“Oh yeah, this is great.”
Lukas Aguilar was on a warm beach, a pair of sunglasses, as he lounged back on a deck chair. His body had completely healed itself of all scars, and looked just like any other random, albeit highly athletic young man in his early twenties. A small smile crossed his face as he relaxed under the shimmering heat of the tropical climate in this particular borderland.
Next to him, Tanya lounged in her own deck chair in a two-piece. Her hair, still snowy-white, glittered in the light and her smooth, pale skin was bronzing quite nicely — even if it was temporary. A single transformation would revert it back to her pasty pale self, but that was neither here nor there.
“Enjoyable, yes,” Tanya answered, her voice warm and carefree. “However impermanent.”
“Everything is impermanent,” he said softly, caressing her cheek with his left hand. “Still, a bit of rest before the next bit of insanity will do us a bit of good.”
He idly watched the seagull-like creatures soar and buzz around above him. This particular borderland was particularly comfortable, unlike the dreary and absolutely scorching lava ridge where they had encountered the Ifrit King. He had found it during his time in the Haze earlier, and knew that it was the perfect place for a hideaway. Being the accomplished terramancer that he was now, it was child’s play to conjure a full set of deck chairs, clothes, sunglasses —and nearly every single thing one needed for a relaxing vacation, and they were set.
Just as promised.
It also gave Tanya all the time she needed to come to terms with Frost, and slowly progress in her understanding of the true nature of her power.
“You don’t have to lie to me, Lukas,” said Tanya lightly. “We both know this is just a distraction.”
Lukas flipped to his side and gazed at her beautiful form. “Tanya, regardless of whatever happens, I’m not going to leave your side. Even if it means having to spend the rest of my life finding a solution that will keep you from losing yourself.”
“I don’t think I can be fixed, Lukas,” Tanya murmured. “In the end, it is the destiny of the Taboo-bearer to channel the End in its purest form into the World, into worlds, until nothing remains. Frost and I have talked about this… at length.”
“Yeah, Frost has a bit too much confidence about how knowledgeable she is,” scoffed Lukas, remembering how Frost had been completely at sea upon hearing about the oddity that had affected Inanna. “Unlike Frost, I happen to believe in finding a way that doesn’t exist, instead of just giving up and accepting fate. And besides, it will be a good distraction between now and the next big thing that I — that we’ll get dragged into.”
“Oh? Like what?”
“Who knows?” asked Lukas lazily. “Your position as the new Lady of Shimizu? Politics, both on the Empire-level and within the yokai? Finding a way to keep your true nature hidden from the Empire?”
“You’re conveniently omitting the more important things, Lukas,” said Tanya with a smile. “You just want some time to come up with a convenient excuse to explain how you killed Grandfather in the end.”
Lukas smiled, pulled the sunglasses off his face. Oddly enough, his eyes had gone back to completely being the soft brown that it had been before. Something had triggered within his body the moment he had gained the last three Levels needed to cross the threshold that was Level 39, which had unlocked the entire power of the Apex-tier Level-4 skill Kinetomancy.
A power so deadly, a power that defied comprehension..
A power that he could spend the next decade studying and honing and still only harness a fraction of its true capability.
A power that made him a Warlord of Motion.
“We both know you killed him with Everfrost.”
“And I’d have believed it if I remembered how,” said Tanya seriously. “What did you do? What psionic mystery did you use?”
Lukas sighed and pretended to ignore the irritated glare aimed at his skull. “I told you, Tanya. All I did was manifest my inner-world and bring you all into it.”
“And somehow, cursed me with a psionic mystery so complex that not even Frost is immune from its effects?” She uncharacteristically snapped at him in genuine anger before regaining her composure. “You know how I feel about psionic manipulation, Lukas. You know of my circumstances. Better than anyone save for perhaps, Frost. To not prepare me for what I’d experience ....”
This time Lukas did flinch. She was right. He had overstepped his trust with her in that regard. He had vainly suspected that she’d be acceptable to that train of thought and hoped it would prepare her for that quirk of his inner world. However,that had been a horrifically poor and cruel overestimation on his part.
“I suppose I should’ve warned you,” he simply replied, not striking up the nerve to look at her just yet. “Honestly, there are conditions to trigger different effects inside my inner-world, Tanya. It’s a unique existence, and based on a bizarre, circular logic that will keep us here debating for days. Just understand that whatever happened inside my world was forgotten by anyone that doesn’t belong to my world and leave it at that.”
“What does that even mean?” she asked. Her tone had a keen edge to it.
“My world doesn’t exist. At least, according to this Reality.”
“But you do,” said Tanya stubbornly. “You’re real.”
Lukas laughed. “I suppose I am.”
