It all made terrible sense.

Legba, who spoke with and raised the dead. I should have seen it coming, if I hadn’t had a seer working against me to actively make sure I didn’t.

Gods lost their powers upon hitting the grave, but it didn’t undo pre-existing damage. Damage like coercing an entire world – an entire multiverse – into your personal worship, along with its gods and pantheons.

Everything Yahweh could only dream of had already happened to someone else. Someone with a less hands-off approach, who toyed with his playthings before devouring them piece by grotesque piece while his retinue cheered and applauded in blind, ignorant bliss.

Baldr, born with true mind control at near-limitless scale, if not versatility. Another of Odin’s messed-up children, though I couldn’t blame the parent for this one as much as it was deserved. Odin would have sold out every one of his offspring given a good enough reason, but not Baldr. History had and would always remember him fondly, because he told it to. Still in effect, still unbroken, since the gods with the power to break it didn’t – couldn’t – believe it existed, and wouldn’t want to if they could. A whole universe still in love with an utter monster, their perfect avatar of joy and hope. Because it was what he’d wanted, and they’d had no choice. Even after I’d killed him.

Distance, I’d noticed, helped. Baldr’s influence didn’t turn people into mindless zombies; they retained their own hopes and dreams. They didn’t spend all day thinking about how to best serve Dearest Baldy; it was just a sickness consuming the part of their brains representing him, blocking out reality and replacing it with whatever he wanted.

In essence, a geas at its very worst. Why I alone had been unaffected was a question I’d asked myself enough times to fill a continent with interrobangs. It certainly hadn’t been Baldr’s decision. The only reason I’d survived his childhood years at all was by keeping my distance, staying unnoticed and giving my acting skills the biggest ongoing test of their life.

The things I’d seen him do.

And now they were going to bring him back.

If Legba had been talking to him, even in the void, the reminder would have been enough to put ideas in his head. Hell, it might have originally come from Odin.

If Tez in his searchings had stumbled onto a future where Baldr was alive, or worse, interacted with him in it, it would have been all over. A geas getting its hooks into an ordinary mortal was bad enough. Finding inroads into a seer was the flame to its gasoline.

It all made sense.

It all made sense.

And I’d realised too late to stop it. I raged, the building pressure in my tear ducts unable to find release.

“You can watch again, now,” Bragi said in my ear, and the piazza snapped back into clarity. What had been a muffled drone blasted back into my ears as the crowd’s overwhelming roar at the announcement, even though half of them wouldn’t have known what they were cheering for. It didn’t matter. The Baldr effect transcended familiarity, or the fact a bunch of people had died nearby.

On the rare occasion resurrections happened, they tended to be behind closed doors drawing as minimal attention as possible. Nobody liked to admit it when they’d made a mistake. This one was out in the open, yet I barely noticed it. The stage seemed a little narrower, a swath of the piazza altered from its original configuration. Nothing to draw the eye, because nothing was an accurate description.

A gateway to the void.

A pale, beautiful man stepped out of it wearing a face I’d hoped never to see again. He wore the outfit he’d died in, a soft silken robe of gold and pale blue. A bloodless ragged tear lay open over the heart. He emerged glaringly into focus against a backdrop my brain wouldn’t register, the absence of reality folding around him to highlight his existence even further. I didn’t miss the casual swat of his wrist as he backhanded Lorenzo into the void behind him. It swallowed the messiah without a sound or a peep, eating him whole in an instant.

The gate closed behind him, returning reality to its usual programming. The cheers rose to ear-splitting intensity as the autocue kept rolling, its reader no longer present to deliver its message.

Baldr glanced at it curiously, then at the crowd with much the same reaction. He raised up his forearms, stretching out the fingers and joints to run a digit along the exposed skin. Anyone else deprived of a body for decades would have been gasping on the floor in the fetal position, but I didn’t suppose that would do for a god of beauty.

I came to the belated realisation that Legba’s hand had returned to my shoulder, and the god with it. He seemed to sense my attention, because he spoke a moment later.

“I’m not doing this to be cruel,” the god of the crossroads murmured, low enough only I could hear. “It’s because you need to see it. Somehow that brain of yours can’t process what literally everyone else’s can: that you caused the hellhole we live in. Not Yahweh, not Apollo – you. And you’ll keep causing it until we tie you down and force you not to. Again and again and again. In some places, they call this an intervention.”

I still couldn’t speak, or I would have had some better names to call it.

