God (capital G) arrived in a state I could only describe as the culmination of several millennia’s worth of accumulated spite come to fruition, and almost the crowning moment of my life to date. Odin’s death had been too sudden to savour, and I’d hardly been in a position to appreciate it at the time. Yahweh, on the other hand, had decided vengeance trumped public image on this single occasion, and turned up with an actual nosebleed. It had dripped onto the collar of his white suit, and I felt a little stab of satisfaction at the stain. Whether he couldn’t remove it or simply hadn’t noticed, the fact it existed at all counted as a win.
Though the angel dabbing at it with a handkerchief spoiled the image a bit. There were three of them, the same group who’d sat in on Thursday’s meeting in the holy of holies. Then, they’d been struck with awe and vacant wonder. Now, the dominant mood had flipped over to vaguely menacing. Fewer points of difference separated the two expressions than they should.
As one, they turned their heads to look at the calm, if singed, moon goddess brandishing the legendary Spear of Destiny, a fraction after their chief executive.
Yahweh had stepped through in the centre of the newly-cleared and reapportioned cave, away from the faltering remnants of the travel station still eating its way through any matter unlucky enough to sit close. It was about one and a half times its starting size and already carving a hole in the floor below it.
A field of repositioned dimensional distortions separated Mayari and Gia from the new arrivals in a neat circle as an extra measure; not that we’d have it for long.
“Be ready,” I said to Lucy.
“Almost there.”
The tyrant’s gaze snapped to me. Even through the blank whites of his eyes, I felt seen. It took me aback for a second.
And then the world blinked out. Replacing it was a new, more familiar chamber I recognised as Mayari’s workshop. Gia, newly outfitted in lunar-friendly garments, released her grip on Mayari and stepped back out of the way.
Yahweh and the angels arrived a second after us in the cramped quarters, already moving towards the moon goddess. In the interim between appearances, all three had acquired weapons: short, ivory pistols with intricate handles.
Four against two and a half weren’t the best odds, but the repurposed edict was about to improve them.
“Now!” I said to Lucy, to no effect.
His jaw tightened. “Buy me time.”
Mayari gestured at the angels, and the walls of the workshop creaked. Otherwise, nothing happened. She frowned, and blinked out of sight as the first of the bullets splintered through a collection of beakers behind her, ricocheting twice off the walls’ metal plating. She reappeared behind Yahweh with the spear. An angel met her there just as fast and intercepted it mid-thrust, smoothly twisting the weapon shaft aside. The tip sheared through a nearby work bench with no resistance whatsoever before Mayari kicked the angel in the stomach with a charred steel-capped boot and blinked out again.
Minus a target, the angels shifted in unison, training their guns on Gia and, to my surprise, me. I slapped my hand on the demon’s wrist and dragged both of us out of there onto the moon’s surface. Two of the angels followed us.
“Now would be a good time,” I urged Lucy.
He didn’t answer, only setting his lips in a firm line, but the blinking lights in the grotto did seem to move faster.
I warped Gia and myself out again not quite fast enough to avoid the next bullet. It trailed through the tail end of my dissipated form, and ached. I detached the leg it had hit and replaced it with a new one. That ached, too. All my forms did, up to and including my real body.
Godkillers.
Target their weapons, I told Gia, moving us again as more shots were fired, and again. They didn’t seem to be running out of ammunition. They were fast, and I wasn’t fast enough to do more than run away.
Below us, gravel rattled freely over the moon’s surface, and plumes of unsettled dust billowed into the air. Nothing more. Mayari was still playing it safe, I figured. Personal domain or not, the last thing we needed was the other celestial gods dropping in to intervene in power plays on their territory.
Gia’s fingers pressed clumsily into my arm. We’d prepared for this; I’d made her a spacesuit – a proper one, this time. Made of visitation stuff, it didn’t exist to the outside world, the soles of the shoes sinking just below the surface of the moon. But it existed for her, letting her breathe even as the helmet disrupted her vision and made her slow to manoeuvre.
An angel appeared directly over us and fired. It hit me in the top of the shoulder, close to the neck where it would pierce all the way through for horrendous damage. I shifted form quickly, hoping to minimise the proportionate injury – and watched the bright foam dart bounce off in a majestic arc onto the ground. Next to me, Gia fist-pumped.
The angel, preoccupied with the fact its divine artifact had become a plastic child’s toy, missed Mayari’s sudden appearance behind it, and her subsequent killing blow to its head.
I shifted back unharmed as she blinked out again with the spear, leaving the angel’s body to topple slowly downward into the grey dust.
Get the gun, I nudged Gia, pointing it out in her mind.
