Azazel's finger pierced Gilgamesh through the chest, but there was no sign of a physical injury. There was no hole, no blood, no pain.
Ishtar, panicked, looked at Gilgamesh and saw that he was just as confused as she was. Marshall and Sylvia had not even seen Azazel or Ishtar move, and were only now catching up with the afterimages.
"Whoa!" Marshall exclaimed, leaning over onto his sister, who hurried to shove him off of her.
"What did you do!?"
Ishtar gathered her spiritual power and prepared to attack Azazel, but a gesture from Gilgamesh made her stop. "Wha- But she attacked you!"
"She's showing me, Inanna. She's showing me what she sees, like she said she was going to."
Gilgamesh's mind had been taken for a stroll, but his eyes still functioned normally. If it were not for his mental fortitude, his mind might have broken. Fortunately, he was able to concentrate of the images from Azazel while also focusing on the images his own eyes were showing him.
"What you see is what I see: you, sitting there, untouched by the one thread that connects all things in every reality. That thing is 'Fate.' You are without fate, meaning that Heaven itself was put at risk just to ensure you would never fulfill your truest purpose."
Azazel retracted her finger after she was sure that Gilgamesh had seen what she saw. Then, she returned to her original self.
"Why is it that your spirit fuels your desire to wage war against Heaven? Were not spirits granted to mortals after the Elder Gods discerned the secrets of Life? Spirits themselves are like brands-- marks of Heaven's authority. Its power over every mortal that possesses a spirit makes it the absolute ruler of all such beings."
"If you were to take away the spirit, then all beings created through Heaven would quickly fade away, leaving only the most ancient of existences behind. However, if your Heaven-given spirit was to be taken away, you would remain just as you are now."
Realization struck Gilgamesh like a bolt of lightning, and he shot to his feet.
"Are you saying..."
"What you have isn't a spirit; perhaps it was, long ago, but when your fate was taken away, so too was all trace of a spirit within you erased. If it were not, then you would have long been destroyed by Heaven."
Gilgamesh took a deep breath, "That explains it... As a creation, it never made sense that I could stand up to my own Creator for as long as I did. I always credited my survival to my spirit, and its power that prolonged my life... I never thought of it that way."
"That is precisely why you have only just now realized it. Your survival bolstered your confidence; your victories over Heaven inflated your ego. While nothing is wrong with that, it led to a number of oversights. One such oversight is, as you've said, the fact that you as a creation should not be able to resist your creator."
Ishtar was the most affected by Azazel's words, because she knew most of what the angel said was true. Even so, she hadn't even known the lengths that her father had gone to to eliminate Gilgamesh's fate.
"When you say Heaven was put at risk, what do you mean?"
As they discussed these things, Marshall and Sylvia were like shushed lambs in the corner. They could not comprehend that such matters could be so casually spoken of, and were unable to believe that the people before them were from such an entirely different world.
Yet, at the same time, the angel speaking with them added several tons of credibility that the siblings could not ignore. To them, angels were the epitome of knowledge and truth. Though they had met only a few, they knew that angels words were undeniable and absolute, and they would never mislead.
The Creator itself had given them a purpose, and as agents of his will, they could not refuse it.
To understand what Marshall and Sylvia were going through, imagine this:
You are sitting in the living room of your best friends house, and their parents come to join you. They tell you all about their child's horrible habits at home, which you cannot believe due to the fact that they carry about themself perfectly when you both go out. Would you doubt the words of the people who raised them? Or, would you believe their words and accept the existence of a side of your best friend that you have never seen?
Marshall and Sylvia chose the latter.
"Heaven did not create 'Fate.' However, Heaven manipulates fate because the Gods of Heaven have learnt its laws, but even then it shouldn't be possible for them to undermine fate itself."
"For Anu to sever my connection to fate completely, he needed to put all of Heaven on the line,' Gilgamesh concluded.
"Yes. He needed to balance the scales, and the only way to do that was to wager all of Heaven against you. Even then, he still had to offer something up to appease the Old Power. With nothing left to wager with, he gave up something that was more important to him than even your fate being erased."
Ishtar was actually the first one to realize, and she fell back in her seat in a daze. When Gilgamesh realized, he stood up and started slowly pacing. In his mind, the information swirled until the pieces found their place in the grand puzzle.
"It was father's fault that we lost the power?" He heard Ishtar's voice beside him, just as he arrived at the same conclusion.
"Fate works in ways that none can understand. Though Anu got what he wished, he lost something he did not wish to lose. Thus the scales were balanced once more, and time continued on from there."
Gilgamesh and Ishtar stared into each other's eyes, and their hands found each other's.
"So, if I don't have a spirit, what do I have?"
Azazel's mouth twisted a bit and she tilted her head to both sides.
"Well... Think about it this way. We are all blank slates, and as we live we paint a picture of who we are. That picture grows with us as we live, learn and experience, and is perhaps the truest expression of the self."
"However, a spirit is not the blank slate nor the painted picture, but the act of painting itself."
