Instead of ocean, I met a series of towering whirlpools ascending into the heavens further than I could see. Yggdrasil’s roots accompanied them denser than ever, creating a field of perilous towers between them. Far below and muffled by atmospheric haze, I made out something that might have been ruptured exposures of unearthed land overshadowed by Yggdrasil’s glow. Between the watery spirals, other vast quantities of ocean drained between the cracks, dumping away.

Streams of angels poured between the hazards in their thousands, showing the way. I followed in Yahweh white, weaving past structures and obstacles. Angels fell to snatching branches, were sucked into funnels and thrown upwards, but there were always more to replace them. In moments, I had a loose shield formation around me as we pressed on to the goal.

Ahead, reality stuttered, whirlpools intersecting but not consolidating; roots with disjointed midsections; angels cut in halves or quarters but still functioning, only to disappear in geometric waves. It took me a while to process the sight: the void, encroaching on Earth in sharp invisible perimeters, swallowing anything it touched.

I let my senses warn me in advance where the boundaries opened and shifted, and ploughed past.

The mental turbulence was terrible here, as bad as at my temple and worse. This was where they were gathered and fighting; it seemed I was late to the party epicentre.

Blades slashed at my skin from somewhere unseen. I healed, sparing no time to search for who did it, and pressed forward. More tore me apart, separating limbs from their owner I let fall into the sky. From out of the corner of my eye, a cluster of angels dived behind a curtain of void hiding the warped space beyond it, dragging out the culprit behind it covered in thousands of scars. She kicked and screamed and was torn asunder.

I pressed on, wishing I could warp ahead to cover more ground. Doing so was dangerous; the compulsion to slide off target still strong.

Gusts of wind pushed me back, and kept blowing. I reached out, made them part of me and stilled the airborne currents, collapsing a few whirlpools in the process on whatever lay below. I was making headway, but still slow.

The angels were battling and losing at the front of the assault, no match for the gods they engaged. Distant white figures plummeted en masse, along with occasional tree bulk, or darker, more dangerous figures. The forest of liquid and timber made it hard to make out anything clearer than vague flashes and shimmers of motion, but I tried.

Unexpectedly, they peeled away from me, funnels bending in symmetrical curves. The entire landscape bent, space itself shifting, slow, then faster, curling out and away to expose molten core below. Liquid magma spurted up at impossible speeds, hissing and cracking on contact with the trails of water still held in impossible columns, moving equally fast. Where it hit Yggdrasil, the tree burned, craters gouged in its wooden flesh.

I grabbed it all in the visible vicinity, extending myself further than planned to force it back into place. Inertia-spurred bullets of fire and water continued to pelt in all directions, but they were me and I didn’t care. I healed the part of myself that was still Yahweh, waited until all the magma had fallen away, then dropped the rest and kept going.

Now we were hitting the big guns.

Outside my immediate reach, the planet kept peeling itself inside out. Skies reddened with the glow of distant annihilation, and my ears filled with the deep whistle of imminent planetary collapse. Breathing was already coming harder, atmosphere bleeding from its usual bed, and I made my circulation self-sufficient. My stomach turned as gravity shifted and stretched, pulling from multiple directions until I lost track of the right direction and tumbled, coordinates rendered meaningless in a world no longer round.

I extended out again and found it; the largest blind spot in a sea of pockmarked self; one with presence in a landscape half-riddled with imperceptible void. I surged ahead and composed myself a new Yahweh facsimile, dropping the old in a convincing illusion of teleportation only receiving a few surprised reactions from the angels. What was Yahweh without his override, after all?

I used my eyes and surveyed what my other senses couldn’t. Reality was stable here, Yggdrasil lacking a foothold. It was the only thing that was. Angels filled the air, swarming in clumps of feathered tumours. Gods flitted past in their thousands, more than I’d ever seen together uninterrupted by office ceilings. There was still no sign of Baldr among them, not that I had the multitasking capacity to process it.

Before me, water suspended at its severed edges, stretched an unbroken and strangely quiet cross-section of pristine ocean. A thin lighthouse rose in its distant centre. When I tried to fly to it I found myself turned away, forced back into chaos.

Those who could had taken to the air. Everyone else clung to shattered fragments, leaping between them or falling into draining waterfalls. By now there was more chasm than not, roots or no roots. It made the stragglers easy pickings. I watched as fierce warriors tumbled and fell, anchors vaporised as they were weaponised against them. As they dropped, caught in one or another gravitational eddy, the battle suffered the brunt of their last stands.

Across several instants, I weathered the field of many certain deaths. My consciousness shifted to less volatile parts as fire melted others. Fragments of self succumbed to pressure and fractured; others hung frozen in space and time. I abandoned what I couldn’t use and clung to what I had, leaning on size and tenacity.

Each successive attack thinned the field, weeding out more gods who couldn’t adapt. It didn’t last long. Bodies reconstituted, resurrected pristine only to be downed again. Disintegrated matter reformed; roads and uninspiring earth from creators desperate for rushed footing. Air filtered in and out of breathability, making gods fall clutching their chests only to rise again to attack. Save for the moat around the lighthouse, everywhere I looked was in constant flux in the friction for the upper hand.

