Strangely, she and Orikka found Novem in Iseult’s old city. Iseult had elected not to invite Elske, wanting some privacy for the reintroduction to her hometown. Elske had preened when she had presented it as putting him in charge of the angels in the interim. He was so predictable it was almost cute. It was a bit weird to think of a grown man as cute, but she supposed her actual age outnumbered his by a good century, despite their physical appearances. He had gaped at her when he found out, one of her more amusing memories of their interactions. It had put him off foot for a while, until he had decided to go back to treating her like the teenager she appeared to be.

Orikka had once offered to assist her in reimaging her form, but she liked the way she looked, with her pink curls, curvy figure, and heart shaped irises. When she was a living girl she had modeled her appearance after her favorite pop star Ira Faye, but now she couldn’t imagine herself any other way. And doing so felt like leaving a bit too much of herself behind. Like it was the first step in dissolving her soul, and she was nowhere near ready to reconstitute herself for a born-again relife.

It was a bit of a shock how much her past city had changed since she had last been there, several centuries ago. She had expected some change but this was far beyond that. She hadn’t really thought about her previous home, it had been too tied up with her death, too tied up with her father, even though it had housed so many other people that she cared about. She had left it all behind without looking back. It had been surprisingly easy to leave, her death such a transformative experience, and immediately followed by her recruitment into Orikka’s work that she had little time to really process the immensity of her decision.

She kind of regretted that oversight now, wished she had thought of it a little more over the years. That she had visited. Before the city was destroyed. It was now devoid of all human life, and clearly had been for a long time, trees having grown up through the demolished buildings, the ruins of the once mighty metropolis now covered in wildlife, lush greenery reclaiming the man made structures. A massive bird skeleton covered the city, and had taken out many of the downed skyscrapers when it had presumably fallen from the sky. She had never seen such a large bird, hadn’t even known it was a possibility. Avis? she wondered, one of the premiere gods worshiped in her hometown. Had the god perished, soul obliterated, corruption spewed, or perhaps succumbed to eversleep? She hadn’t seen the demolition of a god quite like this, assuming her assumption of Avis’ corpse were correct. It merited investigation, but that would be for another time.

Novem had taken up with a familiar face. A girl Iseult had known as Una, when they had both been alive, but was now clearly dead as well, a lone ghostly apparition that walked the city with Novem, clearly unaware of his godly condition. Strangely she was the only ghost, ‘why are there no other human ghosts?’ she asked Orikka, as they sat a distance off, high in the branches of a tree. She eyed the orchid next to them, blooming while a ghostly beetle trundled across its petals, not even making a divot on the surface of the delicate blossom. ‘Take a closer look, daughter,’ Orikka said. At that Iseult paid a little more attention, noting a subtle density in the ghost’s center. A vacuum. Was Una a god? Well. That was unexpected. Had she always been, or was this a new development?

She had personally known a god. As a human. It was not as hard to accept as she would have thought, perhaps her time with Orikka had acclimated her to the supernatural. ‘She looks like a god, but what does that have to do with the lack of human ghosts, unless you mean, did she consume their souls?!’ The reality that her friend was a god, a kin-killer and likely had consumed an entire city's worth of souls was a lot more to take in. She leaned back, shifting her weight on the branch, suddenly aware that she could be a victim to the same fate. Would Una even realize if she consumed her? Even as weakened, as close to the moribund as Una was, she was still a god, a creature limited to the realm of the living unable to pass across, unable to interact with the soul world, and Iseult was fully dead.

When Iseult had first recruited Elske, he had been a living human, but he had managed with his meditation to release enough of his held grudges and strong emotions in order to perceive even a pure soul, one capable of existing in the fourth dimension, not just a ghostly remnant of emotional soul energy, slightly out of phase with the living world, like many ghosts were. To her knowledge he was the only one that had ever accomplished such a feat. How he had done so while still remaining so crotchety was beyond Iseult. So if Iseult wanted to communicate with her friend on the living world she would need to work quite hard to regain some of that strong emotion, something she wasn’t even sure if she would be able to do, besides the issue of whether or not she wanted to. But as close to the moribund as Una could get, no matter how fragmented of a soul shard she could be, it would never be possible for her to cross over, her soul would remain broken, unable to resurrect and be reborn, as corrupted as it was. She could of course, recondense, reestablish herself in the world of the living, hypothetically.

There had been a smattering of incidents of gods dying, not falling into eversleep, but rather complete, obliterated-soul dead. Like the death of the god Roxom, a self-declared god-king, ruler of a forest of demi-god children. She had been extremely interested in him when she was alive, a hobby akin to fanaticism, a girl with a zombie obsession fixated on the zombie-king, one of his other monikers, due to his parasitic animation of a corpse to achieve mobility for his tree body. She had been excited to find out that his myth was based on fact. In Roxom’s efforts to birth as many demigods as possible in order to rally them against the other of Orikka’s children he had caused a backlash in his godseed, the incident of which was the origin of Orikka’s fears of tampering with the godseed. The backlash had obliterated Roxom’s soul, rending it apart. Since he was limited to the world of the living, it was possible for his soul to be reconstructed, theoretically, but one would have to recondense all the shards of it back together. The process of which was under researched.

