Lukas had never been to this place before.

He’d admit. When Solana asked them to follow her, he was half-certain she was leading them to the prisons. Instead, he found himself standing in front of two giant gates that opened, revealing an entryway to… darkness.

Lukas conjured an orb of flames in his right hand. He needn’t have done that. The moment he crossed the threshold, the darkness of the entryway gave way to a large chamber brilliantly illuminated by chandeliers, each crystal reflecting lights that weren’t there in the first place.

The chamber was easily the size of a football field, with a twenty-foot vaulted ceiling. All the walls were covered in sculpture, with thin veins of shining metals reflecting the strangled light, casting a most wondrous illumination on this chamber. Polished stone floors met their feet, covered in elegant rugs, and unless he was wrong, about a third of the northern and western wall was covered with massive bookshelves full of tomes so old and mysterious-looking that he resolved not to leave the yokai territory until he had read them from cover to cover. The rest of the walls were densely inscribed with tiny sigils, which upon closer inspection, proved to not be sigils at all, but a form of insignia — thirteen insignia, engraved all over the walls, like an alien graffiti.

Horizontal bands of elevated rock rose in vast, concentric circles, giving the entire chamber a vast amphitheater-like feel. Ionic pillars arose out of the floor, meeting the ceiling, the shining metal furrowing them with inhuman precision, and rising all the way until they meet the ceiling to form another complex meshwork that could be an insignia itself for all he knew.

“Welcome,” said Solana, “to the Throne Room.”

An apt name, Lukas decided.

There in the center, rose a dias, elevated by at least four feet from the ground, like a central stage. And in its center, stood a massive white throne that looked like it was carved out of solid ice, inlaid with metals he had never seen before. But the most impressive — and intimidating — thing about this throne was what sprang out from its back — a sculpture that could loosely be called a dragon.

There wasn’t much to say about its body, except for its three heads, with the upper one looking down above the throne like a protective roof, while the other two curving around the two arms of the throne protectively, their necks as wide as a tree trunk and looming at the audience, their ruby-red eyes glowing, exerting a mental gravity so dense that it was difficult to look anywhere else. Three pairs of wings arose off the back of the draconic figure, with the rest of its body completely reptilian, entwined around the throne, as if arising from the very dais. The whole thing looked like something out of antiquity, the throne of some ancient draconic god-king.

Lukas glanced at Tanya and found her staring at the throne, utterly enthralled by its presence. She took a single step, and then another and then one more, her eyes never leaving the archaic creation, as if it was pulling her towards it. Lukas grabbed her hand and gave her a jerk, pulling her out of her trance.

“...?”

Lukas shook his head.

Tanya swallowed, but nodded.

“During the Time Before, thirteen such chambers existed across the known universe. Some on this mortal plain, while others centered on the different realms of the Yggdrasil. Thirteen realms, Thirteen Kings, each the epitome of their own kind. This one, is called Nidhogg’s lair, the throne of the Queen of Ice. Before the great war, it was occupied by the Empress of Yokai, Queen of the End, Meynte.”

“Yggdrasil,” asked a skeptical Tanya, “as in the Tree that surpasses the Seven Heavens? That Yggdrasil?”

Maude gave her a piercing look. Solana arched her eyebrows.

Tanya blinked. “I — I always thought it was a myth. I mean, my father — ”

“Typical Asukan arrogance,” Maude murmured, her expression growing darker. It was the second time she had shown actual emotion on her face. “They’d reject the universe if it fed their pride.”

“Perhaps,” said Lukas, ‘it’d be for the better if you just started from the beginning?”

“The beginning?” asked Solana.

“I’ve read the Asukan Scriptures. Their myths talk about the primordials Izanagi and Izanami and the birth of Onogoro. There aren’t any mentions of the Yggdrasil. Kvasir’s treatise says differently but he gets lost in his own ramblings. I think a complete picture would make things easier?”

He glanced at Tanya who nodded reluctantly.

Truth be told, he didn’t need it. Forming a Nexus had shown him way more than Kvasir could’ve ever theorized. This was just a test to see if Solana would give them the unvarnished truth, or hide it within layers of deception.

“A complete picture…” she mused. “I do not see how knowing the origin of our world helps her understand her heritage.”

“I’d like to know that too,” claimed Tanya, before adding a quick ‘Please?’

Lukas fixed Solana with a teasing stare, as if to say, what have you got to lose?

Solana met his gaze. Her look was penetrating. Lukas averted his eyes before things got out of hand.

“I suppose that is fair,” she murmured. “And rather serendipitous too, that we stand in this room of all places. Fine, behold. I’ll show you — the beginning of the beginning.”

She raised both hands, and Lukas felt the pressure grow. The mana that surged around her was immense and potent, and settled downwards, and tiny, burning particles of something formed around them. They zoomed in all directions like tiny fireflies, coalescing into concrete shapes. The general illumination in the room was slowly dissipating, to the point that the burning particles were akin to stars in the night sky. Stars that were shooting around, spinning and settling into something greater. It was difficult to tell if what followed were a hundred different forms, or just one, giant illusion.

