--- Cilia Ulein ---

"...what's going on?" Cilia wondered.

She was seeing a kaleidoscope of colors. Her finely honed sense of balance told her that she was rotating around her left kidney at a speed of 830 degrees per second. Everything sounded faintly like cheese, and her immediate surroundings smelled of Tuesday.

Oh. She was dead again.

Being stuck in limbo was weird. She had a small part of the afterlife reserved just for herself, as a holding area while Brytius worked on finding a new host for her soul. In a few minutes or hours, she would be able to choose her next host from among the options her god provided her.

From what she understood of how Divinity worked, her consciousness was shattered right now and held in stasis, to prevent it from reaching the afterlife. She had studied this extensively in some of her previous lives. What Brytius had done to her soul was almost unique, and formed a key component of the plan all of her alternate selves were working towards.

Finding herself in these circumstances surprised and annoyed her in equal measure. This was the second time that she failed to defeat this strange Avatar, and ended up dying for it.

That was utterly unacceptable. She was an Old Power. Entire history books were filled with her exploits. There were hundreds of powerful mages and monsters that had entire sagas of their own written about their epic deeds, and whose stories ended with some variation of "and then they pissed off Cilia Ulein".

That anything was able to kill her not once but twice in a row, when she wasn't holding back, beggared belief.

Was another Old Power working against her in secret? That would be just what she needed right now.

At this point, she seriously considered asking her alternate selves to send more help. She usually disliked relying on the help of others in any capacity, as taking shortcuts like these often prevented her from learning properly and truly mastering a skill. But understanding the Avatar was more important than that.

An Avatar was a simple, mortal-like interface for an abstract being. Knowing how to create something like that would be very important once she was a god.

She was not planning to half-ass her apotheosis, after all. She was the master of many skills, and if she was going to turn into a god, it wouldn't be a common one. That would not be enough for her plan to succeed. She would have to become the best god that ever existed. Not a simple goal by any means, but Cilia had never been the sort of person who would settle for second best.

Her desire to become the greatest of all the gods was not just her vanity talking, either. It was necessary.

After all, the existing gods had all proven insufficient for saving the multiverse.

The gods were not up to the challenge, and Denissa Mardok, the only other entity who might succeed, was disgustingly complacent.

There was only one option. She would have to save the multiverse herself, and to do so she would become the greatest of the gods, and exceed even Brytius. Student would surpass master. It would be the proudest moment for both of them, when she ascended and became greater than her own patron god.

And once she achieved that station, she would use her power and skill to save everyone and fix everything.

She was not driven to save the world by kindness and heroism, but by simple necessity. She was very attached to the world's continued existence, simply because she lived in it. How could she continue to improve and become ever greater, if she died her final death?

A sudden bright light hit her as the kaleidoscope of colors shifted in intensity. At the same time, her sense of smell told her, somehow, that it was now closer to Wednesday than Tuesday.

She could also hear bacon in the distance, which made her hungry. It was quite annoying, since she didn't even have a mouth to eat with in her current astral state, and if she did somehow manage to bite anything it would probably end up tasting like a sound.

She had been planning her apotheosis for millennia, but kept getting side tracked by other skills to master. Whenever she merged her consciousness with a new host, the host's previous personality was in charge of that life. The kind of people who were suitable to be her host were usually also the kind of people who would not stop pursuing their existing self-set goals just because the fate of the universe was at stake. But now the end was close at hand, and there was no longer any time to spare.

She would either become the most effective god that ever was and save the multiverse, or she would die along with everything else when the cycle came to its end.

Her apotheosis was well-planned, both by her and by her alternate selves. None of the existing gods were really purpose-built for saving the multiverse. But she would be. Each god had a purpose and a domain, and if she managed to ascend in the way she planned, then she would become exactly what was needed: A god whose domain was unbounded growth, the breaking of cycles, and the end of stagnation.

Denissa Mardok had explained to her that spirits were really the ones in charge, and not the gods, but this ultimately changed little. So long as the spirits acknowledged that her domain was the breaking of cycles, they would be bound by their own rules to let her do just that.

Her chosen domains were thematically very close to Brytius, yet different. A natural and plausible pick for Brytius' own high priestess. She gave it a good chance to work.

Her decision to bring in her alternate selves was going to improve the odds of success as well. The spirits transcended universal boundaries, but Divinity did not. Her ascended self would bridge that gap, alone among the gods. If the calculations of her alternate selves were correct, and she had no reason to doubt herselves, then this would put her in a position of control over the other gods and make her largely immune to their madness.

