Clyde's inn was nice and comfortable, but the Horizon cafe had become a second haunt for them in the past few weeks. There was something about the aroma and ambience of the place that kept it wonderfully comforting, and that comfort was something they needed, after the training.

They didn't stick together anymore — not completely. Each of them had different things to work on, and couldn't always work on those things in close vicinity with the others; eventually, they had agreed it would be best if they sought out training on their own, especially if there were others in the town that would help them.

In Mundane, there weren't. But Combat, it turned out, wasn't very far away, and that was a true adventurer's town.

All of which was beside the point. They sat in a private booth in Horizon, enhanced by various protection magics that both the cafe owner and Belle had independently confirmed were very foolproof, and Sev sat on one side, nervously sipping his cup of coffee.

Misa sat next to him, mostly so she wouldn't intimidate him by sitting across from him. Derivan and Vex sat together, and projected a concerted effort of looking very worried about Sev.

Sev, in turn, sighed.

"I still don't remember much," he started. "But I've made a breakthrough in that I'm able to talk to Aurum again. He's... a lot more scared and uncertain than he was before. It was pretty easy to distract him at first, but now it's like he can't think about anything but the end of the gods."

"He is just a kid," Misa said softly.

"Yup," Sev said with a sigh. "Someone like that shouldn't have the responsibility he does, but... here we go. Apparently he's been figuring out how to get in contact with the gods that have been erased."

"So they're not completely gone?" Vex perked up.

"It's hard to erase a god completely," Sev said. "Apparently."

"What does all this have to do with you?" Misa asked. "I'm worried about him, too, but..."

Sev laughed. "Can't get anything past you guys, huh?"

"Sev." Misa's voice was serious.

"I know." Sev's gaze dropped, and he looked at the table for a long moment; he held his mug of coffee in both of his hands, closed his eyes, and took a slow sip. He let himself marinate in the aroma for a second before he said anything more. "As far as I can tell, Onyx and I came up with some kind of plan... a really long time ago. The locks you see on my soul, my system, my future — whatever — those are all locks I signed myself up for."

"Didn't you say that happened when you tried to save Onyx?" Vex asked hesitantly.

"I did say that," Sev said. He smiled a sardonic sort of smile, though it seemed more self-deprecating than anything else. "It's what I remember. And I'm pretty sure it happened. But even before that, apparently, I sealed my own fate... somehow."

"Still not clear on the details?" Misa asked.

"Nope." Sev let out a frustrated sigh, and let his head sink into his hands. "I'm not trying to hide this from you guys, I swear. But I just... I have to trust myself, right? This is a plan I came up with. Apparently."

"Well," Misa said. "I'd agree with you, but your sense of self-preservation kinda sucks, no offense."

"If you built in some sort of grand self-sacrifice in there, we're going to fight you," Vex added.

"I'm not that bad," Sev muttered. He glanced around at both Misa and Vex — who said nothing to this pronouncement and gave him a slightly skeptical look instead — before turning a slightly desperate look to the last member of their party. "Derivan?"

"You are better now," the armor allowed. "But you wandered into the dungeon I was in, alone and underleveled. I am not certain I trust the decisions you made prior to that to bear in consideration your true value."

Sev scowled a bit, folding his arms obstinately. He knew Derivan was right, it was just...

It was funny. Derivan talked about his true value like it was a simple fact; he allowed for no contention, no argument in his tone of voice.

Sev looked down and then away. Something in him responded to that assurance — what felt like an old memory — and yet...

"Is there anything else you know?" Misa asked. "Everything's coming to a head. Derivan says he sees something happening with your system, and even Clyde mentioned something about your time being almost up. There's gotta be something."

"I think..." Sev began. He hesitated — but he saw Misa staring at him, worried; he saw Vex watching him with trepidation, and he saw the concern in Derivan's eyes. He sighed. "I think it's been like that for a long time," he said softly. "I think I've been around for a long time, maybe. A lot longer than twenty-five years. I don't... remember any of it. But it's what makes the most sense."

Misa frowned. "Are you sure?" she asked. "Immortality isn't exactly..."

"I know, I know," Sev said. "I age normally, as far as I know. That answer's not complete. But it feels right. I've been around for twenty-five-ish years, I don't think that's wrong, I just... also think I've maybe been around for much longer than that."

There was a long silence.

"Sorry," Sev said awkwardly. "I know that doesn't actually tell us much."

"Don't apologize," Misa snorted. She flicked the air in front of him, creating a small gust of wind that blew his hair out of his eyes; Sev blinked rapidly at the sudden onslaught of air into his eyeballs.

"Ow," he complained.

"Don't apologize for dumb things and I won't have to do that," Misa said unrepentantly. She looked, if anything, entirely delighted that she'd discovered a new little trick she could do.

"It's a start," Vex said thoughtfully, on his side of the table; his claws tapped briefly on the table, and he took a sip from his (overly sweetened, as far as Sev was concerned — he'd seen the mound of sugar that Vex had practically poured into the thing) coffee, and his tail wagged back and forth slowly. "What you told us, I mean. It doesn't leave a lot of options on the table for what could be happening."

