Flames encompassed everything.

They razed and consumed the land, darkening the sky as if cursing it for its distance yet longing for its peacefulness. Screams of pain and anguish and despair filled the air like smoke as scorched bodies lay strewn across burnt ground, a testament to the merciless fury of fire. Malice saturated the atmosphere like a thick blanket as a malevolent, red light poured out like liquid fire. Scarlet tongues of flame flickered, caressing and striking at one another like snakes wanting to devour everything, even themselves as the massive inferno threatened to devour everything.

And it was there, in the wafting odor of sulfur and brimstone, that she stood.

“Are you sure this will work?”

“Not really,” her companion muttered. The other person— a child, based on voice and size —wore a dark hooded robe covering her entire form. “But for someone with your aspirations, this is the only way forward.”

“Someone of my aspirations…” she muttered, her emerald eyes reflecting the crimson embers around as she peered into the flames. “You failed to mention it involves walking through the Gate of Fire.”

“You wish to stand in defiance of the God of Fire, and yet here you are, trembling before the very Gates,” the child mocked.

To be looked down upon as inconsequential… To be treated like vermin…

The very notion made her insides boil.

“What must I do?”

The renewed strength in her tone gave the child pause.

“Only a fire may devour another. Asshur burns brightly in the sky. Fire that gives life, provides warmth, brings hope in even the direst of situations. That is the nemesis you have claimed for yourself. One might even consider it an impossible task.”

She exhaled, biting back a retort. Appearing to be a child or not, she knew who the figure beneath the robes truly was. Or at least, what she had once been. It would not do to burn the one bridge she could latch onto at the moment.

Not until she managed to defeat Asshur.

A mortal defeating a God. The very thought brought a smile to her lips.

“To do so,” the child continued, “you must be the flames that burn in darkness. The jaws that consume life. The fire that pollutes, purges, and destroys. The Gate of Fire is merely a stepping stone in fulfilling your dream.”

Dream.

Oh how she loathed having her ambitions reduced to merely a ‘dream’. As if they were merely figments of her imagination and would remain as such.

She would not stand for this.

Silently, she disrobed. Her manacles went first. Then her vest. The cloth around her neck fell next. And finally, her waistguard. These were all earthly possessions that would be consumed and turned to ash in the flames.

“What happens if the flames are stronger?” she asked the child.

“You will learn to overpower them.”

The answer was cryptic, but was she really expecting anything else?

So be it, she told herself, staring into the flames once more.

Contending with fire was a fool’s errand, which was precisely what made it such a dangerous weapon. She had always used Wind in conjunction with Fire to augment it, but here, in the heart of Fire, she wondered if her Wind— lifeforce-augmented or not —would save her from becoming scattered ashes.

A small, nervous smile flickered on her face as her hands lightly twitched with a few nervous little gestures. Then, clenching her jaw, she gathered her courage and strode through the passage, her body completely unclothed and unprotected.

The great walls of flame rose to meet her, as if they had an awareness all of their own, crashing upon her like waves on a shore. Wind and Fire writhed around her, deflecting the incoming barrage and recoiling into a web all around her as miniature typhoons of flame rose to consume her whole. She grunted as the kinetic force crashed against her own might. For this was not just fire— it was the very concept of consumption given form. She could save herself from the searing flames, but the mental pressure of the situation was enough to shatter her will to pieces.

No matter how much she poured out, the flames devoured it all.

No matter how much she deflected, there was always more.

No matter how much she struggled, there was no path forward.

But such was the precise line of thought that would ensure her failure. She needed to save herself, and to do so, she needed to survive. To survive, she needed power. And for power, she needed to step forward.

And so she did.

The flames continued to lash around like the tentacles of a ravenous beast. It was all too terrifying, as every single emotion within begged her to escape. To save herself and run away from the inferno before it consumed her.

But escape was no longer an option. To continue forward, she needed to stop feeling.

And so she did.

When she became too scared to move, she stopped feeling her fear. When the burns became too great a challenge, she stopped feeling pain. When she was unable to push back against the force, she stopped her very own thoughts.

