The precise hallways of Facility J were gone, replaced with what appeared to be a dingy back alley in an old city. It was dark, a lone lantern providing the only illumination as its diminuitive flame stretched up into the night with barely a flicker. No stars or moon, just an empty, inky nothingness extending above in a way that gave me an odd case of vertigo, like I might fall into the sky. Piles of rubbish were left by the road and scattered amongst the buildings. The only sound was the crackle of the flame.

I walked towards the alley's entrance, and found more alleys. Run-down houses, backs of businesses closed for the day, or forever. I kept having the feeling I’d find my way to a main street each time I turned the corner, but it was always just another cramped passage and more of the same oppressive stillness. Once I started recognising some of the details repeating, I knew I was in an infinite loop.

Like the facility itself, this place was far too small.

A distant sound grabbed my attention, and I followed it to its source. Stark against the darkness, something was fossicking amongst the garbage. Two glowing eyes looked up at me.

A once-beautiful striped white beast slunk into view, dirt in his fur, and stopped in front of me. “What do you want?” he growled in Mandarin.

So this was what had become of the fearsome Jian Bing, I thought to myself. A skinny stray alley-cat, scrounging for food in the trash.

I supposed I should stick to character in case word got back to someone it shouldn’t, and cleared my throat. “Routine check. You know how it is.”

“Have they decided to let me out yet?”

“What do you think?”

Those reflective eyes hesitated, flicked away, looking distracted. “Have you seen a rat?”

I frowned at the non-sequitur. “No?”

Jian Bing returned to the rubbish, batting it with his paw. “There are always rats in places like these. Once I have food in my belly, I will be able to plan my next move.”

Against my better judgement, I pressed on. “Imprisonment not agreeing with you, I see. You don’t seem yourself.”

“Just hungry.”

“When’s the last time you spoke with someone?”

He stopped to formulate an answer, but after a few long moments his eyes wavered, and he went back to investigating the trash. “I just need to eat. Then I shall be able to think clearly,” he muttered.

“Have you ever found a rat in here? I don’t think there’s a working ecosystem to sustain anything alive. Do these shops ever open?”

The cat didn’t stop rustling through the debris. “Only a matter of time. Once I restore my strength, I shall break free of this prison and rejoin the war.”

“Jian,” I said, carefully. “The war is over. You lost. Providence won.”

He didn’t seem to absorb my words, but he noticed my tone. “Your pity is worse than worthless. Either kill me properly, let me out, or leave.”

I winced a little. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” I offered, wondering if Shitface would have said the same.

At first there was no response. Then two glowing eyes appeared again.

“Have you seen a rat?” he asked, his voice vague and faraway.

“No, I haven’t. But I’m sure you'll find one soon.”

“Yes,” Jian Bing replied, leaving to slink around the corner. “The next alley, perhaps.”

A god’s mind inhabiting a cat's brain for so long was probably like trying to run a quantum computer on a pocket calculator. I would know. Perhaps it was better this way.

I traced my way back to the exit, following my footprints in the dust, and reached out until my hand felt the snag of the dimensional barrier, transporting myself back across. The feeling which had settled in me disappeared when I swiped Apollo’s pass again, recoiling back into the scanner, and when I laid a hand on the wall, it no longer went through.

Having figured it out, I ducked into the next enclosure with more confidence, expecting to make the rounds in short order.

Instead, I registered daylight, buildings and stone for a split second before lunging out of the way as a spinning blade hurtled at my head. Before I had a chance to recover, I registered two more in my peripheral vision and only just managed to avoid them, warping out of the way an instant before they crashed into each other with a terrifying screech of metal and sparks, careening across the ground in a twisted mesh of flying shrapnel.

The fourth blade took me in the back moments later, nearly shearing through my shoulder entirely in an unbelievable bout of blinding pain which pushed Eris’ paperclip incident out of my top ten and drew a yell out of me that completely blew any plans of subtlety I’d had out the window. I healed it immediately, dazed and confused, only to then be hit by a fifth blade out of nowhere in the sternum. It punctured through my ribcage and several vital organs before I could repair the damage, leaving me semi-collapsed on the floor in a large pool of sticky blood, rivulets pooling in the gaps between cobblestones, as blades six and seven whizzed over my head and embedded themselves in a nearby wall.

