The only thing that stopped it from being a graveyard was the lack of bodies.

It should’ve been, what with the large monoliths arising out of the dreary, sandy terrain like upturned coffins. Every few yards, there was a mound of translucent, pale crystal, and inside it, a recumbent, shadowy form. Some of them held figures no larger than a regular-sized dog. Others were of the size of multi-storeyed apartments. Together they ran across the endless terrain, an infinite number of headstones heading towards the horizon that wasn’t there, all the while reflecting light that wasn’t coming down from the pitch, black canvas above. Even the air itself had a leftover and reheated feel.

In the center of the fake-graveyard, there was a cat standing on the ground.

It had to be a cat for it was cat-shaped.

There were some cats which, when you met them, reminded you that despite the thousands of years of human evolution, they only need to mew and blink their eyes at you and turn you into a gooey mess of affection.

This could be that cat. It had the eyes for that.

And then there were cats that have embraced Darwinian evolution to become agile hunters with sharp claws, powerful teeth and unparalleled speed to take down even the largest and bulkiest prey quickly and efficiently. A combination of striking beauty, lethal strength and adaptable, stealthy, predatory instincts that would make even the most fearless man freeze in fear.

This cat would even make that stealthy, apex predator hide behind a boulder and pretend to be extremely preoccupied with its fluffy tail.

It was already meowing, even though said meowing came out less like a purr, and more like a lug of hot iron chugged over asphalt. It took a few steps forward, and sniffed the sullen air.

Its ears flicked up.

There were voices, a long way off. A voice that came from a different world that was outside this world. A voice that spoke to its ear and sought to seek its Master, the center of its Universe. It could sense another ‘itself’ in that world, many worlds away, an ‘itself’ that its Master had left back.

“Lukas,” said the Voice. “Find Lukas. I need him.”

The cat gave the feline equivalent of a shrug, and immediately lost interest in the voice. Instead, it began looking for its Master, that was somewhere inside this world. A world that was nothing like a certain underground network of tunnels with a pit of featherglass and aqāru in the center. A world that was also nothing like an expansive galaxy with a multitude of planets, stars, asteroids, comets, meteors and everything in between.

Every single monolith here shared a history that did not exist, yet the cat remembered it all fine. Every single monolith contained within it a prototype — a monster with instincts that were unique and untouched, but felt strangely familiar.

“Find Lukas,” said the voice again. “Bring him back.”

It purred softly in a question.

Multiple copies of ‘It’ existed. There was that ‘It’ that existed with that [PREDATOR] that was and was not its exterminator in the past. There were also several large ‘Its’ in the same world, and one very large ‘It’ that was growing in a different world that was different from the different world [PREDATOR] came from. It did not quite understand how that contradiction really functioned, but such trivial issues were beneath its notice compared to the command its Master gave it.

It was It. They were It. That’s all that mattered.

It looked around, sniffed, and instantly located its Master. He was… up there.

But how to get there? An idea came to mind. It was very un-cat-like.

----------------------------------------

Lukas ran his hand across the surface of a crystal mound growing from the ground, and felt oddly giddy as he did so.

This wasn’t the first time he had been to this place. No, that honor belonged to the Crypt’s Omphalos, back when he had been stuck in a tug-of-war with its Awareness as it tried to subdue his rational human thought with the Dranzithl’s instincts and protocols. He had received a vision, an eventuality, an outcome so impossibly weird that even the gods themselves would have ignored it. A fusion of two anomalies — one born in an environment that harbored grudge against anything alive, and the other, a revenant splinter of a lostbelt cut off from the Origin. Lukas had also momentarily accessed this place when he had activated Warmonger Protocol for the first time to sort through prototypes faster than the speed of thought.

The Crypt hadn’t lied. Together, they could be great, but even now, the fusion was incomplete. Staring at this endless graveyard of soul prototypes made him feel like the Crypt staring back at him — so different, yet so similar. Fused, yet distinctly separate. He had its potential, its near infinite reserves and its history, but the chasm between them was as vast as the terrain and the sky.

In this case — literally.

And there was a long furrow creasing across the length of the land. Far away into the horizon, one could see the fracture furrow into the sky canvas.

“Soulcrafter?” Meynte called.

Lukas didn’t immediately respond, standing on top of a small hillock, looking at the jet black night sky with a wistful expression. “It’s fine. This place isn’t ready yet. But it will. Soon. I can feel it.”

