At the lighthouse at the end of the world, the present had been delineated in carpet and clay. By contrast, the route to the past was paved in shadow; something just outside of ordinary reach.
Baldr dropped onto it now, gravity reversing for him alone, and our feet touched inky black. It felt solid, but not quite anchored to the usual physical world. Rogue dark wisps spiralled and coiled around our feet.
In the blackness the path was unbroken, the trail leading clearly ahead. Baldr did not speak, but his eyes remained fixed on the approaching point of inevitability. We walked through a wide, shaded desert, multiple paths converging on the goal between isthmuses of light, until the symbols they spelt out became clear.
A small alcove rested in the notch of a dark cuneiform glyph, only visible by the dapple of small LEDs from within. I couldn’t help wondering how they’d arrived there, considering the time rewinder didn’t exactly employ maintenance teams.
I felt Baldr smile, and he stepped inside.
---
At which point the hallway snapped back to Providence white, the floor to Providence grey, like someone had turned on the lights.
I blinked, and realised I’d blinked, my body once again my own. I was back at the first corridor, the white entrance, turned around just before entering the overlapping chamber. I looked like Odin again, grey and imposing, back to one eye with the halo in my hand.
I snapped into full alert, but not fast enough to prevent Baldr’s arm locking onto my wrist and crushing the bones. The god of beauty stood directly in front me, angry, surprised and mercifully separate.
“I don’t know how you did it,” he said, “but there’s still no escape. You’re still mine.” He paused, shot me another wary look, and shuddered. Something flowed from my arm to his – something I recognised as belonging to me – but I barely had a chance to register it before he absorbed me again, my glimpse of freedom restrained.
Something unexpected had occurred, and we both knew it. We stood just inside the white entrance, the edict chamber barely visible beyond. In the distance, I could make out the small figures of Enki and Janus whole and uninjured.
I’d been here before. We’d gone back in time, but not nearly far enough. Something had gone wrong, booted us back to the entrance.
Baldr seemed to think along similar lines. He took several steps back towards the central chamber.
---
I was standing on Lucy’s path at the lake at the end of the world, Odin again, with Pakhet by my side. Gods in full-blown war mode strobed in the skies overhead.
“It’s one week, Loki,” the huntress was saying. “I’ve taken far more from you than –” She stopped short, feet snapping to an acute halt. “Wait. Everything just changed. This is bad.”
I clenched my fingers to make sure I could, and let out a short bark. “Actually,” I said, hardly able to believe it, “I think it might be working. You did it, Lucy, you glorious bastard.” I threw my arms around her in a fierce hug. “Or you’re doing it, at least; it could be too early to say for certain –”
The devil prised me off with a concerned expression. “No, you don’t understand. The chain of events I needed is broken, and it comes from both Baldr and –” she squinted at me suspiciously, “– you.”
“That’s because it’s already happened, Lucy,” I said gleefully. “I’m time traveller number two. And while I slightly begrudge you for setting me up for any length of cohabitation with Baldr, I know why you did it. Thank you. I know what it cost, and won’t forget this even if you do. You’ve repaid that favour and then some.”
Lucy stared at me in deepening consternation. “But if you’ve travelled here, and not a week ago, then something has badly misfired. I can’t replicate it again. Not the way things have been altered.”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “But this wasn’t the first –”
An ear-splitting screech rent the air accompanied by the shattering of glass as the lighthouse windows all blew outwards simultaneously. The still waters of the lake erupted into violent waves large enough to sweep me off my feet.
“I can’t do much for you here,” Lucy yelled over the cacophony. “Run!”
I bolted, summoning the halo to careen over to Yggdrasil and slam the window shut behind me. The violence cut off in an instant, leaving serene, leafy branches to wave slightly over my head at the impact. I breathed, and –
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---
– it was several orders of magnitude worse. Angels swarmed the air like psychic noise crowded my head. I had wings and looked like the tyrant. Durga’s arrow pierced my forehead. I shook it out and blasted straight back to Yggdrasil again with the halo, finding a new branch to sit on and think.
I didn’t think Baldr would find me here. Lucy would probably be panicking; the conversation we’d just had already undone.
I didn’t know what was triggering these backwards jumps or how long I could rely on them to continue. All I had to do was keep having them, and eventually Baldr would hit the void. They’d started the moment we’d stepped into the edict’s black exit, a corridor I’d definitely seen existed but never managed to experience. Unless this was the corridor, and some part of me was still moving down its dark halls towards whatever lay at the end.
It was actually kind of nice here, now that I thought about it. Balmy, with fresh foliage and floral scents. There were plenty of worse places to live than an enormous, world-ending tree.
I closed my eyes, smelt the roses, leant back and took a nap.
