Chapter 45 – Domestic Disputes Destroy City Blocks

The diner lasted about thirty seconds after I picked up my fork.

That’s honestly longer than I expected, given the amount of divine rage building between the two goddesses sitting across from each other. The air tasted like ozone and burnt sugar, reality warping at the edges of my vision.

Then Thalia stood up.

“You’ve ruined our morning.”

Her voice was soft, almost gentle, but the temperature dropped so fast my breath came out in white clouds.

“I’ve improved it! Kai was bored with just you, Kai needed entertainment!”

Loki bounced to her feet, her hair shifting from pink to electric blue.

“He needed peace. He needed me. He doesn’t need a chaotic child playing dress-up.”

“Child? I’m older than your concept of time, you possessive—”

The windows exploded outward.

Not shattered, exploded, glass turning to glittering dust that hung suspended in the air like frozen stars. The walls peeled back like someone opening a can, metal and wood and brick just folding away from the bubble of warped space we occupied.

I kept my fork in my hand and grabbed my coffee mug.

Priorities.

Dad vanished in a shimmer of light, probably teleporting to a better vantage point to watch the show. Coward.

The other diners were screaming but their voices sounded distant, muffled, like they existed in a different layer of reality. Thalia had probably shielded them from the worst of it.

Small mercies.

“You don’t own him!”

Loki’s shout came with a wave of prismatic light that tore through the booth, turning the velvet seats into origami swans that flew away.

“I claimed him first. I’ve loved him longest. You’re nothing but a distraction.”

Thalia raised her hand and the floor beneath Loki turned to black ice, smooth and endless as a frozen ocean.

Loki didn’t fall, she just floated there, grinning with too many teeth.

“Longest? You think time matters to me? I’ve rewritten causality for fun! I could make it so I met Kai before you were even born!”

“Try it and I’ll unmake you.”

The ceiling dissolved into stars, real stars, burning and distant and cold. Thalia’s dress billowed around her like liquid night, her eyes blazing with that terrible golden light.​

I stood up slowly, still holding my coffee.

The floor was gone but I was standing on something, some invisible platform that Thalia had left for me. My immunity meant their reality-warping couldn’t touch me directly, but basic physics still applied unless they specifically bent it in my favor.

“You think you’re the only one who can destroy? I’m chaos incarnate! I’m the breakdown of order! I’m—”

Loki snapped her fingers and gravity reversed.

Everything not nailed down flew upward. Tables, chairs, the entire kitchen range, all of it launched into the starry void above. I felt the pull but Thalia’s platform held me steady.

“You’re an annoyance.”

Thalia’s voice cut through the chaos like a blade through silk.

She gestured and the stars above us began to move, swirling into a spiral pattern that hurt to look at. Each star grew dimmer, colder, being sucked toward an invisible point at the center.

“Oh we’re doing cosmic horror? Fun! Let me try!”

The highway outside the diner started to twist. Asphalt curled up like ribbon candy, cars sliding sideways as the road itself decided physics was optional. The blockade tanks that had been parked three blocks away began floating, spinning end over end like children’s toys.

Soldiers were screaming but their voices sounded like laughter, like birdsong, like static. Loki had changed the fundamental properties of sound in a six-block radius.

Just because she could.

“He doesn’t want this! He wants peace and quiet and me!”

Thalia’s shout came with a wave of absolute zero. Frost exploded outward from where she stood, racing across the ground, up the remaining walls, over the floating debris. Everything it touched turned to crystalline ice sculptures, beautiful and terrible.

“He wants excitement! Adventure! He wants someone who makes him smile!”

“I make him happy!”

“You make him tired!”

They were both right, honestly, but I wasn’t about to say that out loud.

I took a sip of coffee and started walking. The platform extended beneath my feet as I moved, Thalia’s unconscious protection following me. Debris rained around me, ice and fire and broken reality, but nothing touched me.

My immunity saw to that.​

Behind me, I heard a voice shouting through a megaphone.

“BEHOLD! THE DIVINE ONE WALKS THROUGH THE FLAMES OF TRIBULATION UNTOUCHED!”

Elizabeth.

Of course Elizabeth was here.

I glanced back and saw the entire cult assembled at the edge of the destruction zone. They’d set up what looked like a viewing platform, complete with banners and flags bearing my face. Elizabeth stood at the front, tears streaming down her face, megaphone raised.

“THE GODDESSES WAR FOR HIS FAVOR! THIS IS THE PROPHESIED HAREM TRIBULATION!”

I was going to have words with her later.

So many words.

“You’re nothing but chaos with no purpose! Kai needs substance, depth, eternity!”

Thalia’s voice cracked like thunder. The spiral of dying stars above us began to collapse inward, forming a point of absolute darkness that started pulling everything toward it.

A black hole.

She was summoning a literal black hole in the middle of downtown.

“And you’re just darkness with attachment issues! Kai needs joy and laughter and freedom!”

Loki threw her arms wide and the fabric of space began to unravel. Not metaphorically, literally, like reality was a tapestry and she was pulling threads. The sky tore open revealing something beyond, something that existed in too many dimensions to process.

Buildings nearby started to sink into the ground or float away. Traffic lights turned into flowers, mailboxes became abstract sculptures. The laws of physics were taking a coffee break.

I kept walking.

One foot in front of the other, coffee mug in hand, pancakes long abandoned but not forgotten.

To the cultists watching, I probably looked like some kind of divine being striding through apocalyptic destruction with perfect calm. Elizabeth was shouting something about “Supreme Indifference” and “The Warden’s Grace.”

To me, I was just trying to get to a spot where both goddesses could actually hear me when I told them to knock it off.

The ground beneath the city started to crack. Real structural damage now, not just cosmetic reality-warping. Subway tunnels collapsed, water mains burst, the foundation of buildings groaned under impossible stress.

This had gone from a lovers’ spat to a genuine disaster.

“HE LOVES ME!”

“HE TOLERATES YOU!”

“HE DREAMS OF ME!”

“HE DREAMS OF PEACE AWAY FROM YOU!”

Their voices overlapped, reality fracturing further with each declaration. The black hole above pulsed, growing larger. The tears in space spread wider, showing glimpses of other worlds, other dimensions, things that should never touch this reality.

A tank flew past my head, spinning lazily.

A street lamp landed point-first in the ground next to me, its light turning purple.

Someone’s car transformed into a flock of origami birds mid-flight.

I stopped walking.

Found a relatively clear patch of broken asphalt that hadn’t turned into gelatin or lifted into the void. Set my coffee mug down carefully on a chunk of rubble.

My vacation was over.

Had been over the moment Dad called, honestly, but I’d been in denial. Hoping for just a few hours of normal breakfast, normal coffee, normal boredom.

Instead I got a territorial dispute between cosmic entities that was about to erase six city blocks.

The black hole pulsed again, closer, hungrier.

The space tears spread, reality bleeding at the edges.

I took a breath. Let it out slowly. Felt the weight of absolute exhaustion settle over my shoulders like a familiar coat.

Then I reached for that part of myself I usually kept locked away. The part that wasn’t just immune to their power but could command it. The authority I inherited from Dad, the weight of being something more than human, the Warden Voice that even monsters feared.​

I didn’t want to use it.

Using it meant admitting this was my responsibility, meant accepting that I couldn’t just be a tired guy who wanted pancakes.

But the alternative was watching the city collapse.

I straightened my spine, rolled my shoulders, and prepared to speak.

One word would do it. One command delivered with the full weight of absolute authority. They’d stop because they’d have no choice, because that voice came from something older and deeper than their obsession.

I opened my mouth.