I brought Inari to Providence to see its sorry remains. We didn’t stay long. Baldr’s inner circle were nowhere to be found, and most of the outer one, too. No doubt by the aid of prophecy. We returned to my creation in a bloodier state than we’d left, Inari’s quasi-kimono splashed with red in a look I thought suited them, but didn’t jeopardise my precarious standing to say.
By the time we returned, Inari’s face had grown grimmer, and Inanna had acquired a translator. Hathor, apparently, one of the Egyptian big names and until today, a staffer in Compliance. Themis sent her out next. Most of the Egyptian pantheon were shapeshifters in one vein or another, which spared them the recovery time. It made sense to send them up front.
The dark goddess, clad in a very un-businesslike shift, took it better than Inari, especially after speaking with Inanna.
I let them talk, kicking my shoes around the podium impatiently to the backdrop of tapping keys, and wandered across to the overhang. I did like a good view, and it was the opposite of a cave. My city stretched out below me, chaotic and half-consistent, and elegant in its lawlessness. Silhouetted dots hung in the sky above it, skies full of angels interrupted in transit. Silent as a librarian’s curse. Six people in nineteen thousand was barely a beginning. But we’d get faster.
Hathor trailed off mid-sentence to spare me an uneasy glance. “She says she’s responsible for the tree,” she informed me. “And that she can stop it. What do we do?”
“Maybe stop it before it breaks out of Providence and starts swallowing the Earth,” Inari said wryly. “How did a prisoner manage such a feat? And in top security, no less.”
Both staff members aimed glances my way, as if I’d know the answer.
“Technically,” I stated, walking back from the sheer drop, “Yggdrasil already exists here. I think. We just can’t see it.” I remembered I was still carrying around some of its apples somewhere, cycled briefly into the form where I’d stashed them, and pulled one out for my audience.
It got everyone’s attention, including Inanna’s. Some of the eerie calm melted from the Mesopotamian’s face, and she pointed at the golden fruit in my hand. Sharp words issued from her mouth.
“She says it’s the same,” Hathor translated. “But the tree doesn’t fruit here. How did you get it?”
I sidled up to Inanna. “From the source. How we got there is a long story. But I suspect you know something about that, don’t you?”
Hathor conferred with the winged goddess for a while longer, appearing more concerned the longer the exchange went on. On the surface I kept cool, while struggling not to be twitchy. Underlying it all, the lingering question remained: why?
Eventually, Hathor turned back to me. “You’re the conduit, she says.”
“For?”
“She says you’re right. The tree has always existed in every location, reality itself seeping as sap from its innards. She can feel it.”
“Yes, but this ‘conduit’ business. She can’t mean for Yggdrasil, surely; I’m pretty sure I’m spiritually dead in the ‘commune with trees’ department.”
“I’m getting there.” Hathor frowned. “The tree exists in all places. With the right impetus, it can be pushed to manifest.” She nodded to the apple in my hand. “Planting its fruit is one way, and the easiest. But also the most likely to backfire.”
I squinted at the apple and mentally compared it to the roots rampaging through Providence HQ. That was certainly one comparison. I raised an eyebrow at Inanna.
“As strong as the tree is, I could not use it overtly against Yahweh,” the goddess continued via translation. She motioned for me to hand over the apple. “What I needed was subtlety. I needed to work through an agent.”
I passed it over and squinted at her. “And you chose me?”
“I didn’t know who you were. The tree did the finding.”
“Then how do you know it is me?”
“Because I recognise you. I see how Yggdrasil converges on you and strikes through your centre. While Baal held our shields, I convinced Yggdrasil to seek the worlds for their most unstable being –”
Inari, still listening, barked out a laugh.
“In a metaphysical sense, obviously,” I interrupted, but the annoyance faded almost immediately.
Carrying the apple, Inanna moved to the centre of the dip in the floor, under the hollowed mesa, and placed the fruit at its centre. “– the best match for an embodiment of disruption. That is what is needed to defeat a stranglehold.” She rose back out of the kneel to her feet. “The tree moves where Yahweh cannot see.”
“Could not,” I corrected. “Not exactly a problem now. You’re saying all these coincidences that led to me being here came back to Yggdrasil? How could it do that?”
