The astral wasn’t tiring—shifting was. The one perk? It made for a decent nap—if he ignored the part where he kept drifting into the cage bars and smacking his head. Whatever magic Ellie had used to craft his prison, the fact that it spanned into the astral was astonishing to Rowan. He didn’t think any physical object existed in the astral and that magic alone helped with the senses of sight and hearing. Only a god or mighty magic user could even enter the astral.

  Only a god. Had Ellie crafted this prison from her soul? Was this cage an artifact?

  For reasons Rowan didn’t fully understand, the manifestation of gods existed simultaneously in the astral and reality. Ellie was clever—annoyingly so. Had she planned for him to enter the astral, designing the prison to hold him here? Or had she just blundered into an inescapable trap by accident, sealing every exit with her own soul? Marcus had not followed Rowan into the astral, likely because he was too arrogant to care or consider an intangible space. He wasn’t a shapeshifter either—and shapeshifters had to pay special attention to the astral, as that was where they swapped their forms. Ellie seemed much more like Marcus because she cared about the space she could manipulate and control. The astral was a place to watch and move.

  A spear of molten fire tore through the ceiling, splitting the crystal prison with a thunderous crack. Shards exploded outward, ricocheting off the walls. A few clipped Rowan’s astral form and bounced off—painful, but not fatal. If he’d been physical, he’d be dead.

  Rowan knew that spear—it was the artifact that Marcus had crafted and represented part of his power. Now, it lay shattered around the room—a red mist drifting off it.

  Tentatively, he pushed against the remains of the crystal cage, and the structure crumbled to dust. A faint white mist drifted off it—confirming it’s construction of Ellie’s soul.

  Rowan watched the opening above him, expecting to see Marcus following behind, but was startled to see the door to the room open and Ellie hobble in. She was bloody and bruised but still whole.

  “Rowan!” she screamed, spittle trickling from her mouth. “I feel your presence! Come out!”

  She held out her rod of light, and it flickered—but the light grew stronger. Ellie blinked. “My power… it’s returning.”

  Rowan did not want to wait for her to regain her strength and started drifting toward the hole Thadius had left, but he kept his eyes on Ellie.

  “Something’s changed,” she whispered. “There’s still an imbalance.”

  Because Rowan was looking down, he didn’t notice Gabriela's plummeting form until she plowed past him and smashed into the ground. Gabriela’s broken body lay unmoving, and after Rowan stopped spinning, he paused to watch.

  Ellie knelt down. “Marcus? I feel you. Are you alright?”

  When she touched Gabriela’s forehead, her eyes shot open, and they were pure black. “There’s no time! Around we go!” She cackled. “The tulips are here!”

  Rowan could feel Marcus’s soul in Gabriela’s body, but there was another feeling—a taint. Something that he felt around the demons. Thadius was free, and Marcus was here with Ellie, who was still in Gabriela’s body. Maybe this was Gretta’s doing, or maybe Thadius had done this to Marcus? Rowan had too many questions and suspected Marcus was not in his right mind.

  Rowan rose up, and as he reached the void, Gabriela screeched, “The Trickster flees!”

  That was all the motivation Rowan needed. He shifted into a raven as he left the astral and glided out into the void. Maybe on a good day, Ellie might have drawn enough magic to create a tide to bring him back, but she was all but tapped out.

  Rowan noticed that he wasn’t alone in the void. Dozens of small pink shapes, winged demons, flew around the green and purple stars that were Abby and Nadia. The largest form was that of Thadius, flying low over Abby’s green star, taking clawed strikes as if he could tear open reality with his hands—and Rowan suspected he could.

  The last time he had visited Abby, he had simply flown in, but she had let him in. Her defenses were up, and from the erratic flicker and dimming light, he worried that her strength was nearly spent.

  Rowan hovered in the void, staring down at Abby’s faltering green star. The demons swarmed around her light, clawing at the surface as if trying to peel it open. Nadia’s purple glow flickered, dimming under the relentless assault. The largest shadow—Thadius—raked his claws along the green light, and for a terrifying moment, Rowan swore he saw cracks spidering along Abby’s star.

  He wasn’t strong enough to fight Thadius. He wasn’t strong enough to fight even a single demon.

  But maybe he didn’t have to fight at all.

  Rowan’s mind raced, searching for an answer. He had always been different from the other gods. They were their own realms—vast, powerful, unmovable. He was the trickster, slipping between them, bending the rules, never bound to a single place. But what if, just this once… he became one?

  Stolen story; please report.

  What if he became one now?

  The thought was mad. The kind of mad that came with potential.

  Chaos surged around him, a current that he had always manipulated in small, subtle ways. A shift of luck. A trick of probability. But what if, instead of nudging it, he opened himself to it? What if he let it take him?

  No hesitation. Hesitation got people killed.

  Rowan pulled. He reached into the flow of chaos, deeper than he ever had before, deeper than he should, deeper than any reality had ever allowed him to.

  And then he became reality.

