All he felt was pain. A whole lot of it.

Breathing itself was agony. Lukas kept himself from inhaling until his lungs protested, and then he coughed, sending himself into the throes of even greater agony. His chest was on fire and his entire body was—

“Good,” he heard a voice speak. A feminine voice. “Very good.”

Inanna?

Lukas easily recognized the familiar voice, but it felt… different. Every part of the Inanna he knew oozed strength, and her voice reverberated like it was a commandment from the heavens. Even in his mindscape, or in that final illusion of hers, it was booming. So it couldn’t be. It couldn’t possibly be Inanna. Could it?

“Do not overexert yourself, mortal.”

It was definitely Inanna. But… why did she sound so normal? He needed answers. But first—

He tried to feel his body. It felt heavy and dense, like someone had replaced his bones with steel cylinders. Like there was an invisible mountain pressing down on him from above. He tried to speak, but his lips did not so much as twitch. Even the most strenuous attempts produced little more than thin groans.

“Excellent,” Inanna rasped nonetheless. “I always knew you had fortitude. Try opening your eyes.”

His eyelids, like every other part of him, were too heavy to move. He tried opening them. And failed. And then he tried again.

Only to end up with the same results.

After what felt like a small eternity, he managed to slowly open them. His eyes felt coarse, like they were swimming in sand, as they squinted from the sudden brightness that overtook him. And it hurt.

“Stay,” she advised, her voice soft. “Do not overexert yourself if it pains you.”

First her voice was soft, and now she was caring about him? This was a dream. It had to be.

Someone chuckled in the background. No, not someone. Her. Inanna.

Lukas tried again. This time, his eyes opened without discomfort. The wooly mist around his vision slowly faded, and the world came into focus. It was only then that he realized that something— or someone, to be specific —was holding his head in place. Specifically, it was on someone's lap.

“Ah,” Inanna whispered, looking down at him. “Dawn at last.”

Lukas blearily stared up at Inanna’s face. The Goddess of Murder. The Akkadian Queen of An and Ki. And she was holding him, his head in her lap and her hand in his hair like a mother with her son, or two loved ones sharing a private moment.

But she looked… odd. The Inanna he knew had always looked preternaturally strong, healthy, and confident. Her angelic face was more radiant than the sun and her figure exuded a sensuality that could drown Earth’s supermodels in their own tears.

The one he was looking at was thin as a stick and her hair a complete wreck. Her face was twisted with pain, and her eyes were sunken, a strange uncertainty in them as her gaze bore down into him.

It felt wrong.

Lukas couldn’t believe what he was looking at. It— it had to be a dream. It just had to. There was no way this could be anything but a dream.

Unless—

“So… I take it I’m dying?” he croaked out, feeling strangely detached from his bodily pains. “Because if so, then there are certainly worse ways to go than in your lap.”

Inanna stared at him for a moment, before letting out a little tinkering laugh, filled with a puzzling melancholy. “It is a sad world that finds your attempts at humor laugh-inducing, mortal.”

“I’ll have you know—” Lukas broke out into coughs. And gosh did it hurt. “Where I’m from, people found me hilarious.”

“Perhaps because you were too simpleminded to realize others were laughing at you, not with you.”

“Well, at least I got you to laugh.”

The corners of her lips twitched upwards. “That you did.” And then—

Nothing.

“So,” Lukas repeated, his mirth disappearing, “am I really dying?”

“I have told you this once before, mortal,” Inanna chided. “You being dead is counterproductive to my desires.”

His brows furrowed. “Then… I’m alive?”

“Yes,” she said, “but only just.”

“That doesn’t sound too good.”

“Your ability to understate the problem is as powerful as always.” Her lips twisted into a frown so bitter he could nearly taste it. “The spell I performed did not yield the result I expected, but it worked. This spell, our spell, traversed across the subastra and reached into every single realm, singularity, and anomaly in existence to find the link to my sister’s domain.”

Lukas had a foreboding feeling that he wasn’t going to like the next words coming out of her mouth.

