Thyia had taken a shine to the Karmic Realm, finding her feet carrying her there whenever she deigned to leave her room and grace the Four Realms with her presence. Terrorizing mortals with catastrophes – not unduly, only where necessary – was fun and all, but she did need to start getting out more. And the Karmic Realm felt oddly comforting most of the time. Today, though, she found herself wandering the Karmic Palace rather than just the realm itself, drifting through the expansive rooms and relatively empty halls.

More specifically, this was not the Karmic Palace, but a Karmic Palace, one of the new ones recently constructed in the outer regions. She didn't want to run into any of the bigwigs right now, even if Keilan was out and about. Besides, seeing a Karmic Palace like this under construction had been an enlightening experience, like a snapshot of the beginning of the universe. Now that it was complete, beings were beginning to inhabit it.

Karmic Kings waved at her as she passed, the karmic spirits nodding to her as they continued their work. Relatively few souls passed through the palace to head toward reincarnation; for the most part, civilizations were still getting established here. Very much unlike the flourishing central region, and she would bet it was going to stay that way until this catastrophe was over.

A little soul wandered past her, catching her attention. It walked hand in hand with an older soul as they headed toward reincarnation, foul energy radiating from them, full of regret and pain as they were. Thyia frowned, looking into their past with hazy eyes and finding that they both had been killed by Morgan's children, the Arachaeon. The spider-people claimed their river village as a home now, its previous inhabitants slaughtered and...feasted upon. However, they had damaged the infrastructure in the massacre. The supports and formations that helped the village survive floods were no longer functional, meaning the next great rain would destroy the village, and anyone living in it, completely.

Thyia's fingers twitched as her mood soured, her expression darkening like the horizon in a storm, a little bolt of power giving the incoming disaster a little nudge. Catastrophes were callous, and didn't care who they struck or who was in the way. But they were unforgiving of ignorance and stupidity. These Arachaeon, ignorant and cruel as they were, had the coming flood coming. Smiling to herself she turned away from the souls and continued her walk.

Still…she greeted another Karmic King, the dark-colored spirit bowing to her before returning to its clerical duties, pushing a cart of memories, storied in the forms of glowing blue pages, toward the archive of memories stored below the palace proper. She followed him on a whim, happy he didn't seem to mind her presence, discomforting though it could be.

Unlike the other realms, the spirits here treated her like just another visitor. They, of all beings, understood the place of Sacrifice and Catastrophe. Reika was…overbearing, but nice in her own way, she supposed. Her spirits didn't like her very much. Alexander she avoided, and Elvira too. Keilan was like his spirits; ambivalent to her presence, but kind enough when she showed up. Her feet stopped as she turned to look at one of the archival rows, lines and lines of books, each the collected memories of a mortal's soul, glowing on the shelves. Karmic strings hung from the tall rafters like streamers, constantly drifting and moving, ready to be strung together not yet fully formed.

Unfortunately, she noticed their presence far too late.

"Thyia!" Statera Luotian – Dad's – voice rang through the archives with an annoyingly happy trill to it, the god in question coming around the corner of one of the bookshelves with His guest, Alala, trailing just behind. She made a face, immediately recoiling a little. She had not come out here just to talk to people, let alone Him. "Good to see you out and about! What brings you way out here?" He asked.

"Nothing," she groused, crossing her arms defensively. Alala peered at her and she scowled at the tanned woman.

"She's prickly. I like her," Alala decided, nodding her head and grinning. Is that why you like me, or just an observation? Thyia wondered, carefully trying to smooth out her facial features to give her less things to talk about.

"You say that about everyone you meet." Statera said.

"There's something to like about everyone." Alala shrugged. "Is her domain Catastrophe? With a sub-domain – or a Dao, that's what you call it here – of Sacrifice? Weird. Cool, but weird. Everything takes a little sacrifice,"

"What are you doing here?" Thyia interrupted, desperate to get the topic off of her.

"Oh, well, while our main bodies are practicing with the Will of the Realms these incarnations are looking into manipulating Fate. We're trying to teach her to grab it and, honestly, we're running into a bit of a roadblock." Statera admitted freely, and Thyia was being honest if she admitted that that particular combination of words in that particular order made her head spin.

But what else could she expect from the creator of all things? He saw things differently than the rest of them.

"Statera is insisting that we start with red strings of fate, like love, but I think we should go after more complicated stuff, like competitions. I mean, winning a race can be considered fate, if you put in the effort and everything involved to win, right? You're literally building a destiny there." Alala tried to argue.

"Right, but the red string is simpler to follow. I told you understanding is important, and red strings are only built between two people. Far easier to understand the cause and effect there." Statera argued back. Thyia frowned as the two continued to argue, neither side making any better points than the other.

Neither of those sounded right, did it? They were thinking too small.

