I found Ianite sitting on a couch in one of the houses, staring sadly off into space. She barely glanced up when I entered, and let out a long sigh when I sat down beside her.

"What's wrong?" I asked, which was somewhat of a stupid question. "I'm sure we'll see Mot again, he..."

"It's not that," she replied sharply. "It's just... nothing is making sense to me."

"Well, there's nothing we can do about it. You were the one who told us to stop talking about it at the meeting," I pointed out.

She shrugged. "The last thing I needed was for another fight to break out. Plus, it's not like you guys could've done anything. You're... mortals."

"Mortal or immortal, Mot's disappearance had nothing to do with us," I said firmly.

Ianite leaned backward, covering her face with her hands. "I'm supposed to be a powerful being, Spark. I'm supposed to be able to know what's best for the land, and have the power to make things right. Why have I never been able to do that?"

I stared at her in shock. "You... you have! This particular situation must have been controlled by some higher being..."

"No, I haven't been. You wouldn't understand. Just leave me alone. It's every god for himself or herself. That's how it's always been, and how it should always be." It had been a while since I last saw Ianite like this, and I didn't want this side of her to come back.

"You can't be alone!" I moved closer to her. "Please, at least let me listen to your thoughts. Maybe it'll help you. I've been around gods for quite a while..."

"And you're still mortal. It doesn't change anything. It doesn't give you the ability to understand!" she seemed to be descending into madness.

"Ianite, you're not making any sense. Let's just go take a walk, blow off some steam..." I tried desperately to calm her down.

"You can. I'll stay here. I didn't ask for you to come in, and you don't need to understand what I'm saying. Please. Just go." She began to shake slightly, and a tear slid down her cheek.

I didn't want to leave her, but I was afraid of angering her further. Maybe she was right, after all. She was a goddess. She knows best.

"If that's what you want," I said gently. Before I left, I kissed her lightly on the cheek. To my disappointment, she had no reaction to it.

I exited the house and started walking in a random direction, feeling more useless than ever. The only person who had spared me of my constant feelings of helplessness was Ianite, and now this. And, because I was a weak human being who relied on the strength of powerful goddesses, I suddenly became nobody, and nothing.

So, what did I do to relieve myself of these feelings? I paced around the place that carried Ianite's presence in it. That's right. When I couldn't feed off of her strength directly, I did it indirectly. I was a terrible excuse for a human.

Knowing that thoughts like these would never help me, I decided to focus on Aethoria instead. I had never been so far back alone before. There wasn't much, but there were still some gorgeous natural structures laying around, and a few more houses. A cluster of them sat behind an enormous purple waterfall.

"I wonder," I muttered to myself as I entered one of them, "if these are being used. I haven't seen Ianite back here before, so perhaps they're abandoned." I stepped inside and, sure enough, there was a layer of dust across everything. There were a few scattered chests, but nothing was inside of them. Defeated, I left that house and began to search the others. I wasn't sure what I was hoping to find. Perhaps I was just looking for something that would take my mind off of my own problems.

As I had expected, there was nothing. Exhausted and feeling empty, I decided to take a rest inside one of the houses. I noticed one smaller house nestled into the side of the mountain, at the very far end of Aethoria. It was a bit of a trek, but I was able to get there. It was incredibly far away from the portal, so nobody would think to find me here. Perfect. I could suffer in peace.

And that, of course, is when things got interesting. When I entered the house, the first thing I noticed was that there was a lot less dust, especially on top of the chests. They seemed to have been opened recently.

"Hmm," I muttered, speaking aloud to myself as a form of comfort. "Weird." I was about to ignore it and fall asleep on a nearby couch, when I saw footprints. There were shapes in the thick layer of dust, and they were very clearly shaped like feet. Someone had been here. Why would Ianite travel all the way back here to use this house? There were a bunch of perfectly good, unused ones closer to her temple.

I was getting very suspicious. Leaning over so as not to disturb the footprints that had been left there previously, I opened the chest. Sure enough, there were blocks inside of it. It looked like quartz. But why would she come all the way out here to hide quartz in these chests? I was missing something.

I took the blocks out and lay them on the ground. They were strange, smoother versions of nether quartz. They seemed to have different materials embedded in them. Ianite had clearly forged the block herself. Now that I looked at the blocks closely, I could see bits and pieces of the materials that I had gathered long ago. When Ianite was making the healing blocks, could she possibly have made other blocks that she didn't tell me about? Did she... lie to me? What secrets was she keeping?

I dug frantically through the other chests, desperate for more clues. In the very back, I found one more block. It looked the same as the quartz-ish blocks, but it had a purple circle in the middle. When I placed it down, I saw that it had a label.

"Portal control block," I read, panic rising inside me. "Portal? Ianite was building a port... oh my gods."