“I am annoyed.”

Lukas winced. That was definitely a bad thing. Inanna had decimated entire civilizations for less.

Sure, such an outcome was now impossible because she was stuck in his pendant, but that was no reason to become complacent. The goddess was exactly the sort of person to hold a grudge for eons and then act upon it when the time was ripe. He’d know. He was literally a part of one such retribution of hers.

Also, the goddess mentioned in her own words that her relic had run out of charge. The eerie speed at which she’d gotten used to human phrases notwithstanding, it was overall a good thing for the anomaly, since it was safe from her wrath.

Though, the same couldn’t be said of his mind, which was still well within her reach.

What’s wrong?

“This plane. It is not Ki. Not Ereshkigal’s world. It seems the Fates love to obstruct my path.”

The Fates, huh?

“Yes,” she replied scornfully. “They grace Ereshkigal’s throne room, foolish stone-cold manic bitches.”

Which, given who was saying it, was really, really saying something.

“There are always consequences, mortal. Always a price to pay to create a new branching of the universe, to bend the course of the Great River.”

So… what happens now?

The goddess remained silent.

I mean, it was always a possibility, wasn’t it? he mentally communicated. You said there was a fair chance this wasn’t Eresh— I mean, your sister’s domain.

“You speak harsh truths, mortal. But that does not mean I have to like them.”

And that was the closest he’d ever been to seeing Inanna, butcher of god and beast alike, sulk. Besides, it seemed like a perfect pot-kettle scenario. Not that he’d ever admit that out loud.

He liked living, thank you very much.

But as always, he realized after the fact that the goddess was privy to his every thought, so the damage was already done. Still, he was on her side. Surely she’d be a little lenient and ignore that jab.

Probably.

Hopefully?

Well, if you want to talk about it or, you know, just rant…

“The Supreme Queen of An and Ki does not rant, mortal,” she retorted, though the annoyance was missing from her tone. Rather, it just sounded like budding frustration. “Besides,” she caved in, “it is a rather long tale.”

“I’m all ears.”

“About what?” Tanya questioned.

“…Nothing. Are you done yet?” he asked, trying and failing to be completely cavalier about the entire thing. “I still need to find a way out of this place.”

This right here was something he was still annoyed about. After all this time being able to freely talk aloud in perfect English, he was now being forced to think to her. The entire shift was so awkward and uncomfortable that he wouldn’t have been surprised if the goddess had done it out of some weird sense of spite.

And now, every time he spoke up by mistake, the blonde would reply back, thinking he was talking to her.

In an annoyed, yet perfectly earnest, manner.

Lukas hadn’t known such a tone was even possible.

Still, it wasn’t as if he’d blamed her, especially since she didn’t know the reason why he was keeping his mouth shut so much in her presence. What was he supposed to say? That he was mentally communicating with a spurned goddess that had a vicious streak a mile wide? That the same goddess gave him the ability to communicate in every language?

Not that he was complaining. This auto-language magical bullshit was pretty awesome. Apprenticing lawyer or not, he’d have started banging his head against the walls if he had to communicate with this hot alien blonde in body language.

Now there’s an idea…

“I’m surprised you’re not peeping over already,” she shot back. “All you do is keep staring at my back when you think I’m not looking.”

Lukas blinked. “You noticed?”

The blonde huffed an irritated ‘Men!’ under her breath.

He glanced towards her, or rather, where she currently stood. Said blonde had conjured four slabs of ice around her, boxing her away from his ‘lecherous’ gaze— her words, not his. It was… good, he supposed. Had he been on Earth, he’d have whistled and looked away before offering her his shirt or something.

Here, it had been torn to shreds.

Plus, personal privacy was a rather human concept. As erotic as it would be, Lukas knew that dealing with beautiful alien blondes with no concept of ‘modesty’ or ‘decency’ would be far more difficult than those Japanese animes made it look.

He felt the goddess’s dry stare leveled on him.

Sorry. You were saying?

“As a remnant of the True Goddess, I am invariably connected to the Origin. However thin, however meager the bond may be, it exists. It ties me to it. Even when I was lying dormant in your world, I could feel the Call. Silent, thrumming, but ever-present. It was why I knew I would return someday. To sit upon my rightful throne.”

Inanna paused, taking a moment to pin him with a heavy, meaningful stare.

“You once asked me if there were more of Me out there. There were.”

Lukas felt the pendant thrum with power, felt his own lifeforce singing in primal resonance with her. An emotional need to kill or die for her washed over him in an overwhelming flood.

“After I allowed those treacherous vermin to get the better of the True Me, they bound Me behind the Seven Gates of the Underworld, stripping me of everything I once was. My Power, my Truths, my Presence. And yet, Inanna was still out there, in the reflections that were her Relics, distributed across the different realms of the universe.”

Lukas touched the pendant hanging on his neck, its blue sheen burning brighter than ever.

“The vermin gathered my Relics and trapped them beneath powerful enchantments. All except one.”

The pendant blazed brighter.

