Most people took the concept of direction for granted. Below was right where our feet lay. Above soared above the head, while the hands identified the sense of left and right. And not just the hands, but the eyes, the ears, the cheeks, the legs, the entire symmetry of the human body, as well as the natural geometry of the world around us expressed itself beautifully in the language of directions. Why, part of the dizziness that came with being in the dark came from the inability to ascertain one’s direction.
That dizziness was nothing, nothing compared to being inside the Haze.
Haze. Ginnungagap. Inner Reticulum of the now fragmented Ikai Realm. Call it whatever you want. But for Lukas Aguilar, the entire thing could be summed up in one single word.
Directionless.
Everywhere was mist and color, making it almost impossible to ever peer through it. Pump in lifeforce to expand your senses, and the world to his left glowed a bright shade of neon pink. To the bottom-right, was now a particularly light shade of teal. The pink had fled to his feet, and was moving away from him. Was he going forwards, backwards, spinning in circles? Horizontally, vertically? Did geometry even matter in this endless mist of colour? A metallic blue line shot out of nowhere towards him. He stepped back, and found his leg in water —
Water?
It was a dark shade of beige. Still, watery? No, his leg definitely didn’t feel wet, yet the sensation was there.
Closing Nexus
Reverting Consciousness to Host
Lukas opened his eyes. The Haze had no concept of geometry, Euclidean or otherwise. It had connections, not directions. Even the Nexus he had was akin to the Rosetta Stone for the Haze. He knew why A plus B equals C in the Haze, but the reason why it was so was not clear.
“And with good reason.”
Lukas suppressed the urge to yelp out in surprise, and scowled. “How many times have I asked you not to do that?”
“Many?” said his newest headache.
“Seriously Empress,” said Lukas drolly. “You’re quite frankly a pain in my ass.”
“Joke is on you,” said Meynte. “You had the bright idea to trap me in your inner-world.”
Funny thing about voices in your head. When you first get them, you absolutely hate them. Especially when that voice belonged to an ancient god-queen with a superiority complex the size of the freaking Solar System. An entity that was impossibly large in sheer personality, power and history to make you feel like you were nothing but an ephemeral candle to them, and that was discounting their constant attempts to turn you into their personal hatchet-man. But after you got to know them for a bit and then the voice ‘sacrificed’ itself out of your skull to resurrect you, you actually realized how much you got used to them, and how much you missed them.
But only until you get a replacement, and you realize that even without the temptation of becoming their hatchet-man in exchange for impossible skill and power, it was really annoying to be renting headspace in the first place.
Regardless of how good the rent was.
Technically, he was still alone, in the eyes of any neutral observer. Only he could see the tall, athletic blonde frame beside him, stretching her hands in a very distracting fashion.
She was perhaps the most ‘unique’ piece of her collection. He had captured her by forcing her to retreat from Tanya’s mind, only to trap her with Blob. He had expected her to be utterly furious and swearing enmity for life, but instead, she had acknowledged it as her defeat and accepted her new place, as a member of his inner-world.
“Don’t I look good?” she asked, posing for him, making Lukas wonder if it was him or had logic and common sense vanished from the world when he wasn’t looking.
“Uh, yeah,” he said dryly, wondering why the former Empress had decided to do a California blonde impression, complete with khakis and a turtleneck. Technically, she could appear as anything or anyone, since she didn’t technically have a soul.
“Your world’s fashion is rather interesting. Not very optimal for warfare, but certainly more… liberating.”
“I’m glad you liked it,” he said dryly.
Lacking a soul, Meynte couldn’t use any of her skills, despite her wealth of experience at wielding Everfrost. And his inner-world had nothing remotely similar to a yuki-onna, which Meynte couldn’t even draw on her true powers. And even if he had, he doubted she still could’ve, because by Frost’s own admittance, there would only be one Everfrost user existing at a time.
Memory or otherwise.
Of course, that was only valid for the real world outside, and not his inner-world, which for all intents and purposes, counted as its own separate Reality, so technically, it could’ve been possible to replicate Fimbulwinter within it as well. But Lukas knew better than to let the End of Potential take root inside his world, and destroy everything within it.