“Stop moving, you fool!” called a woman’s voice from some distance away. On reflex, I turned towards the sound and heard a ‘whoosh’ trigger. I saw it this time, a disc of metal resembling a miniature circular saw materialising across the square, fading into existence even as it pelted towards me. I warped in the direction of the voice and found myself crammed into a small makeshift shelter cobbled together with what appeared to be tens of thousands of pieces of blade shrapnel painstakingly interlocked together and sealed with a crust-like substance I had a bad feeling about. A new blade clanged into the shelter a moment later. At this point, I’d lost count.

“Don’t look at me,” the woman’s voice said, not far from my right ear. Latin, with an accent. Deep, husky and raw. “Don’t turn your head. Try not to breathe too heavily, if you can help it. You’ll bring them down on both of us. Incidentally, Appo,” she added, in a more conversational tone, “your divination seems to have stopped working. Bet that stings more than the blades.”

I shuddered at the recent memory. “No, the blades are definitely, definitely worse.”

“About time you got a taste of your own medicine. I’m almost tempted to run out and take a few just so you get the backlash. But we both know who loses in that scenario.” She coughed, an alarming wet sound that on a mortal would have had people in the vicinity ordering an ambulance.

Cover or no cover, I had to know, and opened a few extra camouflaged eyes where I thought I could get away with it. At first glance, we were in what appeared to be a town square somewhere in central to eastern Europe, sun low in the sky with no clouds to be seen. Second glance revealed it for the façade it was – the tall rectangular buildings bordering the square had a certain flat quality about them, taking far less damage than they should after being bombarded with whirring projectiles for centuries, and what appeared to be exit roads were gaps between staggered structures to create a deliberate optical illusion. Convincing set dressing, but dressing nonetheless. The actual available space was only about forty by seventy metres in area, and who knew how high.

It was also carpeted in old blood. The walls were stained red with it; the ground caked in flaking scabs.

One look at the prison’s intended occupant revealed her to be a warrior goddess; the kind who preferred to get up close and personal. It wasn’t the thousands of raised scars marring every inch of her naked body, some still healing – no two guesses what had caused those – but the way she held herself, staring out at the square, bracing for incoming threats even while surrounded by walls built from the corpses of their fallen brethren. What little red hair she had left was shorn short, almost to the scalp.

I didn’t recognise her, not that it would have been easy given the masses of scar tissue, but I recognised the thousand-yard stare.

I had a problem, and it wasn’t the flying tetanus deliverers. In between trying to dodge those and not lose consciousness, I’d completely lost track of the exit.

“Well, this is the pits,” I observed, keeping very still. “They really didn’t like you.”

“Understandable. I was wrong to fight,” she uttered simply. “Have you considered the favour I asked?”

“Remind me,” I said. “There are a lot of people in your position; they tend to blend together after a while.”

The noise that escaped her lips then was nothing short of a primal keening sound, siren-loud and filled with more despair than I’d ever heard anyone make. It continued for half an uncomfortable minute, before stopping. The voice that followed was eerie in its calm.

“I barely care about the injuries anymore. I’ve gotten very good at reverse targeting in here. Positioning myself to run head-first into a weapon so it knocks me out for a good long time. Built my masterwork here piece by bloody piece to enable some reprieve the rest of the time. Not as good as putting myself to sleep, though.

"You know what’s worse? Knowing that time is infinite while space is finite. No matter how much I ration it out, each little death machine brings me closer to inevitability. There will come a time, however distant, when this courtyard is filled with blades. I will be running on them, sleeping on them, until there is no room left to move and even the option of sleep will be stolen from me, leaving me to spend eternity in agony.” She coughed again with that same horrible wet noise. “Please make it stop. I’ll do anything, pay anything. This... it's not worth it.”

“I can’t release you,” I said.

“I know,” she replied, still staring straight ahead. “I don’t mind. Really. I’ll settle for an improvement. For good behaviour, maybe?”

I remained silent for a good long minute, trying to keep my own old traumas under control as they attempted to bubble to the surface. I had a feeling I knew who’d designed this particular chamber. There were certain similarities.

“Show me to the exit and you have a deal,” I told the nameless goddess.

“I’ll guard you with my life,” she promised. “Although that doesn’t mean much anymore.” If it occurred to her to wonder why I needed guidance, she didn’t bring it up.

