The meeting circled back.
What to do about the humans? What to make of this concentration of Concepts? Did any of them actually intend to move, or were they content to simply discuss it for the next century?
Mandate had started explaining something about misaligned pairings among the Sin Lords and the spiritual benefit of correcting those pairings by force.
He spoke with the bright fluency as if he had rehearsed this argument many times, looking like he genuinely believed whatever madness left the deranged hole he had for a mouth.
"True alignment cannot be chosen," he was saying, "because the self is not equipped to choose what it needs. It must be given. This is a gift. I have always given this gift freely, and I will give it here as well."
"You give it freely to people who don't ask," Fearless Hiding said.
"That's what makes it a gift," Mandate said, with complete sincerity.
Reshaping had begun cycling through forms again, faster now, and was pairing more cups. "It is the same with form," Reshaping said pleasantly. "No one knows what they should be until you show them. Once I showed a city of forty thousand. They were grateful. Eventually." A small pause. "Most of them."
Then Sovereignty spoke again, and the table went quiet.
"This is an opportunity."
Silence reigned for three seconds.
"Oh," said Fearless Hiding.
"Ah," said Self-Consumption, setting his arm down on the table.
"Ohohoho," said Love, and every flower on her gown bloomed simultaneously, white and wet, before going black in a wave from collar to hem.
False Mercy closed his eyes. And nodded twice to himself. It seems that he had also grasped the so-called opportunity that Sovereignty spoke of.
They all understood.
***
For these aberrant beings, their objective had been singular since the very beginning.
Calling for their masters beyond the Shroud.
But for them to have a chance at this, they had to understand what the Shroud was in the first place.
What they uncovered left them dumbfounded.
The shroud that covered this planet was not built for protection. It contained no defensive concepts or sealing mechanics, nothing any of them could find in three hundred years of proving it.
Yet, it worked.
Their masters… vast, ancient, capable of consuming worlds… slid off it against all odds. They lingered at the planet's edge without attacking, but also without leaving.
It had taken another century to understand why.
The shroud induced disinterest… a Pure, outward-facing disinterest, stripped of any appetite for this particular rock: no ambition toward it, no hunger, no greed, no drive to conquer. To their masters, the planet simply ceased to matter the way a pebble ceases to matter when you have mountains.
They did not choose indifference; the shroud made it the only option available to them as long as they so much as turned their attention toward Earth.
But their masters were not ordinary.
Even blunted, they lingered. Some residual wrongness held them at the edge; some feeling that they had been meaning to do something here, that it was simply wrong to leave without finishing what they'd started.
They hovered at the border of indifference, held there by an instinct they could no longer act on.
Tearing the shroud from within was a colossal endeavor. But their persistence toward their goal eventually paid off, and they came up with a feasible solution.
Gather enough emotions in one place and then use it to form a decisive strike to pierce the barrier, even once.
That ought to be enough to wake the masters out of their indifference.
But collectively, emotions were not a straightforward business either. Especially when it came to happiness, love, and solace.
Their twisted minds were simply not equipped to understand such foreign concepts, so they did not try. Instead, they targeted negative emotions.
And so, they embarked on the quest of collecting the negative emotions of all living beings on this planet… enough of it, dense enough and sustained enough, to overload the concept and rupture something in the mechanism.
But at the natural rate at which the world generated malice and misery, the timeline stretched past twenty thousand years.
Naturally, that was unacceptable.
So they had made a different choice. They stopped conserving the Narkal armies and turned them loose, letting an endless, discarded wave that neither held in reserve nor aimed at any strategic target but simply unleashed with one function: to generate hatred. Every death on both sides was fuel. Every scorched city, every slaughtered family, every generation raised inside a war they hadn't chosen…
All of it will be fuel.
The vessel for all of it sat in the corner.
The Outer God of Devoted Malice rocked back and forth, muttering under his breath. His collection grew heavier by the day… so heavy that he could barely hold it together.
At first, he had been one of the most useless members of the Outer Gods' army. For reasons known only to himself, the sole ability he had devoted himself to cultivating was the power to gather the malice of others with near-religious fervor.
But now that the plan was in motion, he had catapulted into becoming one of their most valuable assets.
…It was simply that too much of anything could be just as disastrous as too little.
And he was currently suffering from the former.
No one cared enough about his condition to intervene, so long as he continued doing his job.
***
"And now," Sovereignty said, "we have this many humans gathered in a single place."
False Mercy nodded, still gentle. "If we move correctly… if we can wipe them out with enough despair in the process… we won't need the slow accumulation. One big harvest, then we can move directly to executing the final phase of the plan… summoning the revered ones."
"Yeh… hehehehehe… if we kill enough of them, we can simply discard the plan and invade their capital—seizing the barrier's core directly."
Fearless let out a manic giggle, a sound utterly at odds with his cowardly nature.
"So everyone is in agreement?" Love pressed her palms together, and the flowers along her bodice bloomed and rotted in rapid succession, petals falling in small, wet clusters. "We attack the humans?"
"Naturally," said Self-Consumption.
"I concur," said False Mercy.
"Yesh! Don't forget me," said something from a direction that wasn't quite any of the chairs.
Mandate raised his hand. "I also agree. And when we've broken them, I would ask that the survivors be paired before disposal. Properly. It would be a waste to let them go unaligned."
"No one is asking you to come," False Mercy said.
"I'm aware." Mandate lowered his hand, unbothered. "I was simply noting it."
Reshaping had finished with the cups and was looking at the room with quiet satisfaction. One form settled, female this time, and stayed. "Everything becomes what it should be," she said contentedly. "Even this."
"There's a problem," Fearless Hiding said.
Love stopped mid-bloom.
The table went still.
"The Custodian Order," he said with utter disgust… and a heavy undertone of fear.
"We cannot move freely. If too many of us mobilize at once, we will draw their attention." He paused, then added, "Two at most."
"Oh, fuck." Self-Consumption set his arm on the table. "I forgot about them."
"Then allow me." Love rose from her seat, and the dead petals swept off the table as she moved. Her smile was back in place, sweet and entirely displaced. "If we're targeting them, we have to kill their healer first. That lust woman." She tilted her head, curious, warm, and rotten at once. "I've always been very interested in love. I'd like to see whether hers can hold against mine."
Nobody disputed this.
"I'll go as well." False Mercy stood and smoothed the front of his robe. "Subtlety should be the foremost strategy for this operation. When it comes to killing without being detected, I'm the most suitable." He said it without arrogance; it was simply a fact, offered like a fact. "I'll see them out of their misery before they realize anything is wrong. It's the kindest approach."
Sovereignty looked at them both once. "Love. Mercy." The threads in his robe were still. "Go deal with the humans."
"Yes~" Love stepped away from the table, trailing a slow ribbon of black petals.
"Understood." False Mercy followed, composed as always.
The meeting ended there.
In the corner, the Outer God of Devoted Malice rocked and muttered, arms tight around his knees.
So much… so much more… ahh… just a little more…
Soon, he'd have enough.