I jolted awake, though I hadn’t been sleeping. It felt like I’d lost time. This was backed up by the significant and important fact I was back in a human body, and one I didn’t remember creating. It was surprisingly pretty for a ‘caught by your mortal enemy’ sort of situation, which alarmed me in its own right. Beautifying your prisoners wasn’t something that tended to happen when you expected to see the last of them.

Baldr crouched directly in front of me, framed by a backdrop of floating architecture. From here it seemed almost legible, like I could read it if only I had the right angle, and luminescent against the dark. The halo, separated from me again, hung casually from his dangling wrist.

Moving hurt. I lifted a slim hand and groaned at the pain. Internally, I was a mess, like someone had taken a paintbrush and zigzagged it through my organs until they resembled spiky fettuccine. It took me a few seconds to realise I was seated with my back against the plinth where Lucy still chiselled away.

I pushed myself straighter, ignoring the bits that grated disturbingly inside me. For some reason I couldn’t heal or shift at all, though my powers seemed to be technically active and still bolstered by the place of power. I could feel them waiting to be used, but found myself unable to bridge the final gap. Some kind of magic was being used against me, and Baldr shouldn’t have had it.

He was staring at me through lidded lashes; expression satisfied, but barely. When he spoke, his tone was civil but translucent, the pleasantry not quite enough to mask the simmering anticipation beneath it. I wasn’t sure if it stemmed from fury or excitement. And I wasn’t sure which would be worse.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he remarked, “for a very long time. One might call it an obsession.”

“Well, hey,” I croaked. “Lucky you. Apparently I can’t stay away.”

The lashes lifted, revealing more of the cruel irises beneath. “Fitting,” Baldr replied, the corners of his mouth lifting. “I had special plans for you. Most people do it wrong, you see. They action one passable idea and leave it to rot, as if that were enough. I can’t blame them; dedication takes passion and time, and even I can’t be everywhere at once. Though that may soon change.”

“Go right ahead.” If I tried, I could almost get a sense of the magic keeping me under. It felt indistinctly familiar and brought to mind associations with Providence, bad feelings and coffee. “It worked out so well for the last person.”

“They didn’t have my resources,” Baldr responded lightly. He lifted the halo and peered through it, raising his eyebrows slightly at whatever he saw. “I can’t do everything yet, but I will. If you thought you were immune, I’m sorry to say you were incorrect.”

“Even a working clock can be set to the wrong timezone,” I replied, as the recognition clicked. One of Themis’ compulsions, no doubt subject to some locally created law. That Baldr had it was bad, though at this point I wasn’t sure escaping would do any good. “And you haven’t changed at all. Most people would consider that a mental deficiency.”

“You’re trying to goad me into a bad decision,” Baldr stated, still smiling. “I’ve seen it. I’ve seen all paths from this point forward, and be assured they are very few. This time, Loki, you lose.”

It didn’t look good, it had to be said. Unless Lucy could pull out an extra helping of miracle on top of the usual divine standard, I was probably about to disappear into annihilation with the rest of the present day. All I could do now was plant ideological timebombs in Baldr’s mind and hope they took hold at some point in the otherwise doomed hellscape of the past.

The thing about enemies was that the worse they were, the harder they were to forget. And maybe, by becoming enough of one, my words would stick around long after the rest of me just enough to make a difference. As last resorts went, it was pathetically awful. But it was all I had.

My throat burned. That one wasn’t Themis’; that was someone else’s. “Sure,” I sidestepped hoarsely. “But no one said loss had to be singular. Inevitability is boring. Sooner or later, you’ll get tired of knocking your slaves around and crave something different. When that day happens, you’ll become your own worst enemy.”

“Mmm? No, I don’t think so. You tell me, Loki. Do I have a lack of imagination? Will I run out of ideas?”

I stared into his eyes and decided he would not. Baldr on his own with his single devastating power had been a font of horrors since day one. With more tools at his disposal and suggestions from an army of creative advisors, I could only imagine the torments would be unending.

“I think you’ll change,” I lied. “And then I win.”

