Divine Execution: Volume I - Fate's Decision

When The Sky Broke Again

There were storms, and then there were omens.

Odin had learned the difference long before Olympus ever fell.

He stood alone in the highest observatory of Omnipotence City, one hand braced on the stone rail as the void above the glass dome churned. The stars here did not sit in neat constellations; they moved like a living map, threads of light lacing together to show what was, what might be, and what should never happen.

Tonight, they were wrong.

Huginn and Muninn sat on either side of him, black eyes bright as obsidian pearls. Their feathers were ruffled, restless. The ravens hated when the stars lied.

"Easy," Odin murmured, his voice low and graveled with centuries of command. His one remaining eye, ringed with faint scars of old bargains, narrowed on the swirling sky. "Show me again."

The dome obeyed.

Tendrils of light folded inward, the map of realms tightening. Midgard, Helheim, Duat, Tartarus, the Nine, the Infernos, all woven around the same impossible crack. Lightning split the void, not white but blinding gold, carving a jagged line across every layer of reality it touched.

Then, with cruel inevitability, the lightning bent.

It curved.

It formed a shape he had not seen since the night Olympus burned.

A jagged, flaming Z.

The air in the observatory grew thin. Huginn let out a sharp croak; Muninn's wings flared in agitation. Odin's fingers dug into the rail hard enough to crack stone.

"Impossible," he whispered.

He had been there when they put Zeus down. He had stood beside Athena, Anubis, Loki, Ares, and a hundred other gods when the sky-dictator's reign finally ended. He had watched the thunderer fall, watched his own spear drink that stolen lightning and pin it to the ruins of Olympus.

He had felt the thread cut.

And yet.....

The dome shifted, dragging his gaze downward. Past the bright realms and their glittering cities, past the quiet dark where forgotten gods slept, down into a place that should not have existed anymore.

The husk of Olympus.

Not the mountain that once stood in the mortal world, but the echo of it anchored in the divine. A shattered citadel of white stone and gold, floating on broken cloud-ruins, locked and sealed by every pantheon that had joined the coup.

It should have been dead.

Something moved.

Odin leaned forward despite himself, every instinct howling.

The vision plunged closer. The ruined throne hall appeared columns cracked, mosaics shattered, the once-grand ceiling open to black nothing. Chains of sigils and runes crisscrossed the space, pulsing with the binding spells of a hundred gods.

In the center of that cage, hunched and shadowed, there was...

No.