“Step forward.”

Lukas was back inside his mindscape. Only this time, the locale had shifted from his grandfather’s rickety old house to the front of his own apartment. The entire building looked just as derelict as he remembered, with concrete slowly breaking off the outer walls in chunks and a half-weeded lawn next to the left entrance.

He was standing right in front of the outer door, covered in moldy growths and stripped paint— just like he remembered. One step forward, a single twist of the knob, and he could step inside.

Into his apartment. Up to his room on the second floor.

Back to normalcy.

His fingers trembled as he grasped the doorknob. Touching the solid shape with his fingers, feeling its icy cold texture within his palm, seeing it with his own eyes made it impossible to believe that they were mere illusions. His mind kept telling him that it was all real, yet his heart was hung upon a single question.

Was this really home?

What was true? What was real? Did it even matter? In this single moment, he was here, back in his own world, in front of his apartment. Everything else— the anomaly, the worms, the monsters, Inanna...

It would be so easy to pretend it was all just a dream.

“Step forward,” Inanna repeated, her words rumbling like thunder.

“All right,” he whispered, feeling something heavy drop in his stomach. With a will of iron, he stepped off the pavement, twisting the knob and stepping inside. Almost immediately, his knees wobbled and his entire form felt weak. An intense wave of disorientation shook him, scrambling his sense of direction. He felt a powerful gale brushing his face, yet there was blazing heat too, along with the feeling of being drowned in ice-cold water and—

Everything started spinning, and Lukas no longer understood what was happening. His eyes shut, unable to comprehend whether he was standing or falling— or if he could even fall at all. Any and all reaches of gravity deserted him, leaving him in some kind of multichromatic vacuum that made him spin and contort and shatter into a thousand pieces, only to be reformed back in a million permutations with several dimensions that seemed utterly wrong and alien to his eyes and—

“We are here.”

Lukas opened his eyes.

And stared.

And kept on staring.

Yet nothing around him made a lick of sense.

“What the hell is that?”

His brain felt frozen, as if someone had shoved bars of solid ice into each and every individual lobe. It was as if the thing in front of him had all the colors of the world sucked out of it.

No, that wasn’t it. It was probably colorless to begin with.

Or was it transparent?

Lukas genuinely couldn’t tell.

A part of him idly noted the general structure of the thing he was gazing at. The base was spherical, almost like a bulb with a single shoot rising out of it, contorting on itself in ways that defied basic Euclidean geometry. The entire thing was twisted into some kind of loop, then coiled back onto itself, almost as if there was nothing there. Yet there was still something… something he couldn’t truly comprehend despite his best efforts.

It was hot, it was cold. It was up, it was down. It was still, it was moving. Sideways went upwards and inwards vanished into nowhere. It was biological, mechanical, alive, ethereal.

It was utterly, utterly wrong, yet he had never seen anything that could be more right.

He could see strange energies twisting in and out of it in all sorts of spirals that made no sense as the entire thing continued to slowly pump, like a beating heart, with the energies vibrating in an alien tune. It was perfectly synchronous, even though he had no idea why he believed it so.

But what was it?

What was it?

WHAT WAS—

“Mortal.”

He tore his gaze from the strange… object? The very action hurt, as if looking away from it was a grievous sin, one that would take an eternity to repent for, if not longer. Standing beside him was Inanna— her attire a flowing gown of emerald silk, laced with veins of turquoise. A belt fashioned from braids of gold snaked its way around her waist, her unbound jet-black hair falling past her hips.

A creature of gentle curves, of feminine loveliness, she was perfection given form.

The barest of smiles graced her lips.

“What—” Lukas’s sudden delirium about the object rapidly vanished now that he was no longer gazing at it.

In fact, what was it he saw again? Any attempts to remember only left him with a blank.

“What was that?”

“That,” Inanna looked at him through long lashes, her gaze affixed to his, “is the Origin.”

“The Origin?” Lukas asked, perplexed. “Origin of what?”

“Everything. The source of all creation. Elohim. The Provenance. The Infinite Dream. The Cosmic Demiurge. It has as many names as there are languages and yet… nothing can truly describe it.”

Lukas thought back to their first meeting, when Inanna had grandly described herself as someone whose very march heralded endless carnage. That the same goddess was now waxing poetry about this strange object felt awfully unnerving.

“—shaper of worlds, the source of all potential, of all realms.”

“Origin,” Lukas repeated blankly.

Inanna had described it as the source of creation, the shaper of worlds. Like any other educated civilian, he believed the Big Bang to be the origin of material existence, yet—

“If there is no way of describing it, then how did I… you know, see it just a second ago?”