It was like seeing a character literally walk out from the television into your living room. It was less about the character or his abilities, and more about the fact that he wasn’t real to begin with.
“And I think it’s all because of this pendant.”
He held up the azure jewel. He was still nowhere close to comprehending its Truth, or even gaining a glimpse into its true nature, but somehow, the pendant was able to bridge the way between this Reality and his.
“You think?”
Lukas let out an irritated huff. “Look, all this is fairly new to me too. I haven’t been able to comprehend a tenth of the mysteries of my world, and I’m the source of the damn thing. Honestly, it’s scary as fuck.”
“Wonderful,” Tanya’s voice strained as Frost spoke through her. “There are two of them now.”
“Could you not just warn me before you do that?” Tanya complained, rubbing her neck. “It hurts when you tighten my vocal cords without giving me a second to brace it.”
“Perhaps we could come to an arrangement, Outsider?” offered Frost. “Why not offer us another peek into this twisted inner-world of yours? If the curse affects us yet again, you have nothing to lose. If it doesn’t, you will get a step closer to understanding the kind of monster you are becoming.”
“Lukas isn’t a—” Tanya began.
“Do not lie to me,” snapped Frost again. “I am you, girl. I know your deepest thoughts, the lies you tell yourself. You’ve seen what happens when someone earns that gaze of his, when he unleashes his hidden fury. No matter what defenses they have, no matter their powers, they are guaranteed death. No matter what preparations they make. The only thing that changes is the time and manner of their execution. Tell me you cannot see the stiffness in that skinwalker’s features when she looks at Aguilar. It's the same look a prey has when fending off a predator.”
“Hmph,” said Lukas. “Your concern is flattering, Frost. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re afraid of me.”
“I am.”
Lukas opened his mouth to speak but words failed him. He had not expected that.
“I am Frost, the herald and avatar of the End. Anomalies and Worlds are my food, my prey. They are Creators, and everything that has been created, shall die. And someday, even the Creator will perish and only darkness shall remain. But you are no ordinary Creator, are you?”
Her cadaverous gaze met his own.
“You are an Invader. A tyrant. A world that grows, consumes, feeds upon another. If unchecked, you will become the greatest power in the Universe, consuming men, beasts, spirits, parasites, Kings, Emperors and the Gods themselves, and then challenge the Universe itself. Your very nature will not allow you to be lesser than any other. I want to stand in awe of you. I also want to crush your throat and shatter you to dust.”
His heart paused a beat at her words. For all her mind games, Frost hadn’t lied to him. Not once. She had shown him her true form inside Tanya’s mindscape, shown him the true might of what she would become in time. For her to speak that way about him was…
It made him uncomfortable. Deeply so.
Frost snaked her hands around her neck, and brought her lips closer to his ear. Giggling, she licked his earlobe with her tongue, and whispered in a sultry purr.
“I cannot wait until I see that end, Outsider. You have such potential, so much to show me. Seeing the castle erupt might scare the lowly parasites, but that display of fireworks did not faze me. I want an odyssey. A storm of legend that would last and rage and build the universe in its image. A story that will exist in rumors and lore for millennia to come. Whether it ends in salvation, or damnation, I care not. Just you and me, on a hill of corpses, watching as the universe burns around us.”
Lukas swallowed.
Frost looked him dead in the eye again. “I wish to see this world of yours with my own eyes. As the Avatar of the End, show me your inner-world so that I might judge its worth.”
“You… wish to see my world,” repeated Lukas, giving her an eerie stare. “Do you realize what you’re asking?”
Tanya agreed with his words. It was a grave invasion of his privacy to even ask for something like that, but she was equally curious about exactly what being a world truly meant. She had seen Lukas perform some absolutely bedazzling things, some very recently. Consuming souls into himself, and storing their spiritual information, only to use it to recreate them was a power that belonged to Anomalies and anomalies alone. While Lukas had certainly demonstrated the former dozens of times before, the only true creation that could be called alive was Blob, and it was, in a way, alive from the very beginning. Lukas only injected it with different souls, transforming it to look like them and behave like them, while remaining utterly obedient to him.
Like a flesh puppet.
Only unlike how Mujin enchanted the minds of his soldiers to become his loyal minions, Lukas owned them — mind, body and soul. They weren’t alive or dead, and maybe, weren’t even individual existences, just skills and instincts that were freely added to a metallic slime that took their physical shapes. Once created, they did their duty, and either died in the process, or were simply subsumed back into his world.
They existed for the world within him, and not the other way around.
Just like any other monster.
