Chapter 53 - Forget

Lukas ran his hand across the surface of a crystal growing from the ground of his World, feeling oddly giddy as he did so.

This wasn’t the first time he had been to this place. Even back when the Crypt of Fiendish Worms had hijacked his brain and overwhelmed him with the Dranzithl’s instincts, he had been able to view brief flashes of this place. The vision he had seen back then was something that had forever stuck in his mind’s eye. A revelation, a future possibility, one that the Crypt had shared with him. A fusion of two anomalies — one that resisted the terrible curse of the Desert above, and still gave birth to Potential, and one that survived its own destruction and arose in a new form, one different from any other. Lukas had momentarily accessed this place when the Omphalos had activated Warmonger Protocol for the first time — he remembered going through monster prototypes one after another at a speed faster than thought.

The Crypt wasn’t wrong. Together, both of them could achieve — would achieve, great things. Even now, the fusion was not complete. As he stared at the endless graveyard of crystal, entrapping soul prototypes within it, protruding out of the ground and staring into the blackness of the sky above — he could feel the Crypt of Fiendish Worms staring back at him. One Omphalos staring at another — so different, yet so similar. Fused, yet distinctly separate. Even now, after he had assimilated its power and potential into himself, the chasm between them was as vast as the earth and the sky.

In this case — literally.

He frowned, remembering the oddity from earlier. Somewhere between his chant, things had gotten out of control, which was weird, because he had used the exact same chant earlier in the Shimizu fortress, and it had worked just fine. Deciding to ponder over it later, he looked up at the titanic figure rising overhead, an archetype of Lostbelt Earth. It was only natural that his world would shape its Archetype in the form of its Prime Species — Humans, which was why it appeared in the shape of one. In this case, himself.

The Prime Host.

Human but reforged with a core of divinity.

Anomaly but with a human mind.

Mortal and Divine. Real and Abstract. Creator and Destroyer. One that sought solitude yet also invaded other worlds. A dichotomous duality if there ever was. After all —

He frowned as he noticed something wrong. Something was here that wasn’t supposed to be. Whatever it was, he couldn’t recognize it, and at the same time, it felt oddly familiar.

Another thing to look into later.

“This place is wrong! This place is…” He heard Frost speak. It was not directed at him, for he couldn’t even see her, and neither could she see him.

He answered anyway.

“My world.”

He looked up, and found both Tanya and Frost looking at him in utter bewilderment. He couldn’t blame them. This was his world. No, this was him. He could be anywhere in this place, and held absolute dominion over it.

He was greeted by their gobsmacked faces. Even Frost — who was a manifestation of a primordial force as old as the universe itself, looked at him with confusion in her eyes. Neither of them could sense or comprehend the absurdity they were looking at. Tanya in particular, looked utterly perplexed.

“But —” she stammered. “What does that even mean?”

He allowed himself an amused smile. Tanya had always been a pragmatic and practical sort of person. Logic and reason ruled her mind. To her, even Everfrost was a twisted skill that operated on a different set of rules than ordinary ice did. Something that ran over logic like a truck before backing up and running over it was not something she could easily digest.

Now Frost on the other hand….

“This is no World!” snapped Tanya’s altered self. “What is it? Tell the Truth.”

“I told you,” he said, his voice serene. “This is my world.”

“Do not lie to me,” she growled coldly. “This place can’t be a World. Worlds are Creators. The Spring of Potential. Terraformers. Bursting with souls, with activity. With Life. Not this deadland. This… this place is— is —”

She looked like she was seconds away from frothing. Her eyes had gone completely cadaverous, and she looked very much like a rabid animal that was gearing to attack. Not a good sign given what she was. Here, in his most sacred place, where the Omphalos reigned supreme, he had no doubt that it would react rather extremely if Frost, no, if Everfrost acted out in hostility.

“This place is unnatural! Vile! Sickening! Revolting! Wrong! This — this twisted abomination cannot be— it cannot be — ”

“Frost. What’s wrong?” Tanya demanded, but her other self was too shaking her head so frantically that a normal human’s neck would have suffered traumatic injuries at a bare minimum. It was like she was losing her sanity with every passing second.

Lukas tilted his head, observing Frost’s growing repugnance, and trying to apply it to his world. He had expected a lot of things from her — including and especially a desire to destroy it, given the source of her existence. But to see it driving her mad just by seeing it with her own eyes?

Something didn’t add up.

