And then Nicholas began the final working.

  He reached out with his will—not just his own will, but the combined, harmonized will of every god now connected to him. He drew upon their authorities as if they were his own, weaving them into a single, unified instrument of cosmic power.

  Poseidon's seas. Zeus's skies. Hades's death. Odin's wisdom. Thor's thunder. Freyja's fertility. Apollo's light. Athena's strategy. All of it—every domain, every authority, every scrap of divine essence that had ever belonged to the Western pantheons—flowed into Nicholas like rivers into an ocean.

  His form, already ten kilometers of woven cosmic tapestry, began to expand.

  Fifteen kilometers. Twenty. Thirty. He grew beyond the scale of planets, beyond the scale of stars, becoming a being whose true dimensions could no longer be measured in mere distance. His body was no longer just threads and galaxies—it was the concept of Western divinity made manifest, the living embodiment of everything the old gods had been and everything the new order would become.

  He grasped.

  His left hand closed around Olympus—the entire transplanted realm, with its temples and palaces, its gardens and arenas. The realm shuddered, then obeyed, compressing into a sphere of golden light that floated in his palm.

  His right hand reached deeper, into the shadowed spaces between worlds, and grasped the Underworld. Hades's domain, with its endless grey plains and its rivers of forgetfulness, coalesced into a sphere of silver and black.

  His will extended further, across the gulf of space and reality, and found Asgard. The golden realm of the Aesir, Valhalla's feasting halls and the gleaming spires of the gods, became a sphere of burnished bronze light.

  Beyond Asgard, the other Eight Realms followed—Alfheim, with its light-elves and luminous beauty; Svartalfheim, with its dark craftsmen and shadowed forges; J?tunheim, the land of the frost giants, its ancient ice and primal fury; Vanaheim, with its fertile fields and Vanir magic; Niflheim, the realm of mist and cold; Muspelheim, the land of fire and Surtr's slumbering rage.

  All of them. All eight. Each compressed into spheres of light, each held in the web of his expanding will.

  And finally, he grasped Yggdrasil itself.

  The World Tree was not a realm—it was the structure that held the realms. It was older than most of the Norse gods, created as a primordial being in the minds of oldest humans, older than most of Nicholas's new subjects, a primordial artifact of cosmic order. It resisted.

  For a single, terrible moment, the Tree fought him. Its roots, still penetrating the Earth, pulsed with ancient defiance. Its branches, stretching into dimensions beyond counting, pushed against his grasp.

  Nicholas smiled.

  He was the Dominator of Magic. He was the Weaver of Fate. He was connected to every god in the Western cosmos. And Yggdrasil, for all its primordial power, was just a tree.

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  He twisted.

  The World Tree screamed—a sound that was not sound but existential protest, a shiver through every reality it touched. And then it too compressed, becoming a sphere of green-gold light, its roots and branches curling into itself like a sleeping serpent.

  All of them. Olympus, the Underworld, the Nine Realms, Yggdrasil itself. Held in the palm of the God-Emperor's will.

  Then he moved them.

  Not across space. That would have been trivial. He moved them across categories of existence, shifting them from their independent positions in reality to new locations within the Atrium's growing architecture.

  The souls came first. From every realm, every underworld, every afterlife—the dead, the dreaming, the waiting. They poured like rivers of light into the Shore of the Unconscious Sea, where the waters of potential lapped against infinite dreamscapes. The Fields of Asphodel became just another shore. The Elysian Fields became a particularly pleasant dream-continent. Valhalla's einherjar found themselves in an eternal mead-hall overlooking a sea of stars, their daily battles now fought against dream-monsters of their own choosing.

  The gods followed. They did not resist—they could not resist, not with Nicholas's fragments seated in their souls. They flowed like streams of conscious light into the Halls of the Ascendant, that vast, beautiful realm on the slopes of the World-Mountain. There they would find their places, their new domains, their roles in the order Nicholas was building.

  And then, with the realms emptied of souls and gods, Nicholas began the final, monumental work.

  He crushed them.

  Olympus, that glittering monument to Greek arrogance, collapsed into itself, its marble and gold and starlight grinding into raw, primordial potential. The Underworld, with its ages of accumulated death and memory, followed—its grey plains and black rivers dissolving into the stuff of creation. The Eight Realms, each a planet unto itself, crumbled like sandcastles before the tide. Yggdrasil, the World Tree, shattered—its wood becoming potential, its leaves becoming possibility, its roots becoming the threads of new destinies.

  All of it. Every divine realm of the Western world. Every structure built by mortal faith and divine will over millennia. Reduced to its essential components—the primordial stuff from which all realities are forged.

  And then Nicholas merged it.

  He took that vast, swirling ocean of raw potential—enough to build a hundred new pantheons, a thousand new worlds—and he poured it into the Atrium's World-Mountain.

  The mountain erupted.

  It had already been vast—a solar-sized structure at the heart of Nicholas's growing multiverse. Now it grew. It doubled in size. Then tripled. Then expanded beyond any scale Nicholas had previously conceived.

  The burning sea of the Cupbearer's domain expanded with it, becoming an ocean of iridescent flame that could swallow stars. The desert of time, the Witness's realm, grew to encompass epochs, its crystalline sands now holding the memories of civilizations yet unborn. The Keeper's libraries expanded into dimensions of knowledge that defied geometry. The Warden's labyrinth became a maze that could trap concepts themselves.

  And connecting it all, pulsing with renewed, incandescent life, was the Tree of Pathways. Circe's masterpiece, fed by the essence of Yggdrasil itself, blossomed. Its branches, now grown beyond measure, pierced every new world that seeded from the expanded mountain. Its roots, drinking from the combined essence of a dozen destroyed pantheons, anchored the entire structure in reality so firmly that nothing short of the universe's end could shake it.

  When the expansion finally ceased, the Atrium was no longer just a realm. It was a universe. A growing, living, breathing cosmos of interlinked worlds and possibilities, each one connected to the others through the Blood Pathways, each one sustained by the refined faith of billions, each one a testament to the vision of its creator.

  Nicholas hovered at its center, his form now so vast that the expanded World-Mountain was merely a throne beneath him. He felt every god in his network. He felt every soul in the dream-shore. He felt every world growing on the mountain's slopes, every new civilization taking its first tentative steps toward divinity.

  He was, truly and irrevocably, the God-Emperor of the West.

  And the universe had only just begun to tremble.