"You have something to say, Thyia?" Statera suddenly asked, interrupting her thoughts. She blinked at her Dad, frowning, then scowling even deeper at Him. She hated when He did that, noticing her thoughts before she had even decided whether or not to voice them.

"You're forgetting collective fate, and collective karma." She snapped, huffing through her nostrils. Lightning crackled in her voice as she spoke, tapping into her domain to help make her point. "One person can be affected by a greater force, so nothing is ever so simple. Sometimes a hurricane is just a hurricane. Sometimes bad weather, striking at the right time, is fate." Like a volcano erupting over a village, to teach not only an entire nation, but people all across the world of its dangers. Was that not part of a collective fate for the entire planet?

Statera blinked. "From the mouth of babes." He said, amused and looking at Alala, who shook her head and shrugged. Did He just call her a child? She was not a child.

"This is still going over my head, I'm not going to lie. And I don't think I'm stupid." She complained.

"It is a complex, sensitive topic. And you're not stupid. Thyia here is just telling use to look at a bigger picture instead of a smaller one." Statera said, crossing the distance between them in a single step and rubbing the top of her head, messing up her already frizzy hair. Thyia ducked out of His reach and He chuckled, eyes glinting playfully. "Well, since I can see you clearly want to be left alone, I'll leave you to it. Thank you, Thyia. And for the record, I am proud of you." The compliment was unwarranted. Unwanted.

And she hated the way her cheeks burned because of it. She turned away with a huff, earning a little laugh from Alala as the duo vanished from the archives.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Shut up," she grumbled, and rubbed her face, glaring at the archives.

…maybe it wouldn't harm anything if she tried to visit His palace every once in a while.

***

Keilan was being run ragged. Absolutely ragged. The One World's reincarnation cycle wasn't a total mess, as he had somewhat expected by the way Curie and Yueya spoke about it, but it was so understaffed that it was becoming a greater issue. The worst part wasn't that the process was inefficient; say what you will about them, but Curie had developed a terribly efficient reincarnation system, they were just horribly understaffed.

And there was no heart to it. He didn't know how else to explain it. Souls, when they died, would flood down into the center of the One World. There, they would spend a little bit of time in the cold dark before being ferried back up to the surface or one of the underground races. There was little to no downtime in-between lives, and little to no duties for the souls to perform during that time besides wait to be reborn. In other words, the afterlife was nothing but waiting for your number to be called.

It was an utter waste, in Keilan's expert opinion. Especially because right there, doing nothing, were a large number of hands that could help them with their personnel problem. Now just saying that and actually implementing it was another thing entirely. Curie had some designs planned out. Yueya did too, for an afterlife. And the blueprints were already there, some foundations in place…it just hadn't been implemented yet in favor of doing some other things that, admittedly, did need handling.

Which meant Keilan had been immediately made a consultant in the construction of the afterlife system, under the direct supervision of Astraea, the Goddess of Stars. His first mission? Training some souls to actually be able to help, which was easier said than done in many ways. Mostly because of the sheer number of souls. He'd heard Mother say that the One World was bigger and less dense energetically than the Four Realms, but that didn't mean they had fewer souls or gods. Quite the opposite. They had a higher number of gods, and more strong souls, but there was just so much space that they were all spread too thin.

Keilan shook his head a little to clear his thoughts. He was getting a little distracted.

"That should do it," he said, patting a soul as it slowly wandered away, back to a group of others. That one was decently powerful, and should be able to issue commands to…well, he didn't want to say lesser souls, but for all intents and purposes, they were lesser souls. The key here was delegation. Even if the small souls couldn't do much, what they could do was still something. And that little something meant things would slowly, but faster than before, get done.

They couldn't worry about quality. Quantity was what they were going for first.

"You are good at this. Teaching." Astraea noted from where she was gently crafting lines of starlight in the darkness of the One World's interior. It was only the framework of the afterlife, but a much better start than it had been when Keilan got here.

"I've had a lifetime of raising siblings." He said back, smiling and shaking his head. "Children like this are nothing to me. The right nudges, the right connections made, and everything comes clicking together. They're cute, simple, and straightforward with their desires. Working with them is endlessly more pleasing to me than working with some of the grown gods; a sentiment not all my siblings share." He said with a chuckle. For all that his siblings – and even Mother – complained about 'mortals being mortals,' it had always been more complaining about the actions of children.

"I see. Connections." Astraea muttered to herself, her power drifting about her hands. She was silent for a long moment and Keilan turned away, refocusing on his next task…but also taking a peek at what some of his incarnations were doing. One was with Curie, performing some scientific experiments – it was fascinating to watch her work, but her brain was far more logical than even his – another incarnation was with Yueya, watching her train some new gods, and yet another was with Gilles' main body as he explored the World itself. "Have you noticed the connection here, yet?"

