No one had suggested a resurrection. This reassured me everyone save the decaptitee on the ground had their heads screwed on, and also made me angrier.

“Maybe we could arrange a resurrection,” I declared after a beat, mainly so someone did, even though it was a terrible idea and not remotely in Yahweh's character.

Hel gave me a look, and I folded my arms as an excuse to check the halo and cut off Yggdrasil’s local escape route yet again. It didn’t stop more of the cave from crumbling. Outside, the chaos of battle had died down somewhat, replaced with more of the world tree’s shakes and rumbles.

Looking equally out of their depth, the demon lords had huddled together in solidarity, speaking in hushed voices and belated introductions. I watched as they made to shake hands, only to stop halfway and shift to comparing palm runes.

“Baldr groups far in the south, lord,” the angel weighed in unexpectedly. “We have found him.”

“If he’s real,” Mayari said, raising the spear hand to join the first with a strained expression. The new crumbling halted. She backed up towards the rear alcove wall and a better view of the cave’s interior structure. “Is Nujalik awake?”

“I am,” the tracker croaked, still in the arms of the angel. A trickle of ink escaped her lips and ran down her chin. “I don’t know if I can handle the angels again so soon. Too many eyes.”

“Sight all-encompassing as befits the Almighty,” intoned the subject of the comment.

“Hardly,” Nuja returned, her face twisting irritably. “But it doesn’t need to be to still be a lot.”

“Gracious father,” the angel entreated me calmly, “allow me to avenge this slight against you.”

Damn it, Hera, I thought, and aimed a kindly, if strained, smile at the creature. “Baldr first, ungrateful churls later.”

“You don’t have to do it,” Mayari addressed the tracker-turned-ink dispenser. “Commit to it, then Apollo can report on the outcome and save you the trouble.”

For his part, Apollo had been unusually quiet. At the mention of his name, he shifted a little in clear discomfort. “There are other Baldrs,” he spoke up. “At least two. No doubt further decoys. They’re organising groups together faster than the original could do it alone.”

“Do we know who they are?” Hel asked.

He shook his head.

Mayari swore. “The time we waste picking even one of those groups off puts us in danger and buys the others leeway. That’s assuming any of them are the real deal. Which, if they have illusions, they probably aren’t. The real Baldr could be spoofing anyone by now, and we wouldn’t know. For all we know, he could be in the room with us now.”

“If he was, I’d pick up the same mixed signals as the decoys,” said Nuja. ”Although one wonders why you have an enemy seer around your wrist, Hel.”

“He’s as much a victim as anyone,” my daughter said flatly. “And won’t be reporting on us any time soon.”

“I hope that’s the case,” Nuja croaked.

It was all happening too fast. Learning from his previous mistakes, Baldr was about to hit critical mass, the point of no return we couldn’t come back from.

Perhaps we’d been approaching it the wrong way. I’d been panicked and alone, terrified of a return to the past and letting it control my actions. When all along, we could have been giving in and letting it happen. Let Baldr win… in name. Remove the real psychopath – still essential – and replace him with a convincing doppelganger to lead his empire, one worthy of the reputation. Install someone better or, spare the thought, even competent. Though it would still be the same age-old scourge of unbalanced upwards adoration, repackaged until unindoctrination won through.

Except to support the lie, we’d need to convince trackers and seers, mind-readers, illusionists and generalists; all on high alert and zealous true believers.

We were doomed; the lie would crumple in minutes.

“So what do we do?” Mayari asked. “Rushing in is a bad move. So is waiting. And we’ve lost our main target.”

“Then scrap tracking,” I suggested, throwing conventional wisdom out the window. “Assume he’s receiving good advice. Where would he be now?”

“All he needs to win is to hide,” Mayari answered immediately. “With one or two informants to relay orders. One would have to be Janus. He’d be a fool not to bring him.”

“Wrong,” said Hel. “We can’t know his movements; speculation is merely that. Moreover, none of us know him well enough to stake a confident guess, given we’ve been idolising a fabrication. Which means we’ll have to assert back control with what information we do know. Remember, he’s reacting to us as much as we are to them.”

“I know him,” I reminded her. “And it doesn’t much help.” My mind raced. “How big are Baldr’s entourages?” I asked the spokesangel.

With the halo in hand, it wouldn’t be much effort at all to swoop in and take out every Baldr clone in a matter of seconds, regardless of true identity. Even if one of them did happen to be the real Baldr and Hel could keep him contained, where did it leave us but still on an endless battlefield? This wasn’t the era of the Aesir anymore; the world had moved on. The resolution wouldn’t be the same.

