The city was already restless before the sky soured.
Tokyo's neon glow—the convenience-store fluorescents, the pachinko blare, the soft vending-machine hum—had long been the great counterspell against the night. But when Amaterasu withdrew her light, the city's machinery faltered. A pale dusk stretched over skyscrapers and alleys alike, refusing to deepen into true night yet never brightening to day. People looked up from their phones, from their noodles, from the easy anonymity of rushing home. They felt watched. And they were.
The Seeker stepped out from the subway at Shinjuku Station, scar prickling like a brand fresh pressed. He could almost smell it: singed skin, metallic tang, something half-recognized from the museum fire long ago. A man brushed against him, muttered an apology, then glanced down at his chest and recoiled as if he'd touched a hot coal.
The Seeker tugged his coat tighter. He'd hoped the crowded metropolis would blunt the gods' attention, but the opposite seemed true. Pantheons loved cities—so many eyes, so many prayers disguised as muttered curses, so many offerings of incense, ramen bowls, spilled beer. They fed well here.
A crow landed on the station sign. Not an ordinary one: its feathers glistened with oil-slick colors, and its eye, disturbingly pale, locked on him. Odin's emissary. The Seeker muttered a curse in half a dozen forgotten tongues, none strong enough to banish the bird. It only cocked its head, amused.
On the street, protesters pressed against a barricade. Some carried placards declaring the end of secular rule; others shouted for separation of myth and state. A banner painted with Kali's eyes fluttered beside a neat poster of the Virgin Mary. Chants tangled with police warnings, sirens bleating, and above it all a low, rhythmic drumming—the heartbeat of something older than politics.
The Seeker had no destination, only momentum. He followed the street into Kabukichō, neon still burning but weaker, like candles on the edge of a storm. A ramen shop's sign flickered out. A vending machine jammed mid-whir. Then, impossibly, the moon rose where it should not—west, vast and golden, a trickster's grin hung in the wrong quadrant of the sky.
Hermes was near.
"Don't look so grim," a voice whispered, playful and cruel, though the Seeker saw only a delivery boy weaving his bicycle through the crowd. "Some of us enjoy the theatrics."
The Seeker kept walking, refusing to acknowledge the god's presence aloud. A lesson hard-learned: gods loved recognition. Feed them attention and they grew teeth.
The crowd ahead parted with a soundless shudder. At its center stood a woman clothed in light, though the light seemed filtered, grudging. Amaterasu. People fell to their knees, not out of piety but because their legs refused to do otherwise. The Seeker fought the pull, gripping a lamppost until his knuckles bled white.
She turned her gaze on him, impersonal as sunlight through glass. Her lips did not move, yet he heard: Specimen.
The scar on his chest burned hot enough to sear. He could feel the glyph shifting beneath his skin, as if trying to answer her. He bit down on a cry.
A ripple passed through the square. On the rooftops, more crows gathered, black wings blotting out the manufactured dusk. Between the protestors, a woman in crimson robes appeared, dancing with knives too fast to follow. Each slash left an afterimage of flame. The crowd surged back. Some cheered. Some wept. Kali had joined the fray.
"Ah, and the matinee begins," Hermes murmured, materializing beside him now, cap pulled low, courier's satchel slung casually. He smelled of old coins and new ink. "You mortals never know whether to worship or run. Sensible instinct, really. Pity you can't do both."
"I'm not your plaything," the Seeker rasped, though the words felt feeble even as they left his mouth.
Hermes grinned. "Every marked one is a plaything. That scar makes you the board on which the game is played."
The Seeker shoved past, desperate to break the circle forming in the street. But the crowd thickened behind him, trapping him inside the pantheon's theater.
Amaterasu lifted her hand. The sky dimmed further, drowning neon in gray. Kali shrieked joy, a sound of childbirth and massacre entwined. Her blades clashed together, sparking crimson arcs. Odin's crows screamed overhead, a thousand wings like storm surf.
And in the middle of it, the Seeker's scar blazed openly now, coat useless to hide it. Strangers stared, whispered, fell to their knees or spat in fear. Each pantheon saw its own claim etched on his flesh.
