The interview was at nine. I left at eight-fifteen, which should have been plenty of time, except that I spent the entire walk staring at the cracks in the pavement and wondering if this was really how it was all supposed to go.
Graduate. Apply. Interview. Work. Repeat.
I was twenty-three years old and already tired of the script.
It wasn't that my life was bad, exactly. I had an apartment — small but mine. I had a mother who called on Sundays and a handful of friends who invited me to things I half-attended. I was fed, clothed, and technically fine. But there was this hollow, persistent feeling that had been sitting behind my sternum for as long as I could remember, like a sound just below the range of hearing. An itch I couldn't quite reach.
I'd been smart enough in school — my teachers had said as much — but smart without direction is just potential going to waste, and I'd wasted mine with remarkable efficiency. While others chased degrees, I'd enrolled in online courses that felt safe and undemanding, filling the hours without filling the years. I told myself I was being practical. Really, I was being afraid.
The city moved around me in the way it always did — indifferent, loud, alive in every way I wasn't feeling — as I turned the corner onto Marchand Street and spotted the glass-fronted building where one Mr. Davies of Davies & Associates was waiting to assess whether I was worth his time.
I was halfway across the road when I heard it. Not a horn. Not a screech of brakes. Just a deep, mechanical roar that didn't belong, the sound of something enormous moving too fast in entirely the wrong direction.
I turned.
The truck was already close.
In the last sliver of a second that the universe gave me, I didn't think about my mother, or my apartment, or the job interview, or any of the things people claim to think about in moments like these. I thought: I never actually did anything, did I?
Then the world went very, very dark.
The darkness wasn't nothing. That was the first surprise. It had texture — a stillness that felt almost deliberate, like the pause between a question and its answer. I sat in it and waited, because there didn't seem to be anything better to do.
The second surprise was that I wasn't afraid. Annoyed, maybe. A little embarrassed that I'd been taken out by a truck on the way to a job I hadn't even wanted. But not afraid.
The third surprise was the light.
It came all at once, warm and enormous, and then he was there.
He shifted forms the way a bad television signal stutters between channels — one moment tall and silver-haired, dignified in a way that made the whole void feel smaller; the next, older, eyes crinkled, wearing a lanyard I was fairly certain had a convention badge on it. Back and forth, back and forth, until my non-existent stomach began to turn.
"Could you pick one?" I said. "You're making me nauseous and I'm not even sure I have a body right now."
The figure stilled, considered, and settled — with what I could only describe as a satisfied smirk — into the unmistakable face of Stan Lee.
"Better?" God asked.
"Infinitely." I looked him over. "I have to say, this is not what I was expecting."
"What were you expecting?"
"Clouds. A gate. Possibly a clipboard."
"We modernized." He folded his hands and regarded me with the patient expression of someone who had done this many, many times before. "Now. You have been brought here because your life was cut rather abruptly short, and the powers that govern such things have decided that you are owed a continuation."
I let that settle. "A continuation."
"A reincarnation. A new world, a new life — but with some agency in the matter, which most souls don't receive." He tilted his head. "Consider it compensation for the sheer uneventfulness of your previous existence."
I laughed despite myself. "Even God thinks I was boring."
"I think you were unused," he corrected, and there was something almost gentle in it. "There is a difference. Now — you will be given three wishes. Two must be used to shape the world you enter and the being you become. The third is yours freely."
The hollow feeling behind my sternum, the one that had lived there for twenty-three years — I felt it shift. Not disappear. Shift, like something that had been facing the wrong direction finally turning around.
"Alright," I said. "Then let's build something worth living in."
The world came first.
I'd always loved mythology — Greek, Norse, it didn't matter — and the fantasy worlds that borrowed from it, twisted it, made it something new. I'd read Richelle Mead's vampire novels until the spines cracked and watched Netflix's Ragnarok twice through during a particularly long and uneventful winter. I'd spent hours in the Shadowhunters universe, in the sprawling mythology of the DC multiverse, in the quiet ache of Persephone's Orchard with its immortals who felt things so deeply they'd built an entire world to hold the weight of it.
So when I described the nine realms — the first shaped from all of those overlapping mythologies, electric with magic and running with old blood; the second a spirit realm just wide enough to hold the new souls cycling through; the third, fourth, and fifth carved from the demon, human, and fairy worlds of the Shadowhunter universe; the sixth rebuilt from the DC CW's infinite crisis; the seventh the MCU in all its complicated, self-serious glory; the eighth a wild card for the monsters of Greek, Norse, and Hindu mythology to roam; and the ninth the gothic splendor of Mystic Falls and its complicated, bloodsoaked families — I described them the way a man who had been hungry for a very long time finally orders everything on the menu.