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Novem himself was something of an expert in the subject of soul obliteration, his god hunt involving a complete consumption of his prey’s soul. The god being would be fully absorbed into his own, the power up of consuming a god significantly more fulfilling to his corrupted soul than the run of the mill mortal soul, given the god’s accumulated souls, all of them already seasoned with corruption. Like a delicious high protein meal. He likely didn’t understand the underlying mechanics, but his practical knowledge was unmatched.

The mystery of the relationship however, was just that. Why wasn’t he hunting Una? Not that Iseult wanted for her friend to be hunted, regardless of her status as a perpetuator of soul-genocide. She rather hoped Orikka was wrong on that count. What had happened to their other friends? Had Una consumed them as well? It was a distressing thought, one she would really rather not consider. She took a deep breath. She was getting off topic, she wasn’t here to visit with her friend, she was here to solve the dangerous problem of god-soul corruption, lest they erupt and take the world with them. She and Orikka would talk with Novem, and then leave, and she could leave the messiness of her rising feelings behind.

Iseult let Orikka approach Novem, unwilling to accidentally get caught in the black hole of his or Una’s soul by accident. They didn’t often appear to their progeny, and Iseult doubted the godlings even knew that their parent was there during their birth. Which was oddly sad. Maybe she would have words with Orikka about it later. She made a note in her sparkly pink planner, dotting her i’s with a heart.

Orikka retrieved Novem, bringing him back to where they had agreed to meet back up, a particularly fluffy cumulus cloud well above the ground where she could possibly run into Una. The potential friend-killer. Una had been new to their friend group, a tight knit group of just her best friend Sym along with their mutual friend Hiru, who had taken to spending time with them after his break up with his famous girlfriend, her rockstar idol, the one and only Ira Faye. She had squealed when she first found out, demanding he introduce her. He had said his joining with their duo was because he was so upset about the break up, but Iseult could tell he really just wanted to spend time with Sym. And she and Sym were a package deal. Hiru had brought Una along one day, a girl he had met in the park, while flying a kit of all things, something that had initially driven Sym mad with jealousy, but she had eventually calmed down when she realized the entirely platonic friendship they had, despite how strongly fond he was of the strange girl. And now Iseult knew why she was so strange.

Novem arrived with a spectral body, his smaller cat form cloaked in a superimposed astral form, vaguely transparent, the outline of his physical body visible underneath. His eyes were jewel red, the brilliance shining through the veil of his spectral form, though she could tell even through the obstruction that one of them was milky, an opaque film covering the glassy iris. She knew from his dossier that he had a run in with his father Noctua resulting in a removal of one of his eyes, but now he seemed to have a full set. Their dossiers were not complete documents, and tended to be slightly out of date, depending on the gleaned gossip Orikka could extract during their covert visit to godly gatherings, when they would stumble upon them.

Novem eyed her slightly visible, condensing form, her concern over Una and their shared past having a slightly beneficial effect of condensing her into the mortal world, to a small extent, allowing this interaction to be slightly easier. Iseult ruffled her notes, unsure how to start the conversation, trying not to be obvious with the distance she was keeping between them. With Elske it had been more straightforward, somehow. That and he didn’t want to eat her. Stop thinking about it. It would only stress her out further, and she didn’t want to appear scared to this being in particular.

Orikka, graceful as ever, glided over to a small round formation in the cloud, sitting down elegantly with their hands in their lap, legs folded under them. ‘I’ve never heard of a god of moribund,’ Novem broke the tense silence, relieving her of trying to find a way to open up the conversation. Ah, it seemed Orikka had not clearly explained. That was very in character. They tended to say things very blandly and think they were being very clear when in fact they were not. Luckily she was by their side. She debated how much to reveal. Orikka had expressed their desire to keep the corruption of gods from their children, but Iseult speculated that their reticence in presenting themselves was more rooted in anxiety, no matter what excuses they gave for it.

Sharing about the moribund should be fine, and if Orikka disagreed, they could always step in. ‘The Honorable Orikka of the moribund is a god like no other, the only god allowed entrance to the soul realm,’ she began. She had developed a special brand of showmanship over the years allowing her to use Orikka’s underutilized but impressive accolades in order to impress the other being and streamline the time it took for them to get what they wanted from the interaction. It did not appear to be impressing Novem, his expression flat. ‘As such,’ she continued quickly, ‘they alone are able to see the pure souls of the resting. Orikka,’ though it hadn’t been Orikka that had noticed, it was best to ascribe a certain degree of omniscience to heighten their strength, in case this meeting went south, ‘has observed that there has been a discrepancy in a certain species within the realm, would you have any knowledge of this?’

Novem paused for a moment, head tilted, considering. ‘Your god isn’t the only one with entrance to the soul realm,’ he finally said. Dropping that bomb as if it were nothing, his lips quirking into a slight, sly smirk.