At the same time, it was a jarring thing to hear. It was something he had expected of his former self, when he had first found himself in the Crypt of Fiendish Worms. Half the time he had spent wandering inside those underground tunnels, he had constantly oscillated between trying to make sense of things and the other half, in complete denial. Denial that he wasn’t on Earth. Denial that he was talking to an actual Goddess. Denial that all of this was real.

To see Frost — something that was beyond human common sense, to look at him and react like that just felt…

Wrong.

“You’re right. This place has no life. No soul. No activity. Nothing. This,” he exclaimed, hands wide open, “is Forget.”

“Forget?” repeated Tanya.

He smiled. “The infinite terrain around us represents perpetual quiescence — the wait that lies between the cycle of birth and death. Nothing here is born, nothing here shall suffer death, nothing here holds any individual existence. They are just Forget.”

“Accursed Thing!” Frost said with rancor. “Vile trash! Twisted blight! This place, these… souls. They do not exist!”

He blinked. Something about her words felt… off. Of course, the soul prototypes in this place didn’t exist, per se. And the only way they would exist would be….

It clicked.

Could it really be that simple?

He looked at the seething avatar of Everfrost, and couldn’t suppress a grin. “I see it now. It exists here, in Forget, but it hasn’t been created. And what hasn’t been created cannot be destroyed. Not by death. Not by time. Not even by the End of Potential. Isn’t that why you hate it?”

“I really should’ve killed you when I had the chance,” she whispered.

“Too late for that,” he laughed.

“What’s — what’s going on?” asked Tanya. “What’s got her in a pissing contest with you?”

“That Outsider is spitting in the rules of Reality, of the Universe. Every single soul he siphons, he isn’t just taking their skills, he is taking them out of Existence. Out of the cycle of Life and Death. They become part of His Reality — part of Forget. So long as he manifests those souls using an accessory, like that blasted metal slime, he can bypass the process of Soul Creation and make them come ‘alive’. Even if you kill them, the soul just returns to Forget, and then can be used again and again and again and again. They aren’t born, they aren’t dead, and thus they are…”

“Immortal?” asked Tanya.

“Yes!” Frost snarled.

“That’s… trippy, I guess.”

Frost balked at her other self. “He’s a thief, stealing from the Great Progenitor, hiding from the End. Everything he siphons is removed from Reality itself.”

“Forgotten..” murmured Tanya, looking at him in surprise.

“No wonder the nightmare has no effect on him,” spat Frost. “He’s even more twisted than that filth.”

“But how can these souls be immortal?” asked Tanya, frowning. “I mean, if this is Lukas’s world, then surely when he dies…”

She paused.

Lukas just smiled at her.

“I see,” said the aeromancer. “That’s why you didn’t die, didn’t you? Lukas Aguilar the human perished, but the world was alive. It just put you back in place and rebooted you back to ‘living’.”

That was partly true. It hadn’t been his body that had perished, but his soul. It took Inanna using her Divinity to reforge his soul back into place, which was then pushed out of Forget into the body — as the Prime Host.

“Even if you destroy his body, he still won’t die,” said Frost, looking at him with narrowed eyes. “For all we know, he has hundreds of those metal slimes hidden away. He’ll probably be able to regenerate himself using them. Unless you can find every single thing that is connected to this abomination and destroy it in one go, the Outsider cannot be killed.”

That was partially correct. It was true he had stored away multiple fragments of Blob in the Crypt, as well as some of the micro-worlds in the Haze. But that did not mean he was immortal. Anything capable of destroying his soul would definitely kill him.

Or, he mused idly, Perhaps the Lands of Forget will just create a new instance of Me?

Come to think of it, exposure to that Memory had destroyed both his and the Crypt’s souls, or whatever went for a soul for an anomaly. And then Inanna had reforged him. By that logic, Inanna had crafted a perfectly identical copy of his soul using her Divinity, one that accessed the memories of Lukas Aguilar.

By legal definition, a clone was an identical, or near-identical copy of an individual, who was not birthed, but made, be it technological, supernatural or systemic means. He could even go ahead and say that the original soul prototypes were stored inside Forget, while clones, or as he preferred to call them — Instances, were created, and destroyed after they had fulfilled their tasks, their memories stored away and filed for creation of future instances. If he was killed again, would the lands of Forget create another instance of himself, one that would believe himself to be Lukas Aguilar?

He… he didn’t know what to think about that. It was like reading Theseus’s paradox all over again.