He was a hyper-specialized existence that could use all forms of mana without fail. His soul capacity was tremendous, but the same could be called for any King out there. His regeneration was remarkable, but again, nothing a Sage was incapable of. His ability to speak every single language they had encountered so far — Tanya didn’t know what being a world had to do with that, but she assumed it was a byproduct and moved on. His growth, the swift yet progressive development of his powers was fascinating to watch, and while Tanya didn’t know what exactly he was becoming, it wasn’t like he would undergo some overnight transformation that would overwhelm the mightiest entities out there.
That would have been just stupid and made no sense in the slightest.
Being something different wasn’t some sort of free pass to become or surpass the apex of the food chain. It just resulted in something slightly unique compared to everything else, but still in the end, could become something unremarkable, or at best, a set of fairly amusing tricks.
But sometimes, tricks were all that was needed to shake the world, and she had seen Lukas demonstrate that in more ways than one.
And yet, the more time she spent with him, the more she realized that for all his claims about being a World, there were certain discrepancies between what should be and what was.
Lack of alien mindsets. Associating with her despite the knowledge that she was his ‘predator’. No uncontrolled or altered body parts. The desire to automatically consume new creatures (souls) that came within his (its) vicinity was curbed or completely non-existent. His control over what he did develop was so exceedingly strong, that even in moments when he muted all his emotions and operated under tunnel vision, not once did he lose control of himself and let the world take over.
Instead during those events, he became, as Frost had aptly put it — an invader. A tyrant. One that would use every tool within his nigh unlimited arsenal and bring the enemy down, regardless of what happened or what kind of mysterious power he or she had. One only needed to look at the fate that befell Empress Meynte, Solana and Mujin Shimizu to recognize that fact.
At the same time, she knew that something very drastic had happened to him, affecting his inner-world to a significant degree. What it was, Tanya didn’t know, but she knew it was too great a change. Too fast. Too significant. Too outstanding compared to the state the rest of his progression was in.
When it came to new skills, Lukas was almost like a kid, enamored by whatever new toy attracted his attention. He would use it over and over to often tiresome degrees, going so far as to invent an entirely different fighting style with them. At first, it had been those daggers, reinforced with his astonishing sharp accuracy, and swift reflexes. Then, it shifted to using metamancy and those corrosive flames. Gravity was further next, followed by his experiments on Blob. For someone like Tanya that believed in rigorous and continuous development of one’s skills to take them to the apex, watching Lukas evolve was practically insulting. He got almost to the point of mastery with a particular discipline, and then switched to another field, and never looked back again. It was as if he threw away everything he learned like yesterday’s trash. By Asukan philosophy, a man like that… would end up getting nowhere, stuck with a seemingly random but high number of medium-level skills. A jack of all trades, but a master of none. A self-crippling attitude like that — it was beneath contempt.
And yet, there he was, taking down one powerful opponent after another.
Lukas Aguilar… terrified her.
“Call it curiosity, if you will,” spoke Frost through her lips. “I am unique, the one and only in this entire Universe. Maybe Tanya will be the one to reach the zenith and gain the power of the End in its entirety, or maybe she will perish in the process. I, on the other hand, will be reborn, in some other form, some other existence, until I find a true avatar that will bring about the End. The world within you too, is unique. I wish to know if it is You that becomes the World, or are you just the current form it chooses to adorn, only to scrape off at the sight of something better.”
She wanted to know if Lukas Aguilar was the one in charge, or if he too, like Blob, was a puppet dancing to something else’s whims.
“Surely something so small and trivial demands little thought.”
Lukas breathed out slowly, as if gathering his thoughts. Something about her words sparked an idea inside his head. After the multiple times he had gotten himself ‘destroyed’ and ‘remade’, he had enough time to come to terms that he wasn’t quite the human he used to be. And yet, ‘he’ wasn’t just a form that his inner-world chose to adorn. No matter what happened, ‘Lukas Aguilar’ would remain at the helm, and it wasn’t only because of Inanna’s Divinity.
But there was an idea.
Slowly, he put Tanya’s palm in his. “What you’re asking is neither small nor trivial, Frost.”
“From you, it is both. No doubt you cannot manifest it without prepare—”
Snikt!
Frost trailed off mid-sentence as the world around her instantly changed around her. No longer was she on that tropical beach. Instead she was in —
… an endless maze of crystals.
They ran like tombstones in an infinite graveyard, standing upright in the ground, beneath a dark, starless sky, and that titanic silhouette shining from above.
And she couldn’t look away.
Literally.
Next to Frost, stood Tanya, her exact duplicate in everything save perhaps, her befuddled expression, but she too held an equally perplexed look on her face.
“Lukas, I….how…?”
All Lukas could do was shrug. “There are no rules that my world holds sacred save for its own, Tanya. I think of you and Frost as two different people inhabiting the same body. I’m not surprised you’re here as separate entities.”
“But Lukas —” She couldn’t seem to finish her sentence, as Frost exploded.
