We didn’t have to go far.

Reverberations of distant battlefields danced in the back of my head as I warped past Tez’s back door to the hallway, Apollo ready at my back. It was darker inside than out, and flicking the switch next to the door did about as much as asking Yahweh to cure cancer. I carried the light with me instead. Artificial stars winked back at us from the mirrors embedded in walls and floor, moving as we did in eerie solidarity.

A distant wave crashed in the distance. Vishnu was breaking the world out of stasis.

Something crunched under my foot, and I bent to retrieve it. An amulet, dark and reflective, with diamonds helixing up the edge. The eye in the centre twitched towards me but didn’t quite focus, and I glanced at Apollo over my shoulder in case we were about to be hit with a rematch by Pakhet and Durga.

“Keep going,” said the seer, but something had already captured my attention.

Past my foot a metre or so, another round object reflected the light. I moved forward and picked it up, turned it over, and found another jittering eye. I laid the first one beside it.

“Apollo,” I said warily.

“I know.”

A soft crack sounded from the kitchen. Stepping over two more amulets, I peered around the corner into the room in question, prepared for the worst.

It was about half as bad as I expected. The room itself had been trashed. Many of the shattered mirrors had been splintered further. Odin’s vats had been tipped up and poured out, the contents already making an attempt at regaining their former form. I gagged slightly and, in the absence of any better ideas, shoved the whole mess into the usual volcanic disposal bin where it couldn’t do any immediate damage. Unattended, it wouldn’t hold Odin in the long-term, but I doubted whether those kinds of timeframes were even about to exist.

An amulet appeared a few centimetres above one of the benches, dropping onto the surface with another small crack. It sent the amulet below it rocking back and forth, almost dropping off the edge of the bench to join the many more below; dozens of identical copies scattered across the floor and benches, many still slick with the Allfather’s blood.

“Can’t stop or won’t?” I asked, turning my back on the scene.

Apollo only shook his head. I supposed it didn’t make much of a difference. Either way, it came back to Baldr. A sick kind of logic lay behind it, too – it didn’t matter how long we kept Gia in the game; she’d never be able to keep up with the rate of converting all of Tez’s souls. Baldr would always have his seers on his side, no matter how useless they ended up being.

But that wouldn’t be why he did it. It would be for the joy of making Tez do something he hated. Once his tools burnt out beyond the point of usefulness or reason, that tended to be their fate. The Tezes’ last acts – or at least one of them – had been undoing everything their former selves had died for. It would have worked eventually.

A trail of amulets dotted the hallway deeper into the hacienda. I followed it back around a couple of corners to a closed door, knocked on it, and warped through. The algiz rune met me on the other side, exactly where I’d known it would be.

Regina looked up at me from the chair I’d seen on my earlier visit, tear-streaked and harrowed. A pile of amulets clustered around her feet. One hand clutched at the one still hanging at her neck.

“I can’t stop it,” she said. A new amulet by her toes squeezed itself into reality. “He won’t speak to me.”

“Where’s Neetu?” I asked.

“I don’t know. They separated us. Tez –”

“– was a particularly dangerous god,” Apollo finished for her. He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead for the umpteenth time. “You can’t help him, or your friend.”

The ex-waitress stared at him. “Who are you?”

“Apollo. Dying didn’t take.”

“Oh,” said Regina. Then, “Wait.”

I kicked at the amulets making erratic shapes around my shoes, sending them scattering across the floor. “This is a dead end. Unless we can find a tracker, our chances of finding Baldr now are slim at best.” Raising my hands to my head, I warped onto the bed, rolled onto my back on the covers and folded my elbows over my eyes. “Shit. Shit.” There had to be another option. I just had to think of it.

From across the room, I heard Regina swallow. “Then what do we do now?”

“We fight,” Apollo’s voice answered decisively.

“Against gods?”

“Any fear you might have is misplaced,” Apollo told her, his voice softening in an unusual display of tolerance. “If we win, we’ll revive you. If we don’t, death is the friendlier option.”

“It’s the winning I’m concerned about,” Regina said. “That, and Loki isn’t inspiring confidence.”

“I’m thinking,” I groaned from the bed. In reality, between the psychic noise and encroaching sense of despair, I was struggling to keep my thoughts straight. For a while, it had looked like we’d been starting to turn things around.

Fighting was a poor man’s option, reducing us to an ineffectual drop in the ocean. We didn’t need incremental gains; we needed something capable of turning the entire tide. If we couldn’t find Baldr, the next best option was to take out his seers. That meant Janus, and I didn’t know where he was, either. Scratch that.