Not that it’d have worked, but still, why take a risk?
“I think I might have a himthursar prototype somewhere.”
“Absolutely not,” scoffed Meynte. “I refuse to be reborn as one of those vile beasts.”
“You realize they’re just prototypes. Just skills, body and instincts. Perhaps with your memories…”
“No,” she said stubbornly. “I refuse.”
Lukas sighed again. He had developed a habit of doing that a lot recently.
“We’ve been floating in this endless Haze for quite some time now, Soulcrafter. How long do you wish to go on? Even your world can only siphon so much energy before it burns out.”
“I’m trying to figure something out.”
“I’ve heard,” said Meynte dryly. “But do you know what you’re even looking for?”
“I am creating… correction, discovering the structure of this vast Haze from when it was a proper Realm.”
“And to what end? The Ikai is fragmented. The worlds within it are in disarray. The Yggdrasil and the borderlands are spread along many planes, and all that remains is this dead zone of energy we call the Haze.”
Meynte was right. It was a deadzone for people, or yokai, he supposed. Even for kami.
But for an Anomaly, it was a relic of a bygone era. As an anomaly, he could connect with it. Understand it.
“The Haze isn’t dead. It’s still there. We… I just need to know how to interact with it, without… uh, not getting blown up.”
“Gosh! I’d never have thought of that myself, Soulcrafter.”
Perhaps American fashion wasn’t the only thing Meynte was absorbing from his memories.
“You can just call me Lukas, you know.”
“I can, yes.”
There was no need to make that failed argument for the umpteenth time. Meynte was bound by the same laws that every monster adhered to — to be utterly obedient to the Anomaly it was bound to. Granted, most monsters didn’t exactly share the quirkiness that came with being an advanced life form either.
“I guess it’s the Anomaly in me that keeps treating it as… well, as kin. I’m scared as shit of the kind of power it has. I’m awed and jealous of what it was, or is, even in this state. And there’s that part of me that just wants to destroy it.”
“Great,” Meynte deadpanned. “All that remains is for you to actually decide what to do, and we’re set.”
“Less insult, more analysis.”
“I would. But then I have to actually learn things from you to even begin analyzing.”
Lukas rolled his eyes. He was trying to understand how the Haze truly functioned, hoping to reverse-engineer some of his findings and apply them on his inner-world. He was approaching it from different angles, applying a lot of different theories and mental models developed from piecemeal information he had collected from a variety of places — Frost, the texts in Solana’s library, trivia from Inanna’s fragmented memories that rose through his subconscious from time to time, and of course, his private discourses with Meynte about the nature of Truth and Taboo.
Much like mathematics, you could get to the same place through a lot of different lines of theory and reasoning, with none of the processes truly right or wrong, only different, with some of them more useful than the others.
But the crux of the matter was, like all sciences, the existence of worlds lay in certain pre-established Rules. Rules that might be beyond what the mortal mind could process, but Rules nonetheless. The Origin was not some divine being playing an ineffable game of his own devising with the Universe. It was an entity that followed its own protocols, and operated on a level so far above Lukas’s own that it wasn’t even funny.
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The idea was to study the Haze, and figure out how it behaved, its structures, its limits, its foundations — study them, experiment with them, test his theories on them, all with the intention of finding a way to reverse-engineer a lost goddess.
Or at least, that was the intention with which he had opened a portal to the Haze and stepped through, leaving Tanya’s education to Solana, and Frost to protect her just in case the skinwalker bitch tried something sinister.
“I still think you are wasting time with this silly project of yours.”
“Silly project, is it?”
“Of course,” said Meynte, flipping her ponytail. “Anyone that has spent too long in the presence of Divinity knows that the gods never care much about mortals. Trust me, the best you can hope for is to be remembered as a footnote.”
“I’m not her worshiper, I am—”
“Are what? A world? Her bastion? You are barely able to keep your head on your shoulders. What do you think will happen when a goddess takes charge of your world and dominates it with her Truth? What will you, and your ragtag army of brain-dead monsters do against her?”
Her words hit him like barbs. But he didn’t react. After all, it wasn’t her fault. Meynte simply didn’t know. Didn’t understand.