  The void warped. A distortion rippled outward, bending the space around him like a stone dropped into a reflection. The stars—Abby’s green, Nadia’s purple—flickered, caught in the wave. The demons reeled, their pink light stretching and twisting as the very fabric of non-reality convulsed.

  Chaos erupted—wild, raw, unchecked. A tide that had never belonged here. The void had always been nothing—no reality, no order, no rules. But this was different. Gods pulled from the Heart of Magic all the time, drawing its power through their domains. They had even used it against him, warping its tides to drag him through the void.

  But never like this. Never this much. This wasn’t a current—it was a flood. A riptide strong enough to reshape the nothingness. It was the same force that had once pulled him to Abby’s domain, to Ellie’s, to Nadia’s. But this time, he was the destination.

  The demons shrieked.

  Pink lights flickered wildly as they flapped their monstrous wings, caught in the tide. The void was still unfamiliar to them; they had never learned how to resist its currents, had never needed to. Now, as chaos rushed into Rowan and into chaos made reality, they were caught in the pull, tumbling toward him like leaves in a whirlwind.

  Most of them.

  As the chaos swallowed the demons whole, Rowan caught a glimpse of a single shadow tearing free—Thadius, fighting against the tide, claws digging into nothing, resisting. He snarled, his red eyes locking onto Rowan’s for a fleeting moment before the darkness obscured him.

  Then he was gone. Not captured. Just... gone.

  Abby’s green glow steadied. Nadia’s light flared bright enough to send shadows recoiling. The demons tried to scramble, tried to latch onto something, anything, but there was nothing solid to grasp. They screamed as they were swallowed into Rowan’s forming reality.

  Rowan felt them inside him.

  It was an alien sensation, one he didn’t have time to process. He had never done this before—never been a place instead of a person. He wasn’t creating a world—no land, no sky, no form. Normally, shaping a reality might be safe enough, just a part of being a god. But not with these creatures.

  If he gave them something, they could twist it, infect it—infect him. So he gave them nothing. Just endless emptiness, a prison without walls, without ground, without escape. A space where there was only absence.

  And then he moved.

  Rowan didn’t have a body anymore, didn’t have wings to beat or feet to push off from, but he could drift. The same way he had slipped between realities before, he instinctively found the edge. He only tried to go to purgatory from Earth, not the void. Now, with so much chaos surging through him, with the force of the demons being dragged along, it was inevitable.

  He drifted into a ragged tear—unlike the bright lights that typically guided him, this was a sickly pink that pulsed.

  For a moment, he felt stretched, unmade, scattered into a million pieces. And then—

  He was somewhere else. He was not a being with a body—but a consciousness holding a reality and to any observer, a burning blue energy.

  A vast, cavernous expanse stretched endlessly before him, its high stone ceiling lost in the dim light. The air was thick with the weight of old sorrow, pressing down like the walls of a tomb. This was purgatory—the space between realities, where broken gods faded and lost souls wandered.

  Rowan let go, and as he did, the raw chaos he had drawn into himself erupted outward. The surge of energy, uncontrolled and wild, crashed against the fragile edges of purgatory, seeking equilibrium. The tear Marcus had made shuddered and warped, the fabric of reality pulling itself back together—but imperfectly. The damage was mended, but fractures remained, thin cracks in the veil where magic still leaked through. A problem for another day, another fight.

  The demons spilled out of him, shrieking in confusion as they tumbled into the endless cavern. Shadows stretched along the stone walls, twisting with their flickering pink light. They scattered, their cries echoing in the oppressive gloom, disoriented, lost.

  Rowan didn’t wait to see what happened next. He had one last moment before the strain of it all collapsed in on him.

  He wrenched himself back into the void.

  Reality snapped—but something had changed. The void tear to purgatory shimmered unnaturally, as if it had been stretched too far and barely stitched back together. A lingering instability, subtle but present, coiled through the emptiness, like a fracture beneath the surface of a frozen lake, waiting for pressure to split it open.

  Rowan gasped as he felt his body again—small, fragile, human-shaped. But the void was unstable. The moment he tried to steady himself, reality lurched beneath him.

  He barely had time to shift—feathers, wings, a desperate beat of his wings—before gravity claimed him. His vision blurred in streaks of green, the scent of damp earth rising around him as he plunged into Abby’s world.

  He hit the ground hard. Moss cushioned his fall, but the impact still knocked the air from his lungs. The sky above was a canopy of massive trees, their emerald leaves glowing with inner light. Distant calls of unseen creatures echoed in the thick air. He knew this place.

  Abby’s world.

  A warm voice rumbled through the space around him. "Rowan?"

  He turned his head weakly, just in time to see a massive stag stepping between the trees, golden antlers catching the dim light. Abby’s voice came again, softer this time. “What did you just do?”

  Rowan smirked. “Trash day.”

  There was a blur between the astral and reality for a moment that he couldn’t control. He fought for solidity. The world tilted, and his vision swam. He tried to push himself up, but something felt wrong.

  His arms weren’t arms. His legs weren’t legs. He lifted one of them. It flopped. Tentacles?

  Ah, hell.

  Then—nothing.