Knowing Loneliness
"Under ordinary circumstances, yes."
True to his nature as the god of wisdom, Enki could see exactly what was happening to Sunya.
"Right now, Sunya can't even perceive his own existence."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. Even a great god — how long can you hold on to a self in a world where nothing is visible and nothing exists? More than a hundred years without interacting with a single thing… you'd start to wonder whether you even exist at all. And because he can't be certain that he exists, it's bleeding into his body."
"Then what are we supposed to do?"
Enki shook his head at Inanna, who was uncharacteristically frantic.
"Nothing. There's nothing we can do, at least."
"But…"
"Don't worry about it. You already know, don't you? This is only the past. Sunya made it to Kienkingir in the end, met you, and has been living just fine ever since — pumping out kids left and right and raising them. He's not going to die here."
"…"
Inanna was no fool. She understood it in her head. But watching Sunya suffer still tore at her heart. She didn't want to look at this any longer.
"Let's move past this part for now. We can't stay here forever."
"…"
Enki let the scenes of the past begin to flow rapidly forward. Fortunately, just as he'd expected, Sunya seemed to have found his own way of enduring the time in the void.
The sage had to fight with everything he had not to forget that he existed — to prove to himself that he was real.
He dragged up every last scrap of the life he had lived, from beginning to end. At first the memories drifted in a chaotic jumble; he arranged them in order of time and repeated them without end.
Father said that to me back then.
Come to think of it, my uncle always loved teasing me.
Why did I hate being called the Elephant Prince so much?
I almost miss the way Deva## used to pick fights with me.
Ma@#ma will make a fine king, I'm sure of it.
I did something unforgivable to %&dhara.
What was that child's name again?
Please… let nothing have happened out there…
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat…
As he looked back over the life he had lived, the sage felt emotions that went far beyond ordinary joy and sorrow.
When his father had pressed duty and responsibility upon him — why had he never once considered what his father was carrying?
The only person who had ever treated him with real ease, it seemed, had been his uncle.
His encounters with that spiteful cousin who had sworn to kill him and his family had, oddly enough, been rather pleasant.
He hadn't realized it at the time, but the way the princess had proposed to him had been almost romantic, in its own way.
He still couldn't forget the idiotic looks on his disciples' faces when he'd once hurled the carcass of an elephant blocking the road clear over a mountain range.
And when a little girl had handed him a flower, it had made him unexpectedly happy.
Yes. That's how it was.
Strangely, the longer time stretched on, the sharper the memories that rose were not the ones he had once thought so unforgettable — the desperate battles against the strong. In the end, those struggles had left nothing behind. They had been the most violent, the most visceral memories he possessed, and yet somehow the feeling in them kept fading.
The pain of torn muscle and broken bone. The raw, electric edge you only feel on the knife-edge between life and death. The thrill of victory. The joy of growth. The hope that you might become stronger still.
What did any of that mean now?
If I had been stronger… could I have avoided ending up like this?
He didn't know. There was no way to know. The Vaishnavastra had been something so utterly beyond reckoning — a complete unknown.
No matter how hard he thought, no answer came, and so his mind kept sliding toward the one thing that felt certain.
Regret.
For nearly a thousand years, the sage looked back on his life and regretted.
Trying to cast off his duties entirely had been the act of a fool. He should have been faithful to the people around him. How had he failed to see that happiness was right there beside him?
Hundreds of regrets. Thousands. Tens of thousands — or perhaps far more than that. Only after scourging himself with every last one of them did the sage finally understand. He had no choice but to understand.
They were my shade.
The shade of one's kin is cool and kind. They had given him life — they were his branches and his leaves. Duty and obligation had never simply been a prison, and love had never been a shackle. So why had he been so terrified that all he could do was run?
You idiot. You absolute fool.
The sage wanted to weep. He was so ashamed of himself he could barely stand it.