“But I,” Legba continued, lifting the hand from my shoulder, “consider it fixing a mistake.”

He straightened as Baldr turned his back on the expectant crowd and towards us at the rear of the stage, the last place I wanted him to go. I pushed back against Bragi’s compulsion again and met with less success than before, though I could tell my repeated attempts were starting to wear on his efforts to keep me subdued. I knew Bragi, and the more I made it a continual chore, the more his inner artiste would rebel and the attention would start to wander.

Baldr really was beautiful, even by Providence’s comparatively unfair standards; ethereal and exquisite, each outward imperfection sucked inwards to lurk in the pit of ugliness at the centre. “Papa Legba!” he cried in Old Norse, voice a little stilted from the lack of practice, but enthusiastic regardless. “My personal saviour. You look very different to how I expected. More… physical.” His eyes then turned to me. “And what’s this? A present?”

“This is Loki,” Legba answered, bringing both hands my way in a self-satisfied sweep. “I thought you might appreciate it, considering.”

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The god of light gazed down at me, a surprised smile lifting his lips. “Oh, so it is. The void has made me slow, it seems. No one else exudes that utter hatred quite the same.”

Legba beamed at me as if I’d been gifted a tremendous undeserved compliment. I strained again to move.

Baldr stepped closer. “How unjust you should be the one to survive, after all you’ve done.”

A soft breeze gusted past my face, and a second later the air next to Baldr condensed into a form I barely recognised as Tez’s. “She’s going to escape,” he relayed, steering away from meeting my eyes. At least he had the courtesy to say it out loud. His words creaked like a dry branch. “I can’t stop it. She has too many hooks in the city by now.”

“Mmm,” Baldr commented. “Shame. What if I wounded her first, just a bit?”

“You’ll miss.”

He would if I had anything to do about it. It was also possible Tez was lying to allow me an opening. Even though it told him Baldr could do no wrong, somewhere under the filter of brainwash Tez still had a conscience. My history with him and his predecessor had to count for something. And if internal struggles showed externally, Tez had been through one of the worst I’d seen.

This wasn’t the new-born incarnation at Salar de Uyuni, nor even the later wreck on the beach. The hunched figure in front of me passed for barely a shell, decrepit and sallow, with streaks of white running across his temples and skin so creased you could sheathe a stick in it. His fingers curled in on themselves under coat sleeves suddenly far too heavy for them, with joints poking through them like twigs. Tez was a shapeshifter, but he wasn’t that kind of shapeshifter. He’d given a lot of himself to make this future happen, pushing far past the point he should have stopped. And now that he had, I’d be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing in others.

Baldr sighed. “Nothing for it, I suppose. I’ll make a hunt of it as soon as I’ve established a few ground rules. Papa Legba! You’re my favourite person right now. Would you care to step up to my warm embrace?”

He looked at me as he said it. I knew what was coming. This was a demonstration.

I reassessed my opinion of Legba slightly as he threw his arms around the god of light. The executive had tears in his eyes, welcoming home a beloved friend. No two people reacted exactly the same way to Baldr; it was possible to learn something by watching the subtleties.

Baldr returned his smile, and the hug. Then he squeezed.

Multiple loud cracks sounded in immediate succession, and Legba’s torso bent backwards at an inhuman angle, indented and broken. My shifting was still too weakened to stop the bile rising in the part of me that was still human, and it choked in my throat.

The tears in Legba’s eyes were now running red.

Gripping the twitching body in one arm by the collar, Baldr lazily moved his other hand to the CMO’s throat and dug it inwards.

“I’m grateful, truly,” he said. He looked at me while he said it. “But I can’t have you performing any other resurrections. What if you got the wrong one?” His eyes moved from me to Tez. “You, I’m keeping. I hear soothsayers are indispensable these days.” The hand pulled, and a loud crack sounded from inside Legba’s neck. His head fell down his back at an impossible angle, white locks dangling and rolled-back eyes staring me blindly in the face. Unconscious for now.

“I’d love nothing more,” Tez creaked, as if the gory mess in front of him didn’t exist.

“Take care of him for me,” Baldr ordered the seer. “Either find a way to kill him or keep him permanently subdued.”

Tez stared at him blankly, and I realised they were no longer getting the benefit of Legba’s auto-translate. I would have gloated, except I knew Baldr wouldn’t care. He had a whole world full of willing subjects to choose from, to the extent even gods were replaceable. In a world without judgement, he could afford to make mistakes.

