My arm felt like it was on fire.

The rune had stopped being itchy now and was simply burning, the blisters working their way up my forearm like fast-acting poison. I jettisoned the entire limb before it could reach any further and grew a new one, thankfully unimpeded, and watched as the old one burst into a miniature pyre of silver flames on top of the salt bed.

Not a good sign. If harvest runes could slice and protective runes could burn, I was willing to bet the others would have their own nasty surprises to throw into the ring. I didn’t know what an augmentation rune would translate to yet, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t be an improvement.

Around us, runes were winking out as fast as they appeared as Durga introduced them to the stabby end of her trident. Their numbers didn’t seem to be going down, but at least they were no longer increasing. Every so often a flash of red in my peripheral vision gave me an approximate idea of her position.

Apollo seemed to have realised lancing at Odin wasn’t working and had also switched focus to the runes, sending bolts of light piercing into the dead centre of each one. One of the building-sized emanations shattered into a fountain of motes even as he seamlessly turned to the next.

His doppelganger, on the other hand, was firing erratically; sometimes hitting runes but most often impacting the salt flat or carving dents into the sides of the ziggurat, sending rogue bolts flying. Also not a good sign.

Tez? I asked, amongst a growing sense of alarm. Don’t touch the runes.

Easier said than done when your body was in gas form, of course. I was abruptly glad I hadn’t done it, a sentiment reinforced by the fact the response entering my head was more garbled and unintelligible than an auctioneer with mid-stage dementia trying to describe an illustrated furniture assembly manual.

This was who we had holding up the tenuous reality we were prancing around in. Fantastic.

I sidestepped a rune materialising in front of my face and scanned the landscape for Mirror Tez the Second, of whom there was no sign.

Tez, I tried again, more insistent. Get your double out here and away from the runes. We need one of you with a clear head.

The response coming back was equally unintelligible but - if I wasn’t mistaken - slightly more miffed, which I hoped meant something had gotten through.

Durga’s lion was still hurtling towards me alongside the jetty with fifteen kilograms of deadly god-killer in its jaws and the restraint of a bread loaf with its flour and yeast ratios swapped by accident. I was halfway to changing shape to avoid it when the warrior herself stepped between us, continuing as she did to fire off arrows at Odin’s unwelcome runic surprises.

The animal bounded up to its master, tufted tail high, and headbutted her in the hip with enough force to knock most people over. Gungnir’s tip sheared past her leg in dangerous proximity, and the warrior goddess took a hasty step back with a sheepish laugh.

Not letting go of the spear, the lion stared up at her, paused, and flopped onto its side in the universal cat language for requesting belly rubs. It twisted its back, exposing its underbelly and floppy paws. Rumbling purrs the volume of a washing machine filled the vicinity.

“That’s disgusting,” I muttered, not quite keeping my lips from turning up at the corners even as I expected Odin to swoop in and intercept at any moment.

He didn’t, though, and Durga beamed. “Dawon, you magnificent boy!” In one swift motion, she retrieved Gungnir from the creature’s slathering jaws and crouched low, burying her face in the lion’s mane. Only for a second, though, and the next moment she was standing again, expression as fierce as her cat clearly wasn’t. “Where is he?" she demanded. "Give me a location, and I’ll ensure it’s the last one he ever visits.”

“Right in front of you.” The voice whispering between the two of us spoke in Odin's smug tones, without so much as a moment's hesitation.

Durga reacted just as fast, lashing out in my direction with the object of everyone's attention. Gungnir missed me by mere centimetres as Durga pulled her arm back at the last minute. Odin’s mocking laughter faded out even as Durga became a blur of limbs and weapons scouring the immediate vicinity. None connected.

“Another illusion,” I supplied, feeling suddenly drained; mentally, if not physically. “Thanks for not killing me just then.”

“Then how do we pierce it?”

Whatever Odin was using to create his illusions, he was being sparing with it, striking when he thought it would have the greatest impact. Overuse of a war tactic, I could imagine him saying, was the best way to set it up for failure. In fact, I was pretty sure he had said as much to me on some long-ago occasion.

I nodded at the polearm in her hand. “You’re holding the answer. How fast can you cover ground?”