The kaleidoscope of colors suddenly sped up and became blurry. She got a headache almost immediately and had to look away. This always happened when she died. For some reason, people saw their lives flashing before their eyes when they died. That had been well and good, and even quite educational, the first few times it happened to her. But whatever process was in charge of this seemed to think that she really needed to see not just her most recent life but every single one of her lives every time she died. There wasn't really enough time for that before Brytius reincarnated her, so it just ended up showing her her lives at such an accelerated pace that it was impossible to make anything out.

At times she had seriously wondered if it was possible for her to get an aneurysm from all those flashing lights, and die a second time while she was already dead and in the afterlife. She wondered what would happen then. The afterlife was a little bit broken and needed to be fixed, in her opinion.

But one step at a time. The multiverse seemed to have a lot of things that needed fixing, and many of them were much more important than that.

Millennia ago, when she first reincarnated in a Historian of Secrets, Denissa Mardok had told her that her plans were rash and foolish, and more likely to do harm than good. She had pretended to concede the point back then, but in truth she had spent her time since then preparing.

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She knew that there was a good chance that Denissa Mardok was right even now, and that her plan was still insufficient. But what was the alternative? To do nothing, and wait for her final death at the end of the cycle? And what was there to lose if she messed up? The Cycle would end one way or the other anyway. So what if a few worlds died a few millennia earlier, if it meant a chance of breaking out of the cycle?

Denissa Mardok had claimed to be working on something better, but Cilia saw the truth of it. After so much time spent in stasis, Denissa Mardok had become a fixture and an agent of stagnation. She was completely unable to grow and improve herself further. She was anathema to Cilia, and to everything Brytius stood for.

She might be the most powerful being in the multiverse, but she had proven through her lack of results over the eons that she was not up to her task, and by her very nature as an incarnation of stagnation, she would never amount to anything more.

Somebody else would have to step up and take the mantle from Denissa's shoulder. And who better for this than Cilia herself?

The blinding light suddenly ended and Cilia was able to see again, although the colors she saw still didn't make any sense.

She took a long sniff with her astral nose. Ah, good. It smelled like Friday now. That meant it was about to be time for her reincarnation.

As if on cue, her vision changed: She now saw a field of stars before her. She knew from experience that each of these stars represented a soul she was compatible with.

It looked cool, but was frustratingly pointless. She couldn't actually tell anything about the stars from looking at them, and despite all of her experience she never found a way to investigate them with any of her other senses. She was forced to choose blindly. She gave Brytius an A for effort, though. The field of stars really did look very pretty and impressive.

Even though she could tell nothing about the souls in front of her, at least it gave her an overview of how many people in the world were compatible with her soul. It was less than a thousand. She knew from experience that the number was proportional to the total world population and not to the popularity of Brytius' religion. The people she was compatible with were all so obsessed with self-improvement that they would act as they did out of their own internal drive, without a care for Brytius or his followers. That was the one thing that all her candidate hosts had in common: They wanted to grow for the sake of growth itself. Not for some ulterior motive, but because they wanted to achieve mastery for its own sake.

She reached out to touch one of the souls at random, hoping that it would be somebody useful. It would really set back her plans if she reincarnated as somebody weak. Normally she would relish that as a chance to grow, but not now, with this much urgency and so much at stake. She would even consider killing herself and trying again, rather than waste time bringing a weak body up to par.

She also hoped that her new host would understand the urgency of their mission, and Cilia would not be forced to overwrite their will and assume direct control again.

She touched the star she chose and lost consciousness.

--- Dov ---

Dov woke up in her bed, with the mother of all headaches.

Wait. That did not feel like a normal, type A headache. That felt like a type F headache. Those were exceptionally rare. Sometimes, Dov really regretted the life choices that led her to develop an entire classification system for different types of headaches. Messing with the genetics behind your own brain was not a simple affair.

"*Do not be afraid.*" She suddenly heard a voice in her head.

She immediately disobeyed instructions, and became very afraid. Hearing voices in her head was usually a sign of a containment failure in the submodule encapsulation methods of her cerebellum. Fixing those was the worst!

"*I am Cilia Ulein. You have been chosen as our newest host.*" The voice continued.

Dov took it back. This was way worse than a containment failure in her cerebellum.

"*Who are you?*" Cilia Ulein asked, and sent along a compulsion to answer truthfully.

"*This is Dov Shan.*" Dov responded, unable to resist the unexpected compulsion.

"*...*" Cilia failed to respond.

There were no words, but Dov could clearly feel shock emanating from Cilia's presence within her mind.

Before she could form a response, she was suddenly hit by a spike of pain as Cilia assaulted her mind.

She was trying to take control of her!

