Progress dragged on, with ‘dragged’ being the operative word. It did speed up; as more souls emerged from confinement, a few joined Inari in disseminating facts like any good propaganda team. The exercise would have once left a bad taste in my mouth. Now, I just wanted it done.

Themis began releasing gods in pairs, then small groups. The city remained largely quiet, with only the rare figure wandering its streets, but the hollow mesa began to liven. It started with someone bringing Gia a small table and chair to work on; bland and typical of the standard company offerings ingrained in the collective divine mindset. The seats that followed were less so, with tentatively soft fabrics and muted shades, before someone took a real plunge and splashed out on a bright colour. Once it became clear no punishment would follow, it wasn’t long before the outer lip of the podium was layered with tasselled cushions and the ceiling above it scattered with decorative hangings. Inari, in their own eventual break from inductions, somehow found a way to set up a one-man stall distributing rice of the endless variety, filling the vicinity with scents of various seasonings.

The space around Yggdrasil remained clear, as if no one wanted to violate it. Sentimentality at its most unrelatable – it was only a tree. Not a figure of worship; gods should have known better. I moved Lucy’s flask up again before it could get swallowed.

I’d expected more difficulty; that Themis would need to step in. Apparently I’d had more allies than I’d realised. Not everyone, as evidenced by Quil’s release throwing the entire city into an immediate lightning storm. But on the balance of things, not bad at all.

It all seemed deeply suspicious and unsettling, and I waited for the other shoe to drop.

I needed to find out where Baldr had gone. A handful of powered trackers, distressingly few, still floated around in the soul jar. One corollary of effectiveness putting their own jobs out of action. Still, there should have been more, and I knew where they’d be.

Nuja, the goddess captured along with Themis, was arguably the most powerful one left. But not ready for action. She and the others were let out next, all in need of regeneration. Without them, we were stabbing blind. Even culled to a single, measly dimension, the world was a big place.

There was one avenue I could still check on my own.

I found Regina in a lightless cabin, only visible at all by the rune shining out from her hand. Her frozen features peered out into the dark. Amulet Tez still hung from her neck. One look at the frozen environment told me the strategy behind the situation.

The room was cosy, comfortable and safe, and designed for sensory deprivation. Smart; algiz wasn’t a rune to face head-on. Instead, the setup kept Regina from accessing anything to work with. Darkness took her sight, without being a direct threat. Thick stone walls gave her nothing to hear. Touch was taken care of in reverse, with an abundance of soft, harmless blankets diminishing the sense of a threat.

Neetu was nowhere to be seen. In visitation, I was hesitant to investigate. It was impossible to tell whether a Siphon field had been set up around the room’s perimeter. Not for Regina, who could counter it, but for me. Tez had all the intel; he had to have expected a visit at some point. I would have done it in Baldr’s place.

It was also hard to tell the extent to which the demon lord was a prisoner, given the way Baldr treated his allies. If she’d played along as I’d asked, she might still be undetected. I couldn’t ask – not in a freeze.

But I had located Amulet Tez, and a confirmed link. The only question was how to use it.

I backed out and saved Lucy’s flask from Yggdrasil again. The devil was another player of whom there was no sign. I spent some time between releases searching the likely places, but only found frustration.

My efforts to retrieve Yun-Qi and Xiānfēng proved similarly fruitless. The cave Gia and I had emerged from had collapsed fully, and Janus’ door effect barred entry more effectively than any material. I could only hope a door had remained on the other side, in which case the scientists could be anywhere.

Time passed, in limited places. More staff were freed. Rooms began to gain occupants, and activity built. By the third sunrise, gods started emerging from regen.

Then the suppressants vault went.

I knew this firstly because the sun plunged into darkness, again, along with the rest of the stars in the sky. I also knew it by the several stressed gods who arrived to usher me in front of Themis. A sizeable crowd had beaten me to it, shuffling and murmuring in anticipation. Small lights flickered into being around the mesa, compensating for the visibility gap left in the celestial void.

It felt suddenly very lonely, and I didn’t think it was sentimentality alone. At the very edges of my place-of-power-boosted awareness, things felt… small. Universe-ending small, if pressed to elaborate. That meant business. So much for my holiday plans.

I hadn’t been short for a while now, but stood on my tiptoes to move Lucy’s flask out from being tree-swallowed. This time, I didn’t put it back. Mayari had held out longer than I’d expected, but it was too soon. We only had a few hundred people ready.

Several thousand gods just came out of metaphysical hibernation, Themis said urgently, and I can’t contain them for long. I’ve given Gia the list of greatest threats, but we might only have minutes.

I sank back onto my heels and clutched the flask with a death grip. What about Vishnu?

Like Themis, my abilities have been waning since your ill-advised gambit knocked their foundation from under them, the one-time executive answered directly. Or I would have embargoed more than just Earth. The situation is too far gone.

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I bit back a cutting retort. Please tell me you can still unfreeze the planet. If not, that might just be it for the mortal world, depending on who unfroze it and when.

For now.

But then, we had bigger problems. This changed everything. If the suppressants vault had come undone, Tez had to have foreseen it. We wouldn’t be able to hide that one. Assuming Baldr was still trying to get gods on side, and didn’t know about Gia, it was a fair assumption they’d aim for the largest collection of gods when it broke.

They had trackers on their side, and combined with foresight, it was probable they’d already been predicting our movements.

It was possible they were already here, waiting for the time freeze to break. Just because I hadn’t seen anything didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Just like we were pre-empting them, they’d be trying to do the same to us, with the added benefit of involving actual seers.

But then why not jump me before the freeze, while I was distracted by angels? It would have been the perfect time.

