"You should call it "Tuesdays with Loki."

"Too derivative," I said. "Plus I see you practically every day. I wish it were just Tuesdays."

He scratched his chin. "Interview with the Jotunn? The Gospel of Loki? Wait, that one is taken."

"Why do you want this book written?"

"Answering that would be a book in itself. A better question would be, Why do you want this book written?"

"I've been meaning to get back into writing," I said. "And, have you ever written anything yourself? Any fiction? You ever get a character stuck in your head, and the only way to get them out is to put them in a story?"

"Maybe once or twice. So you want me off your back, eh?" And he smiled dangerously. He looked the way he'd looked the first time, which was what you got if you started with Tom Hiddleston and added red hair and a decade of hard living.

I looked him in the eye, past the scarred lips and the broken nose. You don't show fear to a predator. "I want to know where this is going. Why me? And why do you say that you know me?"

He looked sad. "Before this is over, I will hurt you more than you have ever been hurt in your life."

"Uh."

He smiled. "But you'll be glad I did. You'll think it's the best thing that ever happened to you."

"You don't want me to start a cult, do you?"

"Goodness, no," he said. "It used to be that you could get most of society behind a religious movement. That opened up the chance for real change. Now, well, we live in a cynical age."

"No cults, then."

"No cults. It shall be up to each individual person to decide what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong."

We let that hang in the air.

"I'm still publishing this as fiction," I said.

* * *

I first met Loki in February 2021. This was a few months into my career pivot as a psychic and medium. I was in the middle of an early-morning session when he walked into my mind's eye.

People have asked me, "How do you know you're talking to a go?" And I answer, "The same way I know I'm talking to a spirit. Practice!"

We all have intuition. But it takes at least a dedicated hobbyist to develop it into something more than the odd hunch or premonition. And it takes years. In my case, it took twenty years to learn to distinguish other people's thoughts from my own. Twenty years to tell the difference between a spirit of the living and a spirit of the dead. Twenty years to build up enough lived experience to not only trust my senses but to take the supernatural for granted.

What my intuition was telling me was that Loki was not only real but very much within my realm of experience.

He sat down in my office and waited till I wrapped up the session. It was a remote reading so I just had to turn off my computer.

"So," he said.

"So," I said.

I thought about my spirituality. You don't need to believe in religion to believe in spirits. Actually, you don't even need to believe in spirits when you can talk to them. I thought I'd outgrown my Catholic roots and my atheist phase and settled comfortably into agnosticism, but then a Norse god had walked into my life.

"Really upsets your postmodern sensibilities, doesn't it?" he asked.

"Are you reading my mind?"

He glanced at his nails. "I know you. I've been checking in on you all your life. I keep tabs on a lot of people."

I stared. A spirit of the dead shines like reflected moonlight. A spirit of the living shines like a little sun. A god is a sun that can somehow walk into offices and lounge in chairs.

"Are you getting a good look?" he asked.

Like a star, there were layers to him. Centuries of accumulated knowledge and worship and experience wrapped around a blinding core. He had an aura that was brighter and more detailed than that of most people. And yet, he was basically still a spirit. Energy and information. Thought and feeling. I was a pebble to his mountain but we were both made of the same stuff.

Soulstuff, I'd been calling it.

"I do hope this is a good time," he said.

"What do you want?" I asked.

* * *

"Comes down to three things, what gods want," Loki said, some months later. "Worship, worldview, and word-of-mouth."

There was a corndog place near my apartment. It was a tidy little eatery, and airconditioned comfortably against the summer heat, but you did inevitably come home smelling of fry oil.

Loki had expressed an interest but like all spirits he was a cheap date. I sat at one stool with my tray and he appeared beside me with an identical, illusory tray.

"The 'worship' part is obvious," he said. "Who doesn't like being told that he or she is awesome? Gods need moral support too."

"They do?" I said. There were a couple of other customers but I was wearing a bluetooth headset. I tapped it meaningfully.

"Hey, godding is hard work," Loki said. "You try being there for all your worshipers."

"There are a lot of Norse pagans?"

He gave me a look that said, *What do you know?* and then started on his Korean-style corndog.

"I pitch in with other pantheons. I was someone before I was Loki and I was someone after Ragnarok."

We'd established that this was definitely a post-Ragnarok Loki and that it wasn't a cyclical thing. Faced with beings with apocalyptic prophecies attached to them, it just seems reasonable to find out the truth of that before anything else.

I'd asked him as carefully as I could, and while the events of Ragnarok weren't exactly historical, they had indeed paralleled the Christianization of Scandinavia. Loki's capture, the murder of his sons Narfi and Vali, his long imprisonment -- they had all happened somewhere, or else actual events were close enough to resonate.

"They hurt my babies and broke my wife's heart," he'd said, and I understood why the world had needed to burn.