With every new step, she left a piece of herself behind. With every step, she became less than she was before. With every step, the flames coalesced around her. Purging her, unmaking her, adding to her, breaking her, strengthening her.

And when it was all over, the pain vanished.

The pressure faded.

And bright emerald eyes sprang open in the darkness.

Lukas’s eyes snapped open. “What was that?” he murmured.

“That was another facet of my life,” Inanna replied. “One predating my own rise to Supreme Queen. A quest to achieve power enough to eclipse a God’s own, seized by a mortal.”

“Mortal?”

“Slow as ever in comprehension,” she chided, her tone judging. “I too was mortal once, like yourself. But unlike you, I shed my mortality and ascended to the High Heavens to sit upon the Throne.”

“I could feel it,” Lukas slightly shuddered. “You threw away a part of your humanity at every step as you walked into the flames.” He paused, considering his next words carefully. “Is that why you always refer to me as ‘mortal’? To remind yourself that you’re no longer one?”

Inanna stared blankly at him.

He tried again. “You were trying to gain power far beyond your limits to control, and you didn’t give up. You embraced it.”

“A lesson I have been trying to impart upon you for quite some time. My condolences, you have a rather thick skull that keeps me from success.”

“Very funny,” Lukas groused. Though, inwardly, he couldn’t help but wonder. Was this how she gained that firestorm spell of hers? Fire that devoured, fire that purged, fire that didn’t give heat but only consumed— every single description fit the bill for that spell she’d demonstrated on the khorkhoi way back then.

Had it all been from this 'Gate of Fire' place?

“You ask many questions.”

“And yet you never answer,” he retorted. It was one of the reasons why he felt resentful from time to time. He’d had dreams of Inanna before, the type he’d never talk about openly. But to exclusively dream of her past was a far rarer event, given how Inanna actively suppressed that particular facet of their relationship. In fact, this was only the second time he’d dreamt of her, the first being the dream about her corpse hanging on a wall.

“It is indeed surprising.”

“That I dreamt of you?”

“Of course not,” Inanna scoffed. “Dreams are, after all, the vehicles of lesser beings to lay claim on that which escapes them in reality. No, what truly surprises me is your mind’s capability to accept the influx of my memories despite everything going on.”

Lukas had to grudgingly agree. Ever since the event with the khorkhoi that rendered him an anomaly, he had found himself a target for an ever-increasing number of monsters. It wasn’t anything particularly troubling, rather just lots of tiny little monsters all gunning for him at once. Tiny squirrels to fang worms to cinderfaces— it was like every pest in this crypt had his number.

But even after fighting the hundredth monster, there was no change to his schema. Even after hacking into his twentieth thoggua brain, he didn’t net a single experience point.

And no soul capacity, either.

Either anomalies leveled up differently from humans, or the Omphalos inside him was ignoring the rules. No matter what he tried, it looked like the old way of leveling up wouldn’t work any longer.

Just his luck.

On the bright side, he had plenty of soul capacity to spare. Developing new skills and adding new monster prototypes to the Omphalos wouldn’t be a problem for the time being. But that said, if the other monsters— the big ones, anyways —were anything like the khorkhoi, he’d be running out of soul cap within the month.

Assuming the Crypt of Fiendish Worms didn’t do him in by then.

Speaking of which…

“I still think I should try out the khorkhoi’s skills. To see what I’ve got under my belt.”

“Terrible at best, and suicidal at worst,” Inanna sighed. “The khorkhoi’s skills are ruled by its instincts. Its nature. Its Anima. No amount of practice will ever make those skills yours. When it is time, allow the creature to assume command. It knows its skills far better than you ever can.”

“And I shouldn’t get used to the mental shifts by training and practice because…” he trailed.

“Because you weaken the hold your Anima has on the Host body. Do not forget, mortal, you are no longer a human, but an anomaly. You may be the Host Anima, but the more of these shifts you allow, the easier it will be for the other Anima to gnaw at your dominance over this body.”

She may have said it in a roundabout way, but the message shone through.

Every time you shift, you risk losing yourself forever.