---
“Facility Q,” Apollo announced several seconds later, nodding at the bloodied grey desert, then immediately made a double-take.
“Cataract,” I said.
“You have got to be joking,” responded the sun god.
“Baldr’s already at the failsafe,” I informed him. “Everything we do here is designed to waste our time. But Lucy’s also wasting his time, so it approximately evens out.”
“Go back to the part where you said ‘cataract’,” the seer insisted. A pillar of ice slammed down in the background.
“Pretty sure I’m going to overshoot it,” I said with a grin.
“You’re not making sense, and we’re in dire peril. Do you even know what you’re invoking?”
“I’m guessing it involves you not making predictions,” I suggested helpfully. “Just based on current questioning patterns.”
“And now I need to know why, unless knowing that information is part of the hazard I need to avoid.”
Mayari speared a body crawling out of one the many dimensional rifts over a mutilated hydra head and swore as she took a stab to the back. The god who did it exploded immediately after in a cloud of expanding algiz orange.
“Just testing a theory,” I answered, before being swallowed in ice.
---
The mud on Apollo’s face was fresher and wetter, turning his blonde hair brown. Expended amulets surrounded my feet. I considered trying the codeword again, when the seer’s expression stopped me in my tracks.
Orange light emanated softly from Regina’s palm. I could feel her rune again. When I tried to summon the halo, I wiggled only empty fingers into the flickering shadows of Tez’s hacienda.
“He’s coming for us,” Apollo announced, dropping into a stance of alertness. “Guard yourselves.”
Regina gulped, and a shimmer of orange appeared over our bodies.
“Regina,” I said.
My priestess glanced at me fearfully.
I winked at her. “It’s going to be alright. I’ve got this.”
Apollo frowned in my direction, and I met it with an extended hand. After only a beat, he accepted and we warped together to the peak of the island. Bubbles of ocean were already starting to rise, great droplets pulling at the surface below until their viscosity broke in a shattering of smaller liquid vehicles.
The seer pulled me aside as Baldr slammed into existence in a wheel of spinning shards and blades, the storm filling the air with deadly fury. It cut through the garden, cliff, and water, sending spray soaking the area. Apollo warped me aside again, dodging another flurry and firing a volley of bolts Baldr’s way that ricocheted off the flying debris. Sparking flares fired in all directions.
The seams of my body fell apart and I pulled them back together, barely aware of Apollo doing the same. Changing tactics, I became one with the battlefield and searched for my target while Apollo took hits.
When I had him pinpointed, teleporting around the courtyard, I wove the runes and made them stick. I mightn’t have been great at that whole branch of magic, but this one I did know, earnt through countless attempts to buffer my children against history’s cruelty and venom.
A shooting star plunged from the sky.
Apollo stopped healing, leaving Baldr open to blast his body to pieces.
Just in time for Mayari to pierce him with the Spear of Destiny on her descent.
That was what he got for wearing an illusion of Yahweh, courtesy of me.
I warped down, snatched the spear out of Mayari’s hand and drove the point into Baldr’s face over and over in frenzy. I knew what it was like to be struck by that weapon, and by all the gods – for all the gods – I would make it hurt.
Apollo, already reconstituted, rolled over and groaned, and –
---
Casual chatter rumbled around the temple platform. My hands were empty. Gia sat nearby, hunched over a laptop, and my stone snake circled around the branches of a more peaceful Yggdrasil. Lucy’s flask sat in the intersection of its branches, in danger of being swallowed.
I heaved a deep breath and moved it up.
Sharp hooks drove into my back and tore me across continents, before slicing through deeper.
“You think I can’t find you?” Baldr screamed in my ear, his voice hoarse. “I know where you are at all times. You think I was caught by your little time trap? I already owned that tool. I chose to leave you wallowing in your own pathetic ignorance while I sprinted ten steps ahead.”
I numbed the pain and lashed out in response, stinging, grasping and clawing at everything that moved. My limbs froze, rebelling against me, and more hooks joined the first group. I couldn’t see where they were coming from.
“Whatever you did to mess this all up,” Baldr continued, pulling disfigurement through more of my flesh, “it won’t last forever. I will keep coming wherever you run, and after you stop, and after you’re already mine.”
I let out a sharp, rolling laugh that became louder the longer it went. “I’m not the one who messed it up,” I giggled, tears streaming from my eyes. “Maybe you should have let Enki finish what he started, instead of stopping halfway. Seems to me like you got what you wanted.”
“What I want,” Baldr snarled, “is for you to suffer.”
I laughed again, partly from genuine humour, but mainly to goad him. Maybe, instead of hunting me, he could have been off finding solutions for his predicament. I wondered if he’d even realised Lucy had lied. “You can try."