No Lukas, he told himself. You are looking at it the wrong way. You’re not an individual. You are a world, an entity that was once human, a single soul, and answered to the name ‘Lukas Aguilar’. The Lands of Forget are not a separate entity.

You are Forget, and Forget is you.

Maybe his consciousness was a copy, forged out of the memories of what was once Lukas Aguilar, modified with Inanna’s divinity,  but so what? In a way, it was fitting. Earth was destroyed, yet from its ashes, Forget existed — a twisted facsimile of the real thing, one that held all of Earth’s memories, all of its information, but was not Earth. An endless clone-crafting machine, growing, interacting, engulfing, encroaching upon Reality while stealing from it.

He wanted to laugh. An instance that was once Lukas Aguilar, Anomaly of an Omphalos that was once Earth, trying to craft an instance of an entity that was once Inanna.

“If Forget is this confusing, what by Wind is that?”

Tanya’s words brought him out of his musings. He followed her gaze, and looked up at the humongous figure of the human silhouette taking up almost half of the black sky. Seated in the posture of a human yogi, it looked like the outline of a meditating God.

It wasn’t.

It was far, far more than that.

On its titanic outline were seven glowing points or plexi,  each of them arising out of a particular region on the human anatomy, shining like stars, their brilliance infinitely reflected in those crystal tombs that adorned the Forget. Stars. Plexi. Chakras, call them what you would, but every single one of them represented a particular form of energy.

The Crown.

The Temples, or as Inanna would put it, the Third Eye.

The Throat.

The Heart.

The Solar Plexus.

The Sacrum.

The Root.

Seven points. Seven plexi, and together, they underlined the truth of the Universe.

His grandfather had once taught him the concept of Tantra, as explained in less-mainstream Hinduism, Abrahamic religions proclaimed that Man was a polluted creation of the Supreme Being, and through ordained methods of worship, he could shed those negativities and ultimately rejoin the creator in his afterlife. Even mainstream Hinduism had a related concept about the atman, or the Jivatman, meaning an embodied soul, which was polluted, while the Creator was referred to as Paramatman, or the Ultimate Soul. The methods of worship and surrendering oneself completely to the Divine by chanting holy names, singing the Lord’s glories, or performing austere acts was how the Jivatman would shed its earthly sins and join the Paramatman.

It was here that Tantra disagreed.

In Tantra you said, “You are my object of worship. You are superior than I am and that is why I’m praying to you. But, I’m not merely interested in eulogizing or seeking pardon for my sins. I want to purify myself to the extent where I merge in you and you merge in me, so that one day I become you. I’m not interested in this union after I die; I want to experience it while I live.”

If the ultimate Creator was the Origin, and every soul in existence was just a tiny shard of Potential arising out of the Origin, then the rules were similar. Only instead of praying or chanting holy names, the job was to activate these plexi or chakras, thus  accessing lifeforce and mana and using them to perform a variety of actions. Lukas had no doubt that the manifestation of a skill lay in the successful activation of the corresponding chakra. It was why acquiring the first skill in any discipline was the hardest, and why the subsequent skills were far more easily acquired. And leveling-up was perhaps a measure of the degree of a chakra’s activation. Everything in nature, from plants to animals to monsters to demons to Kings and Gods — the difference in power, potential and race was nothing but a variation of their chakra activation and subsequent development.

It was a recent addition to his inner-world, and something he was totally psyched about. Growing up as he did, he was no stranger to the concept of pressure points or energy plexi or chakras, what with their growing popularity in the West. But to see those same seven points on this humongous form, each of them shining with the radiance of a small star, their dazzling brilliance infinitely reflected in those crystal tombs, and knowing exactly what they were, and what activating each of them using the ever-growing number of monster prototypes meant….

I wonder what you’d have thought of this, Inanna.

“That?” asked Lukas, still smiling, “I call it the Demiurge.”

He wasn’t being arrogant. In old Platonic philosophy, the word ‘demiurge’ referred to an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe. That being, if he could refer to it as a being at all, was the manifestation of the Future. Vision. Illusion. Imagination. Dream. Much like the Infinity of Forms, the Demiurge represented an everdistant utopia where all potential skills of all potential prototypes within Forget were realized to the fullest sense. A state when his world would be eventually deemed complete.

He wondered. Did Inanna feel like he did when she gazed upon the Origin, something that was so far beyond comprehension that you needed to become someone detached from Reality to do it? Was that why she was so feared? Because she had Ascended to a level that allowed her to comprehend the Origin itself?