Second option – migrating elsewhere, even if only temporarily while we came up with a plan of attack. I was regretting closing the door on Yggdrasil. But it was too late for that. The demotion facilities would be exploding right now with hell-raising angry gods. The only other place that might suit would be the Abyss, and Lucy had well and truly closed that door.

Although he hadn’t entirely succumbed, and he did owe me a favour.

“I don’t know how to fight,” Regina was saying to the sun god in a panicked tone. “What would I do, keep the enemies at arm’s length? How would that help? What if they got through?”

“Here’s what you do,” Apollo instructed. “Create a ward around yourself so nothing can pierce through. Keep it up at all times. Create another around your opponent. Then make it smaller than they are. The size of a fist will do. Keep doing that. We’ll take care of the rest.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Monster,” I muttered.

“I know.”

I sat up, draining my body of its building fatigue, and deflected an amulet in the process of dropping onto me. Regina looked at me with the eyes of someone desperately seeking alternative options.

Sighing, I reached out to Gia. “First things first.”

It was hard to locate through the storm clogging my head, but eventually I managed to grasp onto the edges of the raidho rune and manhandle them into a tenuous connection.

Tell Hel we need you here, I shot through to Gia, along with the coordinates of the island. We found Tez.

I had a sense of frantic key-punching, while various pieces of bedlam carried on in the background. Little busy right now.

Okay, but make this your next stop, I said. There’s a lot of seer to unbrainwash, and it’s only going to accelerate.

Sure. Fine.

The rune dropped from my grasp, drowned out by the increasing competition. It was still growing. I trusted Gia would keep to her word.

“Alright,” I said, rising to my feet. “We fight.”

Regina bowed her head.

“But we’re not doing it alone,” I added. “We’ll have an army.”

“The demons in Rome?” Her face lifted slightly.

It hadn’t been looking good for them last I’d seen. “Not exactly.”

I shifted form, figure growing taller and hair greyer. Fabric spilt down my body and resolved into a pristine white suit, well-tailored and designed to intimidate, with white shoes to match. Completing the picture, a pair of long white wings trailed from the back of my shoulder blades onto the floor in a slightly uncomfortable posture. It wasn’t my target’s usual look, but I still couldn’t fly without them.

Apollo gave me a look that spoke volumes. He didn’t need to explain. The form I’d chosen ensured we’d be attacked by both sides, drawing twice the aggression. It was reckless, ill-advised and stupid.

It was our best edge.

The seer’s expression shifted again. “Trouble outside. I’ll handle it.” A moment later, he vanished in a scattering of light.

I turned, wing feathers haphazardly sweeping amulets in all directions, and took a reflexive step towards the door before remembering it would dump me somewhere random. “I suppose we’d better be the backup,” I said, and held out a white-sleeved arm.

An amulet dripped onto the floor. “It’s another god,” Regina informed me. “Are you sure?”

“Have to start murdering somewhere.” The breath left my lips in a sigh. Thousands of years of innovation, human or otherwise, and no one had learnt anything. I doubted Baldr had even needed to nudge things much. This had been coming a long, long time.

With some hesitation, Regina pulled the last amulet up off her head, swinging it past her ponytail, and placed it on the bed. The eye twitched on the covers. “Bye, Tez.”

“Big of you, considering,” I said.

“I could feel what was happening to him the whole time. Like he… withered.” Her voice cracked. “I don’t want to feel it anymore. I don’t want to feel anything like that ever again.”

I kept out the arm. “I’m not going to make you join us. But the storm’s on its way. There’ll be rain.”

The demon lord nodded mutely and balled her fists by her sides. Then a hand shot out and grabbed mine.

I stepped us through into the courtyard and caught a glimpse of two figures before Apollo’s voice yelled “Shield!” and a haze of distorted orange threw itself over my vision. Something wet splashed onto my head. Regina had her hands up next to me, looking terrified, and the first of the two figures threw itself in our direction before the second cut in to intercept, deflecting the tip of a stick from piercing the semi-transparent corona.

I knew that spear.

“That’s Loki,” Apollo was saying to the interloper. “Not Yahweh. Don’t put down the shield,” he added in our direction.

Mayari set down the end of the spear with a thud, squelching it into the wet grass. It was hard to tell through the haze, but I thought her body shone with a faint golden light. The eyes that tracked me were both moving with natural precision, and the hair floating liquid-like about her shoulders – albeit bloodstained – was a lighter blonde than Apollo’s. “Urgh,” she said, shoulders reluctantly relaxing. “That does make sense. I don’t know how anyone can think through this racket.” She didn’t take her eyes off of me, however, or let go of the spear.