This was the first time he had voluntarily manifested both Meynte and Blob inside his inner-world. Meynte was a memory, consciousness given form, but in this desolate Reality where Lukas presided with utmost authority, even the shade of the Empress could not willingly manifest without his express permission.

Blob was an accessory that was simply an extension of this inner-world in Outer Reality. Watching it react to this place that was both ‘it’ and not, was rather amusing.

“That’s not the point,” she uncharacteristically snapped at him in genuine anger, before swallowing heavily, and going silent. There was a minor itch at the back of her mind, but somehow, she was unable to finish that thought.

If Meynte had been in full control of her mind at that moment — something that never happened while she was within this place — she would have noticed that whenever she tried to think about the world around her beyond a superficial level her thoughts slipped away like a duck off water.

Lukas smiled. Not even Meynte could wrest herself away from that feeling of contentment that came from not knowing, not being, not having to care for anything at all. One could call it a curse, except he didn’t know the conditions that set off. He wasn’t sure of the length and breadth of this mystery and he was the source of the damn thing.

“MEOOOW!”

The sound of a massive air-horn, only imitating a cat, threatened to tear his eardrums apart. Lukas wasn’t sure, but it was somewhere in the territory of a hundred and thirty decibels. That was practically the sound of a small passenger jet taking off. The sound exerted pressure against all of his skin and hurt his ears. If not for the recent Level-ups he had gained by fighting powerful species over the vast multitude of borderlands floating in the Haze, he’d have been rolling on the floor, bleeding from his nose and ears by now.

Inner-world be damned.

He looked up.

And up.

And up.

It was a reptilian monster prototype, there was no doubt about that much. But to call it merely a ‘monster’ seemed the equivalent of calling a ‘wolf’ a ‘puppy’ or a tiger a ‘kitten’. It was dark gray clothed in thick sheets of crimson and purple flesh, all crafted out of varying layers of aqāru. The massive two-legged lizard had a row of thick spines beginning at the neck, and running down the back until its hip region, extending all the way down to the end of its tail. Its teeth were the size of a crocodile, unevenly jutting out of its lip-less mouth, which could have swallowed him whole.

This was a giganotosaurus. One of the largest known dinosaurs to mankind. One of the largest and most destructive monster prototypes from Lostbelt Earth — finally available to him. It was as long as a city bus, and easily spanned thirty feet in height, and given how even the terrain sank with every step, weighed its value as well.

Sometime before leaving for the Haze, Lukas had collected a large quantity of aqāru with him, not knowing what kind of danger he might run into while traversing the Haze. Larger quantity also meant the chance to explore larger monster prototypes, now that he had access to an impossible large collection of those.

So far, it was proving less of an experiment and more of a headache. For Blob the giganotosaurus lowered its massive maw, and let out another roar.

“MEOOOOW!”

He sighed.

Form shaped nature. Certain ways of behavior were appropriate to cats. You couldn’t just become a cat and mew around and hope to stay unaffected — eventually a certain cat-ness would permeate your very being.

It showed in the way Cat-Blob kept chasing around rodents like it was the most enjoyable experience in its life. And how it had attempted to stand off against a feline by standing on all six of his limbs, raising its fur and yapping loudly.

Lukas understood that. What he didn’t understand is why it kept meowing even after transforming into something big and terrifying like a dinosaur.

A headache for another time. He instantly synchronized with its dinosaur-like cat-brain, a task that was easier than it sounded.And with it, came a message, a voice from far, far away.

“Find Lukas,” floated Tanya’s voice. “I need him. Bring him back.”

“A call to return this soon?” asked the shade of the Empress.

Lukas frowned, wondering the same. He had left a tiny portion of Blob back with Tanya before jumping into the Haze. Blob, by some mystery that he was unable to fathom to this date, did not care when multiple copies of it existed. All of them were capable of carrying out functions that he had installed in them independent of each other, and at the same time, were a single, shared existence that answered to the name Blob. The closest way to describe them were perfect clones, and when you introduced concepts of Scrying to them, that’s when things turned exciting.

“I told her to call me back, if things really went south,” he said, frowning. He was still far from done, there was still so much to know, calculate. To understand before he went ahead. He… he shouldn’t have to get back, not so soon. He should’ve had a few weeks at the very least before he was made to fight again.

He swallowed the bile rising up his throat at the thought.

“What are… we going to do about this?”

“There is no option,” said Lukas, jumping down from the hillock. “I’ve learned all I could. I’ve a theory, and it’s got a fair chance of working. We might as well try it.”

