I hadn’t specified a destination, so the halo had decided for me. Classic beginner mistake, or excusable for someone who hadn’t done this in many hundreds of years.

Putting aside the fact I hadn’t expected to move, I’d been here before. Recently. The lack of body and sense of space told me exactly where I was, and for a moment I wondered if I’d died, murdered by incompetence with my own weapon.

But I could see through the hole in the circlet to the sky above Mayari’s island, a significant feat while not having eyes, so I suspected not, and that things were possibly operating as intended.

Amaterasu had already blinked out of view. I couldn’t do much without a body, but the window followed where I wanted to see regardless. After a stint of obstructive angel feathers, alternating seawater deluges and exploding steam bubbles, I managed to get it to focus back on the courtyard, where still no one paid it any attention.

The garden and cliff were crumbling, shafts of rock bleeding away into the ocean – or what used to be. Part of the problem was that thick brown roots had ruptured the courtyard, curling up from the ground and the walls of the cliff. Mayari had abandoned it entirely, bolting her way back inside the hacienda, and Apollo was still fending off angels taking my directions about carrying him too zealously.

I shifted views slightly and the scene was instantly replaced with the skies of Yggdrasil. There was no question of where the roots had come from. The tangle of them overlapped with the ones in the courtyard precisely, called there by my own blinding interference.

Though not just mine. In the distance, I could see more roots on the move elsewhere, searching for exits. Searching for Earth. The world’s dimensional boundaries were thinner than they should have been, and becoming more so under current stress. Sites of pre-existing rifts seemed to be more susceptible. Providence had been first. Now here. Gods would be breaking out of demotion facilities all over the world, and those would likely be next. There were worse ways for the world to end.

I aimed the halo at the island root cluster, put my destination firmly in mind and fired again.

Now I was falling, branches scratching at my face and arms as I plummeted past, circlet clamped firmly in one fist. I tumbled over a few times before getting my wings in order and buffeting myself to a standstill.

Even this last fraction of Yggdrasil was immense and seemingly endless. Bright colours and bursts of blossoms dotted its branches. I glanced around for more apples, found some, and heaped as many as I could carry into my robes before rechecking the halo.

Amaterasu and Ao Guang were still at it, evenly matched, and more figures had joined them in the sky. I watched as Security’s Tawhirimatea appeared in a whirl of lightning, immediately took out a few angels – I facepalmed – and made tracks for Ao Guang, who shoved him in another bubble to be self-electrocuted. Amaterasu kaleidoscoped in in a cloud of steam, bashed the Dragon King over the head and was pierced in the side by Nujalik, one of the trackers I’d wanted to find.

The gun-toting huntress started to fall, warped out before she could build up momentum and collected herself on the remaining roof of the hacienda, making a double-take at the sight of Apollo. The latter warped over, whispered something in her ear, and the pair vanished a second before Amaterasu blazed into existence above the roof, melting its obsidian structure and crumbling Yggdrasil’s incursions to ash.

On my side, the desiccated roots shivered, along with the rest of the nearby tree. Fresh growth spurted to replace what was lost, breaking through faster than before. Tendrils wrapped themselves around Amaterasu’s feet, anchoring her in place, only for the goddess to burn them away. Others took hold, pulling at one limb as she freed another, and more still spilled over what remained of the cliff and courtyard, seeking the rest of the island.

Angels descended on her, themselves getting tangled in Yggdrasil and burnt by fire, but it was enough to keep the goddess occupied.

This was my chance. I gripped the halo and put Amaterasu in its centre. The ‘real’ weapon existed in the other world, Regina had implied. All I held was its shadow. Firing it hadn’t worked as expected, which was exactly what I’d asked for, if I was being honest.

Which left the obvious. I warped across to the mass of roots on my side of the divide. They completely ignored me. Keeping Amaterasu in my sights, I groped my way over the writhing mess, fighting its unconscious attempts to dislodge me, thought: ‘kill’, and felt something switch in the back of my mind.

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I sliced it through where Amaterasu had been standing.

On the other side of the window, the goddess’ body fell to the ground in two pieces, twitching.

I took the weapon off danger mode immediately, glad I hadn’t caught any roots in the exercise. So. Not bad, then. I could live without runic magic.

Retreating to a marginally safer distance, I haloed back to Earth in time to see Ao Guang fall to Tawhiri and the oceans crash back out of the sky. I looped the circlet over one shoulder, dodged a mountain-sized water turret, and immediately found myself face-to-face with the storm god.

