The Dream of the Goddess
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Quite suddenly, Tiamat found herself remembering the old days.
Old days — meaning, of course, ancient even by her reckoning. From before she descended to the surface. From before anyone called her a goddess.
In her most distant memories, she had been a B-Rank monster.
Had she been born at that rank, or had she clawed her way up from E-Rank, step by patient step? She could no longer recall. In those days, proper intelligence had not yet taken root; only in the latter half of her time as a B-Rank did anything resembling a genuine self finally begin to sprout. And even that, looking back now, had not lasted so very long.
'Climbing a mountain was easier, back then.'
Because everything that happened after she became an A-Rank had been sheer pandemonium.
Hunting. At the end of a brutal struggle for survival, she devoured her own kin and absorbed their mana — and one day, she awoke for the first time to an Authority. At the time, she assumed she had merely gained a stronger weapon. But that day marked the moment her life flipped one hundred and eighty degrees.
For the power she had awakened was the Authority of a goddess, lost to the world ages past.
The infinite monkey theorem. Set enough monkeys to hammer away at typewriters for eternity, and one of them might someday produce a play by Shakespeare. Whether this had been the product of astronomical chance, or whether some deeper cause lay behind it, even she could not say. All the more so when, at that point, she had not yet even inherited the goddess's name.
All monsters were born from Tiamat. Paradoxically, that meant every monster of Mesopotamian origin — great or small — carried her blood. Perhaps that was why such a miracle had been possible at all. But she, who had never even heard the words "Mesopotamian mythology" back then, could hardly be expected to know the answer.
And so.
A brief peace settled over her existence. The calm before the storm, one might call it. Gods and monsters alike held their breath and fixed their gazes upon her, offering up their mana in the name of tribute. For a creature who had inherited no goddess's name, it was the most tranquil era she had ever known.
And then — at the culmination of all that devotion, another opportunity for growth arrived. She attained power equivalent to an S-Rank by the world's measure.
Jubilation. Awe. Worship. The day the long-awaited scion of the goddess at last obtained strength equal to the goddess herself, the gods and monsters gathered to test that power. Whether by pure accident she had inherited one of the goddess's abilities, or whether she had succeeded in reproducing the goddess entire, the answer was the latter.
And so, war began.
Until only recently, both factions had regarded the reproduction of the earth goddess as their supreme mandate — now, neither so much as glanced backward. It was only natural. A rightful successor bearing the name of the goddess Tiamat existed. Her. Casualties mattered not. Fight to the death. Lay down your lives for the swarm. If only they could win, the race could be rebuilt beneath the banner of Tiamat's name.
It was nothing less than the reenactment of a creation myth.
And in truth, that was not an exaggeration. Her Authority was so overwhelming that even if ninety-nine percent of her kind perished, the species could rise again from the ashes. For the sake of their kin's future, her fellows tore out their own lives root and branch to offer them up — and the one who had become the spark of that war of extinction still, even now, could not comprehend the sight of that day.
To be fair, she had been a monster too. There had been a time when taking the lives and mana of her own kind for the sake of survival seemed to her the most obvious thing in the world.
But even so, the slaughter unfolding before her eyes went too far. And it had nothing to do with ethics or morality. Gods and fiends. Constellations and monsters. The war between those two races was, no matter how you looked at it, not about survival at all.
The war that seemed like it would never end — and then ended. The reason she flung herself out into the wider world, slipping through the gap as both factions' vigilance grew lax, was precisely that. Actions taken for survival she could understand. But the war between those two races was, to her, nothing more than waste. It was why she — a mere monster until relatively recently — had grown into a creature that despised conflict.
The modern era proved no different. The great temple that had once been said to enshrine her and the ten thousand gods; the traces of that magnificent ancient civilization — none of it remained. And so she found herself abruptly saddled with an absurd accusation and driven out of the Middle East altogether.
A genuine clusterfuck, that had been.
'Who could have imagined that a thing called a "hijab" would become such an enormous problem.'
