I sat in a three-layered circle of delineation with the most obnoxious, most insightful therapist I’d ever had, and sent up a call to two Gods from the pantheon of her ancestral nemeses. It was on behalf of the woman across from me, a woman who was under a hundred years old and still casually, accidentally pulverizing enchanted stone with her fingers. A woman who bore the scars of war—and who knew that pantheon like only someone who warred against it might.

As surreal moments of my last fortnight ranked, it certainly wasn’t at the bottom.

Skin prickled at the back of my neck, and Spark sent a sense of blandness marked this is a feeling of anticipation. A moment later there was a sense of listening, which was… well, it wasn’t new in my time on Yelem, but I’d gone thirty nine years without ever getting a sense that the divine existed. Now it felt like all I had to do was call.

Sometimes not even that. Sometimes they visited my dreams, uninvited as they were.

My next breath was hot and acrid, smelling of earth and fire. My right hand’s fingers twitched as though they were wrapped around the neck of a beaker, and my left settled around a crucible, and then I spoke.

“Hephaestus Tæknodíaitos, God of the craft and the work, of the perfect arc of the tool’s movement and the life that lives within art. Hermes Trismegistus, Thrice-Wise God who teaches us the principles that underlie life and the world, of movement and reason.” I took a deep breath, smiling and shifting cadence and tone. “I appreciate your time and attention, and the way that you’ve helped make this a place sacred to you both.

“I’m not a supplicant this afternoon, not making offers or offerings on my own behalf. Mera Taphtala is a woman of Shem, and she’s got scars she doesn’t want to talk to me about, scars it’s pretty obvious nobody else can help with. And they’re not only of the body, but those are the ones we’re here for.”

I breathed deep of sparks and fumes. There was a sense of patience around me, a timelessness that was willing to wait until I had the words. I settled into that and the knowledge that there was no rush, and then I spoke again, letting the looming powers pull the truths out of me.

“I wouldn’t say that I like her, or the ways that she leads me into baring my heart and my vulnerabilities. She’s manipulative and sometimes genuinely vicious. But she cut deep with her words in places that needed the touch of a knife, and I’m grateful for that. Sometimes, a chisel has to be struck; sometimes, a solution has impurities that need to be distilled out.

“I won’t speak for her on the subject of grace, of exchanges or transactions. I don’t know what lies in her heart, or what she can offer. But I suspect it’s shoatshit that she wound up injured the way she is, and I won’t sit by and not try to help. If by my intercession something good might come, let it be so—and thank you, even if it’s just for listening and considering it.”

I let it stop at that, fighting the urge to keep talking. Their attention was like a drug, like the feeling of catching a thousand eyes walking into a room, like a truth spoken that burns, and I’d always been weak to that. But this wasn’t about me, and even if it were…

Well, it was a bad idea to ramble to the Gods. They might get bored—or, potentially worse, they might listen.

I could feel the attention leave me, with a feeling that was sort of like a pat on the shoulder. Spark sent a wordless message, just the sense that the message had consisted of the feeling of relief, and I relaxed into my seated position.

That attention landed on Mera’s shoulders, like a glance from an expert. I knew that feeling, or at least a minor, mortal version of it, from what felt like a million procedures in a dozen labs, and I knew the feelings that came after.

Puzzlement and interest, the feelings of an intriguing problem to be solved.

Even from where I was sitting, I could feel the increase of intensity. From the initial level of something barely beyond mortal, it rose, and I felt more than heard the wake of a conversation rippling outwards. The intensity increased again, and then again, and I observed in fascination as the tone of the discussion changed with the increase.

No longer was this the wake of something’s subtle passage. I was now observing the penumbra of Leviathan, and the vastness studying Mera could no longer speak. He studied, instead, with a totality of understanding in his domains that felt only right for such a titanic power, and the study itself was an action that could shatter a nation if he’d loosed it without due care.

There was another presence with him, one that spoke softly enough that the woman across from me could hear him. One that could commune with the galaxy that was the other God while still hearing the mote that was a woman, a herald and messenger. Hermes, performing a role I hadn’t even considered, a role obvious in hindsight.

The conversation went back and forth for a timeless moment, and then they, all three of them, came to an accord.

The vastness of Hephaestus’s attention became something incomprehensible, something I could only think about through metaphor and allegory. He was a craftsman at the forge and a sculptor before his armature, with a swing that could shatter a universe and the precision to strike so finely that the clothes of marble would look like billowing silk.

It still wasn’t enough. Something about the wounds he was turning his gaze to was too complex for him to work with, or too simple for him to see. It was too far out of his domain, maybe—or maybe there was just too much of it, too many tiny pieces. He was an artisan of vast wonders, intricate as they might have been, and this was nanoscale watchwork on the hundreds-of-trillions scale.

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He was a God, though, and great among them. And something in him, in his greater nature, took umbrage to the notion of limits; and the fullness of his attention was upon her. Nine billion facets of a God—nine billion names and epithets, nine billion forms of understanding—manifested in a liminal space that quaked and shuddered to bear witness to it.

It was the end of thought, the end of awareness. The degree of might simply erased the universe of my Self for a time, and when I came slamming back into the world, it was all over.

“That was…”

Mera’s voice wasn’t a rasp, which felt weirdly wrong. It was slightly unfocused, which felt right; I’d have hated her for a moment if she’d sounded unaffected. “Bwuh,” I managed eloquently, and then I started giggling.

