Gods have a lot of free time, mostly they hang out on asgardian worlds and give out skills to mortals through Yggdrasil in exchange for part of the soul strength the mortals earn using said skills. The worship is a lovely bonus.
It isn't exactly time intensive for gods to give skills, so many gods entertain themselves by watching the mortal souls Yggdrasil bring to have their pasts washed away in the rivers of forgetfulness.
It's important for souls to be wiped completely clean of any mortal remnants from its previous life after all there are rules to enter paradise: mainly go through 100 lives in a row with positive karma, there are a few other conditions but generally the karma is the most important.
With the gods being so free its hardly surprising several were conversing together near the rivers, but then they saw a soul with 99 lives of good karma. This was very surprising it's very hard to achieve such a feat, so they could be forgiven for wanting to help the little soul in its efforts, but they shouldn't have tried to circumvent fate. Souls are immortal after all they'll all eventually get into a heaven of their choosing.
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Unfortunately the gods have no patience, and so they hatched a plan: like the mother of Achilles they would dip the soul into the waters of forgetfulness and let them wipe its memories away, but they would pull it out with perfect timing so that only the inherent goodness of its previous life would be left, allowing it the best chance to finish it's 100th life with positive karma. This was a mistake, all souls needed to be completely cleansed to remove the divine energies the soul would absorb while in the asgardian worlds. When the new life would be born of this soul it would have a divine gift, as a gift not given by any god fate will balance the scales and a curse will follow this new life as well. The gods failed to notice due to constantly being surrounded by divinity, and so the unfortunate soul was reborn.