I tasted salt. I wiped some of the wetness on my head onto my fingers, but it seemed to be just water. I took a couple of steps towards the edge of the orange haze. The shield was disrupting my view, casting the world into distorted blobby chunks that drifted in random directions. “Apollo,” I remarked lightly in a sing-songesque notification, “she hasn’t been through the thing.”

“What thing?” said Mayari.

“I was getting to that.” Apollo sounded annoyed. “Infohazard.”

“What? How? When?”

“I thought you were on death’s door,” I cut in, both for curiosity’s sake and to distract her from asking more questions.

“I was,” Mayari answered. She stepped closer to the edge of the shield and peered through at Regina, tilting her head at the sight of the algiz rune clearly visible on the demon lord’s palm. “Shitface can occasionally be good for something.”

“Don’t make me regret it,” Apollo grumbled.

“And you’re avoiding the question.” Mayari’s tone turned accusatory as her eyes slid from Regina to myself. “Is this something to do with your problem from earlier? And you’re supposed to be dead,” she said to Apollo, completing the circuit. “Was that part of it? What the hell happened over the last few days? Like what kind of madness is happening to my island?”

I crossed the rest of the distance to the edge of the ward and put a palm up against it, digits bending back in a slight concave. It reminded me of the ground during a visitation, as though I could almost slide through if I bent the right way. The bubbles I’d noticed earlier continued to swim through the tint, and I realised I’d been mistaken. They weren’t a visual artefact of the shield at all, but actually part of the atmosphere, floating in massive globules in the distance. Some the size of a fingernail, others the area of my head, all the way up to blobs half the size of the island and bigger. It had all been fine when I’d arrived, and now this. I’d barely been inside for minutes.

A low whistle escaped my lips. “Is that ocean water?”

Mayari looked between us incredulously. “You don’t know?”

“We have visitors,” Apollo announced, shortly before Hel arrived with Gia, somewhat bedraggled and scorch-marked. “Friendly ones.” He ducked behind the demon lord and positioned her shoulders until she faced the spear-wielding goddess. “Envy, your new target.”

“Let me get this straight,” Mayari said a few minutes later, raising a sceptical hand while the other continued to grip the sphere. “The whole world lost to a psychopath –”

“Multiverse,” I corrected.

“– except for Loki and Yahweh – I really wish you’d choose someone else to imitate – and now half of us are fighting the other depending on which side they believe for the sake of the world which now has half its volumetric water capacity vertically displaced.”

The shield dropped around us, and I stretched out my wings gratefully. “It’s more like ten versus ninety per cent, plus everyone who just got their powers back and the probably insane facility deserters, but that’s the gist of it, yes.”

She didn’t move for a few moments, then shrugged. “Sure, okay.”

“That’s it?” Regina let out a disbelieving breath and shook her head.

“It does answer most of my questions.”

A soft clatter sounded from inside the house, earmarking another amulet adding itself to the pile. I shuffled up to Hel and gave her a nudge with my elbow. “Tez is inside. You’ll need to get them all.”

“Right.” She paused. “Dad? If I don’t see you again –”

“I love you,” I interrupted, and swept her into a hug. Her chin dug into my shoulder. My eyes felt wet.

“I love you, too,” she said.

I waited until the pair of them had gone, then turned back to Mayari. The goddess’ brow was creased.

“You should know I’m losing my power,” she admitted. “There’s no moon. No sun. The tides –“ She gestured to the spools of liquid tracing their way through the sky. “There isn’t much left to go on. I’ve got the spear and a whole mountain of vengeance, and that’s about it.”

“Can you fly?” I queried.

In answer, her feet left the ground, hair and clothes billowing out in a bloody radiant corona. “For now. Why the tyrant? Does he still have majority support?”

I threw back my head and laughed the laugh of the depleted.

“The office is gone,” Apollo uttered.

“And Lucifer?”

“On the other team,” I said. My laughter dried up. I didn’t know if a cure would even work on him, given everything I knew. I tried not to think about it. “So is Durga. And Tez.”

“But you said…” She glanced at the open arch. “Oh. And Apollo can’t fix it?”

“Not this one,” the seer replied.

“Oh,” she said again, and sounded a little more tired. “Then it’s just us, then. That’s, ah, great.”

“And an army,” Regina relayed for me.

“Where is it?”

We made a sorry bunch if you went by appearances. Two sun gods missing a power source – one caked in sludge and the other in blood – one inexperienced and traumatised neophyte demon lord, and, well, Yahweh.

I raised my eyes to the first of the swarm already descending towards us from the distance in creepy, devoted silence. “Currently?” I nodded my head in the relevant direction. “Pretty much everywhere.”