Lukas didn’t need any more convincing. As far as subtlety went, it was a sledgehammer, and an effective one at that. Besides, with the tremendous reserves of lifeforce now at his command, it had become hilariously easy to defeat the hordes of tiny monsters out for his blood. Quantity held value over quality in a battle of attrition, but not when you could regenerate your reserves faster than they depleted.

Only time would tell whether the same logic applied to the hallowed guardian of the crypt. Or, as Inanna put it, the genius loci.

“Exterminating a World-Shaper is no menial task. Even this Crypt knows such, and is acting accordingly.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. The fact that she called the monster a world-shaper did not escape his notice.

“Tell me mortal, what is the innate nature of an anomaly?”

Lukas slightly frowned, wondering why she was asking this old question again. “They absorb soul architecture from monsters and add it to their own set. In time, they reproduce it over and over.”

“And what would classify as a threat to such a being?”

“If someone takes— oh,” he dumbly finished. Here he was, an anomaly inside another, stealing soul architecture from his larger counterpart by completing that ritual. “But isn’t that all the more reason for the genius loci to neutralize me? It still hasn’t attacked yet.”

“Does the concept of strategy evade you?”

“They’re monsters,” he drawled, as if that explained everything. And to him, it did. Strategy was a human element, or at the very least reserved for creatures with greater sapience. Humans, or human-like creatures. The monsters he’d faced thus far were powerful, but they were feral, like rabid animals. They had all attacked him out of territorial instinct, not a drawn out game to test out his strengths.

“Hubris before a fall, mortal.”

“Speaking from experience?” Lukas snarked, jumping down to the ground. The khorkhoi corpse had been a reservoir of useful items. He’d gotten a change in his waist armor, and his collection of fangs and usable rope had instantly doubled. Gathering whatever fat he could carry on him, he’d thrown a torch on the rest.

It had been a campfire.

A large, underground, monster-fueled campfire.

“Yes.”

Lukas froze. Inanna accepting her flaw? His resident goddess, Supreme Queen Inanna, admitting hubris was known to her? A part of him wanted to dig deeper, but something told him it was injurious for his health. In the end, he dropped the topic altogether. Trading insults was only fun when the other person played along. “So these monsters are basically lab rats for the anomaly?”

He could feel confusion ebbing from her.

“Lab rats, guinea pigs,” Lukas tried again. “It’s a human thing from the civilized world. We run our tests and experiments first on verm— on rats, to check if a product is working and safe before it’s released to other humans.”

“Test subjects,” Inanna mused. “Is that note the role every lesser being is born to play?”

“Being weak doesn’t make you a pawn,” Lukas defended.

“Does it not? You are only a few centuries beyond the times when it would have been natural for a man your age to take a twelve-year-old as his wife and yet another as his concubine and breed both of them by the end of the year.” Her voice was lined with amusement. “Do not delude yourself into thinking humans are exempt from the laws of nature.”

“That may have been true,” he gritted his teeth, “but civilization has grown. We’re now more cultured than that.”

“Culture, civilization… simply one attire after another. For all the posturing that mortals do, there is little difference between the ways of monsters and your own.”

“Plenty from where I’m standing,” Lukas argued. “We have morals, systems, values.”

He’d taken a lot of flak from the goddess these past few months, but her placing humanity on the same level as these monsters was annoying him to no end. After everything he’d gone through in this hellhole, his identity as a human being, his connection to Earth, his memories— they were all he had left.

If the goddess wanted to tarnish what it stood for, she’d have to fight tooth and nail for it.

But instead, she snorted.

“I still fail to see any distinction. Your kind was more powerful, so you took over your world and the lesser beings submitted to your will. There is hardly any shame in claiming your place as the most powerful species.”

“That’s not it—”

“Is it not?” her surprised, innocent tone reeked of mockery. “Do enlighten me then. Did these lesser beings— guinea pigs, you called them — choose to be ruled by you and yours?”

Lukas remained silent to that, unable to offer a rebuttal.

Finally, Inanna laughed. “Did you honestly believe you ruled your world because you were morally superior?”