“This is no World!” snapped Tanya’s altered self. “What is it? Tell the Truth.”
“I told you,” said Lukas, his voice serene. “This is my world.”
“This place can’t be a World,” she growled coldly. “Worlds are Creators. The Spring of Potential. Bursting with souls, with activity. With Life. Not this deadland. This… this place is— is —”
She looked like she was seconds away from frothing. Her eyes had gone completely cadaverous, and she looked very much like a rabid animal that was gearing to attack. Not a good sign given what she was. Here, in his most sacred place, where the Omphalos reigned supreme, he had no doubt that it would react rather extremely if Frost, no, if Everfrost acted out in hostility.
“This place is unnatural! Vile! Sickening! Revolting! Wrong! This — this twisted abomination cannot be— it cannot be — ”
“Frost. What’s wrong?” Tanya demanded, but her other self was too shaking her head so frantically that a normal human’s neck would have suffered traumatic injuries at a bare minimum. It was like she was losing her sanity with every passing second.
Lukas tilted his head, observing Frost’s growing repugnance, and trying to apply it to his world. He had expected a lot of things from her — including and especially a desire to destroy it, given the source of her existence. But to see it driving her mad just by seeing it with her own eyes?
Something didn’t add up.
At the same time, it was a jarring thing to hear. It was something he had expected of his former self, when he had first found himself in the Crypt of Fiendish Worms. Half the time he had spent wandering inside those underground tunnels, he had constantly oscillated between trying to make sense of things and the other half, in complete denial. Denial that he wasn’t on Earth. Denial that he was talking to an actual Goddess. Denial that all of this was real.
To see Frost — something that was beyond human common sense, to look at him and react like that just felt…
Wrong.
“You’re right. This place has no life. No soul. No activity. Nothing. This,” he exclaimed, hands wide open, “is Forget.”
“Forget?” repeated Tanya.
He smiled. “The infinite terrain around us represents perpetual quiescence — the wait that lies between the cycle of birth and death. Nothing here is born, nothing here shall suffer death, nothing here holds any individual existence. They are just part of Forget.”
“Accursed Thing!” Frost said with rancor. “Vile trash! Twisted blight! This place, these… souls. They do not exist!”
He blinked. Something about her words felt… off. Of course, the soul prototypes in this place didn’t exist, per se. And the only way they would exist would be….
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
It clicked.
He looked at the seething avatar of Everfrost, and couldn’t suppress a grin. “It exists here, in Forget, but it hasn’t been created. And what hasn’t been created cannot be destroyed. Not by death. Not by time. Not even by the End of Potential. Isn’t that why you hate it?”
“I really should’ve killed you when I had the chance,” she whispered.
“What’s — what’s going on?” asked Tanya. “What’s got her in a pissing contest with you?”
“That Outsider is spitting in the rules of Reality, of the Universe. Every single soul he siphons, he isn’t just taking their skills, he is taking them out of Existence. Out of the cycle of Life and Death. They become part of His Reality — part of Forget. So long as he manifests those souls using an accessory, like that blasted metal slime, he can bypass the process of Soul Creation and make them come ‘alive’. Even if you kill them, the soul just returns to Forget, and then can be used again and again and again and again. They aren’t born, they aren’t dead, and thus they are…”
“Immortal?” asked Tanya.
“Eternal!” Frost snarled. “This vile deadland is a nameless eternal-manufacturing factory.”
“Eternal…” Tanya repeated, tasting the word. “That’s… trippy, I guess.”
Frost balked at her other self. “He’s a thief, stealing from the Great Progenitor, hiding from the End. Everything he siphons is removed from Reality itself.”
“Forgotten..” murmured Tanya, looking at him in surprise. No doubt she was remembering the words he had said to her grandfather, describing himself as a thief. “But how can these souls be immortal? I mean, if this is Lukas’s world, then surely when he dies…”
She paused.
Lukas just smiled at her.
“I see,” said the aeromancer. “That’s why you didn’t die, didn’t you? Lukas Aguilar the human perished, but the world was alive. It just put you back in place and rebooted you back to ‘living’.”
That was partly true. It hadn’t been his body that had perished, but his soul. It took Inanna using her Divinity to reforge his soul back into place, which was then pushed out of Forget into the body — as the Prime Host.
“Even if you destroy his body, he still won’t die,” said Frost, looking at him with narrowed eyes. “For all we know, he has hundreds of those metal slimes hidden away. He’ll probably be able to regenerate himself using them. Unless you can find every single thing that is connected to this abomination and destroy it in one go, the Outsider cannot be killed.”
Again, partially correct. His existence could be described as a twisted mix of a hive mind and something similar to a hydra. With interchangeable parts no less. There was technically no ‘core’ to speak of, but that didn’t mean all of his resources were distributed evenly. Trying to focus on killing ‘Lukas’ would be similar to aiming for a lizard’s tail, instead of the lizard.