"You have an idea?" Sev asked. "Because I'd kill for an idea right now."

He paused. "Uh, not actually. You know what I mean."

Vex snorted. "Not any good ones," he said. "There's only a few ways for you to be older than you are." He counted them off his claws. "Reincarnation is one, but as far as we know that's just a tale from the planeshifted. You could be getting your age and memory reset, but I can't see a reason for that. It might not be you that's old — maybe it's just the system attached to you — but we don't have any evidence that individual parts of the system would stay coherent like that."

"With the exception of what I can sense with Patch," Derivan said. "Which does suggest a personal system that attaches to a person's soul and communicates with a greater system, for lack of better terminology."

"There is that," Vex allowed.

"There is a more important question, I feel." Derivan's gaze fixed itself on Sev; he wasn't just looking at him, he was almost looking through him. Sev shifted uncomfortably underneath the armor's piercing gaze. "All these questions answer what you could be, but we still do not know what is coming. Your bonds are falling away. Every sense I have tells me something is coming to a head with you. Even Clyde and the rest of the shadows here have the same feeling. Yet you have remained on this precipice...

"If you have any idea of what is coming, Sev, I believe we deserve to know." Derivan's gaze stayed steady.

Sev didn't answer for a long moment. It wasn't that he was hesitating, far from it — he was searching his mind for an answer. Derivan was right, but...

"I don't," Sev said with a sigh. "I wish I did. I have some ideas from my training, from what I've heard from Aurum and from the other gods I've been in contact with through him — but none of the answers are anything concrete. But I can talk about that; I've been meaning to, anyway, and it might give us another point of data."

He glanced around, and no one protested. Misa nodded at him to continue. Sev took a breath.

"One thing that's clear is that the majority of the gods don't know about this. They know the gods are disappearing; they don't know why. They don't know what the system is for. They don't know that it's cannibalizing them. They can't know, even. Aurum knows because of his connection with me, but anytime he's tried to tell anyone else..."

"Infolock?" Vex asked softly.

"Infolock," Sev agreed with a soft, bitter laugh. "Or, well, we know what it is, now. Imagine an apocalypse you can't know about, because the very nature of it is that it's self-censoring; the only tool we have to know about it gets to pick and choose who's allowed to remember, and no one's in charge of that tool anymore, as far as we know."

"Not the Administrators?" Derivan prompted. "We have seen mention of them in the system."

Sev shook his head.

"That's one of the things Aurum was trying to investigate," he said. "As far as we can tell, there aren't any Administrators left. There are automated programs in the system that can fulfill the role of an Administrator, but they're locked into responding to situations in very specific ways. The only time they can do anything different is when the gods do something about it."

"Except the gods don't know that anything's wrong," Misa said.

"Most of them don't." Sev frowned. "The ones that do... This is where it gets a little complicated. It's the reason Aurum was gone for so long. You guys remember where we first got the reality anchor that Misa has, right?"

"How could I forget?" Misa snorted.

"That place was weird," Vex commented. "It didn't feel... real."

"You can't anchor reality from inside reality," Sev said. "So when we were there, we were on the outside, looking in. Any gods that get erased are kind of sitting there, too, outside reality — slowly disintegrating, and being fed into the anchors."

Vex blinked, feeling a small chill run down his spine. "Then the voices we heard—"

"Onyx and another forgotten god," Sev confirmed. "Onyx has some protection, because of what I did when I healed him. Aurum can visit that space because he's got a link with me. The other gods are just... kept there, away from the divine plane."

"Do we know what the Overseers are, then?" Derivan asked this question with a small frown in his eyes.

"Best guess is that it's a system defense powered by the gods," Sev said. "But that's one of the things we haven't really managed to figure out. Aurum's... in recovery. He spent too much time out there — let's just call it the Void, for ease of reference — and his angels tried to get him to come back, but apparently he was very insistent about finding some of the forgotten gods."

Sev sighed. "He shouldn't have to do all this," he said quietly. "I've tried to get him not to, but once he's gotten an idea in his head it's hard to get him not to do it. It doesn't help that our bond drains me to protect him when he's out in the Void, and I don't think he fully understands the cost of exploring out there."

"Shit." Misa winced a bit. "Do you need help talking to him?"

"I might." Sev smiled a small smile. "I did manage to convince him to come back, but mostly by telling him about the Glyph Festival that's coming up. He's excited to be able to experience his first. So you might have to deal with an overexcited god for a little bit tomorrow."

"Oh! The Festival is tomorrow." Vex bounced up in his seat. "I almost forgot. Clyde asked if I wanted to do a show."

"Are you going to?" Sev raised an eyebrow at his friend.

"I'm going to try." Vex looked suddenly worried. "We don't have anything scheduled tomorrow, right? Anything we need to interfere with?"

"Nope," Misa said, eyeing a system window and then shaking her head. "Nah, you're good. Looking forward to your show, Vex."

Vex grinned, and then waved a hand to order another cup of coffee. Sev paused.

"Isn't that your third cup today...?"

"Don't worry about it."