In the deepest, most lightless stratum of the Mesopotamian Underworld, the Kur, the ground was a barren expanse of cold, unforgiving rock. The only illumination came from scattered clusters of eerie, blue ghost fires that drifted lazily in the stagnant air. These were the final, fading embers of warmth transformed from the souls of the departed, the sole source of light in this realm of perpetual twilight.
Amidst this clustered, spectral glow, within a desolate temple hewn from piled, dark stones, a figure stirred. Ereshkigal, the Sovereign of the Great Below, lifted her head from where she sat upon her simple divine throne. A flicker of profound surprise, an emotion long foreign to her, touched her delicate features beneath the cascade of her flowing golden hair.
She… could scarcely believe what she was perceiving.
She had heard the voice with perfect clarity, both its point of origin in the world above and its impossible content. She had heard someone in the vibrant, sun-drenched human world declare… that they longed for her?
And that voice, the unique spiritual signature attached to it, was exceptionally familiar to the goddess who dwelt in eternal silence. It was the same resonance that had, mere days ago, violently shaken the foundations of her domain and cracked open a sliver in the ceiling of her world, allowing her to see a glimpse of the light she had been denied for eons.
"Is it you…?" she whispered into the oppressive silence, her voice a soft rustle. "The one who allowed me to see the light of day once more?"
The goddess closed her eyes, trying to process the sentiment.
You… longed for me?
The concept of being "longed for" felt both familiar and alien to Ereshkigal. For gods, it was normal to be the object of longing; such yearning was a form of faith. Deities were longed for because of their glory and power, and through that longing, they became the devotion in people's hearts. But those were the gods of the heavens above, gods of harvest, love, or the sky. She was different. As the Goddess of the Underworld, Ereshkigal was a figure of dread, a portent of the end. She was not well-regarded even among her own kind, and in the human world, she was feared as the cold, unyielding embodiment of death itself. She received no prayers of adoration, no hymns of praise. She had no faithful longing for her presence—only terrified souls delivered to her gates.
But now, a voice had declared it. And it was the same person who had, after countless millennia of solitude, torn open a fissure to her world.
Who was he? Was it… for her sake that he had shaken the boundaries between the worlds? The thought was as terrifying as it was exhilarating.
She wanted to know who he was. She wanted to see his face, to behold his form. She wanted… to go to the human world.
A chilling, spectral wind, born of her turbulent emotions, howled through the cold realm in response. The goddess's physical form remained seated upon her throne, but a part of her essence, her awareness, seemed to detach and surge upward, drawn by that impossible declaration.
Toward the human world—
...
"You… you utter fool…" After a long, heavy silence, Ishtar's voice finally cut through the tension in the deep alley of Uruk's royal city. "Are you being serious?"
Time had flowed on unnoticed. The last crimson rays of the setting sun had long since vanished below the horizon, and the vast, indigo blanket of night now covered the sky, punctuated by the glittering fireflies of starlight. A single, silvery beam of moonlight found its way through a narrow gap between the towering buildings, illuminating Rowe's figure.
He looked at Ishtar, whose expression was a complex tapestry of shock, indignation, and something else he couldn't quite place. He raised the corners of his mouth into a deliberate, challenging smile. "Do I have any reason to deceive you?" he countered. "Don't underestimate my sincerity, Goddess—after all, I was once a priest of the Uruk temple! I know the weight of such words."
Yes, at this moment, Ishtar was still operating under a critical misconception. She was unaware that Rowe had recently united the three great powers and directly challenged the authority of the entire pantheon. In the Venus Goddess's view, Rowe was not a blasphemous rebel, but merely a somewhat insolent former temple priest. On matters of divine devotion, such a person would not lie.
So—
Come on, Rowe willed silently, if you're going to smite me, do it now! Strike down this mortal who cares nothing for you, who insults you to your face, yet dares to profess longing for your beloved sister!
Having expertly created this information asymmetry, Rowe spread his hands in a gesture of submission, presenting himself as entirely at her mercy.
However, the response that greeted him was not the divine thunder he anticipated. Instead, it was a soft, almost resigned sigh from Ishtar. The surprise and anger that had been so vivid on her face moments before seemed to melt away, revealed as a fleeting illusion.
Rowe was taken aback.
Did it fail after all?
He wasn't overly surprised. He had known all along that an Ishtar influenced by 'Tohsaka Rin's' humanity would be unlikely to deliver a swift, merciless execution.
In Rowe's strategic conjecture, Ishtar's reaction to his declaration could only follow one of two paths: unbridled, vengeful anger, or this… melancholic, resigned sigh of emotion.