She scrambled forward into the path of the materialising second angel. Toy weapon in hand, it thrust the heel of its other palm towards Gia’s helmet.
I lunged and got there in time, exerting my own influence over the contested demon lord. The two forces clashed. Mine was the stronger, but I could feel the angel’s override tendencies starting to win out.
The angel met my eyes. No mercy for apostates. It backhanded me across the head with the gun, ignoring the fact it wasn’t supposed to be able to interact with my visitation. It hurt. It slammed the same hand down on Gia’s arm, twisting it behind her back hard enough to dislocate.
Gia screamed. She kicked out at the construct, but it simply rose high into the air, taking the struggling demon lord with it. All her weight dangled from the dislocated shoulder. My head filled with fear and pain in addition to the bruise from the godkiller.
I shifted into snake form before I could lose contact with my anchor, coiling myself around her other, flailing arm. The demon’s body blurred visibly. If I stopped pulling, she’d probably end up in a star or other nexus of instant annihilation, and nothing I could do would stop her dying then.
“Lucy, we need that edict now,” I growled.
“One minute. Then you’ll have it. Both parts have to be ready.”
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“Perhaps I could help,” Vince suggested in a hopeful tone, glancing between us.
So, this is Lucifer’s doing, a stern voice spoke in my head. He never learns. A snake who keeps the company of other snakes.
I poked my neck in the direction of the words and found myself face-to-face with the tyrant. A heavy coating of moondust caked his suit and hair, turning it an uneven grey. His eyes were still white, and the nosebleed had started up again, tracing a fresh trail from nostril to upper lip, stopping just short of dripping over as the dust absorbed some of the flow. He was otherwise uninjured.
Mayari and the third angel were nowhere to be seen, which worried me.
Yahweh held the Spear of Destiny in one hand, pointed in my direction. This was starting to become a pattern.
“Your dad’s here, less comatose than hoped,” I relayed to Lucy a whole planet away. “Unfortunately, he found his present and appears to want to return it to sender.”
I may as well have directed the words at the tyrant himself. Yes, I am, Yahweh responded. But you shouldn’t be. Loki. External fury added itself to the roil rolling around my already crowded headspace, competing for dominance with Gia’s whimpering. Not at all like mine. My own was cold, still, born of the powerlessness of living through countless atrocities and letting them slip away freely unaddressed because even a god could only do so much, and a god dead from pissing off another god, even less.
On top of the rage, I felt oddly calm. For someone who devoted so much effort to styling himself all-powerful, he really was just a small, petty man with large, petty ambitions. He’d been in the right place at the right time to kick his snowball down the hill and misinterpreted gravity as merit. Never mind who got crushed along the way.
Faking your disappearance? An incredibly unwise action, Yahweh continued. Abusing my trust at a moment of great change, using my own assets against me with your assortment of ungrateful, misguided souls. I see now you used Odin as a stepping stone. I see the ghost of the wound I so graciously healed, where this – he nudged the tip of the spear sideways, in such as way it ended closer to my head on the backswing, – left its mark. But it would never have been enough. Both heaven and Earth look up to me. They would never accept my removal.
Arguing was pointless. You couldn’t, against that temperament. Yahweh’s most impenetrable shield was the one he wrapped around his ego, protected by the complete and utter certainty he was right. I didn’t need to be a mind-reader to know his vision had no room for self-doubt, or that the truth would be butchered in service to justifying his conquest. There wasn’t a cutting remark in the world strong enough to dissolve that level of conviction. But if you could peel away the layers of rigid self-centredness and sociopathic contempt, all you’d find underneath would be an angry old miser, fragile as the rest of them, who yelled at the less powerful because he thought it earnt him respect and approval.
He wasn’t even unusual.
I wanted to ignore him. Turn my back and deny him the barest sliver of respect from engagement. He’d either mistakenly view it as a win, or recognise it for the snub it was. That would enrage him, maybe enough to throw another public tantrum and give the world another chance to recognise his colours.
Except the world, being the world, would just praise him for ‘standing up to evil’ like it always did, and Lucy’s minute wasn’t yet up. The spear pointed at my throat made for another dissuading factor.
Instead, I followed Lucy’s instructions and bought time.
The best part, I mused, lying through my teeth, is that we aren’t even the ringleaders.
Lies. I know who you all are, the tyrant said. Your protection failed you. Five of you, not counting the dead, the seer’s duplicates and Lucifer’s abominations. He glanced at Gia as he said the last part, his upper lip curling in an ugly sneer.
Five? Then Mayari was still alive. Not that that necessarily made it any better.
Wrong, I declared gleefully, flicking my tongue at him. There’s one more. The one pulling all the strings. You can torture me all you like, but I won’t tell you who it is. Can’t give you answers I don’t know.