The temptation to steal a glance at it from the corner of his eye steadily grew, as did the unreal fear of what would follow should he succumb to it.

But I already did once. What’s the worst that could happen?

“What you have seen is a mere… what do you mortals call it? A pocket edition?” She wrapped her lips around the last words, drawing them out with a little tremor that dripped with wicked, secret laughter.

It was terrifying to see firsthand how easily Inanna could rummage through his memories, able to steal his modern vocabulary by simply sharing his mind.

“Of— of the real thing?” Lukas clarified.

“Of my memory. Or rather, my own interpretation of what I saw when I first witnessed its grandeur.”

“And what I saw was what my own senses could interpret from your own interpretation?”

A soft smile appeared on her face.

“The real thing must be a wonder then,” he murmured.

The goddess’s smile widened, as if to say— you have no idea. It promised to show him things that you just didn’t talk about with other people. Things that could inspire dreams you could only wish you remembered in the morning.

“It is a good thing,” Inanna declared, “that mortal perception is bound by illusions of linear existence. Beings of apocalyptic strength have lost their sanity in trying to comprehend the Origin.”

And wasn’t that ominous? Though, if she had witnessed it and survived with her questionable sanity intact, then was she implying she was even greater than one of those beings?

Thoughts about apocalypses naturally drove his mind towards a more sensitive topic, one that the goddess had agreed to answer. Lukas opened his mouth—

“Everything has its time, mortal. A little patience will not suffer you.”

His jaws shut with an audible snap.

“Now... look.”

Lukas gazed ahead. The Origin was there, only this time it was more? Lukas didn’t exactly understand how or why, but he could now see several… lands? No, they weren’t lands. He could see mountains, see oceans, see flowing rivers and arid deserts and lush forests. It was like gazing at Earth.

A flat Earth.

And there were several of them. Floating and twisting and turning in all directions as they levitated and moved in non-euclidean shapes around the Origin.

“Those are called subastra. Miniature worlds born of the Origin. Each is an independent world, fixed in its own timespace.”

“Subastra,” Lukas repeated, “Below the heavens. Not very subtle.”

He looked again, only this time the Origin had rotated, revealing a large opening— no, several openings? Thousands of entrances, each leading to everything and nothing. It was like looking into a nebula of alien matter, one that was ever-changing. It was both spectral and physical, existing along the line that separated fantasy from reality.

Something that was, yet was not.

“Maddening, isn’t it?”

“That’s a—” Lukas’s throat clenched as the scene in front of him enlarged further. He saw tiny orbs of energy, contorting and pulsating with blinding light, constantly in a state of metamorphosis. All of them were coming out of that singular—thousands of— a single giant opening— several small openings—

The constant superimposition of multiple images made his head throb.

“What are those?”

“Those,” Inanna pointed with a finger at the orbs, “are concepts of creation, given form. Each of those orbs is Potential made manifest, the tiniest possible shard of the Origin itself. An Omphalos.”

Lukas twisted his neck so fast that he nearly gave himself whiplash. “Omphalos?” he repeated in recognition. “You mean like the one in my schema? The one that gives me the Scan and Analyze skills?”

She ignored him.

“Think of an Omphalos as a doorway. One through which the Origin manifests its own essence into the cosmos.”

Lukas cocked his head. “So all these Omphaloses…. Omphaloi? I’ll be honest, I don’t know the plural for Omphalos.”

Inanna threw her head back and laughed. It was a beautiful thing, rich and cultured and wholly mesmerizing. It was a sound so pure, so free that he couldn’t help but smile himself.

Realizing that he had been staring at her for too long, Lukas cleared his throat. “So, what happens to all these... orbs?”

“They appear in different regions on the subastra.”

“But what actually happens to them?”

“An Omphalos is more than just some energy, mortal. It is potential. It is crystallized information. A doorway that connects one to the Origin itself.”

“What sort of information?”

“History.” Inanna seemed inordinately pleased with the question for some reason.

“Of what?”

“Of growth. Of evolution. Of how to be as the Origin is, though there is— and will always be —one Origin.”

I swear she’s being cryptic for cryptic’s sake.

But even so, it only pointed out the strangeness of the object within him. The strange thing that had given him the Scan and Analyze abilities.

He really didn’t know what to make of that.

“Once an Omphalos materializes in the physical world, it creates a boundary layer around itself, terraforming everything within its periphery to actualize a new world within it.”

Lukas straightened his spine as it finally clicked in his mind what she was talking about.

Inanna grinned, her eyes shining with something akin to amusement.

“Such a world is called an Anomaly.”