“Before the beginning,” Solana said, “there was only the Mist.”

Lukas was hit by a wave of nostalgia, as his world sank into darkness. He could still feel the cold stone floor beneath, but everything else had been inundated into inky, black darkness. There was no illumination, and yet, he could see his companions perfectly. It reminded him so much of the Eternal Light that he wondered if Solana was capable of using it.

Then he remembered who she was and dropped the absurd notion.

“No world, no heavens, no stars, no sky, only the Mist,” said Solana, “formless, shapeless and omnipresent. An endless ocean that spanned in all dimensions, a maelstrom of cosmic proportions from which stemmed Existence itself.”

As she spoke, the burning particles smashed together to create a large, expansive cloud-like layer, expanding in every direction as far as the eye could see. Lukas could see different portions of the endless mist behave in quirky ways, some of them spinning into a denser form, while others moved in and out, like the wings of a butterfly.

“It has many names— the wellspring of Creation, the Fog of the End, the Ginnungagap, and many, many more. And floating in this ocean of mist, were worlds, diverse and many. Some expansive, mutating in their own unique environments, forming their own queer laws that went past the extremes. Others, smaller and in clusters, banked together to form minor worlds.”

Lukas saw them, the worlds, lying in the mist bed, the matrix of their creation and the medium connecting them all, tying them as would a thread. He could almost picture each of them being completely separate worlds, each bringing their varying rules, their creatures and their civilizations, together into a closely knit existence.

Like a tree.

“They called it Yggdrasil. The Tree that spans the Heavens. That which links the smaller worlds to a greater whole, from the fiery plains of fire-breathing, warmongering muspels, to the cold, desolate, frosty plains where nothing but cold and darkness reigns.”

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The World-Tree. Lukas mused.

Lukas wasn’t one for stargazing, but even he agreed there was something fundamentally beautiful about the World-Tree. He didn’t know if this was just a cluster of worlds, or simply the known part of the universe, but whatever it was, it was utterly magnificent. His gaze darted from one corner to another of this seemingly endless world of mist, but no matter what he did, he simply could not capture the entire thing in one image.

Then he noticed it.

“What are… those?” He asked, pointing at small, floating pieces of dense mana that looked like islands. If islands could float in space.

Solana raised her hand, and one of them drew closer to her palm, as if pulled by invisible strings. Solana pulled it outward, and the structure expanded, revealing…

“Is that… a world?”

“Yes,” said Solana, “the Ancients called them Adaxes, each of them a minor world by themselves, complete with lands and oceans and mountains and plains. This world, which Asukans call the Real world, is little more than a cluster of Adaxes huddled together.”

Lukas watched in awe as the adax, now shrunk to its original size, fell into its own orbit, revolving within the Yggdrasil, as if dancing to some cosmic tune.

“There are endless tales of how the Yggdrasil came to exist,” said Solana, “The jotunn believe that the Ginungagap spawned an gargantuan being named Ymir, the very first being of existence. After Ymir’s death, his organs turned to these adaxes from which spawned all life. The svartalfars believe that the Ginungagap was an endless forge, and Ymir, the blacksmith that harnessed the power of the stars to craft these worlds. The Alfs…”

“Okay, I get the point,” said Lukas, who already had too much experience reading an endless number of mythical texts in the past. Individually, it was an enriching experience, but after you had gone through ten different versions of Genesis, with each claiming to be the truth, you got a bit jaded over that sort of thing. What was worse was that unlike back on Earth the gods were real. Yokai, vanir, muspel, svartalfar— all these races existed. And yet, despite that, every race had its own fictional genesis story.

Inanna had shown him her memory of the Origin. Whatever this Ginungagap was, it wasn’t that. Yet, these people believed that the nine realms spawned from it.

Lukas shook his head. He had enough things to worry about. He could leave this headache for later.

If Solana was annoyed at his interruption, she did not show it. “What all these myths have in common are the two poles of the Yggdrasil. On one extreme is Niflheim, the dark world. The realm of everlasting night. Colder than cold, it is the realm of ice and frost. Mists cover its skies and glaciers form landmasses. On the other side, is the world of perpetual flame. Muspelheim. The land where fires burn eternally. Muspelheim is crimson to Niflheim’s gray. No terrain, only lava. The land was aflame with the roaring heat of the three suns, with nothing but sparks and spurting heat, molten rocks and embers.”

Lukas thought back to the borderland he had spent so much time on. It was exactly what Solana was describing, but he knew that it wasn’t Muspelheim. No, that was simply a side-effect of an Ifrit King making it its home.

Still, the place was littered with muspels and bylestyr, so even if it wasn’t the original thing, it was a fairly convincing replica.

“And the other worlds?” Tanya asked.

“It is believed that the other worlds formed the body of Yggdrasil, each mutated to become something unique, with rules utterly alien to the others.”

“I am somewhat familiar with the nine realms of the Yggdrasil,” Lukas admitted, interrupting Solana’s tale. There was no need to tell her that he had gotten a glimpse of the Yggdrasil through his connection to the borderland’s awareness. But that had been exactly that— a glimpse. Nothing like the level of detail Solana was imprinting.

