Eight Gods there are I call my own:
Maiden, Warrior, Mother, Crone,
Moment's Guardian, the Sun and her Bride,
And the Witch who soars at lightning's side.
The irreversibility of Mara's decline in health comes from the fact that her very Overself is fracturing and unravelling, which implies that every face of the Warrior, everywhere, is suffering the same fate. In God's Toy, we learn that the mortal souls/selves of Paradox and his dimensional alternates are being stitched together or merged into a (pseudo-)Overself. What if, in order to avoid the final death, Mara's Overself deliberately shatters herself so that each of her faces can survive independently? Of course, the Warrior is almost certainly more than the sum of her faces, so the last of her could go to Paradox, transmuting his Overself from a kludge (a crock that works, "An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole") into a Winning Hack, a proper and complete Overself.
Maiden, Warrior, Mother, Crone,
Moment's Guardian, the Sun and her Bride,
And the Witch who soars at lightning's side.
The irreversibility of Mara's decline in health comes from the fact that her very Overself is fracturing and unravelling, which implies that every face of the Warrior, everywhere, is suffering the same fate. In God's Toy, we learn that the mortal souls/selves of Paradox and his dimensional alternates are being stitched together or merged into a (pseudo-)Overself. What if, in order to avoid the final death, Mara's Overself deliberately shatters herself so that each of her faces can survive independently? Of course, the Warrior is almost certainly more than the sum of her faces, so the last of her could go to Paradox, transmuting his Overself from a kludge (a crock that works, "An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole") into a Winning Hack, a proper and complete Overself.