Wednesday brought another name.

  Not a request.

  Not a complication.

  Just a name, dropped into the observation queue between routine maintenance and a scheduled audit.

  Hestia.

  The Analyst paused when she saw it.

  “…That’s rare,” she said.

  Crisis glanced over. “Problematic?”

  “No,” the Analyst replied. “The opposite.”

  Ms. A nodded once.

  “Proceed.”

  Hestia did not arrive in person.

  She almost never did.

  Her presence was registered as compliant withdrawal, a category so rarely used it still had explanatory tooltips attached to it.

  No room was prepared.

  No meeting scheduled.

  The system logged her departure the way it logged old habits falling out of use — quietly, without resistance.

  I read her file out of curiosity.

  Goddess of the hearth.

  Of shared meals.

  Of the fire that stayed while everything else changed.

  She had never demanded attention.

  She had simply been there.

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  Until she wasn’t needed to be named anymore.

  “She didn’t ask for anything,” the intern said softly.

  “No,” the Archivist replied. “She never did.”

  The Analyst frowned at her screen.

  “There’s no belief drop,” she said. “Not even a ripple.”

  Crisis crossed her arms.

  “So people stopped believing in her a long time ago.”

  “No,” I said before thinking. “They stopped noticing her.”

  That earned me a glance from Ms. A.

  She didn’t disagree.

  I thought about kitchens.

  About shared meals.

  About warmth that wasn’t remarkable enough to record.

  Hestia hadn’t lost relevance.

  She’d been absorbed.

  There was nothing left to contain.

  The system closed her file automatically.

  No timestamp issues.

  No odd phrasing.

  No anomalies.

  Perfect.

  The Archivist stared at the confirmation longer than necessary.

  Then he nodded and moved on.

  Lunch was quieter than usual.

  No one was upset.

  No one was relieved.

  We ate like people who had done their jobs well.

  “That’s two this week,” the intern said eventually. “Gods who just… left.”

  “Yes,” the Archivist replied. “And neither required us.”

  “That’s good,” the intern said.

  Crisis didn’t answer.

  In the afternoon, work continued.

  Everything behaved.

  Everything aligned.

  The system hummed along as if grateful for the lack of drama.

  I didn’t trust it.

  But I had nothing concrete to object to.

  Which felt worse.

  That night, I stared at the ceiling.

  The ceiling had now seen gods of laughter and gods of home leave without resistance.

  I wondered when disappearance stopped being a failure and started being proof of success.

  The ceiling, as usual, declined to answer.

  After a while, I did.

  When the thing you created no longer needs you to explain it.

  I didn’t like that answer.

  Sleep came anyway.