once a major goddess, but the loss of her believers over time has significantly reduced her powers. She is often coquettish toward Dream, who sometimes goes to her for advice or companionship; but she has often claimed never to have been his lover. Bast has also appeared in issues of Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl, wherein she is one of the chief goddesses worshiped by the Amazons of Bana-Mighdall. She appears in Sandman Presents: Bast: Eternity Game (2003), where she attempts to regain her lost power. The Presence/The Creator The Presence is the Sandman universe's equivalent of a Supreme Being, and he shares many characteristics with the standard Abrahamic God, such as almost never taking a physical form, being a Creator deity, and having unmatched power. Nevertheless, Gaiman has on several occasions stated that he never intended the Creator to be any specific religion's god, just as he makes it clear in the first appearance of the abode of the angels, the Silver City, that it "is not Paradise. It is not Heaven. It is the Silver City, that is not part of the order of created things", although the Silver City is often identified as "Heaven" in the Lucifer comic book series. In that series, one of the critical turning points is the Presence's abandonment of his Creation, which leads to a large number of problems, including struggles to claim the power that the Creator has abandoned, to make the destruction of the universe inevitable and to the slow unraveling of the universe due to the disappearance of the Name of the Creator written on every atom in existence. This is an ongoing storyline in Lucifer. Loki Loki is a trickster god seen in Season of Mists; based on the Norse god Loki. In his own form, Loki is a tall, thin man with yellow eyes and long red hair that resembles flames; but he is capable of assuming any appearance at will. He is sometimes nicknamed 'Lie-Smith' and 'Sky-walker' by other characters. In The Sandman He is temporarily freed from his punishment by Odin to accompany his negotiations for the rulership of Hell; whereafter he deceives Odin and Thor into imprisoning another god in his place, but fails to fool Dream, who frees the other god and sends a simulacrum of Loki to take his punishment, in exchange for Loki's debt to himself. Loki returns in The Kindly Ones,