At the end of Three Parts Dead, the goddess Seril, believed dead for decades, returned to Alt Coulumb to gather worshippers and reunite with her lover, the god Kos. Unfortunately, the people of Alt Coulumb are reluctant to trust Seril after her long absence and the chaos that surrounded her departure and supposed death. Furthermore, powerful people with investments in Kos’ church regard his emotional attachment to the much less powerful goddess as a liability, and some see an opportunity to bring both Kos and Seril down and seize control of Alt Coulumb. The gods and their mortal allies - conflicted junior Craftswoman Tara Abernathy, devoted Kosite priest Abelard, troubled Justice officer Catherine Elle, and vampire sea captain Raz Pelham - work to restore peace to the city and fend off the hostile takeover.
Preceded by Last First Snow, followed by Ruin of Angels. See the series' page for tropes that are common to the whole Craft Sequence.
Four Roads Cross provides examples of:
- Above Good and Evil: Madeline Ramp."I bet [Tara] even thinks she's doing the right thing, in that wonderfully abstract language young people use, as if there were a 'right thing' independent of context, interest, or timing."
- Abusive Parents: Corbin Rafferty is emotionally unstable, frequently drunk, and aggressively controlling towards his three daughters.
- And I Must Scream: The goddess in the mountain has spent thousands of years with no sense of time and no worshippers or any other contact with the world, tormented by the demon she’s trapped with her. In order to have any chance of escaping this, she has to possess a mortal, which inflicts a measure of her suffering on them.
- Ambiguous Gender: Ashleigh Wakefield. The character first appeared in the Gamebook-style game Choice of the Deathless, in which Wakefield's gender was determined by the player character's gender and sexual orientation. In Four Roads Cross, Wakefield is referred to without the use of pronouns so as not to contradict any reader's experience from the game.
- Armor-Piercing Question: Tara to the King in Red: “Why don’t your old friends visit you anymore?”
- Badass Boast: Tara delivers one to the goddess under the mountain."Shale is my friend. If you hurt him in any way, I will carve your bones into his monument. You have slept too long to know that you should fear me, but I am a Craftswoman of the Hidden Schools, and my people have slain the hosts of heaven and bound continents in iron chains. I will snap your spine and drink ichor from your skull, I will break you and the demon downstairs alike and send you wailing together to the stars as a feast for the beings that lurk there, if you give me cause. Do not fuck with me."
- Back for the Finale: Characters from every other book in the series, besides ‘’Full Fathom Five’’ which is chronologically later, appear. Tara is also once again the main viewpoint character, her last appearance being the first book in release order. Alt Coulumb’s plot involving Kos and Seril also is picked back up.
- God Couple: Kos and Seril. This is a plot-driving problem, as most citizens of Alt Coulumb love Kos but distrust Seril and the Church of Kos’ investors consider his attachment to a weaker goddess to be an unacceptable financial liability.
- God-Eating: When Daphne Mains attacks Seril to lure Kos into a direct confrontation, the draining of Seril's power is conceptualized as eating.Maestre Gerhardt had written: gods are beings with which human communities exist in relationship. Fine. One relationship was that of diner to meal.
- God in Human Form: Seril is frustrated because the small size of her community of worshippers limits her power and keeps her at a distance from Kos."With so few faithful left, I live at your speed. I think the way you think. Even reduced like this, my mind’s wider than those meat brains of yours, but I should be deeper, bigger, the way he is. Thinking in this register feels like talking after a helium hit. I sound ridiculous to myself."
- God's Hands Are Tied: Kos has the power to protect Seril and her worshippers, but must not do so because it would prove to their enemies that his relationship with her makes him vulnerable.
- Harmful Healing: What Madeline Ramp did to Daphne Mains. The recipient is much more functional and active than before the treatment, but her mind is a mess of repressed traumatic memories and Craftwork programming and her body is filled with dangerous demonic machinery.
- Precautionary Corpse Disposal: The book opens with Tara performing an elaborate ritual dissection on Alexander Denovo's body to eliminate the risk of his coming back to life. Due to an interaction between her powers and his, she perceives his corpse talking to her as she does it.
- Wowing Cthulhu: Tara manages to impress the King in Red by having earned Shale’s loyalty.