He wanted to run. He wanted to tear the skin from his chest. Instead he did what he always did—he watched, trying to read the hidden mechanism. Beneath the chaos, patterns pulsed. Amaterasu's dusk overlapped with Odin's shadow, which tangled with Kali's fire. The scar beat in rhythm with all three.
The ground split. Not dramatically—at first, just a fissure in the asphalt, like an impatient fault line. But from it crawled a figure crowned in flickering flames, candles guttering around his head, eyes smoke-dark. Xiuhtecuhtli, the forgotten fire god. Tokyo's trash fires had called him, and he answered. He looked less divine than desperate.
The Seeker's scar responded instantly, glowing in sympathy. Fire had birthed it once, and fire greeted it again. The heat licked at him, alive.
The crowd screamed as the first police barricade collapsed. Protest banners burned. A convenience store's shelves detonated in sparks.
Agent Nakamura chose this moment to appear, as if conjured by bureaucracy itself. His suit was impeccable, his glasses fogged from the sudden heat. He grabbed the Seeker's arm with far more strength than expected.
"Come with me," he snapped.
The Seeker nearly laughed at the absurdity. "Where, exactly? Into whose custody this time? The Lantern Keepers'? The government's?"
"Anywhere but here," Nakamura said, dragging him into the nearest alley. "This city will not survive gods quarreling on its main street."
The alley was no refuge. Reflections in puddles twisted: Coyote's grin flashed, teeth too sharp. The Whisperer walked there, not in flesh but in suggestion, leaning against shadowed walls, tapping a beat only the Seeker's skull could hear.
"You still pretend choice exists," Coyote mocked. "But you're already the rope in their tug-of-war. Which end snaps first, hmm?"
The Seeker staggered, nearly falling. Nakamura hauled him upright, muttering about evac routes and helicopters. The words meant little against the roar outside.
The Seeker looked back once. He saw Amaterasu's hand raised like a judge's verdict, Kali spinning in ecstasy, Odin's crows blotting the heavens, Xiuhtecuhtli stumbling forward like a beggar demanding alms. Each god turned toward him, not Nakamura, not the crowd—him. Their gazes burned hotter than any scar.
Then Hermes' voice at his ear again, a whisper laced with laughter: "They're not asking you to pick sides, Scholar. They're demanding you become the side."
The words unmoored him.
The asphalt buckled. A shockwave tore down the street, shattering glass, flinging mortals like toys. The Seeker's chest flared so bright he could see bone in x-ray silhouette. His scream tore loose at last, raw, human, helpless.
And the gods answered.
Crows dove, fire surged, dusk collapsed into a well of shadow. Kali's knives carved symbols no language could contain. Each pantheon claimed the Seeker, and each denied the others. The contradictions should have annihilated him. Instead, impossibly, he held. His body shook, but he did not break.
The crowd, what remained of it, saw this and gasped as one: the scarred man who did not die. Some crossed themselves. Some pressed their heads to the pavement. Some livestreamed with shaking hands. The world was watching now.
Nakamura shielded his eyes. "What are you?" he whispered.
The Seeker almost said: Nothing. I'm nothing. But the scar burned, and the answer came unbidden: I am the flame you cannot smother.
Coyote laughed, high and cruel. "That's it, little scholar. Speak the riddle aloud. They've all heard it now."
The gods paused, if such beings could pause. Their attention, fractured, focused razor-sharp. Odin's ravens perched in sudden stillness. Amaterasu lowered her hand. Kali froze mid-spin. Even Xiuhtecuhtli straightened, hunger replaced with recognition.
The Seeker realized too late that he had crossed a threshold. Words, once spoken, are bargains. Especially when gods are listening.
The fissure beneath the city widened, swallowing streetlights whole. Neon signs winked out. The dusk thickened, pressing like velvet. And from the fissure rose not one pantheon, but many voices braided: praise, threat, plea, demand.
The Seeker's knees buckled. He pressed his hand to the scar, but it pulsed beyond his will, a lantern burning too bright to cover.
Nakamura tried to pull him away, but there was nowhere left to run.
The Seeker's last clear thought as the ground gave way: They don't want me as follower or foe. They want me as hinge. The door they cannot open alone.
The city screamed with him.
And then—darkness, not of night, but of stories unraveling.