“At the base of everything in Existence, whether it be the living and the inanimate, physical and ethereal, bremetans and spirits, gods and demons, there is always a world. From the world do they rise, from the world they take form, and upon death, into the world they return. The cycles turn and turn. That being, up there, is the Creator of this world. It’s Demiurge.”

“But you are the World, right?”

“Then that being is Me. Or perhaps, Me at my deepest, my most primal level. Not Lukas Aguilar the human, not the Prime Host, and not the Omphalos. Whatever the Plains of Forget contains, will contain, will be created by the Demiurge. Alive, inanimate, monsters, creatures, perhaps even Gods. If the Great Progenitor is the creator of all there is, then this Demiurge is the same for this place.”

“Big words from a perpetual do-nothing machine,” scoffed Frost.

He smiled. Seeing her so off her rocker was amusing.

“Perhaps you’d like to test it?”

“Test?” she snapped. “I want to destroy it. I….”

It came without warning. No tells whatsoever. So fast that not even his eyes, augmented with Kinetomancy, could catch up with it. In less time that it took to even blink, Frost conjured a dagger and hurled it at him.

Or she tried, anyway.

The moment it left her hands, the frost dagger vanished. He should have been amused at the gobsmacked expression on her face, but instead he frowned in concern.

Not because her plan didn’t fail, but because it did.

That… wasn’t supposed to happen. Was it? Everfrost is a Taboo, and not a Truth that this world can just ignore. And I didn’t even use Territory Creation. So… how?

She tried again, this time conjuring a blade. The third time, she used a spear. After that, pure Everfrost energy. But nothing, nothing she did managed to exist the moment it left her body. It was like the moment she hurled it out into the world, it just vanished.

As if this Reality — his world, was removing it out of Existence.

A quirk that made no sense to him.

Worlds — not even one as byzantine as his own — could do that.

“What!” “Is!” “This?” Frost kept attempting to cast anything and everything, but it all came down to the same result. The moment she hurled it, it vanished.

Weird.

“Lukas?” Tanya asked. “Are you doing that?”

He looked at her, flummoxed, and then at his own world. Was he doing this? And if so, how? Nothing about the Plains of Forget had anything to do with suppressing a Taboo — even if it was a watered down version of the original.

“I…. I really cannot say.”

“Get me out of this place,” Frost demanded, seething. “I cannot stand the sight of this blight any longer. Get me out!”

“F… fine!” He waved his hand, and the next moment, he was sitting on his bed, with Tanya sitting next to him.

“I — I really don’t know why that happened,” he admitted. “It’s a new development, but it raises so many questions.”

Tanya was looking at him with pity and frustration.

“... what?”

“Nothing, just realizing how much work I have cut out for me. I’m finally seeing why you piss Solana off so easily.”

Lukas grimaced. Tanya was either blatantly mocking him, exceptionally irritated with him, or a mix of the two. Three guesses as to which one it was this time around, and the first two didn’t count.

“I suppose it was a little too early to reveal my world before you two. I should’ve spent more time understanding it first.”

“Yes,” she said. “You should have.”

“Well… Frost asked for it.”

“And she’s all the more shaken by it. Honestly Lukas, I’ve been scared as shit of her for my entire life, and stayed in the Eternal Light just to be rid of her whispers. And now I find out that she’s scared of you.”

“Yeah, she probably thinks I’m worse than Joey.”

“You are.”

“Thanks for the compliment, I think.”

“It wasn’t,” she said dryly. “I — I could feel it, Lukas. Feel her frustration. I don’t know what your world did to her that made her act out, but it looked like you were playing with her. Vanishing Everfrost like that, it was exactly like how your goddess messed her up.”

“Well if she can’t digest it, she shouldn’t have asked for it,” Lukas shot back, getting out of bed. “And I can’t believe you, of all people, are siding with her.”

“I’m not. I just think facing her after this in combat is a bad idea.”

A flicker of rage grew within him. “You think I can’t take her?”

“No,” said Tanya. “I know you will. But can you trust her to stay in control? This close to the fight?”

Lukas clenched his fists.

“Think about it,” she said, and stood up, leaving the room.

Lukas watched her go. Something about the entire thing felt so off, and he knew, he just knew, that something was responsible for Everfrost vanishing like that.

If he had been looking down at his shadow, he would have seen it flicker. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but for a moment, it flickered to something oddly feminine.