Echoes of infernal wailing still rang in my recent memory as I left Xiānfēng’s last refuge behind to the tune of six excited scientists clamouring around the strange new phenomenon in their midst. If it could help take their minds off the various tragedies unfurling around them, all the better.

Physically and spiritually, I felt good. Discharging the last of Lucy’s hitchhiking demonic energy had left me lighter and freer, magic coming a little faster even under the fluctuating duress of the pact.

Sequestered a whole miniature world away, Gia’s rune was faint in distant red but still accessible with effort. It helped it was the rune of roads: raidho, the disjointed ‘R’ with its central point adrift like a bow slipping its ties. It wasn’t immediately obvious which position it corresponded to, but I suspected Envy. If not for knowledge or immortality like Xiānfēng, then for life itself, and the span of years about to be stripped coldly away.

Emotionally, I wasn’t doing so well. Ever the consummate professional, Yun-Qi had kept relations civil and productive, but the hurt behind his actions may as well have been a whip searing me in the face. Unlike whip burn, I couldn’t just shift it away.

But I had time to explain neither demons nor the events leading to the cult’s extermination, thanks to a missive from Tru. Tez – the original this time, such as that was a thing – had reported in.

There was to be a meeting. A big one. Soon.

I found myself back in the warm balminess of Mayari’s island, on the road with the cabins. It had gotten bigger since my last visit. The accommodation had been dried and de-tsunamified, and the landmass had been extended further out into the ocean, rising in a gentle slope that became steadily steeper until it ended in a sheer cliff face at the tip of the promontory. At the apex I could see a sprawling obsidian structure reflecting the last rays of sun like a star. It featured the sharp angles of the Aztecs and sat low to the ground with the wide, open walkways of a Spanish hacienda. I could sense both Tru and Vince inside of it, as well as two of the threads of the pact.

I took my time, strolling up the road towards the peak, feeling the warm wind in my hair off the back of the ocean. For once, my mind was still. Not long from now I’d have to orchestrate one of the most ambitious coups ever attempted in known history, against dictators and world-destroyers who could scatter my atoms so far they’d never find each other again. I’d have to do it while aping my oldest enemy and trying to fix my relationship with my son. And if – if – we won – and I didn’t want to think about those odds – an enormous amount of work awaited whoever volunteered themselves to clean it all up.

But I didn’t have to worry about that right now. I gave the sarong around my waist a pat and fluffed my hair, waving at the passing refugees still blissfully unaware the rest of the world was experiencing an existential crisis, and drank in the smell of trees and seawater. I was alive, I had my magic back, and I couldn’t be sure either of those details would stay true much longer.

It took me fifteen minutes to reach the top of the hill, by which time more of the pact threads had joined the others. I was a little surprised no one had come to hurry me along, but didn’t question it.

No one met me at the doors, either. I ducked through one of the angular crystalline archways and made my way across the floor chequered in black and yellow. Inside, the furniture seemed surprisingly… lived in. Worn seats, scuffed tables and even chips and scratches on the glass greeted me in rooms both sumptuous and strangely cosy. There were many of them, almost hotel-like in size and structure. The entrance hallway fed in a straight line through to an open door at the rear, where the sun dipped like a yolk into the ocean below.

But the strangest part was the mirrors. They lined the walls and ceiling; curved and angular, mismatched and uneven, tetrised into every available surface with clashing frames and shades of silver. Many were broken, some completely shattered. A fragment of each had been preserved like the rest, forming long stretches of reflective mosaic. Looking into them, I saw only myself staring back. But I couldn’t shake a mild sense of unease and the notion I was walking past a mass grave.

Chatter reached me from the open door, but at the last minute a loud whirr caught my attention. I ducked right instead and found myself in a small kitchen, mirrors lining the ceiling.

Tez lifted his finger from the blender full of what looked like pomegranate juice. “I know what you’re going to say,” he said. “And yes, it had to be done. No, it wasn’t ideal, but it was the best I could come up with in the time I had. I’m not Apollo; I didn’t have time to narrow it down.”

“And I suppose you didn’t bother to think about the consequences of throwing two million people into death’s purgatory knockoff?”

“I’ve done nothing but think,” he argued. “And it wasn’t easy.” He lifted the blender off its sconce and emptied it into a pitcher nearby, then picked up a second, identical pitcher and filled the kitchen with sloppy glugging sounds as its contents entered the machine. His sleeve, loose in the muggy heat, rose up his arm with the action, and I made out a flash of gaffer tape securing what looked like the end of a wooden handle. “You’re just angry because you’re worried Fenrir thinks you’re a poor mummy.”

“This wasn’t how I pictured our reunion.”

I didn’t get to elaborate further as the blender screeched its welcome a second time, churning its already liquid contents into bloated froth. It occurred to me there were three more identical jugs resting on the bench next to the first two.

I waited until it was done. “Is this…?”

