Among the many things occupying my time, I was also still trying to get a read on that hidden goddess, the one whose power had been linked to mine, who whispered in my mind.

From what I could tell, she didn't like me.

You should really flee this place, the voice suggested with a syrupy sweet cruelty in her voice, while I was arguing with Miana. You have no chance to survive here.

If you are concerned with my well-being, help me hide, I suggested in return. Surely that's not too much to ask of such a powerful goddess.

I am not a goddess, nor am I a djinn, the woman replied, and I thought I sensed a raw anger in her. I am the goddess, the djinn. The last scion of the source, she who inherits all creation, and I deserve your respect.

As I helped Miana get back to reading, and teleported Raine to an area outside of Balant--somewhere hopefully far enough away that the necromancer would not sense me--I seethed at that request. For which of your actions shall I respect you, My Lady? For which of your choices?

I felt a hand clutching my godly Key, as though from within the key itself. Do not toy with me, she snarled into my mind. I am your queen, goddess of all gods.

From what you said, that is an action your mother took--it was not by your own hand that you became a goddess, let alone queen. What action, what choice should I respect?

You DARE?

I tried to keep my cool. In truth, Erika had not given me any guidance on this, and I honestly didn't know if I was on the right path or the wrong one. But... whether I was right, or wrong, she was wrong. The only question was, could I really convince her of that? Without us getting into a fight?

What I dare to do, I replied, is expect better of a so-called queen of all goddesses. There was a surge, as though she wanted to strangle me, but some part of her resisted, some part of her listened. It seemed... unnatural, in a sense, like someone else was watching over her shoulder, but... My Lady, let me ask you a question, and answer it truthfully--if a voice appeared in your head and simply claimed to be your better, would you believe them? No, you would not.

You have seen my power, replied the woman in my head, scornfully. I finished the apology I was making to Raine, one she was barely listening to, and teleported myself back without her, leaving her to guide the others to my temple--hopefully, it would be started by the time they arrived. Hopefully, it would be protected by then, too.

I have, I replied. And I expect better of a person who has such power.

The woman seethed at me, and I could tell, across the great distance I felt between us, that part of her was very lonely, very desperate for real conversations, even if those had to be arguments. Still, I didn't want that to be the whole basis for our relationship. In truth, I didn't want a woman of such power to resent anyone, let alone me, like that.

My Lady... I tried to visualize her again, and the image had again changed--rather than laying in bed or sitting by the fire, she was pacing furiously back and forth, stark naked, her body gleaming in the firelight, her hands clenching and unclenching. Do you not also expect better of yourself?

In that visualization, her face turned to me, and for a moment I glimpsed not an attractive goddess' face, but a face like a mummified corpse, eyeless, lifeless, but not motionless--animated, full of something primal, but not real. She struggled against that feeling within herself, trying to recover her beautiful facade, and faster than I would have believed, she had it, like a mask pulled over those features. I achieve every goal I set for myself. That is what it means to have power.

You lie, I countered, easily. If it was a spiritual Truth, I would have sensed it.

Do not dare to lecture me! Her face, again, was like ashes bound into form rather than a real face, a real person.

You know that it is true. I paused, considering, and I felt my heart fall, a little. That's your true face, isn't it?

W-what? In that mental image, the fire went out, and frost covered every surface of the room, which was plunged into darkness.

The one you showed a moment ago, when you lost control. That is your Truth.

You--you can see me? The image of the goddess, still looking busty and beautiful, but with age and rot creeping in around the corners of the image, clutched at herself, as though the frozen room was sucking all the heat out of her, and it was all she could do to keep from collapsing. Fear, I thought... although I did not sense it from her, that had to be fear.

I am the God of Eyes. Not that that was really the point, I supposed, but it was a nice line. I am... sorry, My Lady.

The face was measured for a moment, but then she turned directly to face me, and I saw those empty withered eye sockets again. You are not sorry, she said in reply, and I could feel a tang of Truth to her words, Truth that stung me. You steal everything that you have from me, and you want more. Your kind stole my world, stole my soul, you want everything, and... The sense of Truth fell off, leaving only the Goddess' willpower. You cannot have it. I will not let you have it.

I... admit freely that that woman's gaze on my face, mummified and twisted, made me feel a sense of horror that might have overwhelmed me, except... except that I felt a deep resonance between her face and the green-flame-tainted key that had been Xenma's. Like him, she had once been forced to survive on nothing but the hatred of others... for long enough that it had left a mark on her that went far deeper than skin, that soaked into her bones. Her whole nature was corroded, corrupted by green flame.

And yet what I said before, in the council chamber, was true: she still loved this world.

It was only as I realized this truth that I understood something I had sensed. When I'd reached for her, tried to touch her, I had found that she seemed impossibly far away, but of course, for us to be talking, we must already be connected. And the truth was... or rather, the truth had to be...

Mentally, in a shared whitespace that didn't feel at all like a whitespace, I didn't reach my hand out, didn't reach out or away at all, but instead reached up to my own shoulder, and found her desiccated, twisted corpse-head leaning against mine. A part of me wanted to recoil in horror--but another part of me had known she was there all along, and had hidden it from me. If not... I might have reacted badly, and in the moment, done something stupid. Instead, with that simple mental block, we could have a decent conversation. That part of me, I realized, had to be a part of my godhood--something added to me, a part of my key, since long before it was mine. It existed to make sure gods like me didn't make a serious mistake, and I didn't need it, not anymore.