No clear winners were emerging. Without the numbers on our side I’d expected an uphill battle, but the angels were doing their job. Disrupted and with minions getting in their way, Baldr’s disorganised forces were employing fairly unimaginative physical tactics. Nor had Janus obviously reacted to my arrival. If he was focused on the rewinder, it was both good news and bad.

Which meant I needed to focus too. Doing my best to ignore the successive waves of destruction, I felt again for a way into the lake. Even my mind touched nothing, sliding past like on ice. An isolated, impenetrable slice of existence fortified against such very times as this.

But still with its weaknesses. Silently, I thanked Providence for its decades of stifling corporate culture, reconstituted my human body for the third time in seconds, and carefully manifested the access pass I’d received from Enki.

“Lord,” several of the angels called to me, barrelling through the crowd. “The divine killer approaches!” It did not go unnoticed. Between my face and the massive wings, I was starting to attract notice.

I snapped to attention and dismissed the lanyard just in time as someone disintegrated my body into ash. I made a new one, pulling it from the molecules of the air. To the untrained eye – or indeed anyone not expecting enormously amped-up shapeshifters – it appeared Yahweh simply came back. As always, confidence could sell the lie. How much attention had the average Providence employee really paid to his exact logistics? How close to omnipotence was he, really? All I needed to do was play off people’s uncertainty, and that, I could do in a breeze.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

A fresh wave of disruption was moving in from behind, more quiet than destructive, though it was both. Linear and surprisingly slow, the encroaching front stalled each body in its path, figures dropping limp and drifting in space for whatever came next to finish them off. Unlike the other waves, it was followed by no subsequent recovery.

It had to be one of the two god bombs, somehow surviving this long. I couldn’t see who controlled it, and couldn’t get in close to check. One or two others less well-informed didn’t stay so far back, and paid the price. I drew myself back, keeping well out of range of the front, with others around me doing the same. With that new preoccupation on the table, I brought out the keycard again and resumed searching for an entry.

Still nothing. The bomb continued on its approach, but by now people were wising up to its danger. Counter-magic poured in, and when that was swallowed, physical deterrence; barricades and tiny planet-like lumps of matter. This did have a slowing effect, until they were promptly destroyed again. Something protected the containment field.

I’d been so focused on the macro situation, it took me a second to notice my palm with the priceless lanyard was missing, stricken from me with the rest of the arm. A moment later, my head was gone with it. I regenerated some way distant and stared at the goddess who’d done it.

She trod through the sky as if descending a staircase, resplendent in red and gold with her arms in formal array. Durga had grown taller since I’d last seen her, quite a bit so, the grey in her hair more pronounced and the weapons more weaponised. In that moment, I saw the woman Parvati had described, fit so perfectly into the remainder I wondered how I’d missed it.

“You should have stayed down,” she called out, and raised the bow. Pain blossomed in the centre of my forehead, and I reached up and pulled out the golden arrow lodged in it, breaking it in half in my hands. By the time I was done with it, half a dozen angels had descended on Durga and met their ends in a flurry of blades. Faking my death would have been easier, but it was hard to say no to leading an army of chronic irritants.

Instead, I leaned into it.

“You dare.” I spoke through the rocks and water, air and angels; everything soulless mine for the temporary moment. I glowed white, except for the parts kept for sneaking – which were not insubstantial.

It garnered sufficient attention.

“I dare,” Durga affirmed. “And when I defeat you, your eyes will decorate my crown to gaze upon the suffering you have wrought, and study how others will fix it.”

“You can try,” I said, shifting into a body not immediately melting and on fire as someone else had a go. For once, I actually had a good chance in this fight.

But ultimately, it was a stalling tactic. One ideally ending in my permanent demise, sure – but stalling nonetheless. I had to find a way in; I didn’t have time for a showdown.

Or did I? Durga emerged from behind me, somehow there without me noticing her move. Her trident pierced my neck. I reformed straight into her frictionless blades, fast enough they might have been already waiting for me, and again into a flurry of arrows.

I resisted the urge to fight back and give the ruse away, edging away from the god bomb’s advancement. It, too, was headed for the lake, possibly to eat its protections. Tempting as it was to lure Durga in, I opted for self-preservation, regenerated a few more times, and seared into my brain what I had to do.

Then I did one of the things I’d promised myself I never would, and split.

Part of me – the smaller, Yahweh-shaped part – instantly evaporated. Which was odd, because he was right there, still ducking and weaving past Durga while she cut him to pieces. I watched through the molecules in the air as he pulled out the halo, sliced it in front of Durga and opened a rift between them. He made it look far more elegant than it typically felt, even with the bulk of the angel wings. White light and roots poured out immediately.

I was fairly sure I still had the halo – or a version of it – on me, but pushed the thought aside. I crept further back from the god bomb, making eyes in whatever surfaces were available to keep tabs on it, and made myself more opposable thumbs for my backup access card. This time a little less conspicuous, though the form I’d chosen – Odin’s – wasn’t much less so. With everyone resurrecting all over the place, candidates with suitable vacancies were getting harder to find.