Left to its own devices, this war would end one of two ways: Baldr emerging victorious and unassailable, his enemies defeated and crushed. Or the slower, laborious way of attrition and decontamination, undoing centuries of misconception through evidence and explanation.

It was one thing to do it carefully with Providence’s senior leadership on board. In a warzone, we didn’t have a chance.

Resurrections posed the other major problem. My daughter was incredible, but still a single death god among many. All her resources would have to go towards Baldr, with none to spare. Even if she thwarted the competition; if they gave up trying; even then, the rest of his forces would keep coming back. They could bring back anyone.

Perhaps I was wrong, and critical mass had already been reached.

“The known pretender cowers behind a wall of peons, lord,” the angel intoned. “One score and two stand by his side. In addition, we have just spied another doppelganger of which your seer speaks., accompanied by at least ten. A trivial number against your might.”

Twenty full-blown gods – or even ten – were hardly trivial, even with our current conglomeration. Normally. But this was anything but normal, and it surprised me to realise the angel was actually right. Not because we could march over a group that size. But because Baldr should have had more – far more – even split between decoys.

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The bulk had to be elsewhere.

Pain erupted in my face as a titanic heave shattered the cave and cut off the rest of her sentence. Mayari, back to a wall suddenly no longer there, was blasted rearwards into nothingness, arms spiralling. “Out!” she called, before her voice was drowned out by subsequent impacts.

Face and skin gouged with bullet-fast stone shards, I stayed just long enough to see Hel escort Gia away and got out, emerging some sixty metres distant onto a chasm-littered surface. Cracks, these were not. The grey outcrop had flattened and crumbled, rocks and mud pouring into metre-wide splits in the earth. I launched myself into the air before I had a chance to join them, angels blurring past me in trails of ethereal white.

About a kilometre away a colossal root towered above the desecrated terrain, difficult to miss. Bright light glimmered from under it, lit by otherworldly sky. Its incursion continued unabated, the efforts of the angels as effective as flies. In the seconds I took it all in, multiple tips of smaller, still-titanic roots pried round the edge of the rift and widened it further.

Near the root, glimmers of Yggdrasil’s glow glinted from between the streams of draining crust.

Falling into a long glide, I checked on the halo and found Yggdrasil still battering at my efficient local containment, belying the true scale of the event. More than one decoy had been in play. It all looked the same through the halo; a lack of landmarks contributing to tricks of perspective.

I could still stop it if I put my mind to it, even now. All of this – the fighting and flashy displays – had ultimately not stretched anyone’s limits but Tez. We were all still adjusting, working to scale rather than full power; targeting specifics rather than broad desolation. In the old world with its old power structures, the latter got you punished.

Yggdrasil didn’t give a shit about such distinctions.

In the far distance, almost hidden by atmospheric haze, other roots reached for the sky in an impression of planetary acupuncture. A flash of light from the one close by saw it split and topple lumberjack-style, victim to unknown divine intervention. It simply grew back with more roots and was cut back again, greater in numbers each time.

Calling it an ally was more than a stretch, but it wasn’t on Baldr’s side and that was good enough for me. If reality depended on Yggdrasil, it couldn’t be destroyed without wiping out everything, overzealous destroyer included. It could, however, be contained. Or diminished; Enki had done it before.

Enki. If gods were coming back, so would he. Or Hera. Or even Legba, assuming Baldr had changed his mind. It wasn’t their powers that scared me most, although they did scare me. It was their knowledge about one resource in particular.

That we hadn’t already ceased existing indicated there was a high probability it hadn’t been acted on yet, and I knew what we had to do.

I flagged down an angel and gave it instructions to pass on. I could still fix this. At the cost of a few million souls, but I could fix it.

In the near future – or past, as the case seemed increasingly likely – I expected I’d look back on this moment as the lowest point of my existence. Worse than mass murder, even than torture, rewinding time removed almost every chance for recovery the affected souls would ever have, stealing the one asset we normally couldn’t take away. No doubt I’d always wonder if I could have found a different way.

And yet it had to be done.

“Circumstances have changed,” I told the angel nearby. “From now on, all other tasks are secondary. You have one primary job: disrupt and distract. Use whatever means at your disposal, and don’t hold back. The glory of Yahweh demands it.”

It hardly mattered what else happened now. Soon it would all be gone. Even Gia was now the backup plan, with a host of allies to keep her… if not safe, then functioning. I readied the halo.

“You’ve lost hold of your senses,” Apollo’s voice said behind me, and I glanced over my shoulder to see him carried by another angel and looking strained.

“Oh, I told you, did I? That was stupid of me. You’re not going to stop me, so don’t bother trying.”