God listened. When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.
"The first realm," he said finally, "will run hotter than the others. The convergence of all those mythologies means the magical energy there will be... amplified. More volatile."
"I figured," I said. "That's fine. Makes it interesting."
He smiled at that. "It does indeed."
For the second wish, I asked to be born an immortal — the kind from Persephone's Orchard, long-lived but not untouchable, bound to the world's cycle of death and return. Then I paused. "Can you give them access to magic? I know it's not canon, but—"
"Adjustments can be made."
"Good. Then I want that. And for the third wish—" I thought about the four forces I'd always found fascinating in the DC shows — the Speed Force, the Strength Force, the Sage Force, the Still Force — and the extraordinary, almost terrifying things they did to the people who carried them. "I want the powers of all four forces."
God's expression shifted into something I could only call a divine version of we need to talk about scope.
"That," he said carefully, "would make you rather impossible to kill and rather impossible to challenge, and a world without meaningful challenge is simply your old life with better scenery."
I conceded the point. "One skill from each, then. You pick the limits, I pick the abilities."
"Now that is a deal."
From the Speed Force I chose something like Nora West-Allen's trick — appearing in a crack of lightning, moving between places the way thunder follows a strike. From the Strength Force I took the ability to grow, to become something larger than the body I'd been given when the moment called for it. From the Sage Force I took Bashir's strange and intimate gift — the ability to see through other people's eyes, to understand the world as they understood it, though I accepted God's caveat that it would never extend to influence. Seeing was enough. And instead of drawing from the Still Force, I asked for something different: mana manipulation, the ability to reach into the current of magical energy that ran beneath all things and shape it.
"These together," I said, turning them over in my mind, "will be enough."
"They will be more than enough," God agreed. "Which is precisely why I've left you the capacity to grow into them rather than arrive with full mastery. You'll earn what you become."
Fair, I thought. Actually fair.
"One last thing," I said, as the light around us began to shift, as I felt the strange and unignorable pull of somewhere else beginning to draw me forward. "When I'm born — can I be named Kronos? And born the same year as the immortal Rhea? And—" I hesitated, feeling faintly ridiculous. "I'd like to look like Björn Ironside."
God looked at me for a long moment over the frames of invisible glasses.
"The king of the Vikings."
"He has a good face."
"He does," God agreed, and laughed — the kind of laugh that sounded like it could rattle stars — and then I was gone.
The Mother's Account
The child did not want to be born.
Gaia had known difficult births. She had lived through two of her own, had sat beside women she loved and held their hands through nights that ended in silence instead of crying. She knew what that silence meant. She had learned not to brace against it, because bracing never helped.
But when the shaman finally drew the child from her — still, terribly still, his small chest refusing to rise — Gaia felt something break open in her that she had not known was left to break.
Her husband heard her cry out. He came through the entrance of the tent like a man walking into battle, and then he stopped, and she watched his knees buckle, and she thought: we cannot survive another one of these. Three times now. Three.
He began to curse. It started low, directed at no one, and then rose as his grief climbed with it, and he called on every god he knew — called them by name, called them cowards and thieves and worse — until he reached the very end of his list, until he had exhausted every deity he could name, until finally, in desperation or fury or both, he cursed the king of the Titans himself.
The lightning came immediately.
Not from inside the tent. From somewhere outside, somewhere close, a crack that silenced everything — her husband, the shaman, the wind — and in that silence:
Crying.
The most furious, indignant, alive crying she had ever heard.
The shaman spun around with an expression that would have been comical under any other circumstances. Gaia reached out her arms before the woman had even turned fully, and when they placed her son — red-faced and outraged and breathing, breathing — against her chest, she pressed her lips to his forehead and shook with something too large to be called relief.
"A blessing," the shaman said softly. "From the gods."
Gaia said nothing for a long moment. She studied her son's face — the particular set of his jaw, the furrow already forming between his brows as if he found the entire situation mildly irritating — and felt with absolute certainty that whatever had happened, it had not been a blessing casually given. This child had arrived from somewhere deliberate. Had been sent with intention.
"His name," the shaman prompted gently.
Gaia looked at her husband, still on his knees, tears cutting through the weathering on his face, and then back at the boy in her arms.
"Kronos," she said. "His name is Kronos."
Outside, the storm moved on. But inside the tent, something that had been wrong with the world for a very long time quietly righted itself.
And somewhere further away than distance, something that looked like Stan Lee smiled, and went back to whatever it is that gods do when no one is watching.