“A plant has no mind,” Inanna said. “It can’t plan, only react. But it can be guided. Ultimately, a large part of what we know as magic stems from this one. It sees more than any of us could if we all joined together. I gave it a direction and ushered it forwards.”
Palm upwards, she raised a hand, and the apple rocked in place. A second later, it exploded upwards as stems shot out of the golden flesh. I shared concerned glances with Inari and Hathor, but no uncontrollable ransacking followed. A single wide crack appeared in the floor as roots pierced the stone, but the growth slowed at waist height and crawled to a trickle.
“That just bumped up the real estate value,” Inari observed.
“She says it’s easier here because of the conduit,” Hathor continued to translate. She looked at me.
“I feel nothing,” I reiterated. “If I understand this, it could have been anyone. But Inanna wanted change, and Yggdrasil looked and found me. Apparently even a houseplant knew about me before me.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“What about you?” asked Inari, shifting a half-step back towards accusation. “Is there somehow more?”
I opened my mouth in time to be cut off by Inanna.
“The tree doesn’t see things like we do,” the Mesopotamian goddess explained. “I’ve inhabited it. To its senses, a soul is indistinguishable from concepts, space and time. It took me millennia to wrap my head around it. What it does perceive is pathways. If you can point it down the right one, it can achieve almost anything, ignoring the execution of minor details.”
“Oh,” exclaimed Gia. She’d stopped typing some time ago. “You’re saying Yggdrasil is a seer.”
I felt my eyes widen.
“Effectively. But inert, and far more encompassing. The tree accounts for what every seer predicts, building wider paths around their collective possibilities. We’ve known this since before Yahweh’s conquest. It just couldn’t be controlled. As far as I know, I’m the first.”
“And now you’re talking about fate,” I asserted. “You’re saying it’s not dead, just operating on a scale so broad it may as well have been imperceptible.”
“Fate is the art of deciphering,” Inanna said, with a sideways glance in my direction. “Small fates, perhaps, may actively decide, but strain against Yggdrasil’s might. All they ever guide are twigs seers can snap. But fate also exists on a larger scale, and that, too, can be changed. By me. And you.”
Involuntarily I let out a giggle at the idea Yggdrasil had simply been running large-scale seer interference with me at its unwitting centre. Why not? “It’s been that kind of week,” I said, shaking my head. I could take it at face value, but there was one detail I had to know. “Critically, though, when did you make your breakthrough?”
The feathers at the tips of Inanna’s wings fluttered. “I relied on visits to measure time in Etemenanki,” came her reply. “There was little else to do. We tried many times to escape, in countless ways, but were outpowered outside our sanctuary. Through it all, I worked on Yggdrasil in the background. If the timeframes my captors gave me were accurate, then this is the result of efforts spanning thousands of years.”
“So this locus around me,” I said. “Could it be responsible for my, ah, particular affinity? Possibly other old effects?”
The goddess tilted her head. “I doubt it. I’d barely broken through before you turned up on my doorstep. I assume a matter of days.” She broke eye contact to gaze out towards the starry vista, even if it did contain the occasional intruding angel. “It’s nice to know you still have them. The tree found you because of who you are. It didn’t make you that way.” She frowned. “You should know this. Or have standards really fallen that far?”
“Both.” Still adapting to the latest revelations, I shoved back an unsummoned surge of disappointment. “Then it wouldn’t be the cause of my immunity against Baldr.”
Inanna peered at me curiously. “I don’t know what that is.”
“Who.”
Hathor, Inari and Gia all stared at me like I carried another, worse batch of grenades. I couldn’t blame them. “There is,” I began carefully, “a mind controller at loose. A bad one.”
Understanding flitted across her features. “The one you’re scared of.”
“That’s him.”
I explained the situation, with a fair amount of ad-libbing to cover new developments in the past several thousand years. It didn’t take much. Once you got past the technical minutiae, the important things hadn’t really changed. I was far more surprised at the apparent sanity of a goddess caged up in the same few dozen metres for longer than several of my lifetimes. I would have expected she’d have forgotten how to talk, or evolved into some kind of completely feral state, but no. Inanna listened intently, and remained silent when I was done.
“So this is your test,” I finished up. “Repeat what I just said.”