The question was so subtle, so quiet, that Keilan almost didn't register it. And when he did, it took a few moments longer for him to even realize she had been talking to him.

"Me?" he asked dumbly, gut twisting as he resisted the urge to glance up, at the streams of connections he'd been grasping at ever since he'd arrived her. He was close to grasping it. So close to finding its end source, but it consistently eluded him, almost as if something was blinding him.

"I can't see it," she admitted, the tone of her voice forcing him to turn around. She had stopped working, starlight drifting about her fingertips. She was such a different kind of goddess than Xing Wu, even though both ostensibly held the same domain of Stars. What could cause such differences, he wondered. "I'm sorry, that was a weird question to ask. Forget I said anything." Well now he definitely wasn't going to forget it.

"I don't think so. Spill it. No being mysterious and cryptic, that's the domain of my Mother and She earned that right." Keilan challenged, turning to fully face her. Astraea met his eyes and immediately looked away, the starry goddess fidgeting with the hem of her robes, mouth working silently as she processed that. You don't get confronted like this much, do you? Keilan hid his smile as best he could; again, dealing with children, and his siblings, had prepared him well for things like this.

Sometimes the only way to get Elvira to admit anything was to confront her directly.

"I – I don't like it down here. I'm a goddess of stars, I'm supposed to be up above, in the skies, shining down upon the world, but…but here, I can feel it better." Astraea started, shaking her head rapidly. "I'm sorry, I genuinely don't know how to put it into words. I remember meeting someone from your universe who was like me, but opposite. Randus, I believe his name was. A god of dreams. I tried to figure it out through him, but I couldn't quite grasp it beyond this; I oppose something that's growing in the universe; not through strength, but through subtlety. But it feels like its cracked before me, shattered glass, an unfinished painting. Sometimes it mends a little. Sometimes it breaks more. I was hoping something you said would spark the insight I need by being mysterious."

Talkative once you get her going. Keilan thought, even as he smiled at her. "I am sorry, I do not know what you're talking about. Perhaps in time I will, but for now I do not." Did it have something to do with the Shadow, maybe? Kei said something about it before he'd left, as had Mother...had Randus been born to counter Morgan? In a way, yes; he was a dream of the future, rather than a nightmare of the past. So how was Astraea the same?

He pondered the question for a time, working slowly, until he realized something else was sticking out to him. One of the words Astraea had used; "shattered." He looked skyward, through the dark to the crust of the One World, and slowly started to fit the puzzle pieces together. It took him a while. Far longer than he would like to admit. By the time he realized it, he had already moved away from Astraea, moving on to different things at the request of Yueya.

And the moment it struck him, the incarnation that accompanied Gilles froze. The Shadow deity paused from where he'd been helping a deity of justice build a relay tower, something to help with the potential aiming of the Four Realms to pass harmlessly through the One World, and narrowed his eyes at Keilan.

"You're acting weird." He accused, and Keilan nodded, keeping his expression carefully neutral as his mind raced, going over the possibilities a thousand times. There was…there was no way. It couldn't be possible, could it? It wasn't a direct answer to why this was happening, to what connection was truly drawing the One World and the Four Realms together, but it was a much larger piece of the puzzle than he anticipated.

"We need some privacy. Do you mind…?" Keilan asked the justice god politely, the tanned dwarf, as Yueya called him, grunting as he hammered a pin into place with a glowing hammer. Immediately Keilan waved his hand, using his power to create a little bubble for the two to discuss in. "Gilles, tell me you feel it."

"Feel what?" Gilles asked, now truly concerned. Keilan swallowed thickly, let out a breath, and steeled his nerves.

"The One World. The problem it's facing isn't a Shadow, as you feared. I mean, I'm sure that's part of it, but…" Keilan shook his head while Gilles' expression quickly soured, becoming more and more concerned with each second he drug it out. "I need you to confirm something for me. The One World. What does its structure feel like to you? Stable?"

"…what?" Gilles all but demanded.

"I just noticed it, but look, you can see the fractures already starting to appear. I don't understand why yet, which is why I need you to take a look as well. It's not a quick process, but that's what it looks like. The One World's collapsing. It's a failing universe." Keilan rambled, prepared to start rattling off everything he'd noticed, and things he hoped –

"I'm going to save you the trouble." The voice that interrupted his thoughts came not from this incarnation, but from another one completely. The body of his, the sliver of his power that was helping Curie in her lab froze as the goddess of science stared directly at him, Gilles' own incarnation freezing. "Since you finally figured it out, I suppose I should come relatively clean. Yes. The One World was on the brink of collapse, though I cannot say the same anymore. That is why we are so concerned about the fragility of our universe. Now," at this, Curie's eyes narrowed, and she adjusted her glasses a little. "I do believe we finally have something important to talk about."

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