“And if you fail…”

“Oh I’m exceptionally skeptical that everything will go smoothly,” he admitted with a slight grimace. “I’ve conjured all possible potential worst case scenarios on what could go wrong, whether it be the Rewrite of a past Reality, or the Haze being incompatible, or reacting in an unconventional manner, the possibility of me being unable to resonate her Truth with the Origin, or even me dying in the process…” He looked up. “The chances are one in three…”

“One in three?” whispered Meynte. “You realize manifesting someone that doesn’t even belong to this Reality is paradoxical and unbelievable. So, one in three….”

“If I sacrifice my soul to serve as the creation fabric, eight out of ten chances are it will work.”

“Then you will die.”

Lukas almost smirked at the note of tension in Meynte’s words. “You forget, Empress. I’m not just an individual. I’m a world. And Lukas Aguilar is a soul prototype, like the hundreds and thousands of others inside this terrain. If it kills me, which I am quite certain I will, the world will recreate another Me.”

“But you will die!”

“Yes,” Lukas deadpanned. “That’s what killing me means. Don’t worry, the next Me will be just as fine.”

“But it won’t be you. You will be dead—”

“I died back when I tried to absorb the Crypt’s Omphalos into myself. Inanna might have kickstarted the process and fueled it with her Divinity, but the original data that was Lukas Aguilar was there inside the Omphalos. Inside this terrain. Her sacrifice of her own divinity merely elevated my soul into something so significant that the Omphalos chose it as the Prime Host and brought me back to life. So by your logic, I am a thing that believes itself to be the same individual. Because by your logic, I am not. I am a clone. A Lie.”

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

“You don’t know that.”

“Only because I don’t remember dying,” said Lukas drolly. “And trust me. I won’t. My world will install all my memories until before the point of Death.”

He knew it would. It always did it for the monster prototypes. And Lukas Aguilar, Prime Host prototype, was no different.

Meynte did not respond. She didn’t need to. Her displeasure made its way clear onto her face. Lukas wondered if he should tell her that she had died eighteen times while witnessing the true nature of the Haze. That she was the eighteenth… no, nineteenth copy, of a copy, of a copy… of the original shade of Meynte that was siphoned into his inner-world.

“How… are you going to do this?” she finally asked.

Lukas smiled, and closed his eyes.

It took them a couple of days, just to go through the potential worst-case scenarios all over again. Not because Lukas was afraid, which he was, but because Meynte had an absolute mortifying fear of being erased from existence. It was hypocritical behavior for a former wielder of the End Of All Things, but Lukas knew better than to voice it out loud.

And finally, they were ready.

The borderland he had chosen for the ritual was rather beautiful as far as borderlands went, if a little too hot and humid. The forest around him smelled fresh and rich, the heat burning his skin through the shadow of the gargantuan trees looming all over. He wanted to bask in the glow of another fine morning, he really did, but he couldn’t get carried away from his original goal. There was finally light at the end of the tunnel, and it was shining brighter and brighter every day, for he was getting close to the climax of this multi-world trip.

Performing it in the Haze itself would’ve been easier, but Lukas chose an isolated setup over a greater availability of energy. Precision was the name of the game after all.

The first step, as always, was a circle. A layer of complete isolation from the rest of the world, where he could perform his craft without any disturbance. Meynte had taught him that almost all rituals required a circle, augmented through use of props that provided a physical as well as symbolic parameters to the circle. An Asukan would favor the Eternal Light as the ideal prop, while the yokai preferred the boundless Haze to be their crutch, using it to envision the pathway for energy influx, their manipulation and so on. Props also served as a mnemonic device — you attached a certain image to the prop, inside your head, and every single time you saw the prop, the image was packed along with it.

In theory it was simple.

In Lukas’s case, however, the props wouldn’t work, for the simple reason that they were all part of the world, the mortal one, and the Haze, and what he was trying to summon was anything but.

Instead he’d have wing the whole thing through pure imagination, concentration and arrogance.

Use the Abstract to summon the Abstract into the Real.

“Territory Creation,” he commanded. “Set Boundary. Ten feet. Expansion. Set Isolation Matrix.”

A wave of anomalous energy erupted out of his body, expanding in a massive circle. This was the ‘isolation matrix’, and it would prevent anything from the outside to taint the interiors where he’d perform his forging. When Meynte had demonstrated it in person, she had used the structure of a pentagram, its five points representing five elements — fire, wind, water, earth and ether. The inner pentagon and the circumcircle acted as constraints that filtered the innate power of the yokai, coming from within, and safely conducted into the possessed host body.