“He wasn’t the right—”

Kelly’s voice, bright and bubbly over an undercurrent of concern, interrupted her. “Welcome back, you missed dinner, none of us helped with anything for Ease but because it’s Mera I was able to smooth things over. Eat!”

“Missed—” I winced as a sudden cramp of hunger doubled me over with a groan. Kelly was there, hand under my shoulder and shoving a basket into my hands that was filled with dumplings. “Oh, adoring God who sits in judgment,” I breathed, “may every act of friendship be so delicious-smelling.”

I heard her stomping steps going past me to Mera, and decided that I could deal with worrying about why she was stomping after I filled my stomach.

It took me a half-dozen hand-sized dumplings, eaten in two quick bites each, to be able to slow down long enough to drink water. I downed about half a quart of water in two long drags, then forced myself to slow down for the next six dumplings.

“These are djao! Well, they were djao.”

I looked up at Kelly, squatting next to me after having apparently teleported there between one moment and the next. “More of Keldren’s work, like the mants and gya and all the others?”

She nodded. “They don’t need leavening.”

I tilted my head, but she didn’t follow that up with anything. A puzzle, then, I thought to myself, popping another djao—or was there a singular?—into my mouth. There was something vaguely like cabbage in them, a couple kinds of allium, and something else crunchy that I couldn’t recognize. It was all mixed with ground meat, which had the texture of meat that’d been frozen a while.

If everything in the djao was something you’d store for a while in the root cellar or make out of waste products and then freeze, it was the same kind of thing that had led to the morning’s culinary disaster. Go through the stores, grab the stuff that’s marginal, check it for cromulence, and use that stuff up preferentially. But…

Well, my culture of origin had, obviously, a concept of when it was important to make food without leavening. And I knew full well what kinds of food you were cooking on our equivalent of Ease, or when you had holidays that required a real thorough cleaning of the kitchen afterwards.

“It’s a scraps meal,” I hazarded, “where you want to have only a very contained workspace, and you’re using ingredients that are at risk of going bad. It’s a before-Ease thing, since you want to go into Ease with everything cleaned up and you don’t want to have to commit to cooking any particular thing?”

“Not a bad guess,” Mera mumbled from behind me.

“Choke on your shit!” I swore reflexively, startled into spraying dumpling-mix across the floor. I’d have lost the basket, too, if Kelly hadn’t deftly caught it as it swung from my hand.

“Why do you know how to curse in Koshe, of all languages?”

I turned and glared at Mera’s cherubic expression. “Go fuck yourself in a gas pocket! I hope the blight rots you slow.”

She snickered, breaking into giggles and then full-on laughter. I started to lose my own composure, avoiding it only by dint of drinking another long swallow of citrus-cut water. Delicately, I popped another djao into my mouth, chewing and then swallowing. “You get to clean up the crumbs, they’re totally your fault.”

“Tell me why you know Koshe,” she countered immediately, “and it’s a deal.”

“Can’t.” I shrugged, eating another dumpling. I was only just starting to get full, which was kind of ridiculous, since I was pretty sure I’d already eaten more than the maximum volume of my stomach. “Dunno the answer. Everyone says, no Low Roads in the horizon and miles more. So, why do I know Koshe?”

“That,” Mera murmured around a mouthful of food, “puts a whole extra spin on the Delver Princess and her team being here. Bet you a cleaning job they’re pushing for depth, not going wide or looking for value.”

I snorted. “No bet. You obviously know more about Iōanna than I do.” I took a deep breath, setting the basket down for the moment. “Kelly, Mera. That was… a lot. Are we going to have drawn attention? Do we need to do, like, disclosure or paperwork?”

“Nope! Well, you don’t.” I tilted my head at Kelly, and then glanced back to see Mera doing the same with a more sardonic expression. “When I didn’t show up to help Shafta with Ease-prep, she came by to see why. Then she got that look on her face, the one that half the village does when you, you know, do Sophie things! And that’s how we got ten visitors, and one of them was James.”

I stared at her for a moment, then sighed, rubbing my temples with my fingers. “Let me guess. Shafta and James, obviously, and… Veil, Kartom, Rafa, and Zrodne, they always show up. That’s six. Keldren, or maybe someone else from Rise. Uh, three more… Zqar, Safra, and Flame? I’m sorry I made such a mess for you. How bad was the paperwork?”

Something flickered in Kelly’s face, a sort of surprised admiration with a note of exasperation. “Safra wasn’t able to come,” she huffed. “She’d have liked to, but Zqar had her still working. Ketana fixed the wall, which, really? Really, Mera!”

Mera shook her head, ignoring Kelly’s complaint. “Who the fuck’s Flame? I’m pretty sure I would have heard if there was someone living here by that name.”

“Junior under Veil? He moved here in, um, Growth last?”

“Wait, you’re telling me that Devoted Acolyte Cataclysmic Burning Faith lets you, Sophie, call him Flame?”

I shrugged, smirking unrepentantly. “It was that or Kitty.” I gave it a beat, then leaned over to stage-whisper at Mera. “Because Cataclysmic starts with Cat, see.”

She closed her eyes for a long moment, running her hands through her hair in silence. Right around when I was starting to get worried, a span of time that felt natural but had to be calculated, she looked me square in the eye.

At the same moment, she and I started to snicker; and when the laughter swept across us, I didn’t fight it.