In the Name of Order
"I never thought I'd live to see the day some shepherd brat would make a fool of me."
The Inanna within the vision did not look pleased in the slightest.
Having just witnessed her so-called husband in the act of infidelity, that was only natural.
"It's not what you're thinking."
"Not what I'm thinking? What else could it be!"
"That was just... a greeting between family. A kind of game."
"Ahh~~ so sucking each other's cocks and fucking your own sister counts as a greeting to you?"
Inanna did not hesitate to reach for the crudest words she could find, making her disgust plain.
She had just watched Dumuzi kiss his own sister without a shred of shame, right there in front of her, and she had confronted him for it.
Gods could not lie.
And Dumuzi himself had never been particularly gifted at deception, so the improper relationship with Geshtinanna had come spilling out the moment he was pressed.
Incest among the gods was not, in itself, something especially unforgivable.
The problem was that he had done it while married. That was nothing short of treating his wife as a joke.
Inanna, whose pride ran deep, was furious—not only at the betrayal of her trust, but at the sheer insult of it.
"That's not it, Lady Inanna!"
Geshtinanna stepped forward, trying to defend her brother, but only succeeded in stoking Inanna's rage further.
"Shut up!"
"Even so, she's your sister-in-law—don't you think you're being far too harsh?"
"Hah. I can't believe this. Want me to show you what 'too harsh' really looks like?"
"You've always been like this. Looking down on me. Never treating me like a real husband. Not a shred of consideration or respect for your man."
That was where it began.
Beyond the brief honeymoon of their newlywed days, the marriage between Inanna and Dumuzi had been worse than that of strangers.
In the beginning, Dumuzi had courted her with genuine passion—but it had only ever been the beginning.
He carried an inferiority complex toward Inanna, his wife in name yet a being of far higher station and rank than himself. And for Inanna, Dumuzi had never been a satisfying husband in either character or capability.
As the years passed, the emotional chasm between them only grew deeper.
"Well, well. That shepherd bastard really was a sheep-shit of a man."
The real Inanna, watching the vivid illusion unfold, clicked her tongue.
She was not entirely free of discomfort—but it was the kind of feeling one got while getting swept up in a drama. Nothing more.
This was only a "possibility" that had never come to pass, and she placed no great weight on it.
Though she did find herself rather furious about the part where she had been raped by some worthless gardener while napping under a poplar tree.
"What are you doing, Inanna?! Snap out of it, please!!"
In a small mercy, the Inanna of the vision had woken from that sleep in a towering rage, sweeping through city after city until she found the gardener and tore him apart with savage thoroughness. Watching that, at least, had been deeply satisfying.
After that came seducing a drunken Enki and stealing the Me from him; defeating the monsters he sent in pursuit to reclaim them; descending to conquer the underworld only to be captured herself, and sending Dumuzi—who had been playing with slaves in her place—down in her stead; sleeping with Grandfather An to win dominion over the city of Uruk; taking lovers among great warriors and kings...
The other Inanna had lived a life so tumultuous that it barely resembled the one she knew.
No—from a certain point onward, it would not have been an exaggeration to say she had become an entirely different person.
"So this is the kind of life I could have lived."
It might have been entertaining, in its way.
For all the twists and turns, nothing ahead could ever be predicted.
Even so, not the faintest flicker of envy stirred in her.
She still dressed lavishly for everyday life and outings, but the version of herself in the vision took that extravagance to an entirely different extreme.
Any man who seemed even moderately appealing, she took—without discrimination, without hesitation.
There was a free-spirited boldness to it, a wild and unrestrained confidence that stood out—and yet beneath it all, something like an unfillable emptiness showed through.
The determination to seize whatever she desired was magnificent. But it was a life in which the one thing she truly wanted forever remained beyond her reach.
At least, that was how the vision of herself appeared to Inanna.
The Inanna of reality was different.
She had married a good husband named Sunya, and lived a life of loving and being loved without end.
In every sense that mattered, Sunya more than satisfied her.
People said love faded after marriage—yet decades into theirs, Inanna had never felt so much as a whisper of that cooling. The more than twenty children between them stood as living proof.
She had always known she was happy. But seeing the self she might have become without Sunya made her understand, with sudden clarity, just how precious that happiness truly was.