“I – was – Head of Security,” Apollo reminded me, fidgeting in the angel’s grasp. He heaved himself up off of his armpits with a grunt. “I know what lies where you’re going, and it wasn’t designed for you.”

“And I suppose you’re going to tell me I’ll kill myself trying,” I said. “Turns out that doesn’t mean much anymore.”

“Not long ago, I would have. Now, the truth is I don’t know. You know why this is happening, don’t you?”

“Other than the obvious?”

“Borders weakening between worlds? That’s Janus’ work. Last time he did it there were more dimensions to work with, but the principle’s the same.”

“Figures,” I admitted, beating my wings uncomfortably to stay aloft in position, then changed my mind as a new root roared up from the desert directly below. “He did seem weirdly obsessed with the apocalypse,” I added, once the angel had caught up to regroup. “In hindsight, that should have been a red flag.”

“He’s not trying to end the world,” Apollo grunted, pulling himself up by his forearms again. “Not this time, anyway. He’s breaking into the same place you are. The rest of this –” he raised one arm from the angel’s to sweep it out briefly at the collapsing landscape, “– is incidental casualty.”

“This is painful to watch,” I said, not referring to the apocalypse. “Find Hel and ask her to be a dragon again. She might deign to give you a piggyback ride if you ask nicely. Thanks for the warning about Janus. You saw him, then.”

He shook his head. “Confident estimate. It’s what I’d do in Baldr’s position. I’d have everyone capable on it I could spare. Lofn was probably working on the same thing from a distance. Clearly she wasn’t out gathering converts like the others.”

I shot him a sharp glance. “A love goddess, breaking and entering the Precious Red Dot?”

“Come off it, Lo –” He broke off. “Lofn’s power isn’t love, we all know that. It’s the worst-kept secret in her whole shifty pantheon. The only reason it works at all is because she’s so adept at selling it.”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s a great secret, and not everything has to be about malign intentions.”

“I know. Consider it trained leeriness of abstract practitioners. Personality doesn’t excuse the fact she’s one of the most extreme.”

“I think she’d disagree with you there,” I informed him, circling away from a new root prying up from what remained of the surface. “I don’t think she much likes her personality or her powers. Even before the takeover, both made her feel ineffectual. Not surprising when what you do is constantly forbidden by the establishment.”

“There’s a piece of irony,” Apollo grunted.

“That’s exactly what I said.” Roots and bright sunlight beamed through the holes riddling the breadth of the expanse below us. I wasn’t sure what they were aiming for, other than fresh dimensional nutrients. I sighed. “On the upside, it’ll be just as easy for me to break in as for Baldr.”

“Why break in?” asked Apollo’s angel, who I doubted had a clue what we were talking about. “It is yours. Simply command the heathens to bow before your might.”

Ignoring it, Apollo nodded towards the circlet in my hand. “I’ll be right behind you with backup. If you do run into my past self, tell me ‘cataract’.”

“And what does that mean?” I probed, raising an eyebrow.

“It means your outlook will vastly improve,” he said, and vanished from the angel’s arms. His transport seemed unconcerned.

I looked at it and lifted the halo. “Remember your instructions,” I said, and catapulted myself into the void.

Creation fell away, pushed into the background by the prominence of primordial ooze. I could still distantly feel it, roiling, somewhere beyond the nowhere and nothing. Boundaries weakening indeed.

Few gods dealt directly with love. When applied to powers, any form of emotional manipulation was just another fancy referral to a certain breed of mind control. ‘Love’ in divine circles tended to encompass euphemisms for fertility, sex, or gods who had nothing to do with the emotion and everything to do with an interest in matchmaking for purposes benign, nefarious or hilarious.

Lofn hadn’t controlled love. She just liked it. She controlled the forbidden, made the impossible possible, changed rules like Enki in a fraction of the time, if also a fraction of the breadth. Generally not practical except in highly specific situations, but dangerous enough to warrant close scrutiny from those in charge. But time travel and its associated protective security measures would be up there.

Between her, Janus and who knew how many other gods, we wouldn’t have much time.

I directed the halo towards the device’s coordinates, and hit a wall. The circlet’s small sliver of existence gave me echoes of open sea and violent water, and slid off to the edges every time I retried.

Guarded, even against a backdoor in the void. There went my route of subtlety.

Nothing for it, then. Options and time draining away, we were down to a last-ditch frontal assault. I trusted my colleagues, tried not to think about incoming annihilation, and threw myself back to the reversal device’s coordinates on Earth, near as I could get.

And found it already broken.

Not the device, which I hadn’t managed to land on.

The Earth.