Dov reacted instantly. She was used to psychic intrusions. She had fought Mind Warpers before, after all. Not to mention, she had practiced her telepathy under the tutelage of her mother Damiah Shan, one of the greatest telepaths alive. Rebuking Cilia's psychic attack was literally child's play to Dov. She even managed to turn it around and strike back at Cilia's presence within her mind. She felt a stab of pain from Cilia, along with shock and irritation.

Cilia reacted by changing her attack vectors. Instead of using telepathy to fight mind-to-mind, she kept her attack contained entirely within Dov's own brain. It was an entirely novel type of attack that Dov had never encountered before.

Curiously, the attacks from within her own mind turned out to be very similar to the random side effects she suffered whenever she made modifications to her own brain. She had been making such changes as a matter of daily routine for weeks by now.

So when Cilia struck at her from inside her own mind, Dov countered the attack on reflex, as if that was the most natural thing in the world.

She felt another surge of shock from Cilia, who had expected her defenses to crumble immediately. This time, the shock was tinted with nervousness and even a hint of fear.

Then Cilia did something odd. She retreated within herself and started meditating. Dov was so confused, she failed to take advantage of the lull in combat and just wondered what was going on there. Had Cilia decided not to attack her after all?

Maybe it was all a giant misunderstanding?

Dov really hoped so. Fighting the high priestess of your own god was not something to be proud of. It would really be great if they could get along instead.

Before she had learnt that Cilia Ulein was their enemy, Dov had often dreamed of merging with her. It was the greatest honor for a follower of Brytius, and it was well known that Cilia never took control away from her hosts. It was supposed to be a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship.

That made this all so confusing. Why did Cilia attack her? Why was she trying to take control?

Maybe it was because Dov had been involved in murdering her? She hoped not. She would be very disappointed in Cilia if that was true. If they killed her fair and square, then she ought to accept the loss and learn from it, and not harbor any grudges. Really, she was expecting more from the high priestess than that.

Something was happening. What was Cilia doing? What a strange form of meditation. That looked wrong and painful. If she continued to think like that she might end up giving herself a headache or worse.

And given that they shared a brain right now, that would harm Dov, she realized with a start.

As if on cue, she watched as something within Cilia's portion of her brain broke, and a moment later Dov suffered a stroke.

That attack would have been lethal, if it happened to a human or an elven brain, but to a Davlash it was virtually harmless. Cilia Ulein had mastered knowledge of biology, but the Davlash were new and she had never had an opportunity to learn how they worked. They had failsafes against many common medical emergencies built into their bodies, and Cilia was unaware of the details. A stroke would do no serious damage to her.

She was lucky she survived that, Dov knew. The only thing that had saved her was Cilia's lack of knowledge of her biology. She should not have become this complacent.

She needed to take the initiative and fight back. High priestess or not, it was her own brain and she was not going to let herself get possessed.

Dov started to isolate the regions of her brain in which Cilia resided and then did to them what she had practiced repeatedly over the past weeks when she put Galanys' genes to use: She put the affected brain regions dormant and replaced them without harming the rest of her brain.

Cilia kept attacking her even as she was being sealed away, but Dov was very good at multitasking, both because of the way her brain was structured and because of her habit of trying to learn and do too many different things at once.

Even her bad habits were coming in useful here. Dov found it quite strange how she just happened to have all of the highly specific skills and abilities she needed to fight off Cilia Ulein’s possession. She would have to think about this when her life was no longer in danger.

To an outside observer, it looked like Dov was just having a bad dream, but in her head a fierce battle was raging.

After what felt like hours but were actually only minutes, it was over.

The last part of Cilia Ulein's consciousness was isolated and sealed away.

Dov was utterly exhausted, but she needed to make sure that she had really won. Locked in a mental prison inside Dov's own brain, Cilia Ulein was now unable to resist her telepathic probes. She took a look at Cilia's memories and her most dominant surface thoughts.

Oh. That was surprising.

It looked like infinite multiversal Cilias would be coming for them all because her dear friend Rania was apparently some kind of eldritch abomination that scared the gods themselves, and was also the key to Cilia's apotheosis, or something. It was kind of complicated and she only got the cliff notes. And as if that wasn't worrying enough, letting anyone know about any of this could maybe possibly destabilize the universe and wipe out all life on the planet.

Great. Because her life had urgently needed to become more complicated.

She thought about this for a few seconds, then decided to make use of the most important skill a ruler can learn: Knowing how to delegate to others. Specifically, she decided that all of this was going to be Future Dov's problem.

With her responsibilities successfully put off to tomorrow, she decided to take a nap to recover from her ordeal.

Two seconds later she was out like a light.