She gave me a look, then snapped her fingers. Dawon, who had been making petulant mewling noises unbecoming of a kitten smaller than one of his paws, stopped rolling around on his back and bounced back into an alert crouch. “Fast enough,” she said. “But how –”

There were complex spells carved into the spear to nullify all sorts of negative effects on the wielder, but with the mirror’s rune reversal in place, most of them wouldn’t be working. Outside the mirror, just holding it would likely have been enough to clear the cobwebs from her eyes.

For now, we’d just have to rely on its intrinsic nature.

“Not how so much as where,” Apollo said, jogging up to join us. “And that’s where I come in.”

I eyed his double, who had stopped firing energy bolts altogether and was standing not-quite-slack-jawed alone on the salt flat, embers sparking from his fingertips. Clustering runes glittered into being around him, but the damage had already been done elsewhere.

“Geez,” I muttered, with a quick check on my own regular reflection to make sure nothing disturbing was happening to it. “Is Tez going to make it?”

“For now,” the other seer replied, though his face was grim. “We should act fast all the same.” He fired off another bolt over his shoulder, not looking back. The beam hit his double in the centre of the forehead. A small plume of smoke rose from the site of impact. The reflection staggered back a single step before toppling over and falling flat on its back with a small splash. Runes swarmed over its body an instant later, creating a glimmering mass that hurt the eyes and obscured the remains of the body from view.

Durga blindsided her way into the thick of it a moment later, punching a hole through the runes with Gungnir’s point. Each rune exploded into motes of light on contact, but she may as well have been using her trident. Having never encountered a situation quite like this before, I hadn’t been sure exactly what to expect – but this was underwhelming. At the very least, Gungnir should have assisted in breaking the underlying spell, or tracing some sort of connection back to its owner.

For her part, Durga didn’t seem to have noticed anything amiss. Her form had become a smear of movement launching weapons in all directions. Runes shattered and fell around us like rain, and the warrior goddess’ incensed laughter reached our ears in increasingly erratic peals. But it was getting us nowhere, and Odin was still nowhere to be seen.

A low growl next to my knee made me look down to see Dawon crouched low, ears back, tail twitching and fur puffed out along his back, staring in the direction of his mistress. The bad feeling simmering away heightened further. “Durga,” I called over, “The runes on your arm -”

“Are brilliant! I told you, I’m feeling great!”

Pent-up battle frenzy or no, she must have seen what had happened to my arm. This wasn't a mistake you could easily put down to wilful ignorance.

Apollo’s eyes narrowed, scanning his underling. “She’s not,” the god of medicine said, turning his gaze from her to me. “She’s got some kind of virus inside her. A magical one. What have you done?”

I made a frustrated noise. “We can assign blame later.” Preferably to Odin, whose fault it was. I spun on my heel, trying to follow Durga’s trajectory across the salt flat, which was an increasingly difficult prospect since she only appeared to be speeding up; a literal blur now. “Are you blind?” I shouted. “This thing’s a virus! Cut off the arm!”

“You’re crazy! I’ve got this in the bag!” Durga’s voice seemed to come from all around us now, each syllable coming with its own short-lived doppler effect.

It was true; runes were fizzling out everywhere I looked, faster than the eye could follow. This part of the battle was indisputably ours.

But it wasn’t a victory. Not if I knew Odin.

Already we'd taken losses. Tez was effectively out for the count, pulling the integrity of the mirrorverse into question. I wasn’t sure what had happened to his reflection, but I hoped it was busy keeping the pocket dimension in one piece. I’d nearly fallen for the same trick myself, twice – once in almost assuming gas form and twice in using the runes for my own purpose. And now Durga was coming under their sway in a way I didn’t entirely understand, but which felt wracked with foreboding.

It felt personal because it was. The nature of the attacks showed Odin had come prepared for shapeshifters, giants, and runic magic users. In other words, me. And without Providence to watch my every movement, he had free reign to dispatch me at his leisure. No fastidious middle manager was going to jump in to save me now that my soul was supposed to be bobbing around in whatever stand-in Siphon happened to be using for glorified suction jars.

Though whatever was happening here went well beyond my comprehension of runic magic. This wasn’t just bending the rules; it was writing a whole different set. Odin had been busy creating new magics behind the scenes, as was his wont, keeping them in reserve for a time like this. He didn’t give up his secrets lightly.

