My hands trembled as the strange vision subsided, leaving me with a white-hot anger that I knew didn’t have anywhere to go. I didn’t know how I knew it had nowhere to go. I just did. The child’s first death was obviously from the Celaura extinction event, but the rest… The Beginning. Something that had to be equal with The End. I should hate it. But I didn’t feel anything towards it. The anger spun and churned in my gut with the intensity of a smith’s crucible, yet I couldn’t find a proper mold to pour it into.

“Where is The Beginning?” I whispered to myself, gently lowering the bag that now contained the last slyk pieces to the abyssal floor. “Did you kill it?”

For the first time in a while, The End responded to me.

//MY SIBLING HAD TO END.

//IF YOU TRULY WISH TO KNOW MORE, IT CANNOT BE OVER ANY SORT OF REMOTE COMMUNICATION.

//WHEN WE MEET ONCE MORE IN PERSON, THEN I CAN EXPLAIN.

I nodded absently, staring down at the corpse of a god. It just felt… wrong. “Why do I know there were fourteen Celaura reborn as gods?”

//A GIFT FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE BRINGER OF HER BLESSED END.

//THOUGH SHE WAS THE ONLY ONE WHO KNEW THERE WERE FOURTEEN; EVEN MORICLA HERSELF WAS AWARE OF FOURTEEN.

//I CANNOT EVEN BEGIN TO GUESS WHY THIS POOR SOUL WAS NOT TRANSPORTED TO THE SPACE OF CREATION ALONGSIDE THE OTHER THIRTEEN.

//DOES THE LOCKER ITSELF HAVE ANY SPECIAL FEATURES?

“Let me check.” I said quietly, placing a hand on the old metal. I tried to pull it into my inventory, but something stopped it. I frowned and shifted to try and identify it, but that failed too. “I don’t think this is real. It must be another hazard-in-a-hazard.”

//I CANNOT CONFIRM NOR DENY.

//HAZARDING A GUESS; I WOULD ASSUME THAT THE GOD AT YOUR FEET CREATED THIS SPACE WHEN THE TERRAFORMING OF SOTRIEN BEGAN.

//HOW IT ENDED UP WITHIN A HAZARD ON ANOTHER COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WORLD, HOWEVER, IS FAR BEYOND MY KNOWLEDGE.

So we knew the same amount about this fuckery. That didn’t make it better. I felt the rocky splinters within the bag, no longer recognizable as ever being a living being, and couldn’t help but feel sick to my stomach. A child, sentenced to an eternity of pain and death by The Beginning. The thing that, in all likelihood, would be hailed as the good guy in every myth and whispered legend.

I reached into the locker and pulled out the picture. It crumbled to nothing in my hands, destroying the only visible memory of this poor little god. “Is Mortician ready?”

//NOT QUITE.

//THEY ARE STILL MISSING ONE OIL TYPE TO CREATE A CORE THAT WILL BE ON PAR WITH YOURS AND JUNIPER’S.

“There’s oil all around me. Will the creator;s work?” I asked, yet the answer came to me before The End replied. The Creator was an amalgamation of everything the slyk were, and in that muddling, nothing was strong enough to show through. I could not split the tainted rainbow.

//NO.

//YOU MUST–

I cut off The End’s message by closing my interface completely. I knew what I had to do for Mortician. For all the poor souls forgotten by their own fucking gods. I unsummoned my right gauntlet and changed my weapon into a small knife, then placed an empty cylinder from my inventory on the ground. I hovered my hand over the contained and took a deep breath.

My knife cut into my palm with an edge so sharp I barely felt it. Oily blood lazily welled up in the cut, and when I thought it was enough to start flowing, I flipped my hand over and pressed it to the cylinder. The sound of my blood impacting the bottom of the container was stolen away by my surroundings, and as I watched the drops fall, my anger drained with it. In its place came a sense of protectiveness, and of stomach-wrenching guilt.

Guilt at being unable to help the Celaura, even though they’d died long before I was a twinkle in my parents’ eyes. Guilt at leaving Jun to fight the creator while I sat here watching my own blood trickle down like an oily hourglass. Guilt at making Okeria take the risk of Keratily’s wrath on his own, so that we could bring Mortician into the real world. And most of all, guilt at abandoning my old friends to whatever Garrett and Tarel had planned for them.

I hadn’t thought about that in a little while. But it seemed like it was simmering under everything else for so long, just waiting for an inopportune moment to rear its ugly head. Here I was, embroiled in what was probably the start of a Staura civil war, while Humanity needed me. Or… did they need me?

What was worse; that I’d abandoned them in their time of need to the chosen, or that they were doing swimmingly without me? I blinked in surprise at a feeling I hadn’t even thought of before. Of course it was worse if they were suffering because I wasn’t there, but a part of me… a horrible part of me hoped that was true. That I was important enough to matter to my people. That the chosen hadn’t learned from their old lives and changed for the better of humanity.

“What the fuck am I thinking?” I laughed coldly, leaning down to rest my head on my bleeding hand. “I’m not that selfish. I wasn’t even important in my last life. Why do I care about this now?”