A prison within a soul.

But that structure would not do it.Not in this case. Instead he drew on a different structure, one that Inanna herself had shown him, back in the anomaly. Anomalous energy erupted further, moving in straight lines, only to change directions, and then move straight again, until he stood in the eye of a pentagon, the outer circle touching its vertices in perfect symmetry.

Inanna’s symbol of Order. Five points. Five sides. Five elements — air, fire, earth, water, ether — exactly in that order. The circle represented his hold on the spell crafted within, molding it to obey his orders.

Force within restraint.

“You are going to go through with this…” Meynte said flatly.

“Don’t have much of a choice,” Lukas shrugged. “I have a theory, and it’s got a fair chance of working. Unless we test it out, we cannot progress any further.”

“You don’t even have a physical part of her to converge the Truth into.”

A non-issue. Gods were spiritual entities, not unlike yokai. The soul reflected on the body, so the more esoteric components got added to the soul, the stranger and further from physicality it became. And a Truth was so far into the Abstract, that its wielder would sooner or later, cease their physical forms and assume a spiritual existence. By the time they became gods, they ceased their physical forms altogether, since physicality and Faith didn’t go together. That didn’t stop divinities from crafting a physical shell to interact with the world around them, but it would be little more than a false construct conjured out of Ether, only far stronger. They would be completely indistinguishable from mortals — eat, sleep, drink, breathe, have physiological functions, have memories, feel the senses, the entire kit. And yet, those bodies would be little more than puppets operated by the soul.

So no, it wasn’t the lack of a physical body that made any difference.

To bring Inanna back, a total of five different ingredients were needed.

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.

The blueprint would come from Inanna’s own divinity that resided within Lukas’s own soul. The materials — physical and spiritual, would be created out of pure Anomalous Energy. As an Omphalos, Lukas himself was a Forge of the perfect quality, and the fuel would be supplied from energy he would draw from the Haze.

And finally, the anchor, would be her own relic — the pendant that was currently hanging on his neck.

Using all five factors, he could likely be able to manifest a proper version of the goddess. That was the theory anyway.

He closed his eyes.

“Metaforge.”

Spells happened within the mind of the caster, and if something went wrong, it could fuck a lot of things up. For that reason, it was always better to insulate it by giving it a name, a state of mind, and a phrase to lead oneself into that particular mindset. With how he was attempting to act like a world and not a human, the presence of an insulation barrier separating the two was even more essential.

Searching optimal Rift Channels along periphery

Opening Rift…

For a second, everything went completely silent.

Then, there was a dull disturbance in the air as a sinister crimson sheen began forming in the air around him. The circle’s power grew like a tidal wave as it met the crimson sheen, the periphery touching, vibrating, expanding, contracting, deepening as endless power from the Haze poured through the rift into the spell.

His heartbeat was tortuous. The mere act of breathing sent jolts of pain down his spine. His arms, his chest, his everything burned.

Finally after what felt like eternity, the Screen displayed a notification.

Forging Circle Complete

Power Levels holding steady

Initiate Metaforge?

“Yes.”

The fuel was pouring in. The forge was ready. The blueprint was next.

“Scan Soul Prototype: Lukas Aguilar. Filter. Access Divinity.”

Prime Host accessing DIVINITY

Breaking existing conventions

Safety Off!

An alien rage lit up his mind. Like a white fiery blade, it cut into his conscience, threatening to overpower reason and undo the tranquility within. He struggled to try and wrestle it back. But it was a living thing, this anger. The more he pulled, the more it fought back. It would not be extracted, it would not be twisted. It was something beyond his mortal soul.

DIVINITY ACCESSED

Maximize Sympathization Ratio

SCAN Initiated

ANALYZE initiated

METAFORGE initiated

The gates of his mind blew open and the anomaly within him broiled under the strain, waves of power magnitudes more than it could deal with rushing through the body. He could feel it surging within, the rage saturating every inch of his body. It was all he could do to prevent it from leaking through.

What seemed like an eternity passed when it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. The volatile emotion gradually ceased. The pentagon around him writhed in power, achieving a balance between the anomaly within and the Haze without.

A small smile floated along the edges of his lips.

The pendant on his neck began to glow, and with that, the fifth element was added into the mix.

“Now,” he whispered, and yet, his voice resonated across the entire terrain. “Give her back to me..”

A dazzling bright light erupted out of the pentagon and rushed into the pendant, 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.