I summoned the halo first, piercing a rift to the void and drawing it around myself into a protective hemisphere. With the worlds so close, I barely had to try.

A thin shadow roamed across my face, one of many cast by competing sources of light. “You won’t find it there,” a voice accompanied it.

I glanced across at Pakhet in a change of tracksuit and expression, her face unusually grave. She stood on the other side of the barrier, the one I couldn’t get into, which told me much of what I needed to know. She also stood on the water, which was jarring, but at this point got a free pass.

My heart sank. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me?” I asked hopefully.

She looked past me to where Yahweh and Durga still fought in clashes of white and red. “Actually, yes,” she said, surprising the hell out of me and eliciting a strong double-take. “It’s just good communication.”

I stared at her a moment, took in the strange behaviour and buoyancy, and something clicked. “Lucy?”

“Naturally.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Stalling, and waiting for you,” the devil replied. “You weren’t going to get far without someone on the inside.”

“Hold on,” I uttered, dismissing the halo to hold up my hands. “Just so we’re clear, who exactly do you think I am?”

“Well,” she said, “you should be Loki, but apparently so is my dead dad. I’m guessing there’s something one of you isn’t telling me. Or you did the thing.”

“I did the thing,” I grunted. “How did you even – never mind.”

“It’s come up,” Lucy acknowledged.

“Tch,” I said. “I take it you’re here to lower my guard.”

“No. But if I was, I’d say the same thing. How about I just let you in?” She waved me forward expectantly, as if the barrier didn’t exist.

Frowning, I extended a hand forward. It crossed through over the cut-off waterline, and I reached a little further to be sure.

Lucy caught it and helped me across. I made myself small again and mostly human, enough to fit inside. “Tricked into confined spaces,” I muttered under my breath, but splashed down anyway. All the noise outside cut out instantly. To my surprise, a narrow stone path shimmered into existence to meet my shoes, rising up from just below the surface. It felt ominous, as if I was expected.

Without constant disruption obscuring it, the lake gave us a great view of the war. It was similar to being on the inside of a snowglobe, but with all the mess on the outside. Dodging the efforts of other deities, Durga whirled overhead faster than the eye could follow, ferocious and untouchable, with Yahweh – as it was easier to think of him – struggling to withstand the onslaught. Every few seconds, he summoned the halo and opened a new rift from which roots grasped and extended.

I mirrored the motion with my own weapon, stopping short of the angry forest summons. “Any travel restrictions in here?” I asked Lucy, who shook her head.

She caught my wrist before I could forge ahead. “Wait.”

“Give me one good reason,” I argued in an attempt to wrest back momentum. It didn’t look promising.

“We have time.”

“Like I’m going to believe Baldr’s not already here.”

‘He is. The others…” She cleared her throat slightly and waved a palm in a so-so motion. “Effectively displaced. Walk with me?”

I began walking. “If this is a delaying tactic –“

“I could have left you outside. And that you’re talking to me shows you’ve already made up your mind.”

I made a disparaging noise and found it turning into a double-take at the battle above as Durga missed a strike. The goddess looked as surprised as I was, until she moved and my conception of the perspective shifted, showing she’d been positioned much further away. It was less confusing the second time as the outer spatial dimensions warped, throwing gaps in front of Durga and Yggdrasil alike until the universe seemed to expand.

In reality, I suspected the opposite. Every time I checked, more gods, corpses and divine activity seemed crammed into the available space, and that was accounting for the defeats and the chutes to the void. Granted, the world turning inside-out with Yggdrasil eating it only added to the impression, but in general there felt like large-scale movement.

Durga lunged for the halo, only for Yahweh to reabsorb it with a fierce grin. Again, a space opened up. A moment later, she turned up on the other side of the sky dangling Djehuti by the scruff of the neck.

Lucy glanced at me sideways through Pakhet’s lidded gaze. “You recruited him?”

I winced as Durga gave him a gentle rap between the eyes with the butt of her sword. He’d have been a strong line of defence against the rewinder. “Barely.”

Djehuti’s eyes closed, and he dropped away into darkness.

“We’ve both been busy,” Lucy stated, then fell into silence.

“I don’t understand why you’re helping me,” I confessed uneasily. The thin layer of water sloshed under my feet, subtle ripples audible in the quiet.

“Perhaps you forgot the part where I committed myself into owing you a favour.”

“I haven’t forgotten the part where you’re good at loopholes,” I pointed out. “Such as the fact that Baldr going back would mean said promise had never happened. What’s the real reason? Is he stuck and hoping to sweet-talk me out of my access card?”

I broke off again. Yggdrasil’s branches had twisted with sudden intent, spearing from all over to wrench bodies from the sky. I remembered vividly how impervious they’d been to my efforts. Here, too, the world tree’s victims struggled to free themselves. Curls of wood snaked up their limbs; constricted, suffocated.

Then they stopped, as Inanna fell in a limp tangle of gold and white, a fang the size of a house pipe protruding through her chest.

My stomach twisted.

Fenrir.