His eyes were always a little red, but I couldn't say if it was from the snake venom or if he cried a lot.

He wiped his mouth of a bit of mustard. "Godding's a gig, my psychic friend. And as you know, like all gig work, it comes and goes."

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

He was giving me the old I have many names bit, not that it was inappropriate coming from a god.

"So why come to me as Loki?" I asked, and picked up my second corndog. "Isn't that a bit like trying to fit into jeans you haven't worn since college?"

"Heh. Well, first of all they might be my favorite jeans. I enjoy being Loki, doncha know. Secondly, the jeans are coming back in style, and that's always worth a boost."

"So you do gain energy from worship," I said.

"Like a musician gets royalties," he said. "And thirdly of all, the jeans are uncontroversial."

"Loki is uncontroversial?"

"Sure," he said, and reached for his soda. "The Norse religion is dead. What people practice now is a modern reconstruction, or rather a multitude of them."

He slapped the table. "And that means few enough people are going to have trouble with your portrayal of me, because it is merely one of many. And if they really have a problem with it they can tell me themselves."

I nodded. Any half-decent medium could call on a god. They weren't guaranteed to answer but a good-faith attempt went a long way. And assuming the practitioner was actually connecting with spirit and not hallucinating there was little risk of some minor spirit impersonating a deity. That would be asking for the god to come through the spirit, chestburster-style.

"And these jeans still fit me because I am a god."

* * *

"Let's talk about word-of-mouth," he said one night while I was scrolling Reddit.

"GAH," I said, and fumbled my phone into the bedsheets.

"Relax, relax! You're pretty well-warded. When a face looms out of the darkness you should just assume that it's a friend."

". . . Is that what we are? Friends."

He looked momentarily wounded. "C'mon, we go way back."

"If we do, I don't remember."

"I knew you in Italy. I did your portrait a few times."

"Nope!"

There was a sigh in the dark. "We'll get back to that. What were you reading?"

I found my phone by the light it was leaving on the bed. I flipped it up and showed him.

"Ah, you're on the Lokean subreddit."

"I post there sometimes. What do you think of all this? They write poems and they talk about traveling altars. Altars! And they argue over the proper way to make offerings to you."

"Are you trying to catch me saying something bad about the cosplay crowd?"

"No, no, no. Wait, you call them the cosplay crowd?"

There was a shrug. I was propped up on a pillow and he was sitting on the floor behind me, at the head of my folding bed. "They do a lot of cosplay, is all."

"Doesn't it ever seem a bit silly?"

"If it does, what does it matter? A lot of the time I'm a bit silly."

"I don't do any of those things," I said. "Except maybe poetry. I don't even consider myself your follower. And yet I can't get rid of you. So is any of that really necessary."

"My brother in Christ, don't gatekeep spirituality. Let people do what they can, however they can. If it doesn't hurt anyone -- if it's meaningful to them -- then it's all to the good."

He rested his elbows on the pillow. "You see someone packing a traveling altar into an Altoids tin. I see someone building a cathedral inside their heart. That's important, you know. Makes a person just a bit more of a person."

* * *

After a while he said, "If godding is a gig, sometimes it's a business. And Loki is a brand."

I turned to look at him. "So you're an influencer now?"

"Baby, when have I not?"

"Fair enough."

So, like any influencer he needed to stay in the public eye. This was familiar territory. I have a marketing background and I was beginning to wonder if this was why Loki seemed to be cultivating me. I was learning a lot from being around him and knowing him had already opened a few doors.

"The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, is that right?"

"You got it, Oscar Wilde," he said. "No such thing as bad publicity."

I pulled up the Avengers clip where the Hulk slams him repeatedly into the floor. Loki winced at this, but he nodded too. "Yeah, that was a win for me, but it was an even bigger win for Set."

"Excuse me?"

"It was an even bigger win for Set."

"What?"

He sighed. "Okay, you know what happens when people try to summon the Loki from the Marvel movies, right?"

"They still get you," I said. "Or rather, you pretending to be the MCU Loki, with the look and the backstory."

"That's right. And you remember how the Romans basically took their gods from the Greek, right?"

"Sure. Zeus became Jupiter, Hera became Juno, and Poseidon became Neptune."

"That's right. And only a very particular kind of person would think that Hera and Juno are two separate people, for example."

"What would happen if someone tried to summon both at once?"

"We-ell . . . it's well within our abilities to appear in two places at once. I'm not all here, you know."

"Oh, I know. I know!"

"Heh. What I mean is, you're not the only person I'm having a talk with right now."

He went on to say that the gods could migrate in other ways. When two religions came into conflict, the gods of one could become the demons of the other. The Canaanite god Baal became Beelzebub and so on.

"Is that all that demons are?" I asked. "Just co-opted gods?"

