Epilogue-2

Location: Somewhere in a borderland amidst the Haze…

It was finally time. He had trained himself as much as possible, raising his levels higher and higher for as long as he could without getting into the ‘absolutely irksome’ category.  He had spent nearly equal if not more time in comprehending the nature of the world that was him, and studied the entire nature of Truth and Taboo, both through triggering more of Inanna’s memories, discussions with Frost, and less so, but equally valuable talks with the memory of Empress Meynte that was now a part of Forget. He had made sure to get everything in order this time, ensured that the Sacrifice was fully and conceptually complete, and that he had not gotten anything incomplete or worse, wrong this time around.

A goddess was a spiritual entity, and 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. And by the time they became gods and goddesses, they ceased having any true physical forms altogether, since physicality and Faith meshed as well as forests and flamethrowers. Of course, divinities nearly almost always crafted a physical shell to interact with the physical world around him, and even if it was a false construct, it was completely indistinguishable from mortals, as in, could eat, drink, sleep, breathe and use all physiological functions, have memories, feel the senses and the like.

Even though said bodies were little more than puppets operated by the divine soul housed within them.

So to resurrect her, he needed six factors, namely —

A template to craft her identity from.

Materials to create it with.

A forge to do the actual crafting.

Fuel to facilitate the forging process.

An identity to attach to the newly forged form.

And finally, a location to anchor this new spiritual entity.

That had been the theory he had been operating under the last time he had attempted a resurrection.

Man, the more he thought back to that stuff, he wondered how he could’ve been so close to being successful while being so far from the truth.

“Alright,” he said to Tanya. “It’s about time. I’m going to attempt it now. Make sure I’m not disturbed by anything.”

Tanya nodded, and just for safety’s sake, created a wall of Everfrost around him from all sides, literally isolating him from the rest of the borderland.

Connecting to Nexus

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. Lukas felt the circle’s power grow like a tidal wave as it met the crimson sheen, the periphery touching, vibrating, expanding, contracting, deepening —

And then a deluge of pure, violent, nauseating pain blanketed his world, as power, endless power from the Haze flowed through the Nexus he had established. Lukas could barely stand, his muscles and ligaments feeling like they were being stretched for miles. His own 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.

Nexus achieved

Power Levels holding steady

He exhaled. One of the six factors — gathering the fuel, was complete. Time for the next.

The last time, he had crafted a mental circle around him using pure imagination, concentration and arrogance. Use the Abstract to summon the Abstract into the Real, and all that.

Only this time, he had something better. Something that fitted the scenario to a tee.

Inanna did not belong to this world. Nay, this entire Universe. Her Truth was absent, unwritten from the very Origin itself. No matter how hard he tried, the Real World — the Origin itself, would deny Inanna’s Truth, and reject her. He had tried to brute force the Abstract (Inanna’s Truth) into being assimilated into the Real (Origin) using the endless power of the Haze, only to be hit in the head with a cosmic sledgehammer of failure.

He should’ve been looking at it the other way around.

Under what conditions would the Real need to have to embrace the Abstract? And if those conditions didn’t exist, was there a way to apply it on the Real?

The answer to the second question was, quite naturally, No. There was a name given to a condition that was applied on the Real (Origin). They were called Truths. And no one, Anomaly or not, could create Truths out of thin air like that, or just copy them out of somewhere else, and forcibly attach it to the Origin.

The answer to the first question was unknown. Despite the divinity within his soul, Lukas was not Inanna. He had not Ascended through Inanna’s Truth. He had not lived Inanna’s life, and not even in a thousand years, would he be able to be Inanna as she truly was, even if he somehow gained access to every waking moment of her life.

Thus, a different alternative was needed.

Create a Real (world) that could embrace the Abstract.

Had Lukas been anybody else, such an option would never have existed. But he wasn’t an individual. He was a World. A Real. One that was cut off from the Origin, and free to embrace or reject whatever Truths or Taboo it might come across or give rise to.

Like the Plains of Forget.

Lukas closed his eyes, and the next thing he knew, he was standing amidst the crystal graveyard, with mounds of spiritual prototypes littered all over the endless plain, with the massive figure looming in the heavens above him.

There was no need for Territory Creation. This world itself was his territory. Everything here was unquestionably, unerringly his. One might even say that he had more right to them than they had to themselves, if a comparison like this could even be drawn. The last time he had conjured a pentagon — Inanna’s symbol of order. This time though —

Lukas exhaled and spoke —

“Fire.”

A crystal mound containing the Bylestyr prototype arose from the ground, and shattered, revealing an ethereal form of the Bylestyr, flames exuding out of its form.

“Water.”

Shahxith, the kami that had once been Olfric’s, or an instance of it, manifested in a different direction.

“Earth.”

Hreidmar rose. Svartalfar. Master of the terrain and Innate Gravity control. svartalfar.

“Ether.”

Yurei. The first specimen that Lukas had ever absorbed.

“Wind.”

This one was difficult. It took a while, but finally a massive hillock erupted from the ground, shattering with a massive roar. The Level-4 jaan, once the kami of Mujin Shimizu, bellowed its presence with primal fury.