I hadn’t thought about the lurking mastermind in some time, largely because it hadn’t come up, and also because I’d started to wonder if I’d gotten it wrong. There had been players behind the scenes; my own family among them, with Hel and Fenrir both involved in various degrees of mutiny, Durga keeping seven hundred year old secrets, and Lucifer’s secret army of abyssal children. The mortal intellectual elite were so fed up they’d joined a suicide cult and its racist offshoot, and I still didn’t know what had been going on between Legba and Odin, but there was definitely something.
And yet none of it quite added up – why it was all happening at once, the different spokes drawing inwards like a closing umbrella. I wasn’t ready to give up on my theory yet. Yun-Qi had been my best guess, and it hadn’t been him. Odin, my second, also a no – for which we could all be grateful. Who else, then? Legba? Pakhet? The other three-quarters of Janus? Or someone unsuspected flying completely under the radar?
If you’re telling the truth, the tyrant said, I don’t need you to seek out the rot in this company. I’ve already repaid your favour; I owe you nothing. You’ve proven you’re more trouble than you’re worth, and the limit to my infinite patience.
I’ve seen higher limits in carparks, you ruptured haemorrhoid, I noted, which weren’t the best last words ever spoken, but needed to be said.
In the grotto, Lucy grinned. He lowered his arms even as Janus repositioned his, and snapped his fingers with an audible boom shivering flakes of stone from the ceiling. The water-filled floor sloshed over the edge of the remaining platform. The whirling symbols snapped to an abrupt halt only to slam back again into the face of the dome. Scintillating blue and gold flared around their edges, then faded back into new cut engravings. I was almost disappointed Mayari was busy on the moon – I could already picture her muttering about metaphysical logistics and implications for various underutilised practical applications.
I didn’t have time to linger on the image. Below Gia’s dangling feet, the surface of the moon erupted. For the briefest of instants, I saw a wave of blue-gold spike outwards from the miniature planet, and then we were awash in it, dancing colours temporarily blinding my sight.
My powers hiccupped, reacting on pure instinct. I let the change happen, falling to partial pieces as something slashed through the space I’d been. It missed not by a small amount, and as my vision cleared I saw the spear’s golden crown tumbling through space towards a speedy appointment with the landscape. Faster than it should, given where we were.
Yahweh fell with it in a flutter of fabric. His angel made one glorious double-take and warped after him, positioning itself for the catch. I reformed and put myself between them, disrupting the effort, and gave the tyrant an extra kick on the way down for good measure. The spear tip streaked past my flesh as his small limbs thrashed.
Gia still dangled from the angel’s grip; smaller now, less dislocated. She whipped her free arm around to start thumping heaven’s divine messenger in the side of the head.
The angel, apparently deciding it wasn’t worth it, dropped her. It warped again and I followed, snatching its grasping fingers backwards out of the tyrant’s path. I shouldn’t have been able to restrain it, but if they were going to break the rules on visitation, I could make that cut two ways. Its body was lukewarm in a way that felt artificial; harder than a mortal’s and impossible to break. It didn’t react like a person would, barely registering the creature tearing into it through its single-minded objective.
I covered it in claws and teeth, disrupting its vision even as I made mine perfect, but it warped out again, almost colliding with the tyrant. I blinked across and rammed it aside, blinked out as Yahweh lunged with the spear. I made a grab for the weapon only to abandon it in favour of slamming myself between master and slave as the angel tried again.
Rippling backwards as the spear shaved past me, I grabbed for the toy gun still clutched in the angel’s hand and wrenched it backwards with the force of ten limbs, two divine forces warring for control of the object. Unable to warp out without letting go, the messenger opted to cling to it, waving side-to-side like a rag doll, until Mayari, golden-eyed and golden-haired, materialised next to it and shot it through the head.
Blood sprayed from the exit wound. Mayari gestured, the projectile blurred, and blood sprayed again from its chest.
I backed out of the way and went to catch Gia, who was busy screaming and cursing inside her suit as she plummeted towards death. I pulled her away from an early grave and used the extra altitude to ease back into a friendlier velocity, my younger body automatically making adjustments for the lack of atmosphere and lower gravity. In some ways the lack of control was a boon rather than a hindrance, though I had to focus on keeping myself stable enough to avoid accidents.
Yahweh landed first, in a puff of dust that skidded several metres along the surface before coming to a halt. The spear, in contrast, ratcheted back into the air in time for Mayari to pluck it from its trajectory and join us as we landed. She stomped over to the thickest part of the dust, flipped the weapon forwards, and plunged it head-first into the cloud.
And thus on the seventh day, the tyrant rested.
Not so special after all.