//BECAUSE YOU HAVE SEEN WHAT THE EMBODIMENTS CAN DO.

I snorted. That was the understatement of the century. Between Tarel and Endra, I didn’t have the best encounters with the Embodiments. But that didn’t explain why I cared that humanity was doing just fine without me. I wasn’t that kind of person. Never was.

“The old Seb wouldn’t care if he was important or not. Just that his friends were alive and well.” I muttered in shame. “If I knew they were fine, then that should be enough. But I know it won’t be.”

//JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE WEARS A VENEER OF PLACID HAPPINESS, IT DOES NOT MEAN THEIR SOCIETY IS FINE.

//CORRUPTION CAN HIDE UNDER THE SURFACE FOR DECADES UNTIL IT BUBBLES UP IN A DESTRUCTIVE BURST OF SOCIETY-ALTERING CONFLICT.

//YOU HAVE SEEN THAT FIRSTHAND.

//AND DO NOT WISH FOR IT TO HAPPEN TO YOUR OWN PEOPLE.

//YOU COULD BE MISTAKING THIS SENSE OF ALL-CONSUMING RESPONSIBILITY FOR SELFISH DESIRE.

//NO.

//YOU ARE MISTAKING IT.

//AND YOU ALONE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE.

//TRUST IN YOUR PEOPLE.

//RETURN TO THEM WHEN YOU FEEL IT IS NECESSARY.

//BUT DO NOT PUT THEIR FAILURES AND SUCCESSES ON THE SHOULDERS OF THOSE YOU ONCE KNEW.

The wall of text scrolled on until it eventually disappeared from my visor. I didn’t feel that The End was one-hundred percent right, but it wasn’t a hundred percent wrong either. The fact was that these were new emotions brought on by one of the multitude of changes and experiences I’d had over the past few months, and I’d either been repressing them or ignoring them up until this point.

And the hard fact was that I was responsible. I might be the only human who knew what The Embodiments were capable of. How they could use their chosen. I needed to make sure my people knew too. But to do that, I had to get through Endra first. I was the biggest thorn in her side if she wanted to keep her emergence a secret, and an even bigger thorn if she wanted to pose as Nia. Once she was dealt with, then I could go help humanity.

“So much can happen in just a few months.” I mused, tapping my hand against the half-full cylinder to get a glob of stubborn blood to fall. “If humanity has a few relatively boring years, then that’s the biggest blessing I could ever ask for.”

I sat in the dimly lit room until the cylinder was completely full. It took close to ten minutes, which was a little more than I was willing to spare, and I felt a little woozy when I resummoned my armor and stood up. I took one last glance at the locker, still standing there as a makeshift gravestone for the little god that was once trapped inside, and said a silent prayer that her memories would become a comfortable part of Mortician. Or that she finally got the rest she deserved.

Unfortunately, I’d overlooked one fairly important detail. I pressed my hands to the walls and tried to break through, but the room didn’t budge. It even withstood oil-enhanced slashes from my petal-scale empowered weapon without taking a single scratch.

“Well, shit. I probably should’ve thought about this sooner.” I chuckled worriedly, shifting the bag I cradled in my arms as if it were alive. “Hey, End? Do you have any idea how I’m supposed to get out of here?”

//UM… WELL… (COUGH).

//NO.

“Did… did you just write a cough into your message?” I asked with a grin.

//YES, I DID.

//I THOUGHT IT WOULD ADD A SENSE OF… CONVERSATION, INSTEAD OF SIMPLE TEXT.

//WAS IT EFFECTIVE?

Was it effective? I shook my head with a laugh at The End, who was rapidly cementing itself in my mind as a kind of all-powerful grandparent. “Yeah, it was effective.”

//WONDERFUL!

//I WILL TRY TO WEAVE MORE OF IT INTO OUR CONVERSATIONS WHEN APPLICABLE.

//…OH, AND GOOD LUCK FINDING SOME WAY TO LEAVE THE HAZARD’S CORE.

Good to know where I was, even if it didn’t matter for shit. Well, worst-case scenario, I waited for Okeria to teleport me out of here in about half an hour. There were only two things left to do; tell Jun I was fine, and get Mortician’s last pieces to them along with my blood. I hoped it would be enough, but knowing my luck, we’d still be missing something.

{Hey, Jun, just telling you that I’m fine and that I’m going to send Mortician their last pieces and the last vial of oil. I’m stuck here in what The End said was the hazard’s core, and I’ll be here until Okeria teleports us to him. You don’t have to keep fighting, so stay safe until time’s up. Love you. Stay safe.}

I sent the message and instantly swiped over to the part screen, taking one last glance at the bag before I reluctantly sent it into my inventory. I hovered over Mortician’s name and put the god’s body bag and my cylinder of blood in the package, paid the potential cost with some of the empty nodes I’d gained from the infesters, and sat down again.

There was nothing more I could do. I just had to trust Jun and hope that Mortician was in a place where they could finalize their body. Less than an hour to go. Then we’d finally be done with this hazard.