“Even with my Everfrost, I was able to fight just one goddess and almost bring her down. But now? I’m just a Memory. No soul, no skills, nothing. Conjure by my word, soulcrafter. You will rue the day you resurrect her.”
“You think…” said Lukas softly. “You think a goddess can triumph over a world. You think that the world is just a bastion for a higher being, created to spawn followers to do the Divine being’s bidding, is it?”
He smiled.
“Let me correct your ignorance.”
Opening Nexus
Transferring Consciousness from Prime Host to Anomaly-State
The next second, he gasped as he was submerged in piercing cold water. The cold stabbed him like a thousand sharp needles and all the airways thrust from his lungs. He lost complete feeling in his arms and felt his vision flicker in the dark, unforgiving cold of the water.
Despite his shock, he didn’t make the slightest attempt to get out of the stream, whatever it was. The current pushed him forward straight into a ball of bright light, and suddenly Lukas had an idea of what infinity looked like. His eyes shut tightly, and there was no saying if he was standing, or falling, or if he could even fall at all. Any reaches of gravity deserted him, leaving him in a multichromatic vacuum that shattered him into a million pieces, only to be reformed in countless permutations in all sorts of dimensions and —
— And then it was over.
And before him lay… That.
The base was a swirling mandala, with shoots arising out of it, contorting into itself in all sorts of ways that defied Euclidean geometry. Calling it looped into itself would be inadequate, because there was nothing inside, or was it upside down? Sideways went upward and inwards vanished into nowhere. It was pulsating like a beating heart, firing waves of energy enough to destroy worlds with frequency of nerves firing, and at the same time, it was dead and the most inorganic thing he had ever gazed upon. Back when Inanna had shown him the Origin, he had been unable to see it all, take it all, so all-encompassing it was. Now, he faced the exact opposite situation.
Having achieved a Nexus, Lukas was sharing the Awareness of this massive cosmic entity, and an omnipresence and omniscience hundreds, no, thousands of times greater than what his mind could fathom was being forced through his brain cells. It wasn’t Astral Projection, like he had shared so many times with Inanna. It wasn’t some kind of extrasensory cognizance, or telepathy that connected him to a system far greater than himself. No, instead it was like he had become more, like he had transcended into an elevated life form, one past the boundaries of Reality, Time and Space, beyond the reach of any monster, demon, king or god. How maddening that when granted with the knowledge of everything all at once, to see all, to know all, and yet, to be completely and utterly immobilized because every action had endless potential outcomes, and each of them had equally endless outcomes and….
“What…. What is that thing?”
Meynte had turned white. She was trembling, and staring at the image before her like she had never seen anything more terrifying, as though she couldn’t bear to be near it, as though it frightened her to her very core. Sweat was beading on her forehead, which made absolutely no sense since she was a mere illusion. Even more, she was a being of Frost. Seeing her sweat like a human being —
Was this how Lukas had looked while gazing at Inanna’s memory of the Origin? Granted, the Haze, or rather, the Ikai, was way less complex than the Origin, but it mattered little. For what difference did a two-storeyed building or a mountain make to an ant? Still she couldn’t have —
SPLAT! She exploded into shards of energy.
Memory prototype MEYNTE disintegrated
Creating new Instance…
A new ‘Meynte’ popped into existence right next to him and —
“What is… that—”
Memory prototype MEYNTE disintegrated
Creating new Instance…
Shit! He hadn’t seen this coming.
“Soulcraft—
Memory prototype MEYNTE disintegrated
Creating new Instance…
And on and on it went. An endless loop. And everytime her consciousness snapped, his inner-world created an exact copy of ‘Meynte’ complete with the memories of the previous one until the point of its disintegration, and again, and again and again. Hastily, Lukas severed the connection to the Nexus, and he was back in the colorful mist of the Haze, and then —
Creating new Instance of Memory prototype MEYNTE…
“WHAT!” said Meynte, looking absolutely haggard, like someone that had nearly been killed half a dozen times, only to be brought back at the last moment. Which to be frank, wasn’t far from the truth.
“What was that, soulcrafter?”
“That,” said Lukas, smiling and meeting Meynte’s eyes. “Is a World. Or the remnants of one.”