Gilgamesh frowned, "So you're telling me that if I were to attune to magic, I wouldn't be using my spirit at all?"
"Exactly. That is why Heaven can control the kind of magic you touch. Your spirit is given to you by Heaven, which is the same as Heaven providing the brush and the paint. If you do not cast aside everything that Heaven has given you, you are allowing yourself to live under it."
"But if you cast aside that spirit, what is there to fill the void? Another kind of spirit?" Ishtar posed this question with confusion in her tone, and Gilgamesh nodded as he heard it. They both could not understand where Azazel was going with her explanation.
Azazel only giggled and shook her head.
"Have you increased your spirit potency at all?"
Gilgamesh nodded, "To 1%."
"What did it take?"
By asking this question, Azazel had revealed the answer to Gilgamesh. The more he thought about it, the more he fell further and further into self-explanation, until it became embarrassing to him that he had not figured it out on his own.
"Self-becoming... Self-becoming is the spirit. It isn't an energy source that fuels your perception, or bolsters your mental fortitude-- it's a state of self-becoming."
"The Process of Self-actualization is what we Angels call it. A spirit is more profound than you realize, and the potential of one is impossible for anyone to estimate. This adds value to every single life, and is a huge part of the reason we Angels were called to order in this world."
"Knowing this, perhaps you may be able to guess at the nature of your... predicament..."
Gilgamesh blinked and his head tilted. "I'm afraid I cannot."
Azazel nodded, "It figures."
"The name you mentioned- Samael- is a name I do not recognize. Moreover, it infringes on the limits of the knowledge I am able to access. Though I am an Angel, even I cannot hope to contain all of The Creator's intelligence. There are things I am not permitted to know, and then there are things I simply cannot comprehend, thus will never know."
"I believe that 'Samael' falls under one of those categories."
Gilgamesh gulped, and his hand squeezed Samael's hilt.
"As for your case, I am fortunate enough to recognize what it could be. What you hold within you is not a spirit. It functions like one, and on every level resembles one very closely, but it isn't one. The fact that you are immune to the initial impact of negation proves this."
"I was wrong, at first, to think that you don't possess a spirit. Once I knew for sure that you had not only died and been reincarnated, but also spent thousands of years locked in conflict with the Gods of Heaven... There can only be one explanation."
Azazel nodded, as if needing to assure herself that her answer was the right before she said anything.
"You know of 'The Old Power,' yes?"
"I am intimately familiar; one of its Hands left a mark on my memory since before I reincarnated, and once I recalled that memory, I suffered its pressure."
"Ah, then it seems I was worried for nothing..."
Brows raised, Ishtar and Gilgamesh wordlessly inquired of Azazel what the hell she was talking about.
"I was skeptical, you see. I thought the answer I had arrived at could be incorrect somehow, but logically it is the only possible answer. What you told me about the Hand of the Old Power that you met was all I needed to know."
"Your spirit was imprinted upon by the Old Power, which has influenced its nature ever since."
Gilgamesh sat back and lay the sword across his lap.
Marshall pouted and opened his mouth, but before he spoke he could feel Sylvia burning gaze on his cheek. He closed his mouth and chose to remain silent until they were finished discussing things.
"Was there any particular reaction from your spirit after you recalled that memory?"
Nodding, Gilgamesh recalled the system's notification. "That was when my Spirit Potency increased to 1%; it only happened after I recalled the memory."
"Was there a physical reaction as well?"
"Yes, there was. My body was torn apart from the inside, almost as if... it was struggling to contain the memory..."
"Not the memory, but the power being passed through it. The imprint was left all those years ago and, foreseeing exactly what would happen to you in the future, the Old Power left its energy within your memory."
Ishtar exhaled slowly, "So it made room, all those years ago, for something it only just gave to you? Why not just do it then?"
"The Old Power is hard to understand," Azazel admitted, "even for me."
"My best guess is that there was a prohibiting factor, or perhaps a problem with your spirit that you hadn't yet rectified."
"It knew." Gilgamesh folded in his lips and nodded in slow realization.
Ishtar and Azazel looked to him.
"The Hand knew that I would sacrifice my spirit and all of its accumulated power to save my parents. That's why it did what it did."
Gilgamesh's hazy eyes found Azazel, and he sucked his teeth, "What I need right now is knowledge. Enough knowledge for me to understand what's happening and why."
With shimmering eyes, Azazel chuckled and straightened up.
"You're in luck. If an Angel was drawn to you here, on this world, it means that there's something The Creator wanted you to know. Perhaps what I told you was precisely that."
A question came to Gilgamesh, and he asked it after deliberating with himself for a while.
"What does your creator know about me?"
Azazel smiled and shrugged, "I haven't a clue. I have a general knowledge of most things The Creator knows, aside from the exceptions I mentioned. However, there's no indication that The Creator doesn't know about you, or that it doesn't want me to know about you."
"It's just blank. Completely blank. Therefore, to answer your question, only The Creator knows."