“I’ve already changed.” Baldr smiled back. “Just not the way you want.” Carefully, he laid the circlet flat against the floor and crept in uncomfortably close, until his hand touched my chin. I expected him to snap my neck or go for my eyes, but instead he chose the dread of anticipation. “But if there is light ahead for you, you’ll be the first to see it. I’m not going to let you go. I told you I had special plans.”

I strained to catch a better glimpse of Lucy, fighting the sensations of each movement dealing me severe physical damage. I had a bad feeling as to where those alterations had come from, like something my own powers could do if I were insane enough to be self-tormenting. The lapse in my mind leading up to it also bode poorly; the kind of symptom you’d experience from being possessed. In that situation, it would be easy to use my own powers against me.

He had Lucifer’s, too. Had Lucy played me the whole time? Or did he still, somehow, have a plan?

With a soft tug, Baldr guided my chin back in line in a mockery of sensuality. Over my lower lip, he ran an alluring thumb. Trying to brush it away earnt me immediate failure and another batch of searing agony.

“By rights, I should hate you,” Baldr declared, his tone almost a melodic lilt. His beautiful eyes loomed large in my sight. “My clever murderer. You’ve hurt me and targeted me, lied and deceived, and now set an army against me.” With each beat of the sentence, his fingers walked up the side of my cheek towards my eye.

I braced.

“But I don’t,” he finished abruptly. His fingers caressed the ridge of my cheek, thumb skimming the shape of the bone. “I don’t. Among all others, you see me. That leaves you full of potential.”

For a moment, I genuinely wondered if his perception was so abysmally skewed he mistook any sort of challenge for actual feelings. Or some kind of warped capacity to mould me into his twisted protégé. A second later I forced myself to look closer and noticed his shaking fingers, eyes filled with wild anticipation, and realised my error.

It was none of those. Baldr knew what he was doing, and there was no challenge here. This marked the precipice of absolute assured conquest over an enemy. Baldr was simply drinking it in.

“Ugh,” I articulated in the moment, other words having viscerally failed me.

It didn’t put him off. “You still don’t understand,” the god whispered. I felt his light breath on my lips. “I want you here with me. Forever and inseparable, every moment shared and savoured. I want to feel your observation of the actions wrought by our own hands. We will keep things exciting. I hear you like excitement. That shall be your eternal reward.”

Again my brain took a second to catch up with his meaning, because the obvious implication was so absurd. Absorbing souls went both ways. Either you worked together to accomplish anything – which was almost always to immediately find a way out – or the resultant endless squabbling rendered you all effectively helpless until someone else did it for you. Multiple souls weren’t good at sharing bodies; it was one of the first things jötnar learnt as children. He would be handing me a weapon, however double-edged and blunt, and I would use it to my advantage. If Baldr’s plan was to take me back to the past with him, I’d sabotage his efforts at every turn.

“In that case,” I rasped, trying to emphasise the fact I felt slightly more confident over the general ongoing background of horror, “I’ll make sure a coherent word never comes out of your mouth again. And I promise that will be the least of your concerns.”

“Except,” Baldr replied pleasantly, “I’m not just me.” He picked up my arm and laced his fingers gently through mine. “I’m a little bit of everyone these days. Durga gifted me the ability to withstand attacks on my soul. Janus, the power to control their boundaries. From Lucifer, I gained the ability to suppress them entirely.”

It only confirmed my existing suspicions, but it still hurt. My lips pursed before I could help myself. How much of Lucifer’s cooperation had been voluntary, and why? In trusting him, had I made the mostly costly mistake of my life?

“Oh?” said Baldr, noticing. “That one bothers you? Then in celebration of our upcoming union, our first stop in the old world will be him.”

He didn’t have Odin’s mind-reading yet, I reminded myself, and very consciously did not look towards Enki. I hoped Lucy was hearing this. Though as to what warped conversation registered in his afflicted mind, I could only guess. Why wasn’t he doing anything to stop this?

Often, before I’d killed him the first time, I’d chafed at holding my tongue against Baldr. Now, when it didn’t matter, I found all the insults dying on my lips. “You’re a monster,” I settled for eventually.

