The Sage's Story
"I have my own little tricks for it. If the chance comes later, shall I teach you?"
"I'll think about it. I still don't understand why you'd bother hiding it in the first place."
She had a point.
There was no real need to restrain the divinity that radiated from her. Not unless she intended to conceal her identity and mingle among mortals.
In ages to come, the gods would make frequent use of such methods—but in a world still so newly created, a vigorous young goddess like Inanna had no desire to dim her divinity and play at being weak.
Before long they reached the summit of Mount Ebih.
Sunya settled Inanna in a suitable spot, then went and fetched the whetstone that had once sat in a corner of his house.
"Fortunately, the whetstone wasn't damaged."
Inanna looked at the stone he had brought. After all the chaos that had torn through this place, the fact that it bore not so much as a single scratch struck her as remarkable. At first she had noticed nothing—but looking closer, she could sense a faint divinity within it.
This is… Sunya's divinity?
It was too faint to be certain, yet even from that mere fragment she could tell it was a divinity of extraordinary firmness and density. Even a simple wooden branch, once imbued with divinity, could become a weapon of eternal renown. Considering the sheer toughness of Sunya's own body, it made perfect sense.
While Inanna was turning over these thoughts about him, a sphere of light appeared beside Sunya's head—somewhat larger than a human skull.
A globe of blue-white radiance.
It looked as though one of the stars fixed in the highest heavens had been brought down to earth.
Sunya reached his hand into the blue-shining star.
Isn't it hot?
The thought had barely crossed Inanna's mind when Sunya drew a long object out from within the star. The process was a touch theatrical, but she recognized the principle as similar to the way she herself summoned her countless golden spears.
"Is that a sword?"
The blade Sunya had drawn from the starlight was a single-edged curved sword. She had never seen its like before, yet she knew at once, by instinct, that it was a sword—a thing made for cutting.
It was not the shape that told her so.
The blade itself radiated a fierce will to sever, to cut through anything. And one look was enough to know: it was sharp enough to shear through the soul itself.
From hilt to tip, the whole of it was a single seamless whole—less a thing shaped by any craftsman's hand than an object that had simply come into being that way from the start.
Beautiful.
Gazing blankly at Sunya's sword, Inanna reached out without thinking. The instant her fingertip touched the spine of the blade, a vision seized her.
"Kill them! Kill them all—trample them into the dirt! Leave not a single drop of bloodline—wipe them out completely!"
"I want to change it. I want to make it as if it never happened. Again—again—I want to go back to that time."
"Where did it all go wrong? What am I supposed to do now?"
"Who am I? What am I even doing here?"
A whirlwind of every emotion flooded Inanna's mind. She had never experienced anything like it in her life. Her sanity felt ready to shatter at any moment—
"Touching it carelessly is dangerous."
Sunya hastily pulled the sword away from her hand.
"Hah—!"
The moment her fingers left the blade, Inanna gasped for breath. The mental strain had been that severe.
"What—what was that just now?"
"My defilements, you might say. This sword exists to cut through such things. I named it Paramita."
"Paramita…"
Sunya sat down at once and set Paramita against the whetstone. Then he began to sharpen the blade—and strangely, the pace was slow.
Once. Twice. Three times…
At a glance it looked like ordinary honing, but Inanna knew that what she saw was not the whole of it.
She felt despair.
Despair became rage, and rage blazed into hatred. Then that directionless hatred gave birth to emptiness and pain.
It was agony.
It was unbearably hard.
The same storm she had felt when she gripped Paramita moments before swept through her again. She had never discovered such complex, violent depths of feeling in any other god.
Just what kind of life have you lived?
Sunya did not stop. Only after honing the blade against the whetstone exactly one hundred and eight times did he put Paramita away.
By then, Utu was already rising into the sky.
It was morning.
"I've kept you waiting. I hope you weren't too bored."
"Not really. I've never been bored when I'm with you."
She meant it not only of this moment, but of every other time as well.
Gods might seem eternal and transcendent—yet even they had something that could be called a natural enemy. Ironically, it was time itself, in its near-infinity, that was their weakness.
In theory the gods could live forever, and for that very reason they spent most of their existence in a kind of numbness. The chaos of the world's earliest days had been one thing—but once stability settled in, few things proved more tedious than their own lives.
They never starved, so they never sought food. Nothing could kill them, so they never felt fear. Imprisoned in the cage of eternity, they could not throw themselves wholly into anything, could not look back upon a life, could not even offer up their lives. Words like "do-or-die" or "desperate resolve" simply did not exist in their vocabulary.
For the gods, then, killing time was not mere diversion—it was the prolongation of life itself.
And of course Inanna was no exception. In that respect, Sunya's stories made excellent ways to pass the hours. When she was with him, each day flew by. She found herself looking forward to tomorrow. She was happy.
It was one of the reasons she liked him.
"Why do you sharpen the sword every day? Paramita is already sharp enough, isn't it?"
"A kind of ritual, you might say. A way of governing the defilements within me, in my own fashion."
"What are defilements?"
"Sufferings that wound the heart rather than the flesh. Rage, hatred, love, regret, attachment, emptiness—the things that destroy the soul."
"Why force yourself to control them? Can't you just get rid of whatever's causing the problem?"
"Because I cannot. You cannot cut off a finger simply because it hurts, just as you cannot pour spilled water back into the cup."
Sunya paused. A faint tension showed in his manner.
"I am not a person of this land—not one of Kienkingir, blessed by Lord An."
"What?!"
The revelation struck her so hard that Inanna's eyes went wide and both hands flew to cover her mouth. Even with her body grown larger, she was still so open and endearing that Sunya nearly laughed despite the gravity of the moment. Inanna had always reacted so vividly that telling her stories was a pleasure.
"Then where did you come from?"
Kienkingir was the name of the world itself in which they lived. The underworld beneath the earth, the surface where mortals dwelled, and Dilmun—the paradise of the gods above the clouds—were all merely parts of Kienkingir. Which meant Sunya had come from outside the world. And that, in turn, meant another world existed beyond this one.
"A place called Shindu. It was every bit as fertile as Kienkingir, and if you traveled south, you would find a world of dense, abundant greenery."
Sunya's voice was softer than usual, as though the thought of his homeland had drawn him into a quiet nostalgia.
"I was born a prince there. I no longer remember the name of the kingdom clearly. A certain sage once told my father that I would become either an 'Enlightened One' or a holy king. In the end, I became neither…"
Sunya opened his eyes a fraction and smiled self-deprecatingly.
"Ah—I should have said this earlier, but at the time, my name was not Sunya."
"What do you mean?"
"Sunya is a name I gave myself much later. In the language of my country, it means 'emptiness'—to be hollowed out."
"…Then what was your original name?"
"I don't know. I knew it once, but now I cannot remember it at all. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was erased."
"Hmm. All right, I get it. Keep going."
Inanna tilted her head.
"My father was strict, so I grew up without knowing most of life's pleasures—but I never wanted for anything. Those were quite happy years. I trained in the martial arts, mixed with people, and I scarcely ever felt the unhappiness of hunger or want."
"…Is it just me, or are you skipping a lot?"
"Haha. Since it's my own story, I was afraid that adding needless digressions would make it drag on forever."
"I don't mind if it goes on forever."
"That… I'll tell you in more detail when there's time. In any case, back to the point. One day I went out for a simple outing, just to take the air. By chance I witnessed small tribes near the kingdom waging war on one another. And there, for the first time, I saw it."
"Saw what?"
"A god."
A god.
Those mighty, exalted long-lived beings who had transcended physical limits.
That day, Sunya came face to face with a god for the first time.