Klesha
It took a long while before Kali finally managed to stop laughing.
"Ah, I haven't laughed that hard in ages. I ought to give you something in return for making me so happy, don't you think?"
Even so, the afterglow still clung to her — she was panting for breath.
"What's so damn funny?"
Inanna did not care for Kali's attitude one bit. There was something in the goddess beyond mere madness. Perhaps it was an instinctive aversion. Had circumstances been different, she would never have deigned to associate with her at all.
"Of course it's funny! He defied the laws of the world and desecrated fate itself — how could I not be delighted?"
"Fate? What was the Sage's original fate supposed to be?"
Inanna deliberately called him "the Sage" rather than speaking Sunya's name aloud. She had no intention of handing Kali any free information.
"You wouldn't know this, but that Sage is one of the most important figures in all of human history. Born a mere mortal, he was meant to attain enlightenment by his own power and become a being who transcended the gods. That was his destiny."
"A being who transcends the gods — what does that mean?"
This time it was Enki who asked. Even he found himself intrigued by the notion of something beyond divinity.
"The 'gods' I'm talking about are personal deities — beings with form, who feel ordinary emotions like joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure. For anything beyond that, form itself ceases to exist. They simply become one of the vast principles that constitute this universe."
"…Like you, then?"
Kali snickered at Enki's question.
"I may look like some kind of monster to your eyes, but I still haven't fully cast off the category of personal deity. My body is vast enough to be called a 'small world' — its form may change, but it can never die. The mind that steers that body, though, isn't so different from yours. Hit it with more strain than it can bear, and it dies."
But the realm the Sage was originally meant to reach was something else entirely.
"If fate had run its course, the Sage would have cast off every affliction born of human emotion, ascended, and become part of the cosmos itself. A colossal super-self, if you like — something the intelligence of humankind could never even begin to measure. And I planted afflictions in him to stop that ascension."
Kali went on. The prophecy delivered to his father at his birth, warning that he must never know pleasure. The sudden naga attack during his first hunt. And now, appearing before him to plant the affliction called "attachment" — every one of them a scheme to keep him from becoming the Enlightened One.
"What's the point of telling us all this?"
"Think of it as a gift for entertaining me. I'm a creature of whim."
"Why are you trying to stop the Sage from becoming a transcendent being, Auntie? What's your actual goal?"
"…Do I need something that grand to call a goal?"
Kali frowned at being called "Auntie," but answered readily enough.
"Denying fate is my purpose in itself. Whether he becomes a transcendent or not has nothing to do with me, really. If the Sage had been a tyrant of legendary cruelty, I would have guided him onto the path of the liberated sage instead."
"Why do something like that?"
Inanna could not understand it. And when she thought of the suffering Sunya must have endured because of Kali's actions, she found it impossible to look on her kindly.
"Why do humans have sex?"
"What?"
"Why do they eat and sleep? Why do they assign meaning to useless things, worship abstractions, and fall in love? Why do you think they do all that?"
"Well…"
"Because that's human nature. Same thing."
Kali laid a hand over her own chest.
"Sowing chaos and denying fate is my nature as an agent of Chaos. I don't need any benefit from it at all."
"…And that's why you sent the Sage to Kienkingir?"
"Get your wording straight. I didn't send him to Kienkingir — he just ended up there somehow. Pure coincidence. Well, without me, he never would have gone there in the first place, but still."
"…"
Inanna's expression grew complicated. She hated Kali for tormenting Sunya — and yet the knowledge that without her, she never would have met him at all left her feelings tangled beyond sorting.
"…So in the end, the Sage succeeds at this 'time travel' you mentioned?"
Enki's face hardened. The idea that a predetermined fate could be altered was a matter of no small gravity.
"The time travel itself succeeds. He just doesn't reach the era he wanted."
"Why not?"
"Aren't you asking a few too many questions? You've got eyes — keep watching. That's why you came here in the first place, isn't it?"
Kali's gaze turned toward the Sage.
The Sage spent a long time contemplating the concept of "time travel."
Then he used his Eyes to dig deeper into the nature of time itself. As his very cognition shifted, so too did what those Eyes revealed. And so the Sage found the thread of the time travel Kali had spoken of.
"…It's possible, at least."
Of course, it was nothing so simple as a straight line, just as she had said. The flow of time was far more intricate than he had imagined. And that current was so violent that swimming against it bordered on the impossible.
But with the power he possessed, he could at least make the attempt.
Even so, the Sage agonized for a very long time. Whether going to the past was right. Whether there would be side effects. What he had already lost… He conjured dozens, hundreds of reasons why he should not commit this madness.
And yet no matter how hard he thought, he could not cast off the affliction. The attachment that had already driven its stake into his chest kept goading him on.
If he had never known — if it had been a realm of pure impossibility — he might have managed to let it go, if not cleanly, then at least in the end. He would have continued his practice to free himself from the affliction. But that half-measure of possibility tormented him without end.
In the end, the Sage could not cast off the affliction within him.
"So after everything… I haven't changed at all."
Smiling bitterly, he made his decision and set about studying time travel. It was nothing like academic research. Instead of complex numbers, the Sage delved deep into Prana — the root of all power — and strove to understand time through pure sensation.
That alone took more than ten years.
"If I were an ordinary human, I couldn't even have attempted this."
The flow of time was not something a mortal could endure. Traveling to the past in the flesh would place such a crushing burden on him that he would disintegrate without a trace. Even the gods would suffer no small damage.
"Transmitting only the mind to minimize the strain… is impossible."
He abandoned that approach the moment he considered it. A god was already a being whose body and spirit were one — the two could not be separated.
"I'll have to gamble, then."
Preparations complete, the Sage walked into a jungle so deep that no human would set foot there even as a joke. He took his stance — left hand down, right hand up — brought them to face each other, and interfered with the most primordial Prana of all.
The ground rumbled. The sky convulsed. What the Sage was doing was no different from forcibly reversing the current of a vast river. Of course the entire world could not remain unaffected.
A little more…
The earth split. Trees were torn from their roots. Water rose into the empty air. He knew the danger, but having come this far, he had no intention of stopping.
Just a little more…
Just a little further and it would be done. Then he could move into the past. Thinking so, he was about to push past the final threshold —
A colossal bolt of lightning crashed down from the gathering storm clouds. It struck right in front of the Sage's nose, and from the point of impact a man he had never seen before rose from a crouch, one knee to the ground. It was a kind of landing. The man had arrived before the Sage on a bolt of lightning.
What…?
Even the Sage lacked the concentration to continue a time-travel attempt in the face of so sudden an uninvited guest. He stopped what he was doing.
He did not need his Eyes to know who stood before him. The divinity radiating from the man's skin was enough to tell him.
"That is far enough, Sage of the Shakya."
The man spoke. Looking at him, the Sage felt his blood surge for the first time in a long while — even in a moment like this, facing a true powerhouse made his body respond of its own accord.
"I, Indra, have come to punish your folly."
Lightning crackled across Indra's body. From the tip of the Vajra in his hand, a blade of blue-white lightning took shape.
The chief of the Lokapala, guardians of the world, had planted himself in the Sage's path.