“Thank you,” Baldr said, in the tones of a dying man receiving water after wandering the desert, and for the briefest of moments, I thought I saw the tiniest of cracks. “It’s nice to be finally recognised.”

The fingers holding my hand elongated. It was a lost cause, but I tried to pull back anyway, pushing through the shards tearing at me from the inside. Muscles and bodily functions ruptured, and blood poured from my nose as the pain became too overwhelming to bear. I reeled, paralysed by the force of it, and forced myself to stay conscious while Baldr’s liquid flesh flowed up my arm, his features blurring from beautiful to distended and then nothing at all.

I couldn’t get it off of me; it poured across my body, down my sleeves and across my back until enough had been violated to make the difference, and then the changes became internal: spasms and twitches and lumps shifting under the skin. Baldr didn’t know what he was doing and that made it worse – but then the pain subsided abruptly, mobility restored and damage healed, and I felt much better.

A jarring sense of wrongness hit as my lungs failed to expel their pent-up breath. The feeling intensified when they did a moment later than expected, under someone else’s control.

Reflexively, I tried to breathe again, putting all my willpower behind it. I tried to twitch a finger. I tried to move my eyeballs.

Nothing.

Baldr hadn’t been bluffing. Trapped in my own body, the centre of my powers and control, I could do nothing but scream. And even that had been folded into silence.

I held out my hand, though I wasn’t the one moving it. I took a deep breath, still shaking with adrenaline I didn’t instigate, and felt myself break into a wide, delighted smile.

“How simple that was,” my lips spoke. It felt wrong. “To think it would be this easy.”

Every way I might have responded had been taken from me. I seethed behind the outward satisfaction on my face.

I shifted, cycling through a few different forms all ethereally beautiful, only to settle back at the one Baldr had started with, delicate and ice-pale. My eyes shifted towards Enki, still dedicated to his task even now. The soft scraping of clay scratched through the infinite cavern.

“Well?” my voice demanded of the engraver. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

Come on, Lucy, I thought. This was the time to bring out one of his devious plans.

“I need to focus,” the devil responded instead, as if Baldr taking me over had been nothing more remarkable than stooping to pat a dog. “If I’m to do my job, it needs to be done without catastrophic side effects rippling through history.”

“You really are interminably slow, you know that?” I commented. “Both mentally and in effectiveness. I can do your job, and faster.” I paused, rolling the tip of my tongue against my teeth as if checking for changes. Inwardly, I tried to find an edge of Baldr to peel back from the rest and force my escape.

There was nothing.

“Would you like to?” Enki offered. He looked up from the small plinth and turned, coming face to face with me at last, and offered up a small metal stylus in the palm of his hand. “It would be an honour.”

I eyed the implement, then Enki’s sincere face. It looked tired and mildly conflicted, and not like it belonged to a liar. In the shadow of his body, fresh Akkadian script curved two-thirds of the way down the pedestal, coming to an abrupt stop mid-symbol.

“Does it have to be on clay?” my lips asked.

Don’t, Lucy, I thought, but the words never made it out of my head.

“The material is unimportant,” Lucy answered. “What matters is –”

He froze, caught between breaths, and didn’t finish the sentence.

“Good,” I said, filling the abrupt hush. I left him to marinate frozen in the silence, alone but for myself in Baldr’s intimate prison, and took a few steps along the edge of the edict.

I tried again to find the physical point where Baldr ended and I began, but there was no doing so. It didn’t exist. My breaths were slow and calm, no longer my own. I was still here, where ‘here’ meant I could only be a passenger to another and feel everything in the process.

I had an approximate idea what was coming. No matter how much I strained, my muscles wouldn’t respond.

“You tried so hard,” Baldr said sympathetically, using my eyes to scan the vista of expanding symbols floating illuminated in the dark. He wasn’t talking to Lucy. “But I’ve seen how this ends. It ends with me. You were the last possible point of uncertainty. Now that you’re gone, every forwards path belongs to me. And I declare they will only end one way.”