An uncomfortable part of my brain raised the possibility we were only getting to see them at all because he expected us not to live through the altercation.

“It’s attempting to affect her brain,” Apollo muttered next to me, an expression of deep concentration on his face. “If it succeeds, we're in trouble. But it’s not too late. Go fetch Mayari. I’ll talk to Durga.”

Eager to put some distance between myself and the goddess waving around the equivalent of a nuclear warhead, I didn’t need to be told twice and assumed bird form, exploding into the air in a flurry of wings. New glyphs materialised in front of me but I managed to dodge them, shedding any feathers which happened to come into peripheral contact.

Flush with that small success, I wasn’t expecting it when I rammed into what felt like a hard invisible wall. At the velocity I’d been flying at, it was enough to make bones snap, sending me spiralling to the ground in a disoriented heap before I could regain my bearings.

Yet another illusion. They seemed to be Odin’s manoeuvre of the day. It wouldn’t have been the runes doing it, I didn’t think – even though it was becoming clear my knowledge in the field was aeons behind. More likely he had something else in his arsenal not affected by the mirror’s ambiance.

I tried again, more cautiously, and ran into the same result. While we were running around distracted by runes, it looked like Odin had been quietly hemming us in. Didn’t look like I was getting to Mayari that easily.

I shifted to mosquito form and headed back towards the centre of the action, keeping well out of Gungnir’s range. Only to be met with a deafening cry.

Apollo stood well back from Durga, on edge, his head darting back and forth to keep an eye out on potential incoming threats. But he seemed to have gotten through to his underling.

To her credit, it looked like Durga hadn’t hesitated. She’d dropped to her knees and doubled over. Gungnir pierced her infected forearm, pinning it to the watery ground. Another two arms clutched the shaft of the spear, driving it home. Agony sheared across her features, but she held on and gave it another twist. Silver light spilled from her arm, working its way up cracks into the rest of her body reminding me of Tru’s run-in with the exorcists.

The best attack to use against a warrior god was one masquerading as assistance, even if that assistance took the form of runic malware. If you could get someone else to deliver it for you, all the better to scapegoat with. It was a little uncomfortably familiar.

Motes of light sparked and broke where the artifact shattered the rune, however, and the light working its way up her body began to fade and die.

Apollo breathed a sigh of relief. He took a step towards Durga.

Straight into the knife that had appeared out of nowhere, along with the god who wielded it.

Odin stepped aside in a fluid movement worthy of a well-trained matador. There was give in his elbow as he caught the stumbling seer and arrested his movement. But he never let go and never withdrew the knife. His hand strained with exertion, driving the weapon in as far as it could go. The other reached around the Head of Security’s back as if in a gentle embrace, pushing his torso further onto the knife. The first hand then finished it off with a savage twist.

An expression of utter shock crossed Apollo’s face, and his lips moved in silence, not quite forming words. His palm rose, rays of white fire blasting out from each fingertip - but the arm stiffened halfway with a terrible splintering noise, and the fires sputtered out with a crackling fizzle. At the same time, I felt three more runes flare to life from the vicinity of Odin’s arm: algiz, granting protection, mannaz, an augmentation rune, and isaz. Ice.

All symmetrical and immune to the cancelling effect of the mirrorverse.

On reflex I shifted back to human, landing on the surface of the lake with a slight thud some distance away. I lifted my hand to counter with my own spell, then realised the foolishness of the action. If this encounter had taught me anything, it was that the runes, when it mattered, answered only to their creator.

As if sensing my defeat, Odin met my eyes over Apollo’s shoulder, still holding him in that mock embrace, and smiled. He twisted the knife again, sliding it further downwards. Vaguely, in the back of my head, I realised Durga was in the process of wrenching Gungnir free and was shouting something. Too late.

Stone spears rose up from the ground, rock forming around Odin’s body, but a second iteration of algiz flared, and the pieces crumbled on contact. The hallmarks of Tez’s interference at last. Also too late.

Blood dribbled from the corners of Apollo’s mouth, crimson and bright. He coughed once. It occurred to me Odin had always looked most himself when his cheeks were flecked red with someone else’s blood.

Then Providence's Head of Security, the most powerful seer in existence, died.