consumed.”

“I’m sorry, are you saying that all of these things? These plants, and those birds, they’re all the Beast pretending to be the things it ate?” Beauty shied away from a Shootgrass leaf which chose the moment to flutter closer towards her in the breeze.

“I don’t believe the Beast was mathematically capable of pretending anything,” Helgon said. “In fact, I’m sure I have a paper on that back in one of my labs…umm, somewhere, probably?”

“You say that as though you couldn’t derive the formulas from first principals with a whiteboard and fifteen minutes of uninterrupted focus,” Dyrena said, patting his ghostly arm in support.

“So this is all real then? The world is fixed?” Responsibility asked, casting a glance towards me as though I could possibly confirm or deny that.

“Not fixed, changed,” Meluna said, appearing in an unnecessarily dramatic fashion from the shadows beneath the Shootgrass trees.

I still wasn’t certain what I wanted to be when I grew up, but she made a damn fine argument for one possibility.

“These birds are like the ones we once knew,” Diyas said. “But they are not the same. Their song continues the song that was, but it is in a new key, with new notes.”

“And yet still about the same old thing,” Meluna said. “Loud single Greyjoy seeking Quiet single Greyjoy to make many, many more Greyjoys with.”

“That’s not true,” Diyas said. “Not for all of them at least. Some of them are saying ‘The Sun! The Sun! Look! It’s the Sun!’”

“Don’t say that, you know she’s going to be…”

“Intolerable about it?” Sola asked. “Yes, I believe I shall be.”

That we had, by my count, at least three gods standing with us, should have been calamitous. That much divine energy gathered in one place threatened world ending annihilation, as my very recent experience illustrated vividly.

But the world wasn’t ending.

It wasn’t even being disturbed much unless you counted Beauty’s continued aversion to the wind blowing leaves in her direction.

“How are you all here?” I blurted out. “I mean, you’re welcome, of course, it’s just…aren’t you not allowed to be present like that all together?”

“We are more grounded than we used to be,” Sola said, which seemed particularly odd coming from the God of the Sun.

“Before we were the embodiments of our domains,” Diyas said. “If Sola had manifested in person, it would have been like the sun itself stepping foot where she walked.”

“You can imagine why I never did so directly like that,” Sola said, and I could. The Beast wasn’t the only thing that could have ended the world.

“Instead we worked through our Blessed, or at the most, through carefully limited Avatars,” Diyas said. “To survive losing so much of ourselves though we had to turn to you, the mortals in whose hearts we could still dwell, and in living with you, we became closer to you than to the celestial sphere.”

“Though some of us had to wait far longer than others,” Draconia said as she and Jilya both dropped down from the sky above.

Their arrival, being rather the opposite of subtle, was the one which drew the attention of the other Deaths, who decided that the dragon and the dragon-plant-lady looked friendly and approachable. 

To the Deaths’ credit, that was true, but I only knew that because I’d spoken to Draconia and Jilya before. I think anyone else might have felt a bit of reasonable caution towards approaching two people who looked to be substantially higher on the food chain than we were.

Or were they?

My shadow shrugged, and the thought occurred to me that though we were largely a group of lost children and young adults, the Deaths might not need to fear what the new world could throw at us. We’d given up godly power, but that didn’t mean we were necessarily powerless either.

“That is for me to apologize for,” Dyrena said.

“Save it,” Little said, as Zeph set her down. “You did a whole lot of bad, and a whole lot of good. Enough that I don’t think we’ll ever be able to sort it all out, but the fact is we’ll have ‘ever’ if people want to work on doing it.”

“They will, believe me they will,” Diyas said. “History and I have been friends since the beginning and I can just imagine how many papers, and treatise, and highly fictionalized novelizations, will be written about you.”

“I never wanted that,” Dyrena said. “It’s not fair.”

“When have you ever imagined that I was fair?” Diyas asked, viciously sharp glee slicing through each syllable she spoke.

“You give us all a chance,” Jilya said. “That sounds fair to me.”

“Better to say you all take your chances with me,” Diyas said. “I give very little.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” Little said. “Though I have to say, I’ve probably gotten more than my fair share so far.”

“Says the woman who is desperately trying to avoid being named High Empress of the World,” Zeph chided Little.

“Yes. About that,” Little said, drawing in a serious breath. “If you all have a moment, I have a very simple request to put to all of you…Help!”