Lukas felt his knees weaken. He funneled lifeforce to keep them steady.

It was the time for the last element to be added.

Identity.

Accessing Host Memory

He reached into the depths of his conscience. Flooded it with everything he knew of her. Her good parts and her bad parts. His mental image, his understanding of Inanna. One by one, the information flowed. 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 turn corporeal.

Lukas knew he was breaking rules. Defying laws. The spiritual form had appeared, brought into existence through sheer will, spitting in the face of all accepted rules. The power was coming from the Haze, but it was creating something that did not exist before.

For potential never followed rules. Instead, it merely shaped them to its will.

The omphalos within him laughed in approval at what he was doing. The borderland he was on, didn’t. It screamed and whined as he broke the laws of the universe with impunity. The creatures in the borderland screeched and roared and attacked him from all sides, filing the air with power and sound. Even the monsters knew what he was doing, what he was so close to achieving, and in desperation, they selected him as a target.

They were failing because Blob was protecting him.

Like his hearing, Lukas’s vision too had become a former mockery of what it once was, but he could still see. In flickering imagery burned into his mind he saw the monsters all around him, meeting their deaths as Blob tore them apart, passing on the Experience directly to him.

Lukas didn’t give it a second thought. Fires roared within him, seeping from his bloodied, grimy skin as drops of white-hot liquid fire. His eyes burned and shriveled in his sockets, only to heal almost instantly and be burned again, and his hair caught fire. For a split second, the little semblance of conscious thought that Lukas had left idly noted that Inanna was right. His greed would be his death.

The pain was only bearable because, to an extent, his body was merely a shell. Worlds weren’t meant to feel pain.

The very molecules that made him human shuddered and quaked as something otherworldly settled upon them, crafting a place within his body for itself. He didn’t know how long this went on for as he lost meaning of time, but it occurred to him at one point or another that this massively overwhelming presence that threatened to tear his mind and soul in half was very familiar.

Still this would all be worth it as long as he could bring back Inanna.

WARNING!

Truth Rejected!

Aborting…

“WHAT?” Lukas yelled. “No. The body’s forming, isn’t she? It has to —”

This was a roar of pure, unthinking rage, brought on when the portion beneath his right knee disintegrated into motes of dust, followed by his left. The Anomaly within him screamed at the suicidal behaviour of the Prime Host, as his flesh began to dissolve, and tendrils of white began to worm their way through the rest of his body.

The pentagon wavered, and his face cracked, with motes of white light exploding out of his face. His skull was crushed like a tomato under a sledgehammer. The half-forged form of the goddess shattered, and Lukas embraced himself for Oblivion.

Metaforge Aborted.

You died!

…

…

…

After everything he had been through, Lukas had begun to believe that his Inner-world would never let him die. Even if his soul disintegrated, the world would create a perfect copy of it and resurrect him as good as new. Even his body and soul disintegrating at the same time made no difference.

Error Detected

No Vital Signs found for Anomaly Body

Soul Prototypes cannot be utilized.

Troubleshooting…

Host Prototype Exists. Anomaly Body does not Exist.

Incompatible.

Attempting failsafe protocols….

Divinity Identified in Host prototype [LUKAS AGUILAR]

Converting Host prototype to PRIME HOST

Initiating reconstruction of Anomaly Body based on Prime Host’s configuration…

…

…

…

Somewhere inside the borderland, an identical copy of Lukas Aguilar was born. The copy did not feel any different, but he was still a copy of him, and thus, thought like him, and understood that he was dead.

Why? Because the copies (instances) were installed the moment the previous instance was deleted, complete with memories until the point of death. But with the body destroyed, that was no longer the case.

The copy knew this, and even though the Omphalos had crafted a perfect replica of his body using Anomalous Energy, the copy understood that it was just a copy.

A brief Scan and Analyze told him that.

The copy of Lukas Aguilar opened his eyes, and sat up, looking around, slack-jawed for what seemed like eternity. Finally, he roused himself from the stupor and made his way to the place where he had performed the resurrection spell. Inanna’s pendant, good as new — had fallen on the ground, pulsing with power. The self-analysis also told him that somehow, he still had Inanna’s Divinity in his soul, exactly how it was before he had begun the ritual. Despite the fact that he was a copy both Inanna’s divinity and the core of his soul were preserved. As were his memories.

So was he still a copy?

The copy decided that now wasn’t the time for such complex thoughts and looked around at the devastated borderland around him, before finally speaking his first words after getting his new life.

“SONOFABITCH!”

----------------------------------------