“It found nothing.”

His stomach plummeted.

“Excuse me?”

Inanna snorted. There was no humor in it. “I realized halfway through the scrying ritual that nothing was being detected, so I altered it mid-course. I did not just search for Irkalla, my sister’s home. I instead expanded it to look for everything else. Ereshkigal. An. My throne room. My relics. The faith I held in my ancient temples. I even searched for every single deity of my pantheon, using myself as the anchor.”

She laughed, and the bitterness was back in full force. “I found nothing.”

Lukas gazed up at her, horror overtaking his features. “You couldn’t find any sign of your home at all?”

Inanna slowly nodded. “It is like the entire realm of Ki, the thrones of An, the Underworld of Irkalla— none of it exists any longer. My followers, my betrayers, my Truths, my sister— none of them exist any longer.”

“But the spell faltered midway, right?” he eagerly asked. “Maybe you’d have found something if it had finished. Maybe we can try again once I—”

Lukas’s voice gave out as he looked up at her expression. Never had he seen her look so lost. So helpless. It was almost as if she— she had just… given up.

And suddenly, he decided he hated seeing her like that.

He absolutely abhorred it.

“The spell did not fail, my dear mortal.” She gently ran her dainty fingers through his locks. “I cast it over and over, hundreds of times, across the universe, all in the blind hope of finding anything that connected me to the life I know I have lived. That was what drained you so dry. And yet—”

She let out a bark of laughter. “I found nothing.”

“...where does that leave us?” Lukas finally asked, not knowing what else to say.

The goddess looked crestfallen. “I… do not know. For the first time in eons, I simply do not know. The spell did not fail, which means everything I once knew no longer exists. As the laws of time for Lostbelts do not follow that of the Origin, it is possible that Akkadia and Sumer have fallen prey to Time, or worse, the Dirge has swallowed them whole. But even so, it cannot be so clean. There would be remnants. Fallen gods. Truths embedded into the Origin itself.”

Lukas bit his tongue. But there wasn’t. Was there?

Inanna sighed. “No. There was nothing.”

“There has to be an explanation,” he pressed forward, wholeheartedly believing it. After all, Inanna always had the answer. And if she didn’t, then she’d eventually find it. Always. “Maybe— maybe this is a different universe or something.”

After all, if his planet could explode and he could get dropped into a dungeon with RGP-esque abilities, then a multiverse certainly wasn't out of the question as far as he was concerned.

“Your preachers feed you the most surreal stories,” Inanna chuckled. “There is but one universe. The Bedrock of Creation. The Cosmic Demiurge.” She paused. “And if you remember, you yourself know a small piece of my story, though your knowledge is distorted, no doubt due to the overactive imagination of your historians.”

He tried to get up and argue the point, but her arms held him down tightly.

Helplessly, he just stared at her.

“The way I see it,” she said at last, “is one of two things have happened. The first is that my life is a great lie. Something, or someone, tampered with my memories to make me remember a life I have never lived. A history that never occurred. A reality that never was.”

Lukas gulped. “And the other?”

“That my World, my History, that myself— it all existed. And someone has gone to extreme lengths to erase the Akkadian pantheon, and everything associated with it, out of existence.”

He stared at her, flabbergasted by a conspiracy so bizarre that it made his own situation of forced homelessness feel practically tame in comparison.

“But I have lost my chance of finding the truth. My only solace, as much as it pains me to admit it, is you.”

“…Inanna, you’re scaring me.” Surely she did not mean what he thought she did. Right?

“I—” the goddess looked like she was trying to pronounce a word she had never spoken before, “I am sorry.” And there it was. “In my anxiety, in my desperation for freedom, I drained you completely. And the Omphalos in you reacted poorly. Your mind perished.”

And there she went again, saying all sorts of confusing things. “But you saved me, right?”

“Must you always make me repeat myself?” she sighed fondly. “I saved you for my own selfish pursuits. Would you like to know the circumstances?”

He wordlessly nodded, and Inanna closed her eyes.