“Not for drinking,” the seer confirmed. He poured it out and refilled the appliance. “Long story short, the future is essentially broken. It shouldn’t be. I’ve been limiting the number of my reflections out in the world since the Siphon purge. But even with only two of us active, it’s still a mess. We’re talking planet-scale divergence. And the more time that passes, the worse it gets. There are just too many moving pieces and outcomes. I can’t tell you if the world will be blown up, for example, become a global police state, or sees the entire human population merged into a giant green earwig.”

“Pretty sure we can rule out that one,” I said, sniggering.

Tez only fixed me with a humourless stare and initiated the blender.

“Moving on,” I continued twenty seconds later, “if your visions are unreliable, what do we do now?”

“The best we can,” he said. “Unreliable isn’t the same as incorrect. I’ve spent this whole time figuring out bits and pieces of the puzzle. If we get the beginning right, there are steps we can follow to ensure at least some parts go to plan. We wing the rest.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Is it me?” I asked, remembering the effect I apparently had on seers. Adding extra possibilities to the timelines and all that. “If I sit out, let Lucy take point, does it make things clearer?” I didn’t want to sit on the sidelines after all my effort, but if it was my participation holding us back, I’d do it. Follow-through mattered with prophecy or it didn’t work.

“First thing I thought of. And not really. Extricating you from the operation is a tough ask alone. Your fingers are dipped in every part of this plan. You’re our mole on the inside. More than that, you know and talk to everyone. People trust you.”

“Save the lies for the enemy,” I sniffed.

“They do. You’re fifty percent of the demons’ anchor point quota, and your improv on the fly is what saves us in a number of scenarios. Scenarios that keep changing on me, so we can’t rely on prophecy alone. Yes, things get a little easier to follow if you’re gone – but finding those timelines is difficult, and if anything our chances of success go down.”

Only a little easier? That didn’t seem right. Odin and Apollo both being out of the picture should have cleared up a lot of the seer interference, and Amulet Tez – while solidly in frame – would willingly cooperate.

“There’s no other seer involved,” Tez declared, pre-empting my question as he poured in the fourth jug. “Well, they’ve promoted a couple due to the shortage, but no major players. I’ve had to deal with them – another thing making my job difficult – but even if we do nothing and call off the plan, the timelines are still acting haywire. Everything still goes pear-shaped, even if we all head quietly back to our desks like good little children.”

“Why?” I asked when the noise had finished. “How?”

“A better question would be when. Tomorrow, specifically. No matter what we do or how we do it, that’s when shit hits the fan. The Marketing announcement seems to be the trigger.”

I pulled a face. “Seems to be? Shouldn’t that be pretty clear cut? What’s the announcement?”

Tez stared at me grimly. “I don’t know.”

“So they’re using anti-seer concealment spells, then, or confoundment. Alright, I’ll pull rank to get some direct answers from the source. That should narrow it down.”

“Yeah. You’ve tried. I ran that scenario a few times. It doesn’t help.”

My eyes widened on reflex. Despite myself, I was impressed. That would make it the most powerful concealment I’d ever encountered. Most people never thought to ward against the future, considering only the present.

Of course, it could also have been something like a powerful geas affecting the mind. But I suspected Enki. I could even guess at a motive – he knew Odin was a seer, and there were tensions between us. It was possible he was trying to keep something hidden from the object of my impersonation.

Tez held up a hand before I could speak. “There’s one other possibility you’re overlooking,” he suggested, holding off on pouring the last pitcher. “That it’s not a confoundment at all. That it actually changes.”

I frowned at him. “That doesn’t make any sense. There are only so many things this announcement could be, and you don’t just change your mind at the last minute about something this major. Not without substantial outside influence. And if someone was doing that much pushing, it’d have to be a seer who’d leave obvious traces.”

“Or fate. And it can’t be Janus. He’s a central part of the plan; I would have noticed.”

“And why induce uncertainty?” Did someone know about us and was trying to throw up an obstacle against Tez? Or were they friendly and trying to throw up a barrier against the other seers? I never had gotten many answers about the unseen manipulator sitting behind the shadows in all of this, and if it hadn’t been for Pakhet’s confirmation there was someone at or above management level assisting Siphon, I might have let it go by now. I didn’t even know if they were the same person. Or if there really had been a mastermind at all and I hadn’t been eager to jump to hasty conclusions.

Could it be Yahweh? In addition to the reality slice, he had anti-magic I didn’t understand the full extent of. We were trying to depose him, after all. Perhaps we were looking at some kind of auto-defence system kicking in; although, again, a very impressive one to be able to predict the future.

Tez shrugged, a grand, blithe gesture. “I have no idea. And we can’t afford to waste any more time trying to find out. At this point it’s too late for us to quit; this goes on without us whether we like it or not.” He poured the last jug into the blender. “We need to focus on controlling what we can.”

A small clump of ambiguous pink mush sloshed up against the side of the capsule, and I wrinkled my nose. “There’s got to be a better way to stop him regenerating.”

“Hey,” grunted Tez. “Priorities. Better we keep Odin here than yeeting him somewhere latent protections might kick in unsupervised. You laugh, but it’s happened before.”

He waved me away as the whirr of the blender started up, and I plodded out of the kitchen back towards the rest of the voices.