Anomalous Energy erupted out of the terrain itself, moving in straight lines, connecting all five prototypes, changing directions, only to move in straight lines again, forming Inanna’s pentagon, with each prototype at the vertices.

Perfect symmetry.

Force within restraint.

Harmony.

The forge was set. As were the materials.

Three more factors remained.

A sixth crystal mound erupted, this one exactly in front of him, revealing —

“... this is one of those weird days, isn’t it?” asked Lukas.

“Yes,” answered Lukas.

Lukas sighed. “I suppose it can’t be helped. At least this one’s familiar. I’ve already perished once when Inanna cast that Scrying spell. Can’t be too difficult the second time.”

“The world runs on faith.”

“You suck at philosophy.”

Lukas exhaled. As did Lukas. Both of them were Lukas, and here inside the Plains of Forget, there was absolutely zero difference between them.

It gave him a new appreciation for the word ‘trippy’.

“I’ll continue the rest of the ritual,” said Lukas to the version of him that had just appeared out of the ground. “Get out of the circle.”

“Erm, didn’t you raise me to do exactly that?”

“Yes, but this is a ritual by sacrifice. I collected all the materials. I set the forge. I’m adding the constituents, and I shall become the source of her divinity.”

“You realize that both of us are spiritually identical? And you just raised me for exactly that purpose. I won’t exactly be considered foreign by —”

“You get out or help me I will. And besides, you’re wrong. We are spiritually similar, but once the Divinity is used up, it’s gone forever. There is no attempting it again.”

Lukas — the newly raised Lukas, stopped talking immediately, and leaped out of the circle.

“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.

Maximum Sympathization with Prime Host

Accessing DIVINITY

Breaking existing conventions

Safety Off!

The gates of his mind blew open, as primordial chaos was unleashed. The anomaly within him broiled under the strain, waves of power magnitudes more than it could deal with rushing through the body as Lukas writhed in tormented agony. 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, as the five elements began flowing into the ritual circle from all five prototypes, and merging with himself in the middle.

Perfect balance.

The pendant on his neck began to glow, and with that, the fourth factor — the template, empowered by the Sacrifice, was added to the mix.

The last time he had used the Pendant as the anchor for Inanna’s form. This time he couldn’t afford to be so 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, Inanna had escaped as a reflection to Earth, one that had become a lostbelt in time, cut off from the Origin. It was only poetic that the same Earth 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.

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.

A single tear of blood trickled out of his right eye. Lukas felt his knees weaken. He funneled lifeforce to keep them steady.

This was the difficult part. He couldn’t afford to be distracted. Not now. It was the time for the last element to be added.

Identity.

The last time, he had 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. He had brought it forth, coalescing power through himself and channeling into the forge.

And it had ended horribly.

The process had rejected the vessel, calling the memories corrupted, and shut the entire process down. During his entire time spent in the Haze, Lukas had been exceptionally skeptical that everything would transpire smoothly after the last attempt, and as such, had gone over potential worst case scenarios with Frost and doubly checked with Meynte’s memory, especially the last part about the corrupted identity. Frost had been absolutely certain that empowered with the Sacrifice and the other factors, the spiritual creation would not be rejected so long as the Real did not reject the Abstract creation.

But Lukas hadn’t been sure about it. For all of Frost’s guarantees, he had taken her words with a pinch of salt. Because this was his last and only chance. Unlike the last time, he was sacrificing himself, and with it, every bit of Divinity that Inanna had used to reforge his soul. If he failed now, then every bit of Inanna’s divinity within him would be gone. That was the main risk of conducting this ritual. The Plains of Forget could recreate everything— memories included, but Divinity — especially incomplete Divinity, was beyond it. It was why Lukas had chosen to sacrifice ‘himself’ for the Ritual. But if he was used up, then so would that divinity. And with that, all his chances, all his hopes of resurrecting Inanna would be gone forever, and nothing he could do would change that.

It took him a long time before he had finally identified a flaw in Frost’s reasoning. Frost, for all her knowledge, hadn’t really understood it. She was the avatar of the End, and regardless of whatever alter ego and form she existed as, she was and would always be present in the present and future. She was absolute. But Inanna — or rather, Lukas’s understanding of Inanna, was relative. Relative to Lukas’s own perceptions of how Inanna acted, and not Inanna’s own reasons to act the way she did.

A minor thing, but it made a world of difference.

If he wanted to assert an identity, then he needed something that was pure and utterly untainted by anything — not by his own reasoning, not by his own experience, nothing. Something that was pure, powerful, and heavily resonated with Inanna.

And he had a memory, a perfect memory, with an aria that defined Inanna to the tee.

Closing his eyes, he began to chant in heavy, reverberating tones.

“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 these words had been said aloud, 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.

As if he had finally earned his respite.

“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 monster prototypes. 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. He felt the bylestyr let out a screech and shatter, only for another to be raised in its place. Mujin’s kami roared furiously, pumping more power than the others could manage in ten lifetimes, and yet it made no difference.

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 turn corporeal.

“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. The power was coming from the Haze, but it was creating something that did not exist before.

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. 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?”