“But…” she gasped. “The Ikai is gone. Destroyed. All that’s left is the Haze and it’s—”
“Is what you just witnessed. A remnant of the Past, yes, but it is also a macrocosm of infinite possibilities. One that’s magnitudes greater than the Empire, greater than the Pantheon, greater than politics of mortals and the divine. That, Meynte, is a World. Gods come and go, but the world forever expands.”
For that one moment, Lukas was back in the Awareness, the feeling of being in oneness with the Haze infused within him. Every single time he had formed a Nexus, he had access to every single borderland within the Haze. Terrains burning hotter than lava, and worlds where the ice had iced over. Singularities that gave the impression of a flawless, perfect, knife’s edge, and worlds where the ground was rusted metal and dust storms reined the sky. Borderlands that were essentially underwater and those crafted out of sentient cube-like metallic forms.
Lukas had swam through the Awareness of the Haze, shifting from world to world, borderland to borderland — sensing, feeling, seeing, hearing, and most importantly, comprehending exactly how vast and endless it was.
Had he been just another inhabitant, his perception would have been limited to the world he was born in. But he wasn’t. He was an Outsider, and more importantly, a world. At some level, he was kin to every single borderland within the Haze. At some level, the shattered remains of the Anomaly within him shared a mutual understanding of what it meant to be destroyed.
It was hard to explain it in words. The more he understood the Haze, the more beautiful it felt. A true wonder to behold, but Lukas felt no joy at the sight of it. Instead, his eyes watered and his vision blurred as an emotion he could neither name nor understand swelled in his chest. For a reason that he still did not understand, his soul ached at the sight of the Haze.
Inanna had called it a remnant of a Has-Been, but frankly, he doubted even Inanna ever truly understood what it meant. Where it came from. She might have stared at the Origin, but did she know its story?
Its thoughts. Its feelings. It’s history.
“But that….” said Meynte, still fumbling for words after that soul-wrenching experience. “That is — was the Ikai. You are just… you. Surely your world is different. Smaller. Less.”
A thin smile flickered on his lips. “You say that I am just me. Compared to the Ikai, or even what is left of it, I am but an individual. Perhaps you speak truly. I am smaller, with lesser reserves, lesser resources, lesser power…. But to say that I am less?”
“Are you claiming that the world within you is as great as the Ikai?”
The smile was now beginning to hurt.
“No,” said Lukas. “It’s bigger.”
He held her gaze for a full ten seconds. Truthfully, he wasn’t sure why he was so insistent on making his point known to the entity before him. After all, she was a part of his world, and nothing she said or believed in would make a pint of difference to him. But Meynte was an Empress, someone with decades and perhaps centuries of experience, and most importantly, a Taboo-vessel in the Past. At her greatest, she was his antithesis, and only by knowing her, could he truly understand the true nature of Fimbulwinter. And if he had to teach her a few things about himself and the world she was part of in the process, well, it was an acceptable loss.
She wasn’t going anywhere after all.
“The Ikai Realm was fragmented, not destroyed, and whatever exists, is this Haze. But the world I come from? It was more, so much more. That which you call my inner-world, the one that holds you and every single prototype I have siphoned, that so casually denies Amaterasu’s Eternal Light, and exerts its own Rules and carves its own domain — it’s just the ruined part of my world’s Omphalos. Think, what will you find when I actually get my world to work again?”
“But,” Meynte’s voice quivered only a little. “If that’s how it is, why did you have trouble fighting me?”
“Because you weren’t wrong,” said Lukas, still smiling. “I’m a world, but I am also an individual. And as one, I need to grow. And in this Haze, we will find hundreds of prototypes. Monsters with skills I can assimilate and make my own. Creatures to kill, experience to gain. Level Up, while I study the Haze.”
“Monsters like the Ifrit King?”
Lukas let out a hollow laugh. “Just getting close to it will vaporize the fuck out of me. No, I’m looking for something that bridges the gap between Level-3 and Level-4."
Locating Rifts…
“Something like that?”
An image rushed into his mind.
“Are those really giant cockatrices?”
“I thought you wanted to start small.”
Lukas laughed, and thrust his hand out. The next moment, he was gone.
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