The aftermath of the Planet-God's shattering hung in the void like suspended dust. The twelve Olympians, scattered and seething, were momentarily paralyzed by their own discord and the staggering presence of the transformed Shaper. Nicholas, now a ten-kilometer titan of woven fate and supreme magic, felt the new power thrumming through the galaxies of his being. It was a profound, almost terrifying clarity. He could sense the ley-lines of the cosmos, the inherent spell-structure of reality, the ebb and flow of arcane potential as clearly as he once felt the wind.
But his work was not finished. His gaze, cold and methodical, swept past the stunned figures of Zeus and Poseidon, past Hera's icy glare and Ares's impotent fury. It landed upon three figures who had not been part of the fused avatar, who had remained on the fringes of the battle, their power more subtle and woven into the background of existence: the Moirai.
The Three Fates hovered together, a single, tri-headed entity of glowing golden thread. Their form was less a body and more a living knot in the tapestry of destiny. Lachesis, who measured the thread; Clotho, who spun it; Atropos, who cut it. Together, they were the administrators of the Fate authority. And now, separated from the direct protection of the fused Olympian might and reeling from the metaphysical shockwaves, their connection to that vast domain was exposed, shimmering and vulnerable.
The same strategy that had worked on Hecate presented itself. Their authority was not brute force; it was administration, the careful, impartial management of destiny's ledger. It could be… persuaded.
Once again, Nicholas reached for the Great Prophecy. The river of mortal desire for an end to divine tyranny was still a potent, directed force. He refined the hook, this time fashioning it not as an end, but as an inevitability. He cast it towards the triune consciousness of the Fates. To beings whose entire existence was the perception of inevitable paths, the sensation was irresistible—a cosmic current so strong it felt like the final, correct direction of all things. It was the logical conclusion to the story they had helped write.
As their collective will strained against and was drawn into this manifested "inevitable conclusion," Nicholas acted. Through the channel of the prophecy's touch, he unleashed another torrent of the Atrium's purified faith. This was belief honed by his Unknowns, faith in order, in consequence, in a destiny that made sense. It washed over the shimmering, complex weave of the Fates' connection to their domain.
It began to work. The ancient, symbiotic bond between the three sisters and the concept of Fate, a bond forged at the dawn of their existence, began to soften. The psychic glue of eons of mortal stories and divine decrees, which tied the authority to their specific identities, started to dissolve under the relentless, clarifying flow. Nicholas felt his own essence, already holding forty percent of Fate, begin to resonate, to expand, ready to absorb the unraveling threads and claim the administrative core…
But across the gulf of space, in the glittering, mead-soaked halls of Valhalla, an alarm was triggered.
Odin, the All-Father, the One-Eyed King of the Aesir and co-master of the Magic domain, was in the midst of a deep, prophetic trance when he felt it. A seismic shift in the foundation of arcane power. A vast portion of the authority he had shared stewardship of for millennia didn't just change hands; it was decisively claimed, its balance tipping overwhelmingly to one side. The sensation was like a mountain range he'd known his whole life suddenly vanishing, replaced by a foreign, monolithic peak. His single eye snapped open, blazing with runic fire.
"Who?" the word was a whisper that shook the roots of the World Tree, Yggdrasil. He cast his sight across the Nine Realms, across the mortal world. The battle at the transplanted Olympus had been hidden under veils of spatial distortion and prophetic static, a private war. But the theft of magical primacy was a beacon, a clarion call that could not be hidden. It screamed across the metaphysical spectrum.
His gaze, piercing time and space, found the source. A dead star-system, five light-years from Earth. The shattered remnants of Olympus. A colossal new god, thrumming with stolen magic. And now, reaching for the very Fates themselves.
Odin did not roar. He did not summon an army. There was no time for speeches or diplomacy. This was an existential violation. A rival had not just challenged a pantheon; they had altered the fundamental balance of a primary cosmic authority. This demanded a response of absolute, overwhelming finality.
He stood from his high seat, Hliðskjálf, and gripped his spear, Gungnir. He did not point it at the distant star-system. He pointed it at the floor of his hall, and spoke a single, guttural command in the tongue of creation.
"Yggdrasil. Bore."
In the void near the scattered Olympians, space itself vomited.
It wasn't a portal. It was an uprooting. A storm of raw spatial energies, green and silver and blinding white, erupted into being. The very light from distant stars was twisted and bent, pulled into a vast, swirling vortex that formed a colossal, impossible circle of fractured luminescence. Within this maelstrom, reality groaned. The local laws of physics—already battered by the god-war—buckled entirely. Gravity became a suggestion. Time stuttered. The very concepts of "here" and "there" blurred into a screaming haze of potential.
And from the heart of this cosmic wound, it grew.
A branch of the World Tree. But to call it a branch was like calling a continent a twig. It was a limb of a reality itself, thicker than a planet, studded with glowing runes the size of cities and leaves that were swirling nebulae. It was the branch that held Jötunheimr, the land of the Frost Giants. And it did not gently extend.
It swung.
Like an interdimensional whip cracked by a mad god, the Jötunheim-branch lashed across the tortured void. Its target was not Nicholas alone. It was the space containing both the Shaper and the shimmering, vulnerable forms of the Moirai. Odin's logic was brutal and efficient: crush the thief and secure the contested authority in one apocalyptic blow. The branch moved with the inevitable, world-ending force of cosmic inevitability, trailing the screaming frost of a dead realm and the shattered spatial geometry of a broken universe. It wasn't an attack meant to wound. It was an erasure.
The scattered Olympians, already reeling, were sent tumbling like leaves in a hurricane by the mere pre-storm of its arrival. The Fates, their golden threads whipping in the sudden, terrible gale, let out a silent, collective shriek of terror.
Nicholas, his absorption of the Fate authority interrupted at its most critical juncture, looked up. His ten-kilometer form, still vibrating with newfound magical supremacy, now faced a force of an entirely different, more primordial order. The wrath of the cosmos's architecture, given focused, vengeful purpose, was attacking his prize.
The branch filled his vision, a tidal wave of wood, ice, and screaming reality.
To be continued…
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