The world does not forget gods first.
It forgets context.
Aldir learned this slowly, over years that did not mark themselves with anniversaries or wars. The days passed without urgency now, which should have been a mercy. Instead, it unsettled him more deeply than any battlefield ever had.
People still practiced his necromancy.
They just no longer called it his.
In the eastern provinces, the dead were consulted before borders were redrawn. In the south, inheritance laws included testimony from the recently deceased. In the capital—rebuilt into something quieter—children were taught that death was not an ending but a boundary requiring consent.
All of it was working.
And that frightened him.
Because systems that work without their creator eventually decide they no longer need one.
Aldir felt the shift most sharply when people stopped asking him why.
They asked how instead.
"How do we stabilize the memory lattice in mass graves?"
"How much autonomy should a revenant retain?"
"How long is too long to keep a voice echoing after the body fails?"
Technical questions.
Efficient questions.
Questions that assumed the philosophy was settled.
He answered them because he always had—but each answer shaved something away. The world was no longer wrestling with morality. It was optimizing it.
Isabella noticed before he did.
She always did.
"You're becoming infrastructure," she said one night, standing at the window of a borrowed observatory overlooking a city that had once burned in Aldir's name.
Moonlight traced silver through her hair—not white, not immortal, just changed. Her magic had never returned in the old way. What she wielded now was quieter. Relational. Dependent on proximity, on trust, on shared meaning.
It made her more dangerous than before.
"Is that bad?" Aldir asked.
He was seated at a desk covered in testimony scrolls—voices of the dead transcribed by students who had never seen a battlefield.
"Yes," Isabella said without hesitation. "Because infrastructure gets replaced when it becomes inconvenient."
He considered that.
"You think they'll try to remove me?"
She turned, eyes sharp. "No. Worse. They'll stop noticing you're there."
The first sign came in a small border town.
A funeral dispute.
Aldir arrived expecting grief. Instead, he found a committee.
The dead woman's voice had been preserved—consensually, carefully—but the living disagreed on how much weight it should carry. Aldir listened. He mediated. He ruled.
When it was done, a young magistrate bowed politely.
"Thank you," the man said. "Your methodology remains sound."
Not your judgment.
Not your wisdom.
Methodology.
Aldir left without correcting him.
That night, he could not sleep.
He lay beside Isabella, listening to her breathe—a sound he anchored himself to more often now. His undead body did not require rest, but his mind still reached for it.
"Do you remember," he asked quietly, "the first city I destroyed?"
Isabella did not answer immediately.
"Yes," she said at last. "I remember the smell. And how you refused to look at the children."
"I did that so no one would worship me," Aldir said. "So they would fear consequences instead of power."
"And now?" she asked.
"And now they've forgiven me too efficiently."
The devils noticed this too.
They did not attack.
They waited.
They began seeding interpretations again—but this time, they didn't oppose Aldir's philosophy.
They agreed with it.
In academies, subtle arguments spread.
If memory is a public resource, should it be regulated?
If the dead consented in life, can that consent expire?
If restraint costs lives, is restraint ethical—or merely sentimental?
These weren't devilish lies.
They were reasonable extrapolations.
Isabella confronted one of them in a university hall where she had been invited—not as Aldir's companion, but as an independent scholar of relational magic.
"You're trying to remove the emotional weight," she said to a lecturer whose eyes flickered red only when he thought no one noticed. "You're flattening grief into data."
The devil smiled mildly. "Emotion introduces bias."
"Emotion introduces accountability," Isabella snapped. "Without it, necromancy becomes bureaucracy."
The devil tilted its head. "Is that not preferable to tyranny?"
That word echoed longer than it should have.
Aldir felt it from miles away—like a hook tugging at a scar.
That night, the first unauthorized resurrection occurred.
A minor lord, desperate to preserve his lineage, raised his father without consent—using a corrupted version of Aldir's early work. The revenant was compliant. Silent. Efficient.
Perfect.
The court praised the innovation.
Aldir arrived too late to prevent it.
He stood before the thing that wore a man's face and felt something inside him strain.
This was what he had tried to prevent.
Not evil.
Convenience without conscience.
He destroyed the revenant.
Publicly.
The backlash was immediate.
"This contradicts established precedent."
"You are interfering with lawful application."
"Your emotional proximity compromises neutrality."
Neutrality.
As if he had ever been neutral.
As if necromancy had not been forged in blood and refusal.
Isabella stood with him through the storm—but he could feel her struggling too.
Her magic responded to belief, to relational acknowledgment. As Aldir's role blurred, so did hers. People wanted her teachings divorced from him. Sanitized. Portable.
She refused.
At cost.
They retreated from the cities soon after.
Not into exile—but into absence.
They traveled together through regions that still remembered scarcity. Where necromancy had not yet become policy. Where the dead were still mourned before they were consulted.
There, Aldir taught again—but differently.
He refused to answer questions without hearing the asker's reasons.
He forced students to sit with bodies before speaking to them.
He made mistakes—and allowed them to stand.
Isabella worked alongside him, reshaping magic not as power but as relationship maintenance. Her spells failed when cast without consent. Her rituals collapsed when rushed.
It frustrated the ambitious.
It saved the careful.
The world, meanwhile, continued forgetting the why first.
And Aldir realized something unsettling:
Forgetting was not the enemy.
Misremembering was.
The devils returned—not as conquerors, but as consultants.
They offered frameworks. Safeguards. Eternal memory without decay.
Aldir refused them every time.
But each refusal narrowed his relevance.
He was no longer the only voice.
And that was the test.
Not whether he could rule.
But whether he could endure being one influence among many.
One night, as they camped beneath a sky unclaimed by borders, Isabella asked him the question he had been avoiding.
"What happens," she said softly, "when the world no longer needs us—but still uses what we made?"
Aldir looked at the fire, at the way it consumed wood without malice.
"Then," he said slowly, "we stop trying to be necessary."
She smiled faintly. "And if that means they forget us?"
He reached for her hand—not as a necromancer, not as a ruler.
Just as a man who had learned too late what mattered.
"Then we make forgetting survivable".
Far away, something old and patient stirred.
The devils had lost the war for domination.
So they prepared for something slower.
If they could not destroy Aldir…
They would outlive him.
And in the space between remembrance and routine, they would try again.