The answer came back clean, and I breathed a final sigh of relief. Stepping over to the apple sapling, I shoved Lucy’s flask into a fork in the branches. When no sleeper agents immediately seized and ran off with it, I conceded I could probably rely on the current crew. It was no Vatican Concord, that was for certain. Instead of one recalcitrant Apollo, here I was surrounded by former enemies. Themis, who I clearly hadn’t given enough credit; Inari, whose passive-aggressive jibes were somehow helping to keep my head in reality; even Vishnu had cooperated. If that could change, maybe there was hope for everything else.
Still, I would have preferred Lucy. Right now, I didn’t know where he was. Ditto for Durga, Mayari and Tez. Hel and Yun-Qi would have been welcome company, or my ovine housemate. Even the demon lords were missing, save Gia, and the latter barely looked up from her work. The revolution hadn’t been supposed to happen with distant coworkers.
There was no point in everyone crowding the platform. Inanna and Hathor departed to claim lodgings, leaving Themis to release a third hostage.
Others followed. Inari chose to hang around, watching the process repeated in action. It helped having them there. A holdover from the previous familiar structure, however tenuous, seemed to provide the legitimacy I couldn’t promise on my own. Even now, you couldn’t ignore reputation.
Things settled into an uneasy equilibrium as new patterns emerged in unspoken agreement. Despite the freeze and inevitable gossip train, everyone present seemed to recognise the fragility of the situation. Voices stayed hushed, even with no one around to overhear. The general entitled flamboyance synonymous with a crowd full of exultant immortals stayed notably absent. Even Vishnu’s occasional demands to re-establish control remained oddly restrained, and were assiduously ignored.
I’d expected Gia to break for sleep, but the demon lord kept working, prepping hostage after hostage for a speedy release. I fed her another of Yggdrasil’s apples, which she accepted with barely a glance, and kept tabs on Inanna’s tree. It was still growing, albeit slower, a little taller with new green shoots budding from the stem. I repositioned Lucy’s flask before it had time to get wedged in.
Somewhat grudgingly, I had to admit Themis’ penchant for categorisation could come in handy. The goddess of justice had front-loaded most of the capable shapeshifters into place to manage the rest and rip holes in the bottlenecks. Most of the discharged came out disoriented and disembodied, getting a briefer version of the full spiel before leaving to regenerate. That would take time. Between explanations I found myself pacing back and forth, struggling to deal with the wait.
After a dozen or so releases, the sun began to rise. Gia looked up from her latest laptop and blinked in the red dawn. We hadn’t moved from the podium.
I sent off the latest escapee with directions and gave the demon lord a nod. “We’ve got enough to keep going. May as well get some rest.”
Her fingers didn’t stop.
“Or not.” I shrugged.
“If anyone else can do it,” she replied, not taking her eyes from the screen, “let me know. Until then –”
She didn’t need to finish the sentence. We both understood the seriousness of the situation.
“Then I’ll take a break,” I announced. Inari had heard the story enough times, and information was starting to spread ahead of us.
There were many places I wanted to check. Some I’d have to work up to. I started with Rome, stepping through to the wreckage of Grace’s last gesture.
The Italian capital had been destroyed as surely as its harbinger neighbour, crushed under the weight of its people’s broken dreams. Claw-like spires still pierced the sky where I’d left my mark, looming above the shattered architecture. I surveilled the damage from the air, gliding above as an eagle, and couldn’t see the end.
I blinked south, into the country. It wasn’t much better. Lines of destruction marked the backed-up roads, and the towns and villages near them. Multitudes of survivors were out in the flowers tending to the wounded and heading for the rude awakenings awaiting them in the cities. Line of sight, my arse.
Returning to Rome, I picked my way across the buried piazza hunting for Grace. The naudhiz rune pinpointed him at the centre of the devastation, damaged but alive. Baldr had left him behind.
Even here, there were thousands of survivors. Sheltering in what remained of the buildings, climbing over the destruction, and pulling victims out of the wreckage. Including a few rigid members of Yahweh’s angel brigade, their Swiss Guard uniforms now tattered and covered in filth. Stasis did nothing to mute the smells of blood, death and sorrow, or to make me forget the expressions on people’s faces.
Namely, of joy.
I’d seen it happen before. Baldr would fix it, went the thinking. Yes, horrible mass death and all that, sure – but that beautiful man, though. Wasn’t that something? For once, the angels held the better position.
There was nothing else to see here.