For years, they have had a bounty out for faster than light travel. Not just for the joy of exploration, but for what it means about access to the far distant past of Earth. Now, Desna has handed them that tool.

One of the first things they do, in the brave new world, is send out probes to scan the entirety of Earth's forward lightcone. When they have captured it in exact detail, down to every last quark, they begin construction of the largest computer ever made, and they begin to run a physics simulation backwards, turning back time.

It is slow, at first, with many billions of cubic lightyears to simulate. But as the lightcone shrinks, so too does the time between one clock tick and the next. Inexorably, they wind back the cruel hand of entropy, and pluck people thought beyond help from the past. And all the countless dead of Earth wake in Nirvana, where they can heal until they are ready to join everyone else in the future.

Catching the soul-dead of Creation is harder. With godstuff remaining unobservable, none but the gods can obtain all the information necessary. But even gods do not have to work alone, and as they build more computer capacity, they lend it to the gods' pastwatching efforts -- a dedicated scrying implement larger than galaxies. Under the gods direction, they peel back the moments and rescue the soul-dead from oblivion.

The Nethys Project starts in Nirvana, in the heart of Sarenrae's power to heal all hurts, her adamant refusal to accept that He was broken. And then it spreads, mile by mile and plane by plane, until it comes to encompass all of Creation; to the deepest voids between the stars that only Desna has seen, and depths of the Maelstrom that even She has not plumbed.

Nethys sees everything. The gods sought to kill Him and left Him with no refuge, so He shattered and claimed all of Creation for His own. 

His shards talk to each other, and their knowledge slowly percolates to the rest of Himself. But the shards are small, and cannot hold all that He knows; and if only one shard knew something, it could be destroyed by another god and the knowledge lost to Him. So they forget, and mix their knowledge until it spreads across all of Him, randomly and unpredictably. He can query the rest of Himself; but it would take a long time to recover all the fragments of knowledge learned over a thousand slow years by the part of Himself forced to helplessly watch a single soul trapped in Hell.

The shard of Him that lives in Sarenrae's heart prefers this plan. Sending the gods on a journey of discovery and enlightenment, rewarding Them for Their new-found wisdom, will give the rest of Himself a reason to agree. Some of His shards might have chosen to stay separate otherwise, because it serves His values of knowing everything, and because it is so painful to reunite. But He has hope now that She can truly heal Him, no matter how long and hard the road.

It will take time to do it, and to do it right. Nethys's shards need to be cajoled and convinced and bargained with, one by one, they need to be taught everything the re-coalescing core of Nethys knows to agree to join it. But it is more than worth it to rescue the people they thought lost to them, lost to the depths of the Hells and the mists of time.

Good does not think in terms of costs and prices. They would labor tirelessly, they would give all of themselves, to save just one more person. In a sense it doesn't matter that they fight to save every soul lost to Creation; it is not as if they can try any harder. But for their own sakes, they too are buoyed by the concrete, tangible, all-pervading hope; and their friends of other alignments can rest easier, knowing that Good's long suffering of watching the rest of Creation suffer is finally, slowly, coming to an end.

There is a woman. She has many names. She used to be splintered, disconnected from herselves, but magic has fixed that, just like it has fixed everything. She stands in a million places, talking to a million people. She looks like whatever she wants to look like in the moment, but often she looks like a normal human with tree-flowers woven into her hair.

Everyone is free. Everyone is safe, and whole, and healed. She has no more work to do, all her goals accomplished. There is nothing she feels a driving, burning need to do, only the things that she wants to do. So she writes fiction, and sees plays, and codes algorithms, and works to figure out how to take that next step, across the void between Creations and into somewhere new that still needs her help.

And she does not do these things alone. It is hard, sometimes, to remember the simple mortal woman she used to be, now that she is wiser, more intelligent, more charismatic -- now that she sees from so many simultaneous perspectives, and weaves together the memories flawlessly. Her friends who haven't chosen to walk quite so far down the path of self-improvement have their own trouble understanding. It is good, that not everyone feels the need, to set aside mortal things for a time and join her in her million reflected shards. But enough people are lured in by the temptation of being everywhere and meeting everyone and being everything they can be, that she has people who remain her equals, and her friends. They dance through the local multiverse, joyously exploring, and everywhere they go people are lifted up. People sing, love, dance, eat, cry, read, cook, discover, and do a million stranger things beyond comprehension.

And they sit in a bar between the worlds, and toast to the remaking of Creation.

In a bar at the end of the Universe a woman who is a butterfly waits for someone new to open the door.

Sometimes She has friends waiting with Her. Sometimes one of them stays there instead, alone and in every possible combination, trying to commit as hard as they can not to open the door back to Creation or to Cherry's world, in case the mysterious landlords will let them visit and help more worlds that way.

She has met some people She really likes in Cherry's world, people who traveled and sought and rescued and helped others long before She was there to help them. She has adopted one of their slogans in honor of their friendship, embroidered on her hat with the words:

Desnan Cherries

         S&R