“It’s not— it’s survival of the fittest.”

“Precisely,” Inanna beamed. “The strong survive, and the weak genuflect before them. The laws of nature are quite simple in that regard. Did you not have a wardum to serve you?”

“Wardum?”

Lukas could feel a strange shuffling sensation in his mind, as if someone was parsing through all his knowledge. It was strange and cold and oddly violating, especially since he could do nothing but stand there and let it happen.

“Wardum. Slaves, in your tongue.”

“A long time ago,” Lukas admitted, actively trying not to think about the conditions of the United States before the Civil War. History had always been a rather dreary affair, as far as he was concerned.

Law was far better.

“You’re right, we did have slaves at one point. Hell, you could probably use the existence of racism to prove your point. But humanity has never claimed to be perfect. We live, we learn, and we grow. We don’t just exist for eons with the same backwards thought processes with no desire for change.”

It took a few seconds before he realized he’d tried to counter her point with a personal attack, and by doing so, set a precedent for it.

Law was a rather specific endeavor; personal attacks, by their very nature, were something of an outlier in that regard. However, the point of a lawyer wasn’t to follow the law to its letter, but rather to use it to gain what they wanted and how they wanted it.

In using a personal attack, Lukas had lost sight of his control over the argument. He had widened the entrance for the goddess’s rebuttal.

Inanna smiled. It was a beautiful thing.

A wolf would have been proud.

“You speak the truth, mortal. It must be a result of seeing mortals snivel away, groveling, slaving at my feet for aeons, begging for food and riches and power.”

“Do you have to keep comparing everything to slavery,” Lukas exasperatedly asked.

The goddess rolled her eyes. “Is it such a terrible thing? Is it not the nature of the weak to serve their betters?”

“It’s not,” Lukas carefully spoke. “Even the weak are living beings. Even they have rights.”

“Rights?” The word rolled off of Inanna’s tongue as if it was completely foreign to her. “What are rights?”

“They’re a product of civilization. A group of fundamental tenets we recognize all living beings to possess.”

“I see.” The goddess seemed almost amused. “And who guarantees these ‘rights’?”

“The government—”

“The ruling party,” she corrected. “Your masters.”

“Elected officials,” he fought back. “They’re not masters we blindly serve. We elect them by exercising our given right to vote—”

Inanna’s peals of laughter silenced him. “Not only do you obey your masters, but you also exercise your freedom to unequivocally choose a master to obey?” Her burgeoning laughter reverberated throughout his mind. “And then you call them rights?”

Lukas opened his mouth, but she beat him to it before he could get a word out.

“None of you have rights, mortal. Man, woman, monster, it is all the same. It is in your nature to serve, and anything else is simply a lunatic fantasy.”

Lukas vehemently shook his head. It seemed like no matter what argument he said, Inanna was hell-bent on twisting his words to serve her own outdated views instead of seeing sense—

“Urkkkk!”

He lurched forward, feeling a sudden force of something push through him. He had no clue what or why, but something small and thick had just hit him from behind, and his entire body seemed to resonate with the blow, as several rib muscles spasmed in coordination with the impact.

Lukas looked down at the origin of his discomfort and—

Froze at the thing protruding out of him.

Out of his chest.

“GAHHHH!” His pained screams petered out into bloodied coughs as the strange claw, black as the darkest night, pulled out of him, tearing through several bones in the process. His precious blood oozed from the injury, dripping onto the floor as he weakly fell to his knees.

What the hell is happening?

Lukas tried to stand, but it was difficult to understand which way was up. Maybe his muscles weren’t working, or maybe it was his sense of movement. His chest hurt. His ribs weren’t— were they even there? Some part of him recognized they were broken in some parts, and something within him was whispering that he should be dead right now.

Lights danced around his vision, as he felt something move behind him. The sensation of something crawling on multiple legs was followed by strange cricketing noises from his surroundings.

None of it seemed normal, but he couldn’t find the right word to describe it.

Danger.

Right, that was it. Danger. He was in danger.

He needed to escape. He needed to fight. He could hear the goddess screaming in his ears—

Darkness consumed him.