"She has heard it," Ishtar stated, her voice suddenly distant and layered with an echo not entirely her own.
The night air grew cold as deep water, the moonlight taking on the sharp, sterile quality of frost. As the goddess's words fell, Rowe watched, his eyes wide, as the figure before him underwent a bizarre and unsettling transformation. Her form shimmered and distorted, as if two distinct spiritual signatures—similar in divine origin yet fundamentally different in nature—were superimposing themselves upon the same physical space, creating a fluctuating, overlapping shadow.
"She heard your words," Ishtar's voice seemed to drift on a wind that hadn't been there a moment before, "and a part of her yearns to see you." Her crimson eyes, now holding a depth of ancient sorrow, were filled with a profound and unreadable complexity. "However… she is also terribly afraid."
Ishtar had always harbored a tangled mix of pity and guilt for her sister, eternally bound to the silent, lightless depths of the Kur, a prisoner of her own domain. But as the radiant daughter of the sky god Anu, the Mistress of the Heavens, just as the Goddess of the Underworld could not ascend, she herself would never willingly descend into that sunless realm. Beyond sympathy lay a thread of apprehension, a god's instinctive wariness of the absolute finality her sister represented. Yet, here was a mortal, boldly declaring his longing for that very symbol of death—something she, in all her divinity, had never been able to openly express. He had said it aloud. Firmly and without a trace of hesitation, he had made his feelings public.
It was under the sway of this inexplicable, turbulent emotion that Ishtar had actively restored the primordial connection she shared with Ereshkigal—a bond of common origin that had lain dormant and interrupted for countless ages. She knew Ereshkigal had heard Rowe's words. She could feel her sister's spirit, stirred from its eternal stillness, yearning to draw closer. And so, Ishtar had relented. She had opened a conduit, accepting a fragment of Ereshkigal's consciousness, allowing it to manifest as a superimposed presence upon her own form, just as she herself manifested in the mortal world.
Now—
"She's here," Ishtar whispered, her voice becoming a gentle conduit for another's will, "but she dares not let you see her fully." She repeated the sentiment, as if reassuring the timid presence within. "She just wants to see you. To look upon the face of the only soul in the human world who has ever longed for her. And then… she will leave."
The repeating, fluctuating shadow gradually stabilized, settling more cohesively upon Ishtar's body. Rowe saw her—a goddess strikingly similar in form to Ishtar, yet her presence was hazy, translucent, as if viewed through a veil of mourning. He could still make out the cascading flow of golden hair and the same piercing crimson eyes, but the expression within them was different: filled with a deep, ancient loneliness and a fragile, hesitant hope.
Ereshkigal.
The Goddess of the Great Below.
She had manifested, but only as a ghostly impression, a spectator clinging to her sister's vessel. As Ishtar had said, she had only come to look, to silently behold the visage of her first and only admirer. She was terrified that if Rowe were to truly perceive her in her fullness, to feel the chilling aura of her domain, he would recoil in the instinctive fear all living beings held for death. She feared it would shatter that precious, impossible "longing" into irretrievable fragments.
It was a personality that was truly… hard to describe. An extreme of shyness and isolation that stood in stark contrast to Ishtar's brazen confidence. Yet, her mere proximity began to alter the world. The air swirling in the alley grew bitingly cold, and a palpable darkness, thick as a funeral shroud, began to seep from the overlapping form, obscuring details and concealing the Mistress of the Underworld behind its gloom, turning her into little more than a defined, haunting silhouette. The manifestation of the Goddess of Death naturally brought with her the chilling wind of the Kur, a symbolic barrier of her realm. It was an intangible wall, a warning of the absolute divide between the living and the dead, meant to hinder any forward step Rowe might take.
—However.
The direct, albeit veiled, appearance of the Goddess of the Underworld did not alarm Rowe; for him, it was a perfect, serendipitous outcome. While death, representing the ultimate end, was an inherently terrifying concept for all living things, mortals and gods alike, Rowe was fundamentally different. He was a soul desperately, ardently yearning for his own demise!
How could he possibly let such a golden opportunity slip away? Since she had come this far, drawn by his words, how could he allow her to retreat back into her shell of fear?
Without a moment's hesitation, Rowe stepped forward. His hand rose, reaching directly into the unnaturally cold wind emanating from the spectral form—the very breath of the Underworld itself. His heart, contrary to all natural instinct, swelled not with dread, but with exhilaration.
Today, this encounter could truly be said to be the closest he had ever come to the death he so craved since his transmigration. He would not let it end with just a look.