Naturally, she was ignorant of Islamic culture. She neither knew what a hijab was nor felt any need to wear one. The trouble was that the Middle East at the time had been consumed by civil war in the aftermath of the Great Invasion — and on the Arabian Peninsula, her appearance drew far too much attention. Her beauty alone would have been enough, but there was more to it than that. In a word: to Middle Eastern eyes, she looked far, far too much like a woman from the West. It took astonishingly little time for a beautiful, bare-headed foreigner ignorant of local custom to be branded a spy dispatched by the Western world.
Even for her — the one who had inherited the name of Tiamat — it was a bewildering state of affairs. She had heard that the moment she set foot in the present world, worshippers would flock to her like clouds. And the form she had taken as she matured, resembling a human's, hadn't helped either.
More precisely, it hadn't resembled a human so much as a goddess. The dragon's horns upon her head. The tail sprouting from the small of her back. Wings that unfurled as if to blot out the sky. Whichever way you looked at her, nothing about that figure said "human."
Granted, her beauty was such that even the most zealous of Muslims — harsh judges of unbelievers — might have cast a covetous glance or two. The one complication was that the faith's fanatics had a particularly vile habit of never asking a woman what she wanted. She remained convinced to this day that had she lingered on the Arabian Peninsula, she would certainly have ended up as somebody's plaything.
And so the goddess, newly descended into the modern world, fled all the way to South Korea in a thoroughly wretched state. For those in her former world, opening a Gate with their own hands had been difficult — but once she had descended, moving from place to place was no trouble at all. Even after she finally arrived on Korean soil, her policy did not change.
A monster sick to death of fighting. Somewhere along the way, having learned a thing or two about the modern world's customs, she realized there was absolutely nothing to gain from announcing her existence. So her conduct afterward was more of the same. Keep her head down. Make no reckless moves. There were those who worshipped her as a goddess and offered prayers — and there were those who called her a monster and harbored other expectations entirely. Either one left her thoroughly sick of it.
Which was why, when she finally showed herself again, it was for none other than this: a village collapsing under the boots of her own kin. And there, for the first time, she encountered pure faith.
The dying parents took her — appearing suddenly before them — for some hunter or other. When the reality was the exact opposite. Perhaps because of that misapprehension, the couple entrusted their child to her and offered prayers to every god they knew, all for the child's sake. And only then did she finally understand. Why countless gods had once laid down their lives for her. What, after she subdued the monsters, they had truly been asking for. Before that prayer — the first genuine one she had heard since inheriting the goddess's name — enlightenment came to her at last.
So this is what they had wanted, all along.
Faith. The desperate hope of the desperate. Once tasted, worship directed at oneself was not the kind of thing one could ever forget. Compared to the vile practice of selling one's own body for the supposed sake of the species' future — how achingly beautiful was a prayer this pure?
Standing, for the first time, on the side of a god and receiving that prayer, she accepted the child and raised her in answer to it. And at the same time, she made a decision: she would grant this child the strength to live without want, even in a world this perilous. She, inheritor of the name of Tiamat, goddess of the Constellations, had no doubt that this would be her recompense to her first true worshippers. It was for this reason that, since inheriting the goddess's name, she chose for the first time not to avoid a fight — and to reveal herself instead.
……To be perfectly honest, the fact that she refused the boy's heart may have been part of that same moment. Faith tasted for the first time. Prayer tasted for the first time. Had she perhaps expected the boy to feel toward her what his parents had? The thought came to her, unbidden. Perhaps the reason she noticed nothing — absolutely nothing — as the way he looked at her slowly curdled into something else was precisely the working of that unconscious hope.
Only in hindsight, of course. Only now.
And so. There came the incident — the one she knew all too well.
The goddess entered seclusion as penance, cutting off contact with the outside world almost entirely. Disillusionment with the mortal world. Guilt over her adopted son's crimes. Which of the two weighed more heavily on her, she herself could never say. Only that time alone was the cure. The devotion of the Hunter Association. The prayers offered by those who came to her, led by the Association's chairman. As she slowly steadied herself on that current of faith, the one she met one day was Park Woochan.