"Well. It wasn't such a bad experience."
She murmured the words—and woke from the dream.
"Hah!!"
Back once more in Sunya's past, Inanna drew a rough, gasping breath.
It seemed that only after Sunya had escaped the rift in time had she, belatedly, managed to free herself from Vishnu's assault as well.
Is this what humans call a dream within a dream?
She did not know precisely why she had dreamed such a thing.
She could only guess that Vishnu had somehow influenced it.
As she took in her surroundings, she spotted Enki sitting in midair with a thoroughly serious expression on his face.
"What's wrong, Grandpa Enki?"
"...You back with us, kid?"
"You look pretty grim. Did you see something?"
Inanna wondered if Enki, like her, had glimpsed the fate he was originally meant to live.
"I did. Something very important."
"What was it?"
"How should I put it... Something like that enormous library I saw in the twenty-first century?"
"Huh? That sounds completely different from what I saw."
"Then what did you see, kid?"
"That was..."
Thud.
Something heavy struck the ground.
It was the sound of Sunya falling into a forest somewhere.
"Gah!!"
Blood spilled from Sunya's mouth.
Looking around, he could tell he had arrived somewhere entirely unfamiliar once again.
But to Inanna and Enki, this world was anything but unfamiliar.
Kienkingir.
Their homeland.
At last, they were witnessing the moment of Sunya's arrival in their world.
"Did I... survive?"
He had been lucky.
He had fought that thing and somehow lived.
Even among gods, Vishnu was on an entirely different level.
Whether a fight with such a being could even be said to properly exist was an open question.
Sunya let out a breath of relief and tried to gather his memories.
But almost at once, his face went pale and rigid.
"...I can't remember anything."
The names of his family and his homeland would not come to him.
More than that—every memory from before the age of fifteen had been torn away entirely.
It was not merely memory. It felt as though some piece of what made him Sunya had been sheared off completely.
The anxiety rising in him reached Inanna and Enki without filter.
"Now it all makes sense."
At last Enki understood why they had been forced to begin watching Sunya's past from his fifteenth year—why they had never once heard the names of his family or the people around him.
To put it precisely, it must have been a consequence of Vishnu erasing a portion of his very existence.
Once he had recovered somewhat from the aftereffects of the time travel, Sunya suppressed his presence and took to the sky, surveying the land around him.
Before long, the sight of gods flying through the distant heavens and the landscapes below told him he had fallen into the mythic age.
It was a mysterious era in which gods and humans coexisted—yet Sunya was not particularly surprised.
Honestly, compared to the twenty-first century, the mythic age felt rather dull in many respects.
"What should I do from here?"
One way or another, he would have to live in this place for some time, so Sunya set about deciding on a course of action.
And just as he had in the twenty-first century, he intended to keep human relationships to an absolute minimum.
The reason was simple.
He hated the loneliness that came from mingling with others only to feel more alone.
He would have to leave eventually. There was no point in forging bonds only to suffer the pain of parting.
Afterward, he shut himself away on Mount Ebih and shaped a modest house from clay.
Living alone there, he tempered his mind by polishing the Paramita, or passed the time recalling various martial techniques.
Without the internet or television, the days were thoroughly tedious—but Sunya had reached a stage where he could find a certain enjoyment even in that tedium.
"But not me."
As the dull scenes dragged on, Enki hit the fast-forward.
Time passed. Beginning with Kubatum, a handful of people came seeking him out—but nothing of particular note occurred.
"After seeing so many incredible things, nothing here feels particularly remarkable."
He was still skipping through the scenes in rapid succession when, one day, a familiar girl appeared at the house where Sunya lived.
She was a beautiful young maiden with hair the color of deep crimson, but even a glance at her expression made it clear she was a considerable tomboy and a stubborn one at that.
She was dressed in lavish, extravagant clothes of precious purple cloth, heavily adorned.
Her appearance itself looked young, yet strangely, her chest and overall development were rather advanced.
"That's the kid when she was still a little kid, isn't it?"
"What are you talking about?"
Inanna grumbled—but she watched all the same, taking in the scene of her first meeting with Sunya.
Having just confronted the fate she was originally meant to live, the feeling it left her with was stranger still.