Thirty billion years after the first sunrise, the world no longer remembered innocence.
Planet Pangea drifted through the void like a god's final thought—immense beyond reason. From the blackness of space, its single supermassive continent dominated the world, a slab of land so vast that seas seemed ornamental. Then there was the Pacific ocean with enough water to drown present earth ten times over. Islands scattered in it like fragments of an earlier, broken design.
This was a world made for gods.
Eshu returned to home annoyed.
The Amazons had been restless again—unusual coordination, unusual defiance. They had forgotten their place at the crossroads of fate and consequence. He had reminded them. Firmly. Still, as he stepped out of hyperspace using his messenger authority and back into the Yoruba Dominion, the irritation lingered.
Strange timing, he thought.
Hmmm... he mummored to himself, staff tapping stone, then shrugged "women". At least he had put them in their place.
The joke went unanswered.
Eshu stopped.
The Dominion smelled of death—not mortal death, but the heavier stench of ended divinity. The sky fractured into uneven bands of color, as if reality itself had been wounded and never properly healed. Shrines lay overturned. Sacred groves burned with a fire that consumed meaning before matter.
Orishas lay dead.
Not fallen—slaughtered.
Some bodies still existed, broken and bleeding divine essence into the soil. Others had been erased so completely that only warped space marked where they had once stood. Death had not claimed them gently. Chaos had not danced with them.
This had been deliberate.
Eshu's eyes widened a bit.
And then he saw it.
Through every crossroads, every threshold between worlds, the same vision unfolded—cities burning, pantheons collapsing, divine lineages severed mid-prayer. It was not only the Yoruba Dominion.
It was everywhere.
Every god with skin the color of night.
Every people born of that same ancient shade.
Targeted. Systematically dismantled.
Eshu's jaw tightened.
So, he said softly, it's come to this. He had always expected something like this, especially not with what lay underneath the Dominion. Any deity who knows what to search for will eventually find it. But it doesn't matter, as long as he's here, things are still salvageable.
CRACKLE!!!
The sky tore open.
Lightning descended—not wild, laughing lightning, not the drunken thunder of Zeus—but storms that moved with intent. Greek standards cut through the heavens, followed by gods who should have been enemies: Roman, Norse, Celtic—marching together in perfect, unnatural alignment.
That alone was an abomination.
They had never agreed before.
Zeus emerged at their head, lightning coiled tight in his grasp. His eyes locked onto Eshu.
"Stand aside," Zeus said. No arrogance. No mockery. Just command.
Eshu tilted his head.
"When did you lot learn cooperation?" he asked lightly. "Did someone finally teach you manners?"
They attacked immediately, not in chaos but in an unnatural and eerie order that these deities were not known for.
Ares' blade tore through space. Odin's spear pinned probability. Thor's hammer shattered mountains that hadn't yet decided to exist. Eshu vanished between blows, reappearing at crossroads only he could see—laughing, bleeding, weaving deception into survival.
He was not invincible.
But he was Eshu.
He twisted attacks mid-flight, turned intent against itself, sent death wandering where it pleased. Gods fell—not erased, but misled into endings they hadn't foreseen. Battlefields inverted. Paths led nowhere. Chaos sang.
Still, there were too many.
And then—
Everything stilled.
The storm clouds gathered inward, collapsing into a single, suffocating mass. Thunder rolled once, heavy with finality.
A presence descended.
It was not Zeus.
It was a storm given authority—wind, lightning, rain, all kneeling to a will that claimed the sky as birthright rather than battlefield.
The gods who still retained their sense of self recoiled.
"I AM YAHWEH," the presence declared.
The name struck the world like a law being passed retroactively instantly overwriting the will of every other lesser deity.
Eshu stared, searched his memories for where he had heard that name, then he remembered.
Yahweh, A storm god or he was supposed to be had usurped his father El's throne long ago. One who had risen quietly, replacing old gods not with war—but with revision. Shrines renamed. Myths edited. Faces swapped until worship forgot what it once belonged to.
Yet—
Eshu's eyes narrowed.
Something was wrong.
This presence wore Yahweh's authority too cleanly. Too absolutely. Like a mask fused to the face beneath.
"You climbed fast," Eshu said carefully. "Too fast for someone who began as weather."
The storm did not answer the accusation.
Instead, it took control of every thing it considered it's own element including the replaced and dead deities. Then in an uncanny manner using everything that can be called a mouth to speak.
"Give up the Ordinance of Heaven"
Eshu laughed, breathless and bitter and looked at the staff in his hand.
Hahhh...
"So you're not here to rule," he said. You're here to make your truth reality. Just what are you? He wondered.
The pressure increased. Reality bent toward obedience.
Eshu knew then—he could not win.
Not with trickery.
Not with chaos.
Not with death.
So he chose mutual destruction, he'd rather die than let some being wear his existence like some fancy clothes, if his was fancy in the first place.
He planted his staff at the deepest crossroads he knew—the one buried beneath gods, beneath stories, beneath time itself—and screamed a name that had not been spoken in fullness since his creation.
"OLORUN!"
The Monarch of Deities answered.
Not fully, he wasn't exactly alive.
Time was not Olorun's domain—not entirely nor any of their Pantheon for that matter. The response came raw, uncontrolled, a godhead too vast forced through a fracture too small.
Time as he knew it reversed. But pulling the flow of time backwards without fully understanding the consequences on fate and destiny caused a backlash. Pangea shattered, shrinking, shedding its impossible mass.
Earth re-emerged—small, fragile, prehistoric. Continents broke apart like drifting memories. Gods were torn from their thrones and sealed into sub-dimensions, their godheads locked away like forbidden thoughts.
Memory collapsed.
Names vanished.
Worship ended before it began.
Even Eshu was not spared.
His divine soul fractured—scattered across time, across flesh, across futures that had no idea what they had lost.
The storm was gone.
Yahweh—or whatever wore the name—was undone.
But the cost—
The universe shuddered, settling into a quieter lie.
And yet—
Fate does not tolerate divergence forever.
Paths may split. Timelines may scatter.
But after enough distance—
They converge.
This time, the convergence would not stop at gods.
It would sweep the entire universe.
And somewhere, in a small world that did not remember being vast, an echo of a fragment of Eshu waited.
At a crossroads.