“That won’t be necessary,” I said. “Just point it out.”

“Behind us,” she said. “You always come through the fifth door on the left. The one with the sparrow carving.”

I looked. All the doors were a shredded mess. “Sure.”

“Appo?” There was a hitch in her voice. “Don’t forget this time.”

I’m not him, I felt like saying, but held my tongue. I was someone who might actually do something. Presuming I didn’t get caught in any of the dozens of choke points along the way. Someone who had been where she had and survived to see the other end. “It might take some time,” I warned her. “Not enough to fill this place with iron. But I’ll be working on it.”

“Don’t let them get you,” she said. Her head bowed forward, very slowly, not enough to trigger a reaction.

“Hah,” I snorted. “Bit late for that. But I’ll do what I can.”

Picking out the fifth door from the left, I warped back over, taking another blade in the spine for my troubles, and plunged my arm into the door up to the elbow before feeding the rest of my body across the divide, stumbling into a heap on the floor on the other side as my legs gave out beneath me.

I yanked the offending object out of the bone and slammed it across the hallway, where it bounced off the wall with none of the velocity it had originally appeared with, skittering to the ground with a clatter.

Not all enclosures were visitor-safe, check.

My once-pristine outfit was now covered in sizable holes and drenched in blood. I looked like Apollo had gone out for a light spot of morning sailing only to turn on his fellow passengers and bludgeon them to death with the boom. The hit to the chest had severed halfway through the lanyard holding the access card, but it was still holding on by a thread. Literally.

I’d have to watch that, I thought, taking care of the damage. I doubted Security would be shoddy enough to grant its prisoners a free escape just by getting their hands on a piece of plastic. Still, the last thing I wanted was to end up locked in a cell thanks to my own carelessness while some desperate soul vaulted around triggering a dimensional deathtrap gauntlet.

I blitzed through the next few enclosures without incident. Their occupants were in no state to talk. Not all were even conscious. Most I didn’t recognise, either because they were around before my time, or they hadn’t managed to make much of a name for themselves before getting shunted off to Disneyland for nightmare fuel.

Until I reached Odin’s former prisoners.

Buried up to her chin in enclosure J-108, unmoving, stone deposits running down her face like stalactite tears, rested my cousin Járnsaxa.

Before my brain had a chance to catch up with my actions, I found myself ducking back out into the main facility and slapping my card against the reader as if my life depended on it.

Her eyes had been closed, almost fused shut. She hadn’t seen me. She wouldn’t have recognised me. But it didn’t matter.

I’d thought she was gone. Back to Jötunheim like Angrboda, like the rest of my extended family, only to be lost in the dimensional restructure. That she was here meant I’d been lied to, and for a very long time.

Well. What was new? You could wail about it, but the situation wasn’t going anywhere just because there happened to be some gnashing of the teeth. Even if Tez hadn’t been clear with his warning, trying to walk a fugitive out of here required a certain degree of manual dexterity I doubted Járn currently possessed.

And on the plus side, one more member of my family was still alive. Two in one day; I should be jumping for joy.

Instead I kept going.

Past a collection of unidentifiable human bits dangling from meat hooks.

Past a fine-featured blonde I’d known in passing once upon a time and found quite attractive. Now pinned halfway up a tree, branches growing through his hands, feet and forehead as he wept tears of blood.

Past a town full of twisted paintings, each one a slice of anatomy only a hair's breadth in thickness, framed and suspended on wooden panels. I left when I noticed they occasionally moved.

Each new discovery made it harder to stay detached, and I was aware my expression had hardened into a sullen façade. It wasn’t all needless spectacle. When dealing with gods, using extreme measures was common sense, and some powers could be resilient even under suppression, like Mayari’s glow, requiring individual tailoring. But this facility had not been designed to simply remove nuisances. It had been designed to punish.

It was succeeding.

And then, out of nowhere, a beautiful garden.

Like the blade chamber, it emulated the outdoors without supporting any of the maintenance-heavy inconveniences of a full-sized dimension, like for example the sky. In spite of this, the air was heavy with distant clouds, a gentle rain falling; reality transitioning in from illusion at some unspecified point. Scrubs and plants peppered the rich soil, nothing taller than knee-height, and the air was cool enough to scour the lungs, crisper and cleaner than I remembered anything on Earth being in decades. You could gaze out to the horizon here, and as before, it looked thin, getting worse as it went further out. I wasn’t sure how travelling into such degraded space would affect a person, but it would probably be interesting.