They were all there, around a courtyard filled with plants and curve-less arches. It opened onto the edge of the cliff, candles leading the way to where the grass came to an abrupt end. Lucy, Mayari and the two demons sat engaged in conversation around a stone table piled with food and what I had to assure myself were definitely cocktails. Durga waited apart from the others, arms folded and eyes closed, against one of the arches.

I made to join her but found myself intercepted by Mayari.

“Here,” she said, gesturing for me to hold out my hand. She placed a small silk pouch on it that rattled a bit. “The other seers. I figured you could, you know, do your thing. For safekeeping.”

I checked inside the pouch and found it full of a small handful of diamonds and a faint sense of the souls attached to them. “You imploded them? All of them? Without getting caught?”

“Tez helped. We had to get them out of the way before the wrong events started entering the primary timeline. I can’t remember the last time I’ve paid so much attention to employee schedules. I had to wait for them all to leave the office before I could do anything. But we’ve only got until someone comes looking. Which is where you come in.”

Pulling its drawstrings closed, I handed the object back. “I don’t absorb souls,” I informed the lunar goddess. “I don’t know where they go and don’t want to find out. But Lucy might be able to work something out.”

“Fair.” She gave me an appraising look. “It’s been nice working with you, Loki. If we survive this, perhaps we should go on that date sometime. We could test out ingredients from my hydroponics lab, followed by an evening building that deathtrap gauntlet you wanted. I’m up for it if you are.”

I sighed. I did like Mayari. “If we survive this,” I echoed back, “I assume we’ll do something about the various hellscapes Providence institutionalised. We’re both going to have our hands full with severely traumatised family members for a while. I have a dead wife and two dead sons in the void, plus a child who’s probably forgotten how to be anything but a mulch factory for the last nine hundred years. I’m not sure introducing new partners is a good first thing to hit them with, especially when I parted with the last on unresolved terms.”

Even after so much time, I didn’t like to think about Sigyn. At some point during my imprisonment, I’d lost the ability to remember my wife for the woman she really was. Since my time in the cave, I could only bring to mind the shadow, the weeping martyr. Her tears raining onto my skin. The sizzle of acid eating into her wrists as it splashed over the edge of the bowl containing my punishment. Odin, in his ‘mercy’, had allowed her to attend me to ease my pain. In reality, it had only comprised a more subtle form of torture.

She’d stayed by my side for three long years, neither sleeping nor eating. We’d talked and plotted to make it easier, but were fighting a losing battle. Sigyn lacked my shapeshifting; I’d watched her waste away in front of me, the bowl growing heavier in her hands each passing week.

We’d devised ways to overcome the challenge. Destroying the snake, the source of the acid – except it would retreat out of reach, magically charmed to evade all harm. Funnelling the venom through clay pipes, diverting it to the floor – except the snake would avoid it and home in on its target. Building a shelter over me for protection failed, too: every material crumbled to dirt the instant it was set in place. Powerful spells had been set into the cave walls and the cursed chains binding me. Even the scales of the snake formed runic patterns. Odin had foreseen or planned for every scheme.

And still Sigyn hadn’t given up. I’d been grateful and angry, oscillating between needing her to stay and wanting her to go. Both options were torture; the question was only whether I wanted it served via body or mind.

In the end, the logical decision had been for her to leave. Only one person needed to bear the burden, and our relationship had started cracking under the strain. It would get worse before it got better, if it ever did.

For a while she’d sent worshippers and retainers to take up the duty, but mortal bodies couldn’t handle the task. They’d stopped coming at all after a few years. I hadn’t blamed them. By that point I couldn’t have carried out a conversation even if I’d wanted to. Odin had balanced the venom against my regeneration just enough to keep me conscious more often than not, but my face had become a ruin to make grown adults scream. All I knew was pain and dreams for a very long time.

When the chains had crumbled, I’d gone looking for my wife only to find out she’d died in the war that freed me. Not in battle, to be taken to Valhalla, but hiding quietly in a shelter. Sigyn, fearsome goddess of victory, had refused to fight. Especially for Odin. That way, she’d be taken to Hel.

My daughter had told me much later they’d gotten on very well.

I looked back over at Mayari, shifting away the burning behind my eyes.

“I understand,” she said. “I take a lot of mortal partners. When they die, it kills me every time. When we do whatever it is we do with the afterlife, I imagine there are going to be some challenging conversations. But it’s also important we don’t relegate ourselves to being alone. If you change your mind, let me know.” She hefted the diamond pouch. “I suppose I’d better see what Lucifer can do about this.”

I noticed her gaze lingered on him a little before she made to head back.

“He’s not interested,” I warned her.

“I know,” she sighed. “Considering all the propaganda about him, you’d think he'd be a bit more interested in the fornicating. Did you ever try?”

“We’ve known each other a long time.”

“And?”

“I’m not immune to the obvious, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Mayari raised the eyebrow above the glass eye.

“It is what it is,” I supplied. “And for the record, I hope I’ll change my mind, too.”