Was it any surprise he had hidden away multiple fragments of Blob in several borderlands in the Haze?
Ironically, when he had done that, he had presumed that anything that could delete his body and soul in one strike would end him for good. Instead, the Plains of Forget had just created a new Instance of him.
Exposure to that Memory had destroyed both his and the Crypt’s souls, or whatever went for a soul for an anomaly. And then Inanna had reforged him. By that logic, Inanna had crafted a perfectly identical copy of his soul using her Divinity, one that accessed the memories of Lukas Aguilar.
No Lukas, he told himself. You are looking at it the wrong way. You’re not an individual. You are a world, an entity that was once human, a single soul, and answered to the name ‘Lukas Aguilar’. The Lands of Forget are not a separate entity.
You are Forget, and Forget is you.
“If Forget is this confusing, what by Wind is that?”
Tanya’s words brought him out of his musings. He followed her gaze, and looked up at the humongous figure of the human silhouette taking up almost half of the black sky. Seated in the posture of a human yogi, it looked like the outline of a meditating God.
It wasn’t.
It was far, far more than that.
“That?” asked Lukas, still smiling, “I don’t know. Though if I had to give it a name, I’d call it the Demiurge.”
He wasn’t being arrogant. In old Platonic philosophy, the word ‘demiurge’ referred to an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe. That being, if he could refer to it as a being at all, was the manifestation of the Future. Vision. Illusion. Imagination. Dream. Much like the Infinity of Forms, the Demiurge represented an everdistant utopia where all potential skills of all potential prototypes within Forget were realized to the fullest sense. A state when his world would be eventually deemed complete.
He wondered. Did Inanna feel like he did when she gazed upon the Origin, something that was so far beyond comprehension that you needed to become someone detached from Reality to do it? Was that why she was so feared? Because she had Ascended to a level that allowed her to comprehend the Origin itself?
“At the base of everything in Existence, whether it be the living and the inanimate, physical and ethereal, bremetans and spirits, gods and demons, there is always a world. From the world do they rise, from the world they take form, and upon death, into the world they return. The cycles turn and turn. That being, up there, is the Creator of this world. It’s Demiurge.”
“But you are the World, right?”
“Then that being is Me. Or perhaps, what I can become. Not Lukas Aguilar the human, not the Prime Host, and not the Omphalos. Whatever the Plains of Forget contains, will contain, will be created by the Demiurge. Alive, inanimate, monsters, creatures, perhaps even Gods. If the Great Progenitor is the creator of all there is, then this Demiurge is the same for this place.”
“Big words from a perpetual do-nothing machine,” scoffed Frost.
He smiled. Seeing her so off her rocker was amusing.
“Perhaps you’d like to test it?”
“Test?” she snapped. “I want to destroy it. I….”
It came without warning. No tells whatsoever. So fast that not even his eyes, augmented with Kinetomancy, could catch up with it. In less time that it took to even blink, Frost conjured a dagger and hurled it at him.
Or she tried, anyway.
The moment it left her hands, the frost dagger vanished. He should have been amused at the gobsmacked expression on her face, but instead he frowned in concern.
Not because her plan didn’t fail, but because it did.
That… wasn’t supposed to happen. Was it? Everfrost is a Taboo, and not a Truth that this world can just ignore. And I didn’t even use Territory Creation. So… how?
She tried again, this time conjuring a blade. The third time, she used a spear. After that, pure Everfrost energy. But nothing, nothing she did managed to exist the moment it left her body. It was like the moment she hurled it out into the world, it just vanished.
As if this Reality — his world, was removing it out of Existence.
A quirk that made no sense to him.
Worlds — not even one as byzantine as his own — could do that.
“What!” “Is!” “This?” Frost kept attempting to cast anything and everything, but it all came down to the same result. The moment she created it, it vanished.
Weird.
“Lukas?” Tanya asked. “Are you doing that?”
He looked at her, flummoxed, and then at his own world. Nothing about this world — no mystery, no curse, nothing he could remotely think of could suppress a Taboo like that. Regardless of his powers, he was a World, and Everfrost was the bane of every world out there that was connected to the….
…the Origin.
He froze as the truth hit him like a sledgehammer.
Could it really be that frighteningly simple? Was this all he was missing all this time?
“Get me out of this place,” Frost demanded, seething. “I cannot stand the sight of this blight any longer. Get me out!”
“No.”
The person that denied Frost wasn’t the soulcrafter, but one that presided over that land with utmost authority. “You came in by your own will, but you will leave by mine.”
Tanya swallowed heavily, but decided to remain silent.