"In many cases yes. They'd rather connect with you as proper deities but hey, a gig's a gig."

Naturally I would follow up on this conversation with my own research. That looking things up, talking to people, and doing my own divinations. I acted on a suspicion and tried to compare Lilith with Isis. That reading was inconclusive, but they felt similar enough that I could thought they were part of the same family.

"An important thing to remember is that humans can't create new souls," Loki went on. "You can make babies, construct tulpas, even write fictional characters, but all of those are just vessels. The animating spark, the thing that makes the dough rise, that always comes from elsewhere."

"Where?"

"Where do you think? You're always telling people that when they see their loved ones in their dreams it's really them, at least one some level."

"I do say that," I said, and shifted so I could look him the eye. "So when people base characters on real people, they're actually putting bits of them into the story? I mean, spiritually?"

"It isn't usually a problem. But it's basically the same as building a voodoo doll. Connecting deeply with a character is the same as channeling their spirit."

"So when someone puts themselves into their work . . ."

"Grant Morrison wrote that his self-insert character got sick and he got sick the same way. So he wrote the character having lots of sex and his own sex life took off. But it's hard to say how much of that was self-fulfilling prophecy."

* * *

"I figured it out," I said. "You were talking about divine inspiration."

It was some days later and I was having lunch by myself in my ex's kitchen. The kids were out and it was either talk to Loki or fire up YouTube.

He appeared beside me. "Took you long enough."

"Wait, you're saying that holy texts are actually holy?"

He grimaced. "I'm probably not the best one to answer this. This is more Gabriel's beat. Jam. Whatever."

"I've never met him," I said. "And you're here."

"Ah, well. How to put it?"

I wiped my mouth and he glanced at the paper towel I was using. An identical paper towel -- ketchup stains and all -- appeared in his hand. He quickly folded it into a little boat.

"Tell me, is this a good boat?"

I just looked at him.

"All right, all right, so it's crap." He looked around. "But I see pots and pans, a stove -- is that a bit of birthday candle? We have everything we need to coat this boat in wax."

"Why? What for?"

"Suppose you have a pressing need for a boat."

"In this third-floor kitchen?"

He rolled his eyes. "It's a metaphor, okay? Every holy text was written for a specific audience in a specific context with the resources on hand."

He waved the origami boat. There was now a waterproof sheen to it but the ketchup stains were still there underneath."

"It approaches the timeless Platonic ideal of a boat, but a lot of it was just thrown in. Does this stain mean anything? Does this?" He pointed. "Imagine wars being fought over this bit of dribble."

Once again we were drifting off-topic. "So. Divine inspiration."

"It never stopped happening. It just got more commercial. Whenever a writer needs a larger-than-life hero or villain one of us knocks on the door."

"So the Incredible Hulk is really the Egyptian god Set."

Loki counted on his fingers. "Big scary dude, the strongest there is. Resistant to mental attacks. Often in conflict with authority. But you can count on him to defend people from gigantic world-ending threats. Who am I talking about here?"

"So it was Set that kicked your ass in Avengers Tower?"

"Yep. It's cool, we still meet up for game nights. "

"You are friends?"

He looked at me.

"Okay, so I want you to look up the concept of kayfabe . . ."

* * *

"If holy texts are indeed holy, then why do they disagree?"

We were in the astral plane and walking out of Asgard. Loki had gone to see Thor. He'd stood under the thunder god's window and held up a boombox.

"What, apart from cultural differences and translation errors?"

"Yes, those," I said. "Why do religions disagree?"

He shrugged. "Why shouldn't they? The gods disagree plenty."

"Ah," I said. "Is this the part where you explain what you meant by 'worldview'? Or 'word-of-mouth'?"

"Word-of-mouth is grassroots marketing. Evangelizing has fallen out of fashion but the gods-as-brands still need people to get the word out. People need to keep talking about us."

"Or else you'll die out?"

"Or else we'll have to come at you in other guises." And he rolled his eyes.

I pictured a bazaar, but with Loki simultaneously manning multiple market stalls in an assortment of funny hats. "Bit of a rigged game, isn't it?"

"Oh yes," he said. "Atheists aren't far wrong when they call religion a scam. But we gods exist, so there's something real there too."

"But you disagree among yourselves."

He kicked a rock. We were still in sight of the Rainbow Bridge. "All morality is subjective. Even that of gods."

"What, there's no such thing as a Big-G God? A Supreme Being?"

"I'm not saying there isn't, but even if there was, why would his opinions necessarily be better than yours or mine? If you coded a karma system into a video game, would that make you the last word on good and evil?"

"Er--"

"And there isn't one. A karma system, I mean. Not one that people haven't made up themselves. It's all just thoughts and feelings." Loki scratched his chin. "Granted, a god's suspicions about right or wrong tend to carry more weight, especially if you find yourself in front of one at the end of your life."