If he ever got out of this place, he would have a child with the princess. Even if he never became king, he would help his younger cousin and look after the nation. He would teach his disciples everything he had come to understand, so they would never make the same mistakes.
The moment he got out of here, he would—
In the instant those feelings of remorse and everything else surged to their absolute peak, the void that had imprisoned the sage vanished as if it had never been.
"Gah—!!"
The sage dragged in a ragged breath. He didn't actually need to breathe — but the sudden flood of sensory information crashing into him was torment.
"Ahh…"
His head ached. Slowly, the sage looked around.
Grass and trees glowing with green light. Birds taking flight. A rising sun. The solid feel of the earth. Wind brushing the tip of his nose. And all the countless sounds reaching his ears…
Faced with a landscape and a set of sensations that were at once strange and familiar, the sage could not adapt. For a while he simply lay there on his face, staring blankly like an idiot.
"Sage!!"
"Are you all right?"
Someone approached him. The sage thought their faces looked familiar. Only after a little more time passed could he place them as people he knew.
"Sage?"
Mara's three daughters waved their hands in front of him when he still showed no particular reaction. His pupils tracked the movement for a moment — but that was all.
In the end, the sisters decided he needed a stronger stimulus to bring him back to himself. They stripped off their clothes and, just as they had done once before, kneaded their full breasts and swayed their pretty hips right in front of his eyes.
Breasts distorting like water droplets, pink areolas blooming like flowers between them, lush buttocks and the pink pussy peeking from between them.
— Thump.
It was a ridiculous thing to do, but it worked surprisingly well. The fierce carnal desire Mara had once carved into the sage's soul jolted a mind that had grown too accustomed to the void. The three sisters knew him well enough to do something so wildly out of place right under his nose.
"…What happened? How did I…?"
Only then did the sage's thoughts begin to turn properly again.
"Ah! You're with us again?"
"For the moment… it seems so. More importantly, put your clothes back on properly. It's distracting."
"Yes!"
The sisters dressed themselves. Ordinarily they would have seized the chance to try seducing him, but right now they had neither the leisure nor the circumstances for it.
"…How much time has passed?"
"If you mean the time you were trapped in that black sphere — about a week."
"A week?"
Only that much?
The sage's face flooded with disbelief and shock. Naturally, the gods of Kienkingir listening from the side were just as stunned.
"That's impossible! What we felt alone was decades. Factoring in how fast Grandpa Enki spun the time forward, at least a few thousand years must have gone by."
"…It seems the time 'inside' and the time 'outside' were completely different."
Enki offered the guess. It was only a guess — even he had no clear understanding of the magic called the Vaishnavastra.
"The Sha@ya…"
"Pardon?"
"The #kya Kingdom — my country. What happened to it? What's the situation right now?"
"Th-that's…"
Tanha closed her mouth. There was so much to say, and she could not bring herself to force any of it past her lips; she only bit down hard.
Arati and Raga wouldn't even meet his eyes.
"Why are you acting like this? Speak. Quickly. Why won't any of you say a word?"
"Sage…"
"No — this is no time for that. I have to return to the kingdom at once."
"Sage!!"
Tanha called after him in a rush, but the sage did not look back. Once he set his mind to it, Mara's daughters could not even keep pace.
"What do we do, sister?"
Raga looked at Tanha, uneasy. When Virudhaka had sealed the sage inside that black sphere, they had tried everything they could to help him. They had been able to do nothing. Afterward they had tried to aid a few of the kingdom's people — but the sisters alone could never have stopped Kosala's vast army. The gods were bound by a restriction: barring special circumstances, they could not interfere in human affairs. At best, they had managed to let a handful of people escape. That was all.
"We're sorry. We're so, so sorry."
"Sister…"
Despite all the grace the sage had shown them, Mara's daughters had been forced to watch the massacre in helpless impotence. They wept. They prayed, and prayed again, that the sage would not break.
"Ah…"
And there, the sage looked upon hell.