Because it wasn’t connected to the Origin. It was in a Lostbelt.

“Yes,” the goddess exhaled. When I woke up in the Pendant, I knew that the worst of all fates had been averted. Being on a Lostbelt had accomplished that much. I had little left to hope for, and little left to fear. Anyone in my position would have gone insane, but I gazed through the Pendant’s senses at the Lostbelt around me. I reflected on the errors in my past life; there were many, in hindsight. I knew I had to find a way back, to start again.``

Lukas waited for the bomb to drop.

“Then, the Catastrophe happened.”

He could feel a tide of frustration sweeping through the goddess. If it weren’t for the resistance he had developed from constant exposure to her, it would’ve been all too easy to be carried away by it.

“When the Omphalos was shredded, I called a shard to myself. Every Omphalos, Lostbelt or otherwise, was once born from the Origin, and such bonds do not break completely, even when the Realm itself breaks from the Origin’s reach. The shard of a Goddess and the shard of an Omphalos… we were both invariably connected by threads to the Origin, so I believed I could harvest its power to create a more tangible connection to the Origin. The odds were against me, but I had to try."

But you were inside a pendant, and thus needed someone else to do it for you.

Inanna stayed silent for a while. “Not quite.”

Lukas was flabbergasted. Excuse me?

“It is true I required someone to absorb the Omphalos shard, but by all possibilities, your mortal form should have been destroyed in the event. No mortal, human or otherwise, should be able to survive its slightest touch. It should have obliterated you.”

“But it didn’t,” he spoke out loud, too shocked to realize it. “Instead, it fused with my soul.”

“Indeed,” she affirmed. “A true miracle. A freak of nature. A possibility so infinitesimally small that even the Fates would have ignored you.”

He just stood there dumbly. He didn’t even know what to think about all this.

“Whatever power I could harvest, it was enough to connect me to the Origin. I opened a Gate, a dimensional passage through the very fabric of the universe, and dragged you through it. The very next thing I knew—”

“I— we were in this anomaly. The Crypt of Fiendish Worms.”

She nodded.

Lukas felt himself tearing in two. On one hand, he had genuinely grown to like her. She had helped him grow from a weak human to someone capable of crushing monsters without batting an eye. And yet, she hadn’t done it out of some errant feeling of magnanimity, but rather for her own agendas. A naïve idiot would have probably cried foul, but after everything he’d been put through, he knew better.

He would have perished in the destruction of Earth. But now? Now, he had a chance to grow.

To thrive.

To be more.

Besides, Inanna wasn’t human. She was a goddess, a primal force of the universe. Such beings were meant to shape worlds from raw matter, not to cope with being frustrated. Her own personal power meant she could make demands and get her way in every circumstance, and as a result, she looked at humans no differently than he would a cockroach.

It explained her original behavior. Her whimsical nature, her willingness to toy with him, the casual manner in which she had nearly broken his mind and rendered him insane. She was not used to such human fragility, adversity, or unpredictability. When she was first faced with it, she reacted the same way a child would to an obstacle for the very first time.

By sometimes throwing a tantrum.

And yet, he could not— would not —feel sorry for her. Empathize? Definitely. But he knew that the Omphalos fusing with him, for whatever reason, had saved his life. If there was one thing that was truly on his side, it was the Omphalos shard.

And he was its anomaly.

There was no way he was going to empathize with a process that would’ve gotten him erased.

“I’d have killed you myself if you were a self-sacrificial idiot,” the goddess scoffed, though there was a strange fondness in her tone. “I do not suffer fools.”

Can you actually do that?

“Is that a serious question?”

He chuckled, looking around and taking in his surroundings. They were still inside the crystal caverns, though the constant barrage of monsters attacking them had finally ceased. Then again, nothing said ‘stay-away’ better than seeing two titanic powers standing inside.

Together.

“I harbor no doubt that this is not Ereshkigal’s domain. And while that is reassuring, it presents a new difficulty against which even I am unprepared.”

Lukas felt a sense of horror dawning on him. When a freaking goddess felt like she was unprepared, it certainly didn’t spell anything good for her little minion. Him.

“And,” he croaked, “what exactly are you referring to?”

“Between opening a Gate and aiding you in a battle against… her,” Lukas glanced towards Tanya, who had settled into a more comfortable outfit, “I can no longer open any Gates.”

“Not even—” Lukas paused. Not even after I get to the Omphalos of this anomaly?

Inanna shook her head. “To open a Gate, we must find the destination. My world of Ki could be anywhere, in any of the subastra surrounding the Origin. There is no way to be certain. When you absorb the Omphalos of this crypt, I can harness its power to See through its History, and find our way to Ki.”

“And then you can open a Gate, right?”

“Only when we find another power source. A greater one than this, if such an entity exists here. And should you require any favors in the future, we will then need more sources of power for each.”

“Which means,” Lukas ground out, his fists tightly clenched, “I’m stuck here.”

“Yes,” the goddess sighed, “and I as well.”