I ran through it in my head, ignoring the prompts from Themis and co. If Baldr’s faction had jumped me in the toolshed glade, I would have been taken by surprise. They would have seized the flask and possibly incapacitated Gia, before escaping back to safety. Probably not worth taking me on, as long as they could get away.

At which point, they would have had to deal with Themis and Vishnu, who would have unleashed the big guns, along with the handful of decontaminated gods we’d had at that point. Even a handful was a lot to deal with.

If they hadn’t jumped me then, I was guessing that battle wouldn’t have gone well for them. If Baldr had had Apollo instead of Tez, it would be a different matter; Apollo delving into deeper layers of prophecy to twist the outcomes in his favour. But he didn’t.

So if they did know where we were, and hadn’t acted, and knew about the vault breaking, the ambush had to be then. Thousands of confused and angry gods handed weapons and already likely to turn on their captors, the majority of whom hadn’t been deconverted – it was a ready-made army the likes of which I doubted even Providence had seen.

Somewhere in those thousands of divine entities, the power to break a time freeze would exist. Probably a few of them. Which meant once Themis broke, Vishnu would follow soon after.

Layers upon layers of games, and it all depended on what Tez had seen.

Find me Inanna, I requested, and Hel.

I got Hel first, transitioning into her usual form the moment her soul bubbled up in release. Her hair was done up in an elegant bun on her good side; patchy and falling out on the other. “Mum, you did it! We’re free!”

I swept her into a hug and held her until she vanished from my arms, reappearing only a metre away.

“Actually,” I insinuated, dropping my arms again, “’free’ is a strong word. You might prefer ‘temporarily capacitated’.”

The delight faded from my daughter’s face. She twisted her head to take it all in. A crowd had gathered as news of the vault rocketed around the city, gods dropping in like tetris pieces. “I heard. Themis has been providing updates. The moment I heard it, I knew it had to be true. It explains so much about everything.” She shot me an apologetic glance, wincing from her blue eye. “And I held it against you.”

“But you helped me anyway,” I said, thumbing the soul jar, “despite how hard it must have been. I owe you, not the other way round. If only you knew how many times I’d told you the same thing as Themis.”

“Well, now we have a means to fight back,” Hel said. “With the numbers of Helpdesk staff with us, we have to win.” She paused, seeing the expression on my face. “Surely.”

It was my turn to wince. “Time’s against us,” I admitted, “in spite of appearances to the contrary. I need you to sweep for some souls around the city perimeter. I think we could be in an ambush.”

Without hesitation, Hel closed her eyes. She turned in a slow circle, withered arm raised as if to steady her senses. I let her work uninterrupted, even as my knuckles turned white around the flask, aware our delicate balance could rupture any second.

I saw Inanna materialise in nearby, chin raised and confident, followed abruptly by Hathor in somewhat less of a state of readiness. The Egyptian coughed into a hand and adjusted the fabric of her top, before hurrying after her language student.

No time for small talk; I met them halfway. “You put Yggdrasil onto me because of my domain,” I emphasised, focusing on the winged goddess. “What do you know about it? How can I make something change?”

Word hadn’t gotten out to the wider audience yet just how bad the situation would be.

Hathor paused in her translation, and raised an eyebrow at me. She was an elegant woman, no jewellery or overt embellishments – the polar opposite of Parvati in that regard. “No one can answer that question, Loki. How do you move an arm? Especially if you’re talking about something abstract.”

“Bullshit. People answer it all the time, ask any physiotherapist.”

“Not the way you mean it.” But she passed it on anyway.

“All magic is change,” Inanna enunciated. The ancient language rolled off her lips in waves as she laced her fingers. “But each of us are bound by limiting factors. Do you know yours?”

I knew my transformations were limited to what I considered the bounds of myself. As to how far that could go… “To an extent.”

“Then, no. You don’t.”

“For good reason,” I defended myself. “I’ve tried everything there is to try, up to a line. When that line bleeds into absorbing other people, I generally consider it time to back away.”

“Even if the alternative is allowing a despot total authority over our future?”

A low, involuntary growl escaped the back of my throat. Shapeshifting could be elegant, and it could be messy. God knew there’d been a lot of the latter on Jötunheim, which might have been why it had never been high on the Aesir’s list of holiday destinations. Every jötunn knew what absorbing souls did, which was why no one did it, and why we all had defenses against it. Outside of Jötunheim, however, it was a different matter.

In theory, I’d only have to take over one person: Gia, and start self-replicating. Especially if I started immediately. Another line I didn’t want to cross. That capability, I was fairly sure, was just me. And I sure as hell didn’t trust more of me with it. More than that, I liked being the Loki, the one people swore curses at, failed to worship, and named their cats after.

That, and I’d seen the toll it had taken on Tez.

“I don’t want to,” I muttered in response. “But if there’s really no other way –”

A hand full of gnarled fingers fell on my shoulder and spasmed into a squeeze. “There’s always a way,” Hel’s bright voice said behind me. “And you were right. About a hundred gods are in hiding around us.”

Hathor sprang to the balls of her toes.

“Fuck,” I said. “I could take the flask and run, but what are the chances there’ll be another hundred waiting at the next destination?” I glanced back at Inanna in one last pleading attempt. “Isn’t there anything I can do to control Yggdrasil’s influence on my own terms?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Inanna said, with a small shrug.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Hel asked, staring at me with an expression of incredulity. “You have a new resource. One who, I’ll add, is apparently the smartest person here and in the middle of one of the greatest power surges of her career.”

Of course. All that death. I stared at the confidence on Hel’s features, and felt my own break into a slow, wide grin. “I like the way you think,” I said.

“You should do,” my daughter retorted. “Now let’s go get Shitface.”