Because while she wasn't beautiful, young, or even healthy, there was something fundamentally worthy to her, a keen intelligence and interest that was buried in centuries of disgust, depression, despair, and repression. The "her" that I had been reaching for, the "her" that seemed to distant, was a spark of civility deep inside, and she herself refused to accept anything else. In order to hold on to that civility, she had to reject her own past, her own feelings, all so that she could hold on to sanity and continue living in this world--because that was all she wanted.

I felt a great swell of pity, enough that the disgust I felt at the twisted face paled. My short life's worth of loneliness could not come close to measuring up to hers. Hesitantly, I reached up to touch her face, feeling leathery skin against my mental fingers. It's alright... My Lady.

It wasn't alright. It wasn't a feeling or thought or message, nor a real fact, but a spiritual Truth that she pushed at me. It simply wasn't alright.

Yes, it is, I insisted, and put my hand on her head, holding her against me. You do not need to put on a false appearance for me. This is your history, these are your scars. You don't need to hide them from me.

This, her mental voice was backed by what might have been a million screams, is hell.

I held her head against me with just a touch of pressure, for a moment. It was, I replied. Is it still?

Something inside of her started to unravel. How can you possibly accept this? I saw two versions of her, overlaid--one beautiful, one twisted. This is... disgusting... unreal... it is...

As long as it's true, isn't it my duty as a God to accept it?

The withered head lifted from my shoulder to look in my eyes--though it still had none of its own. Why would you?

Well, I admitted with a hint of amusement, for one, I definitely would still like your help surviving.

I felt her start to react to that comment, violently... but it came out more like a broken, relieved laugh. Of course... that's just your nature. I see it in you, God of Eyes. You enjoy using the truth as a weapon, don't you? You have never enjoyed living the honest life... but since you're already on that path, you'll use it against others.

I gave the horrific, mummified creature in front of me a strange look. I had never put it together in my mind like that, but... honestly, I had never been a good liar, and I did enjoy using my bluntness, my lack of guile, to hurt people. When people harassed me in the company I'd worked for, I had sometimes stretched the truth, but never lied--because it was just that much sweeter to burn someone with the truth, to get away with saying something nobody else dared.

Especially just before I knew I was going to get fired, I had sent out a... highly unwise internal email. Poorly worded. Too blunt, too crude; true, if misleading in places, and more cynical than the facts deserved by... a little bit, at least. Said all the things that I wanted to say before, but couldn't--all the things that only burned people because they were true, and thus you'd get fired for saying.

It showed up on Reddit less than a day later. Stocks dived two percent, which wasn't nothing. After that, it faded into obscurity, as did I. I enjoyed saying the truth, but it didn't change anything. I was already going to get fired, and I got fired. They were already going to claim "for-cause" dismissal, which I didn't have the money to fight, and now they had the evidence they needed. I received a couple nasty notes from lawyers about libel... but even they didn't want to be seen publicly trying to wring money from a terminal patient.

I did enjoy the concept that I was the one man giving it to people straight, even when I wasn't--I wasn't the only one in the company telling the truth, and again, I did stretch the truth, even bent a few facts. I wasn't as good as I wanted to claim I was. But it felt good to be--to feel like--a force of karma, a force of truth against corruption.

Yes, I replied to her, and I sensed that the one word was a summary of a great many feelings, and at least a few Truths.

Fine, since you've admitted it. You are worth a little bit of investment. In my mind, the woman gestured, and her giant fur coat made of ash and silver flame appeared in her hand. She plucked the tiniest bit off it, seemingly no more than a speck of lint, and it appeared in the hand of the dessicated woman that was touching me, and she passed it to me. This will conceal you from your enemy. But no more than that, not without a trade. And I doubt you will ever be worthy of that.

The bit of silver and ashen fur she passed me seemed to me to be a miracle of complex spellcasting, woven entirely out of soulflame. It was dense and heavy enough that it shifted the whole balance of power within my Little God's Room just by having it, and I knew that somewhere, Raine stumbled, unsure of why.

In that place, in my Little God's Room, I took that shining bit of light and placed it at the top of the waterfall. If the waterfall itself would be my tears, then this would be the pupil of my eye--and sure enough, in response to my will, the fur remade itself into a giant orb, one with a halo of light. Combined, the three pieces formed the image of a crying eye. After a moment of reflection, I moved my Avatar to sit directly beneath and in front of that Eye, looking down on the world.

With that done, I reflected on the rest of the room, but briefly. Raine had moved higher up, indicating (as I'd decided earlier) a mixture of more perspective, more responsibility, and more power. There was also... and I suppose I should not have been surprised, but I found Miana there, eye closed, clinging to the rock, and occasionally making moves like she was trying to climb.

On a lark, I looked for the withered woman, but my power informed me that unless I wanted to change the entire image to make the eye hers, set in a skull too giant for the people beneath to recognize, she would have no place as part of my room.

Before I could turn to leave, though, I felt a strange tug from within me. It was something I was still barely aware of, even as I was marshaling clouds to hide the movements of the people of Balant from pursuers. As busy as I was, I had barely processed that I was now also the god of Storms, and that was not yet reflected in the way this room was laid out.

I was running out of time, though; for now, I decided to merely add a bunch of bad weather on the top of the cliff, feeding the river that became the tears, with a marked line over the cliff and good weather on the downhill side. I didn't want it to stay that way, but it made me feel better for the image to represent me in my entirety.

When I finally had attention to spare, Miana had a number of question that needed answering, to clarify what she was reading of the Book... but just as importantly, I felt that the traveling men from the Yunian Order of Masters were arriving at the base of the waterfall.

So much to do, so little time.