'This one should be fine.'
When the chairman and his people finally, after so long, petitioned her for grace, Tiamat — by then long accustomed to the goddess's name — chose her candidate with that thought. The Butcher. That was what Park Woochan was called, back in those days. Honestly speaking, there had been an element of giving up on the whole business. She'd believed he might be acceptable, yes — but only because her expectations were rock bottom. Offer a few blessing words, send him on his way. That was what she genuinely planned; which is why she never imagined she would be met, without preamble, with a blade drawn at the interview.
At first, of course, she was furious down to the roots of her hair. But once her head cooled, a certain interest took its place. Because of what Park Woochan had shouted that day. Well — he had only screamed the word monster. Not a single soul present that day grasped what it truly meant. They merely concluded the Butcher had suddenly lost his mind. Perhaps they'd seen the horns atop the goddess's head and judged accordingly. Either way, her first encounter with the man had, in its own strange way, been refreshingly novel.
She had been charged, as mother of gods and mother of monsters, with the revival of her species. There had been gazes fixed upon her woman's form, heavy with vulgar desire. Pure faith, too, had been sweetness itself. And yet — the killing intent of a man who looked upon her, identified monster in a single heartbeat, and swung his blade. It was the first time in her existence she had ever been the target of a killing intent so dense that not one hairline crack could be found in it.
And at the same time — she had felt safe.
The blade he had swung at her that day had been filled with absolute certainty. In other words, the Butcher had not been swinging in blind rage. A Constellation arranged by the Association. Faced with a being who called herself a goddess, the hunter passed judgment in an instant: monster. The horns? Or the tail? Perhaps it was the wings. Whichever it was, the man arrived at his conviction. A Constellation couldn't possibly be a monster? He must be mistaken? No — I am right, and that thing is wrong. If that woman before me truly is a Constellation, then "Constellations" were nothing but monsters all along.
So the man swung his sword without a flicker of hesitation. And thanks to him, the goddess, too, arrived at her own certainty.
This one. This one will do. This one looks at me and expects nothing at all.
She had heard the prayers of countless worshippers — and then been betrayed by her very first Divine Champion. It was true that afterward, at the Association's request, she had doled out blessings to many. But even so — a Divine Champion of the goddess. One who receives revelation directly from her, who serves her with selfless devotion. She had never once chosen a god's soldier. When her first Champion existed, there had been no need. After parting ways with him, there had been no heart for it.
What finally unlocked the bolt upon the heart of the goddess in her seclusion was, of all things, Park Woochan's heartlessness. The man himself despised it — and that very reaction was what lit the fire in hers. The response of a bratty child: shown something it wants, it does the opposite on principle. In a word, childish.
……Perhaps because of how things had ended with her Champion, the goddess gave priority to those upon whom she could not project carnal desire. And she thought: if a killing intent that dense could be transmuted into longing for me — then perhaps I, too, might one day open my heart completely once more.
The bolt had slid free, but the door remained unopened — and before it, the goddess nursed a quiet hope. Which is to say, she had already settled on Park Woochan as her second Divine Champion. A being who held toward her not lust, but faith alone. The Park Woochan of today could hardly be described that way — but she had no intention of ever creating "family" a second time.
And so — the bond that began that way brought with it truly innumerable things. Lately more than ever. Days so vivid they threatened to blur all the years that came before them.
And at the end of it —
My, my, being popular is such hard work. No — I do understand the feelings you hold for me, but……
Understand what, you bastard, shit.
Oh my? How shy of you.
……Truly.
It had been a truly, wonderfully good dream.
But. Dreams, as a rule, are meant to scatter upon waking. And at long last, even this long, long dream was drawing to its close.
With a lazy roll of her body, the goddess Tiamat turned to face the end of the dream as it strode, step by measured step, toward her.
It was an exquisitely fitting irony. Just as the beginning of that dream she had once seen — the end of it, finally arrived, wore the shape of Park Woochan.
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