Tanya looked at him in surprise.

“Even back in my world, the norse gods enjoyed a lot of notoriety.”

“That does not surprise me,” Solana claimed. “You recognized Grimnir when we first spoke of Him.”

“Grimnir?” Tanya looked at him.

“Odin,” Lukas murmured. “Leader of the Aesir. Also known as Grimnir, the Hooded one. Glad-O’War, Gond’lir, Wand bearer and Third. Father of the Norse Gods, and an absolute sonofabitch.”

“I take it back,” said Solana, her lips twisted in amusement. “You’re practically his Priest.”

Lukas scowled. He was surprised just how annoyed he was at that insinuation. “I’m not. I’ve just… studied him a lot more than the others.”

Say what you would about Odin, he made for an intensely captivating character, fictional or otherwise. Though given the lack of Norse pantheon and fragmentation of its myths, it seemed Ragnarok had already come to pass here.

“Studied?” asked Tanya, frowning. I thought you were a diplomat. Unless that was another lie?”

Lukas raised his hands in surrender. “It wasn’t. You don’t get to grow up with a fanatic grandfather and not take an interest in the subject.”

“That sounds interesting…” Maude quipped. “I have to ask, Outsider, what sort of devastation did One-Eye cut through your lands?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Lukas. “I’m… fairly certain that the norse gods existed in my world. At some point.”

“And how can you know that for sure?”

Lukas suppressed a smirk. It wasn’t often that he got to shock Solana. He was going to enjoy this.

“Where I’m from, the gods are long gone. Dead. Become part of the woodworks.”

He met Solana’s eyes.

“They’ve become fiction.”

Of all the things she had expected him to say, that wasn’t it. “... Fiction,” she repeated, trying to digest the word. “In your world, the norse gods are fiction.”

“As are the Shin— Asukan Gods. Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, Susannoo, all of them. Where I’m from, you don’t have the gods fighting gods. You have people fighting over whether religion is anything but a myth. A tale told from father to son, passing down generations, sometimes by mouth, and others, through texts. Inscriptions. Monuments. In fact, the number of atheists keeps growing every year. People choose to put their faith in understanding by observation, instead of blind belief in something that might have existed in the past.”

All three of them were gawking at him.

“Granted, there were factions, people who were really touchy about their faiths. To mock their faiths would be to invite peril.”

“With due reason,” Maude all but growled.

Lukas idly wondered what Maude would think of religious terrorism.

“And where do you see yourself among them?”

“Me?” Lukas blinked, “I am, well, was, an agnostic. I thought of religion and mythology as superstition and ignorance. A trick played by our brains in a misguided attempt to explain that which cannot be explained. Maybe there was a God, maybe there wasn’t. My mind said that I’d never understand God, if he existed, and my heart said that I wasn’t supposed to understand him.”

“No gods…” Solana’s lips trembled slightly. “Then what about the Asukan Pantheon? You recognized those names.”

“Oh those…. Now that’s particularly funny. Where I’m from, it’s said that Izanagi and Izanami were twins, and one day they went to a river to ah… purify themselves. They washed off their eyes and nose and from that dirt, the three children were born. Amaterasu, Tsukoyomi and Susanoo.”

Solana stared at him, unblinking. “And the yokai?”

“Well, I imagine if they did go bathing, the rest of their excreta had to go somewhere,” he finished with a straight face.

The funny part was, he was only half-joking. Regardless of how real the Asukan Gods or how dangerous the yokai were in this world, Shintoism back on Earth could win an award for the worst genesis story idea ever.

“You— you cannot be serious.”

Lukas did his best not to snicker. “I told you. In my world, you fellas are all fiction. Even if you existed, it probably was a very long time ago.”

Solana’s breath hitched. “This… world you’ve come from, is it— is it possible that it is—”

“From the future?” Lukas finished for her. He had entertained that possibility before the utter lack of information about the world and the universe had made him drop that line of thought. “It is possible. I’m not sure how I got here, and the only one that could have helped me… is out of my reach. I don't know if I came from a future world. In fact, all I know of your kind is through tales.”

“And that is the truth?”

Lukas smiled. “It is as close to the truth as I’m able to give you.”

Maude tilted her head. “What does it feel to talk to a figment of your imagination?”

“I’m still getting used to it.”

Truth was, it wasn’t as hard as she thought. The lines between fact and fiction tended to blur when a freaking Goddess took rent inside your freaking head.

“Granted,” he said as an afterthought, “not everything is what I remember.”

Solana perked up at that. Lukas felt a tinge of sadness at the earnestness. For all her power and reach, she had nothing to stack against Lukas’s knowledge. Especially if he really was from the future. He wondered if this was how seers felt like, sitting on a dangerous secret that could make or break civilizations.

“Norse Mythology was about the Aesir, about Vanir and the Nine realms. About Midgard. Instead, you have Asukans calling this world Onogoro. There is Amaterasu and her kin. And yokai.” He met her eyes. “Just how did that happen?”