Otherwise, the place seemed to be empty. Odd. I was about to move on, when my eyes picked out a tiny movement from below, a stirring of the soil. Just like that, I found myself expelling an involuntary sigh.

This was the one.

Venturing out into the moor, I crouched low, eyes raking the surface of the well-churned earth. Here and there I caught inconspicuous flashes of movement, hard to spot unless you were making a concerted effort.

Hey, I said into it. It’s me.

No reaction. Probably for the best. Very carefully, I dug my fingers into the soil and cupped my hand through it, displacing the grit until a small pink grub wriggled into view. I provided a hand for it to crawl onto and watched as it twisted blindly from side to side, seeking the safety and familiarity of damp and darkness. A more fragile creature was hard to imagine.

It was so faint I almost couldn’t sense it, even right there in my palm. A soul’s echo, torn across far too many pieces to remember who it was anymore. Nevertheless, I knew family when I encountered it.

Hang in there, I told Jörmungand. I’ll come back for you.

The worm curled around my index finger and stayed there. Moments later, my eyes picked out more movement in the earth as another pink head poked up and waved in indecisive circles before aiming itself in my vague direction. It was followed by many others in quick succession, until I found myself surrounded by hundreds of worms gravitating towards my shoes like the world’s slowest and least ominous zombie horde. I placed my palms flat on the ground and let them crawl on, where they joined the first and curled up to rest.

Without a proper means of communication, it was hard to know how much had survived the demotion; difficult to separate intelligence from instinct. I made a guess at it being the latter. Jörm might have gotten off easy on the physical front, but it couldn’t be healthy having his soul broken up that much.

It could have been worse. Despite his fearsome appearance and reputation, Jörm had always been a gentle child. He took after his mother that way. It was no surprise to find him peacefully and diligently tending to his garden amidst all the horror.

As soon as Tez gave the all-clear, I was going to get him out of here and add his case to the list to give to Janus to fix, assuming he could. Demotion, as a rule, worked. Information was about as much as we’d get out of the god of doors unless we staged a rescue, and it was already established that would be a bad plan. But both Hel and Tez were dropping hints we needed something more tangible, and I wasn’t sure how that was supposed to be able to help.

Then there was the matter of retribution. I wanted it – oh, I wanted it – for the sake of every one of us who had been made to suffer at the hands of the tyrant and his cronies, or others like him.

But then where that did leave us, but sitting on top of an ever-expanding heap of resentment and bitterness, tensions compounding between those with power and those without, everyone convinced they were on the right side of history even as they committed the same brutalities they complained about. As satisfying as vengeance might be in the short term, it would only breed more against us in the long term. Given infinite time, the situation would almost certainly reverse again, even if it took aeons. And again, and so on into infinity. The ouroboros effect.

“Yeah,” I said to the original, who was snoozing all over my hands and feet. “We’re cleverer than that, aren’t we? Well, some of us. Some of us are a pile of worms.”

There was going to be blood, one way or another. Probably no getting around that. And I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to enjoy it while it lasted. But what we did afterwards was up to us.

Of course, that was all assuming we even won. On our current trajectory, it was just more of the same old same old. Providence had already reached peak expansion centuries ago. Having achieved that, it was now in the early stages of a downward spiral. Consolidating, downsizing, reducing the workforce. Whole universes already expunged, afterlives decimated, and a complacent workforce too shuttered to see it was only a matter of time before it also happened to them. Hell, the Vatican attack proved nothing was safe.

I’d committed to this now, I realised. And not just because I’d been manipulated into it. My younger self hadn’t been afraid to poke the gods back into the realms of sanity when things got really bad. With a pointy stick, if required. Somewhere along the way, however – probably the point where I’d been chained up for a couple of centuries – self-preservation had become more important. A stance which had, admittedly, bought me longer freedom than anyone else eventually absorbed into Providence’s inextinguishable garbage fire. But in the end, it hadn’t accomplished anything.

Now, with what was left of my youngest living son carpeting my limbs in blissful ignorance, the fear was taking a back seat to the anger.

You didn’t need Ragnarok for there to be a reckoning.