“Outsider!” Frost snarled. “Two debts you owe me! Do not forget that! The first you may resolve by letting me passage from this blight.”
“You do not have to hold the debt over me,” Lukas bristled, pissed at himself for what he was about to do. “I’m not going to trick and trap you here. I’m not a coward.”
Frost opened her mouth to retort —
“But,” said Lukas. “Just like those two debts, you too are obligated to help me resurrect my goddess. And that is why I want you to wait while I attempt that.”
Whatever Frost had expected him to say, this was certainly not it. Even Tanya had gone from gaping at Frost’s hostility to gaping at him.
“You’re….”
“Yes.”
“In here…” Tanya trailed off, looking conflicted. The chance of seeing something impossible happen before her very eyes was warring against her fear of the goddess he was trying to resurrect.
“Yes,” Lukas repeated. “I’m going to attempt it now. It’s a multi-step process, so don’t interrupt me in the middle, alright? No matter what happens.”
“But —”
“Tanya,” he said softly. ‘I have been experimenting on this for a while now, and even when things have gone horribly wrong in the past, I have gotten back on my legs. All this time, I was assuming that I had reached a point where I was failing because of the limited divinity, but I think I can safely dismiss that assumption.”
The last time, things had gotten crazy the moment the Screen had rejected the Divinity, calling it Corrupted. He had assumed it was because ‘his’ Inanna was a reflection of the original, and even then, her Divinity had been reforged into a mortal soul — his.
But what if he was going about it the wrong way?
“Okay,” said Tanya finally. Frost had just walked him like a hawk.
Outside and a world away, Blob instantly cloaked Lukas’s form, while extending outward and piercing the very fabric of space itself.
Searching optimal Rift Channels along periphery
Opening Rift…
For a second, everything went completely silent, and Lukas waited for the worst to happen. Instead, every single mound on the terrain shook with anticipation, making the very air hum with a chorus of crystal vibrating from all directions.
And then power flowed in.
Lukas couldn’t help but grin like a lunatic. The last time, he had needed a formal ritual circle, spent a significant amount of time dealing with the sudden energy influx, and focused it through specific parameters. And even then, he had been blanketed by a deluge of pure, violent pain just to achieve the Nexus. Only after he had suffered through two brain aneurysms had the Screen given him the green signal for Metaforging.
Now though…
Nexus achieved
Power Levels holding steady
Initiate Metaforge?
Just like the last time, he would require a total of five different ingredients to bring back Inanna.
First, a template to craft her identity from. A blueprint.
Second, the materials to create her form with.
Third, a forge.
Fuel was the fourth.
The final step was to anchor the spiritual entity into the world, allowing it to manifest.
Like before, the blueprint would come from Inanna’s own divinity that resided within Lukas’s own soul. The last time, he had sacrificed his soul to serve as a creation fabric. Noble, yes, but ultimately, a stupid act.
This time, he had options.
Creating Instance of Prime Host
Instantly, a perfect doppelganger of himself, crafted out of Anomalous energy and containing the soul, skills, memories and Divinity that housed within Lukas Aguilar, stood next to him. He glanced at himself, err… at it, and found his words lacking.
“This is one of those weird days, isn’t it?” he asked. He? Damn it. The entire self-cloning business really made pronouns tough.
“Lukas-1,” said his clone. “You’re just Lukas.”
“Basic, but whatever goes.”
“Yeah,” said the newly named Lukas-1. “At least this is familiar. I’ve already perished once when Inanna cast that Scrying spell.”
“So have I,” said Lukas.
“And when you fucked up the resurrection, and —”
“The Anomaly experiment, the fight with Mujin, the last seventeen experiments we did after coming to this borderland,” said Lukas drolly. “I am you, genius. All of me, us… are.”
“Yeah,” said Lukas-1. “This does make pronouns really difficult.”
“So, you’re Lukas,” said Tanya, befuddled. “And you are… too?”
“Technically,” said Lukas-1. “We can have as many Lukas here as we want. You should see some of the basketball games we have here. It’s really awesome trying to outthink yourself when there are twelve of you.”
Tanya blinked.
Lukas sighed. “Ignore him. He’s a nut. Besides….” He trailed off, as a twisted amusement flooded through his being. “I am him, but he is not me.”
Was this why Inanna loved being cryptic? He was sure he could get used to this feeling.
“Oi,” said Lukas-1. “I am you.”
“Technically you are me from two minutes ago. Science says that the moment you and I interact and perform different activities, we are different persons that just share genetic and spiritual similarities to an extreme.”
“Fuck off.”
“This is trippy,” commented Tanya from afar.
“We basically invented trippy here,” said both Lukas, who then proceeded to glare at each other.
“I have a quandary,” said Frost with a conflicted look on her face. Lukas wondered if it was because she was just pissed off at him, or that there were two of him to get pissed off at.