“The Omphalos in you realized that you, the human mind of its Host, was acting irrationally. Keeping you at the helm of your body was counterproductive to its long-term goal of survival, so it cut you out.”

Lukas felt something die inside him. “…What did you say?”

“You hear, but you do not listen, mortal,” Inanna chided. “You are a soul. You have a body. And you share that body, including your brain, with the Omphalos. Your mind and consciousness, however, are extra additions that are suited to the body at times. Times like when the Omphalos allowed you, the human mind, to stay in control.”

“Until I let all that power go free.”

“Until you gave it up,” the goddess corrected, pursing her lips. “So dedicated were you to fulfilling your promise, that you ignored how it could harm yourself and, by extension, the Omphalos. I was—” she opened her eyes and looked down at him again, “I was so consumed by my desire to find my lost home that I relentlessly drew power from you.”

“I see.”

Lukas didn’t like it. But he had to accept it. He’d kept his word to the fullest of his ability and let the chips fall as they may. And now, it was time to face the consequences.

“What happens now?” he asked.

“The manacrafting, that spell we performed… It all took place more than a month ago.”

It was like every other time Inanna spoke, Lukas felt like he was being doused with ice-cold water.

“…A month?”

“Indeed. The Earth-shaper and his compatriots have valiantly been keeping you alive and hidden in their kingdom.”

A kingdom? He was in another kingdom? In a new world? And for a month? This was— it was all so—

“I waited patiently for the Omphalos to wake you once more. But it did not. Instead, it is slowly gathering energy, harvesting lifeforce and mana from the environment to reform the Anomalous Energy reservoir you drained so carelessly. I did not have the power to affect its decisions, so I did what I had to do.”

Inanna’s body turned slightly translucent for a second.

Oh no.

“I trusted you, a mortal, once, and you came through.” She graced him with a soft, pained smile. “So I decided to trust you again, for a second time. Which is why…”

“Inanna,” Lukas asked, his heartbeat picking up its tempo, “what did you do?”

“I used my Presence to add to yours. To—” her voice cracked, “to manifest your mind once more. To awaken your consciousness. And now, I have nothing left. No power. No faith. No Presence. And, unless you find a way to make it otherwise, no existence.”

Lukas didn’t care how much it hurt. He pushed himself up and out of her lap. “What the hell—” He twisted his body around and grabbed her by the arms as he shook her. Hard. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Inanna, to her credit, remained composed. “I did what I had to. Without power, I could not manifest elsewhere. I would be stuck in a dark corner of your sedentary form. The Omphalos would not care for my existence. The best option, my only option, was to awaken you.”

“But— but you— don’t you realize what this means? You’ll— you’ll be—”

And for the first time, the unassailable wall that was her façade cracked. Her lips trembled. She was afraid. He knew it. She knew it. And she knew that he knew it. “I will dissolve and return to the pendant. Asleep. Until you bring me back once again.”

“This can’t be happening!” Lukas felt his heart jump to his throat. “I know nothing about this world, and now you’re leaving? If I die, then you’ll fucking die too! Don’t you understand that?”

The goddess became more transparent. “It took a miracle to find my way back to this subastra. You were my miracle, Lukas Aguilar. I can only hope that you— you will be my miracle once more.”

“I will,” Lukas promised, as he felt her presence fade. “I will. I swear it. You hear me? I will find a way to bring you back. No matter the consequences.”

Inanna wore a serene smile, her face bereft of all worry. A cup appeared on the floor between them. Tenemu. The wine of Sumer. Drink of the gods, Inanna had once described it.

Drink to it, mortal, her eyes seemed to say.

A long lost tradition. After a bargain was struck.

Lukas clenched his fingers around the cup, his eyes never leaving Inanna’s slowly dissipating face. He pushed the rim to his lips, the liquid dark and rich and tinged with honey. He looked ahead to meet her eyes one final time and—

Nothing.

Just like that, she had vanished.

TO BE CONTINUED IN…

Stranger Than Fiction: A Game of Faith