My – his – gaze brushed the exit I’d come in by, and lingered. Abruptly, Baldr turned back towards the god at the plinth. Lucy’s lips were still parted, cut off mid-word, the sliver of metal still in his hand.

Baldr plucked it out of his grip, twirling it from finger to finger. I felt his breath stutter and quicken in the tantalising rush of anticipation. I stopped straining and tried slowing down for a more controlled bid at bodily reclamation. It didn’t make an iota of difference.

“Stasis,” my captor stated into the silence. “What a wonderful gift from Vishnu. Though we’ll have to be careful not to overuse it.”

There was no ‘we’ in this situation.

Baldr reached out to place a hand either side of Enki’s neck, soft and delicate. Then he pushed down. When the shoulders offered resistance, he kept pushing. I endured as the bones of Lucy’s knees and shins crunched sickeningly beneath him, and his collarbone shattered soon after. I told myself the fingers weren’t mine. Nor was the smile. Or the stomach that failed to turn.

It was mild by Baldr’s standards. I doubted he understood who he was really attacking, or the consequences would have been worse. But to see even Enki, formerly the strongest being alive, laid so easily low was a symbol I’d replay forever.

As it was intended.

Shortened gruesomely, the body now lined up with the end of the glyphs. Baldr dragged Lucy in front of the plinth and poised the stylus above his chest, as if to carve a continuation of the unfinished amendment into the god’s skin. But impatience – or lack of ability – seemed to win out, and he slit one wrist and then the other before pulling Lucy’s head back by the hair. Neck thus exposed, he rammed the tip of the stylus into it, crushing the airways in the process until the tiny silver spear pinned the body to the plinth.

Choice seemed like a concept that was about to become a distant memory. For now, it stayed fresh in my mind. I watched the details closely. Somehow, the worst part was my inability to cry.

Time restarted and gravity along with it. Lucy’s head dropped forward, dragging along the stylus with a terrible, gut-wrenching noise.

I couldn’t cry.

“I don’t need your protections,” Baldr informed him. “I want them to know I’m here. As of now, the greatest gift you can offer is your ongoing entertainment, and you can do that as well in the past as any. I look forward to us meeting again.”

So that’s was it, then. Enki’s damaged hand rose to pull at his ruined neck, but his fingers were slick with blood and weak. I lost sight of him as Baldr once again faced the entrance.

I wasn’t sure why until my fingers pulled at the groove of the tunnel, teasing it out of its platform lodgings. Somehow, it slid out from the structure as a corporeal object, nothing like the tunnel I’d walked out of, but dark and solid. With that small, impossible action, my perception inverted; the dark spaces in the air revealing themselves as the true edict lettering; the platforms the gaps in between. We stood in the empty space between giant shadowy glyphs tapering to a discernible narrow point in the distance; the path onwards hidden in plain sight from the beginning.

Loki, said Lucy’s voice in my head. Just mine.

He had seen it, then.

I couldn’t respond, and didn’t know what I would have said to him. Everything that had come to pass had happened because of me.

He can’t see through time, the devil spoke.

And he would know. He’d recently possessed a seer.

Critical mass had undoubtedly been reached in this era. There wasn’t anything we could do to stop Baldr here. But in the past, where modifications drained away into their original shapes, it was a different matter.

And I understood. There was always a door number three, and this time I’d failed to see it. I’d been too close, the false dichotomy of Loki versus Baldr eating up too much of my mental real estate. Because it couldn’t be either one of us who went back.

It had to be both.

I would never make it far enough to travel alone; that ship had sailed. Baldr could and presumably would have, which would have sent him back into the void, either to an infinite time loop or temporary setback, depending on the state of the time reversal edict’s marker. My past self would be none the wiser, and Baldr would be that much closer to escape.

But if we both went, Baldr would go to the void and I to my shitty desk under shitty management with no powers to my name and a giant-sized serving of information and trouble.

For that, all I had to do was endure.

Well, aside from the fact no one but Enki had ever experienced what it was like to reverse time, and he wasn’t in a state to be questioned about nasty surprises.

Importantly, it wasn’t yet over. Against the odds, Lucy had taken me as far as he could.

The rest was now up to me.