“If you can just create endless copies of yourself,” asked the avatar of the End. “Why not just duplicate the Divinity within your soul?”
Both Lukas looked at each other, before Lukas sighed. “That’s because Divinity is more than just souls, Frost. The moment one of us gets their Divinity used up, it reflects on the soul prototype called ‘Lukas Aguilar’. A weird action, I know, but I suppose that’s what I get for experimenting with divinity.”
“Alright, enough with the long face,” said Lukas-1, looking way too upbeat for someone to serve as a living sacrifice on the altar. “Let’s continue with the ritual.”
“Thank you,” said Lukas, and exhaled. He had long since come to the conclusion and accepted the fact that there was no True version of him — just a collection of spiritual information, and an always updating set of memories that defined ‘Lukas Aguilar’, the Prime Host, installed in the Anomaly Body.
Inanna had sacrificed herself to resurrect him. This was him doing the exact same thing backwards.
Sacrifice with a Symmetry.
Just like Inanna’s pentagon.
The Screen flickered again.
Prime Host Accessing DIVINITY
Breaking existing conventions
Safety Off!
The last time, he had planned to use Anomalous Energy to fabricate Inanna’s body. That would remain unchanged. As would Lukas’s, or rather The Plains of Forget’s role as a forge. The energy, as always, was being drawn from the borderland outside.
And finally, the anchor. Last time, it was the pendant hanging on his neck. This time, he had something different in mind. An anchor of the greatest, the highest possible quality.
DIVINITY ACCESSED
Maximize Sympathization Ratio
SCAN Initiated
ANALYZE initiated
METAFORGE initiated
Lukas-1 fell down on the floor, and threw his head back and let out a soul-wrenching scream. Quite literally, given how the ritual was actually ripping his soul apart. Any other person would’ve reacted, would have empathized with his pain. Even Frost had to hold Tanya back from reacting.
Not Lukas though. He just stood through the entire thing with a smile on his lips.
Huh! Maybe he had gone way far into the abyss than he thought. How long before he looked back and couldn’t even recognize the human that he once was?
Later. For now, it was time for the next part.
Identity.
The Screen flickered.
Accessing Host Memory
Laws broke. Rules defied. The spiritual form became corporeal, as Lukas-1 began to disintegrate. The last time, it was him that was being disintegrated. This time, he was creating something that didn’t exist before.
Four factors were already in the mix. Time for the fifth, and the final factor.
“Set Anchor. The Plains of Forget.”
Analyzing Memory of [Lostbelt Earth]
Checking for incompatibilities….
Assessing Anchorage Potential…
The last time, he had offered the Pendant as the anchor for Inanna’s form. This time, he couldn’t afford to be this close-minded. The pendant was good, great even. After all, it was a Relic that Inanna herself wore when she was alive. She had the right to the pendant, because she had killed the god whose Truth it contained. It was her abode for all the centuries she had been on Earth before Lukas finally awakened her. But for all its qualities, it was still a Relic that belonged to another.
Not Inanna.
So instead, Lukas chose a different anchor to bind her resurrected, divine form. One that was a very good anchor of the ultimate, perfect quality. It would break every rule in the book, but Lukas had always been a rule-breaker, much like the goddess he was attempting to bring back.
Even after she was trapped behind the Seven Gates, a part of Inanna had escaped as a reflection to Earth, one that had become a lostbelt in time, cut off from the Origin. That meant that Earth’s history registered Inanna as a goddess. And even if her Truth was erased from the Origin itself, Earth still retained some recollection of it.
Much like starlight, after it had left the star.
It was only poetic that the same Earth, now manifesting as the Plains of Forget, would become the Real World that would host her Divinity post resurrection.
A small smile floated along the edges of his lips at the thought.
“Now,” he said softly. “Give her back to me.”
A massive pentacle formed in mid-air, and in its center, a dazzling bright light erupted, forming a human-sized silhouette around it, white, translucent and unmistakably female. The form shimmered, a haze of blurred imagery. The face was exactly how he remembered, yet there was no emotion in it. Blank, featureless, wiped clean by the neutrality that was death. Like the rest of her form, it was a transparent thing, and in the moments where the hazy energy solidified, it shone like quicksilver.
Anchorage Potential Satisfactory
Drawing on [LOSTBELT EARTH] Memory
Combining Divinity
Setting Anchorage…
Lukas barked out a laugh.
This was happening! This was finally happening! He was resurrecting the goddess! No, he was recreating her!
But — but why were her eyes still closed?
“It isn’t enough.”
Lukas whirled back and found Frost looking at him, something inscrutable in her eyes. “The ritual, it’s incomplete. Even for your world.”
He couldn’t believe her words. Still not enough? What had he done wrong this time?