“You dare,” I thundered in Yahweh’s dark tones, but Tawhiri only grinned and raised a hand.

Then he exploded.

A conspicuously algiz-coloured forcefield occupied the place his bits left behind, before shattering with a small ‘pop’.

I looked about and found Regina from the glow on her palm in the darkness, carried by one of the surviving angels and looking sick.

“Good job,” I said, flying over. “Aim for sooner next time.”

“I didn’t know who was on our side,” she said. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“He’ll be fine,” I said. “Eventually. So will you. You,” I said to the angel carrying her, “and not the rest of you, need to come with me. We’ve found a tracker.”

“Of course, lord,” it replied, getting weepy at being addressed. “We have not located Baldr the Usurper, or Janus the Sunken. Of vile Satan there continues to be no trace. We have found the huntress, but she keeps killing us.”

“Good. Keep bothering her, and tell her Yahweh will have his vengeance for her transgression. Tell me if she starts amassing allies.”

“Gladly, lord.”

I needed to get back to Apollo. Pakhet worried me as much as Janus, given she could drop a surprise on me at any time. If she was watching for Yahweh as an immediate target instead of me, it could buy me an extension. I made a brief detour to send Amaterasu’s body to my disposal volcano, then escorted Regina away from the roots.

I found Mayari speaking words of reassurance to a beachside crowd of fearful refugees and displaced embassy guards, glowing and gesturing calmly with the spear as gigantic roots poured down from the tip of the promontory behind her. It wouldn’t be long before they reached the bulk of the island.

The crowd was smaller than I remembered. Half the camp had already been washed away by dumping seawater, and realistically there was nowhere safe for them to go. Angels swarmed overhead, circling like moths.

Apollo waited with Nuja, Hel and Gia a short distance away, in the middle of explaining what was going on to the former. He cut off smoothly as I approached with the angel. A trail of dead roots led away from their feet before truncating at the shoreline.

“Where’s Baldr?” I interrogated the tattooed hunter, skidding a bit on the landing. Regina immediately freed herself from her escort and bolted to the edge of the beach.

Nuja stiffened a little at the abruptness of the greeting. Dark ink shifted across her skin in perpetual motion, making her instantly recognisable to anyone with even the worst memory. “Yahweh.” She shifted her weight in obvious discomfort, dark eyes flicking towards the angel. “It’s not so simple. I’m getting mixed signals, and no one I’ve sent to deal with them has come back. It’s… not going well.”

“With more problems heading in any second,” Apollo verified.

“Then we need to go,” I said. “With everyone.” I wanted to plan; to cleverly outmanoeuvre, but even I could see we were out of time. I’d prepared what I could; now we worked with what we had.

“I just said –” Nuja began.

The ground shook and cracked, throwing all of us but the angel aground. The refugees shouted. Far from subsiding, the rumbling only worsened. Depressions opened up in the landmass, quickly widened, and began filling with sand. More cracks split off, and in the distance one of Tez’s sturdy cabins tilted and teetered in.

“If we wait any longer, there won’t be anything left,” Hel countered. She had one of Tez’s amulets looped multiple times around her wrist.

I beckoned down a second angel with a glance at Apollo. “You’re our compass,” I said to Nuja. “We’ve got Mr Annoying Foresight and Regina as protection. Hel’s our contingency. Mayari’s our decoy, and Gia’s our primary weapon.”

Apollo hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Janus will be hoping to pick us off,” he warned me. “Separate us out to remove the lieutenants. He’s watching, and he knows I am too. It’s all about where your attention isn’t.”

“I’ve got good coverage with the angels,” I pointed out, as another sharp crack sent me sideways again. A burst of light rent the sky, showing the roots had advanced again.

“And your other protégés.”

Which told me he didn’t know I’d lost contact with the demons. There it was: the downside coming back to bite me.

“And you’re the face of the operation,” Nuja surmised, leaping back from an opening in the sand. Renewed panicked yells drifted up behind her.

A soft ‘whump’ cut them eerily short, lending sudden unexpected prominence to the waves, wind and spray; the crackling and rumbles beneath our feet, and the clumpy trickles of departing soggy sand. Collectively, we turned to Mayari, who stood staring back at us alone in the clearing. The refugees were nowhere to be seen. Something small hovered above her fingers. She released it with a small thud where it dropped in the sand, closed her eyes, and expelled a breath.

Beside me, I thought I heard Apollo draw one in.

“Let’s go,” Mayari growled through the patters, snaps and the wind, and no one contradicted her.