His power made him, as much as anyone had ever been, untouchable. Worse – an exponential curve, as adoring gods threw powers and loyalty his way as gifts to a treasured child. Untreated, it wouldn’t just be mind control I’d have to worry about. It would be the most powerful, invulnerable being in the universe. And it wouldn’t take long. Last time, it had taken Baldr decades to realise the full potential of his ability. This time he had the knowledge going in, and the resources of a consolidated divine collective primed and ready for takeover.

I’d had one chance to stop him before, and had. But my rescue had been incomplete, and I’d suffered for it. It hadn’t mattered how much I’d reasoned or what evidence I’d thrown in people’s faces; the compulsion lingered. No matter what I did, history would remember me as a liar, traitor and source of universal problems. It had taken everything I’d had just to convince Hel to betray her convictions and keep him dead, and the act had wounded her deeply.

I’d been worried when Providence had first taken over, part of why I’d kept running for so long. But the past had stayed dead. And gradually, after centuries of it staying dead, it had dropped from my mind. Not entirely; my very existence served me daily reminders of my predicament. But Providence had its own domineering tyrant; the lingering effects of another not quite enough to overcome his desire for a lack of competition.

And now he was dead.

The cheers from the crowd had been calming down after their promised new leader had promptly ignored them to brutally murder his road crew. Not because of the murder, but because of the anti-climax. Ever the opportunist, I saw Grace moving back towards the microphone.

Baldr noticed too, and cocked his head towards Tez. “Is this going to be bad?”

Tez stared blankly again through the bags under his eyes, before his face lit with enlightenment. He shook his head in a slow, tremulous motion. “You’ll like it,” he creaked in halting Old Norse. I wondered if he’d gotten the translation off Bragi.

“I will? Wonderful! Then Loki should see it, too.”

I could already see everything; a good twentieth of the piazza and the entirety of the basilica was me. Tez, frailer than any god had a right to be, attempted to drag me across the podium anyway behind the leader he’d wrought upon himself. It took him a few seconds before realising it was all one piece, his mind slower than it used to be. The connections taking longer. I’d need it, if I was to get out of this as Tez predicted. Exploit all my friends, just as the world expected of me.

Fine, then.

Interested now, Baldr gazed eagerly out into the masses, who roared at his renewed appearance. Heartfelt tears flowed among the audience like wine. Less joyous ones for the people I’d killed.

Grace gripped the microphone and held up a hand to placate the crowd. “To celebrate this pivotal monument in our history, each of you shall receive your heart’s desire as befits our lord of joy.”

I noticed Bragi step out of thin air to Baldr’s side and whisper a translation in the latter’s ear.

“Oh,” said Baldr, losing interest. “That’s much less –”

I took the opportunity to ram at Bragi’s bindings again, taking more of the piazza into myself before being shut down. No attacks this time, only spreading my influence behind the scenes. If they didn’t know where I was, I’d be harder to control.

Tez reached out a hand to Bragi and Baldr, who blinked at it and accepted. The three warped out an instant before Grace raised his arms.

I felt naudhiz flare over the piazza in a wash of green fire. Its tendrils snaked through Rome, down the streets and through building windows. I saw it from Tru’s balcony in America on only a few seconds’ delay, a flash of green so brief it might have been imagined. It hit the underwater grotto, sending both Lucy and Enki into high alert with expressions of alarm.

“What the hell?” Lucy exclaimed.

Objects rained from the sky into outreached hands; some small, some less so. Houses, cars, trees and villas competed for space that didn’t exist, creasing in and through each other, decimating the piazza and Rome as a whole. My human body and most of the basilica were torn to shreds instantly as hundreds of structures crashed into them. The remainder was battered badly. I struggled to hold onto consciousness, but enough of me had already transitioned and I had the place of power to help. The urge faded as I made the mental switch.

I felt, rather than heard, Baldr’s uproarious laughter. More importantly, Bragi had stopped speaking. I bashed through his compulsion, seeking anything that would take me upwards and out, and managed to jettison a small piece of myself from the rest. I warped it through to Lucy and Vince, clattering to the grotto floor as a pebble, and spent a few seconds unwinding enough to force myself back into a shape that could move.

I opened my eyes to the three of them staring at me. “Legba’s down. Tez betrayed us,” I slurred, and cancelled the visitation giving me double vision. “Whatever you do, don’t kill Enki.”