“Anchoring her to this world was a stroke of brilliance,” said Frost. “But she only exists in the memory of the World. You have to awaken her, with something that is unmistakably her.”
“Unmistakably —” Lukas began, but trailed off. Frost was right. He had assumed that the Divinity alone would have provided the appropriate identity for the goddess. But if it wasn’t enough, then he needed to invoke her with something that described and resonated powerfully with Inanna and Inanna alone.
He had come too far. He couldn’t stop now. To wake Inanna up, he needed to summon her with something that was pure, powerful, and unmistakably Inanna.
And he conveniently had one such aria sitting in his mind from his dreams.
“Your selfishness knows no bounds! you’d snatch, you’d hustle, empires would burn and pantheons would fall, yet your desire shall remain unquenched!”
The last time someone had described Inanna in similar terms, a sense of unease had prevailed through him. Listening to that memory of that child uttering them out had heralded something terrible, not unlike the time when he had accessed the memories of Earth perishing. Something so anathemic to his mind that his brain would choose to give him an aneurysm than deal with the consequences. Something alien and completely beyond his understanding.
This time though, all he felt was cold, distant, silent, peace.
As if his journey was finally coming to a stop.
As if things were coming full circle.
“You are bloodshed and battle, bringing justice and misfortune in equal measure. you wander in treachery and travel with unkindness.”
Power surged through him and around him. His eyes didn’t register anything, but he could feel fierce hurricanes billow across his terrain, even though they did nothing to his world. Those flames, those hurricanes — as powerful and alien as they were, they were still welcome in his world.
They were his.
“Your wrath shall break the divine thrones, your whims defile the most sacred of relics….”
A thousand new possibilities were forming all around him, a thousand decimated, atomized without care.
The ritual went on.
Power coalesced. Not wrathful like it did before. Calmer. At peace. It surged through him like water through a broken dam.
The body began to shake just a little.
“Existence itself is unraveled by your presence…”
This was the tricky part. It was an incomplete line. In the original memory, the child had mentioned the flames of Deprivation, acknowledging them as the Essence of Inanna.
Lukas changed the wording.
“The Truth of Depredation shall be your essence!”
Two different lines. Two different powers. Two different variations. Whereas the Flames of Deprivation, picked up by Inanna in the Vikahl Ashlands, was a Taboo that simply did not belong to the current Reality, the Truth of Depredation was what defined the Supreme Queen of An and Ki. Ultimately, it was simply a choice of one over the other.
Just like before, he was doing the impossible. Defying laws. The spiritual form had appeared, brought into existence through sheer will, spitting in the face of all accepted rules.
For potential never followed rules. Never followed laws. Instead, it merely shaped them to its will.
Closing his eyes, Lukas exhaled and thought back to Inanna. She had used her Presence to bind his shattered soul. To manifest his mind once more, and awaken his consciousness after he lay dead in the anomaly. It had left her with no power, no faith, no Presence, and unless Lukas managed to find a way to make it otherwise, no existence.
You were my miracle, Lukas Aguilar, she had told him. I can only hope that you will be my miracle once more.
Something heavy appeared in his palm. Opening his eyes, Lukas realized what he was holding and smiled.
A coffee mug that his grandfather had gifted him before his death.
The last time he had seen it, it was filled with Tenemu. The wine of Sumer. Drink of the gods themselves. He had drunk it, right as Inanna had vanished before his eyes.
How suitably poetic that he was in the same shoes right now. Only this time, he was going to offer something in that cup.
Himself. The divinity that had reforged Lukas Aguilar, would now reforge Inanna.
It had come full circle.
Symmetry.
Harmony.
Life, Death and Rebirth.
“Plunderer! Trickster! Psychopomp!”
He saw the face. Just like he remembered. Her hair was blacker than the darkest of nights, her skin as white as the finest alabaster. Her lips were the color of frozen mulberries, fitting perfectly onto a smooth, lovely face that had the most beautiful green eyes he had ever seen. And yet, no matter how much he tried, no matter how perfect each one of her facial features was individually, he could not behold her perfection in its entirety.
It was something beyond the superficial beauty of a supermodel. Rather, it was the beauty found between the heavens and the earth. It was majesty made manifest, the kind you saw when you beheld the depth of a valley from the top of a mountain, or the rising sun emerging from the vastness of the sea.
She wasn’t old. Wasn’t young. Wasn’t anything but stunning.
He whispered her name out loud for the final time.
“Inanna….”
She opened her eyes, and met his gaze. Her lips moved, and her voice came out like honey and hot soup on a winter night. A voice that promised things, one that you listened to with unrelenting interest and intensity.
Just like he remembered.
She tilted her head, and spoke her first words in abject confusion.
“Who are you?”