Behold! The Queen of Heaven, the Queen of Earth, holy Ishtar!
Her voice demands that two numbers become equal; her breath shames the winds in fury and beauty both; her hands shatter mountains into dust and gods into pleasure! Her footsteps are wardrums and thunder—her frown is the most terrible of all divine powers! Hail Ishtar, inviolate Mistress of Love, invincible Lady of War!
Behold! She has already lost.
She knows it at the moment of her summoning.
When her city—great and glorious Uruk, whose spirit holds the mes she tricked from Enki, whose flesh is her flesh and love is her love—calls for aid, she answers. The cry is a knife through her veins, a beg, a plea, help me O mother O sister O lover O god, and it cuts her open to spill out into the flesh of a child lost in time. It is a cage she chooses willingly because the alternative is anathema: a choice between duty and pride is not a choice at all.
(Oh, how Ishtar is proud! She is arrogant the way stars are, shining and eternal and ten thousand years beyond you. But you will see that she is willing to stand beside even hateful Gilgamesh the moment he thinks to ask—that she will descend into the Underworld that strung her up on a hook to confront her sister a second time. This is what Uruk means to her.
Do you see, now? Do you see?)
She straightens for the first time in this heavy body and, for a single instant, despairs. There is a hole where her heart should be. The great Divine Beast, indomitable Gugalanna—gone. Ishtar reaches out and her hand stretches into infinity. The Bull of Heaven, so close to her that she has memorised the sound of its breath, has been stolen.
Without the Bull, Ishtar stomps mountains into dust. With him, she could crush Tiamat by herself. Uruk would be safe. Her children would no longer know despair. But he is no more. She is weak, crippled, slaved to the gems that decorate her bedchambers and without her greatest weapon (her greatest friend). Practically useless.
Ishtar steps into the sky with Maana beneath her and all her smile holds is war. So fucking what? Do you think that's enough to stop her? Do you think she will give up? You fool. You coward. You are unworthy of her grace.
She is Ishtar! Ten thousand men could not halt her fist. A dozen armies could not match one moment of her courage! And so an army she becomes: an arrow of light that scours the countryside of Demonic Beasts, a flash across a farmer's eyes taking only the tribute she so rightfully deserves in recompense for her magnanimity.
(Have you ever wondered why she took only gems? She is the supreme goddess of Babylonia, worthy of all glory and praise, the reckless, beautiful hedonist of the heavens. Yet when she could have demanded devotion, she took mere jewels.
Jewels. The only tools this stolen body would allow her to channel her strength through. The only arrows in her quiver. Remember the very first thing she thought, when humanity's last Master came to her in humble supplication offering gifts from hated Gilgamesh's hallowed hoards: these are enough gems to power my Magecraft for a long time!
Do you see, now? Do you see?)
Ishtar cuts her way through Babylonia, searching high and low for any sign of Gugalanna. She knows it is hopeless. She knows she will not find him. She cannot hear the sound of his breath on the wind. She looks anyway. She does not know when to give up. She does not know how.
As long as she is fighting, she is winning, and so she will never stop fighting. No matter how lonely the war, no matter how hopeless the battle. She is Ishtar, axiom of victory, indefatigable, ineluctable. It is not that her defeat does not happen—it is that her defeat does not exist.
How can it? Her people are behind her and extinction is before her.
What else can she possibly allow but triumph?
Eventually, the war comes to her. It glitters in the boy's sky-shadow eyes, shivers across the tremble of the girl's holy shield, smirks at the tension in the incubus' fingers. It offers her tribute from the only man who ever spurned her and bows in humble petition for her help.
Of course she welcomes it. So what if it seems as if she is coming to heel when Gilgamesh—arrogant, cruel, foolish Gilgamesh—calls, as if she is naught but a maiden feckless with love? This time he is the one who needs her. He would not have asked otherwise. Only Uruk bonds them together. Only Uruk is enough to temper his pride. Ishtar will not be shamed into doing any less in return.
(When she sleeps, she is someone else. Not even her body is entirely her own.
Dread Ereshkigal, sister-murderer, a ghost beneath her skin. She can feel the taint lingering beneath her hollow bones every time the sun rises and she opens her wine-drunk eyes: cold chalk and wet earth and a crushing, terrified loneliness.
It killed her, once. She descended beneath the world where the sky could not see her to save her sister from herself and died for it: a sack of meat hung up on rusted iron in the Underworld.
The same fear that struck her from life now nestles thorny inside her heart. She recognises it as the wound does the sword. But she can feel something else, too. Like sunflowers peeking out of black stone. One night she wakes up leaning against the boy and—ah.
So she smiles through the horror and when Ziusudra cuts her sister down and Ishtar plants her foot through his face without a seconds' thought it is not rage at having her vengeance denied that drives her: it is the smell of sunflowers and the smile on Ereshkigal's face that Ishtar spent her blood trying to put there even once.
Do you see, now? Do you see?)
Quetzalcoatl is an insult.
Ishtar is the most famous of all Mesopotamia's divinities, her line tracing from Inanna to Aphrodite—four thousand years Quetzalcoatl's senior, fighting in her homeland with her people praying for her glory and with her tutelary city within sight every moment she spends in the skies, how could some Mesoamerican upstart hope to compete with that?
But apparently she can. Even four-on-one, Ishtar cannot scratch her. It is ridiculous. A farce she might find entertaining were it not for the fact the joke is on her.
She fights anyway, of course. Throws herself at the impossible again and again until finally something cracks. So what if it's her spine? She's Ishtar. She is victory made ontologic. If there is a way, she will find it; if there is not a way, she will make it.
Eventually, the moment presents itself: the boy lacks self-preservation, the jaguar lacks a brain, and Ishtar lacks any better ideas, so when he proposes wrestling Quetzalcoatl into submission and the jaguar suggests the basic technique, Ishtar can do nothing but honour the opportunity. Sky-High Rider-Buster Justice Bomb is an embarrassing name for a finishing move, but it unlocks Quetzalcoatl's heart when even Ishtar could not quite see what would turn her glory to love.
(In another world, Ishtar has the Bull. She wears a different face and sometimes a different name, but she is still Ishtar, and in her own way she is still trying to save the world.
Oh, how she is glorious! The pressure of her smile sends men to madness and when she stands against hateful Gilgamesh it is to lock his Gate with his own key—because she is Ishtar whose legend is to reach and grasp and take and even Noble Phantasms surrender to her avarice—and she watches in glee as terrible Humbaba strikes him down like the ungrateful wretch that he is.
This Ishtar, too, has made friends with a human fool. A girl who struggles with the thought of killing, who has no pretty words to venerate her goddess, who hates the world of magi that she was born into and fights only through self-sacrifice. She is hopeless and hapless and so very, very small. Ishtar could break her with only the slender fingers of her hand.
She saves her life instead. Cows her Servant for her and permits her to walk side-by-side with divinity. All because she is a human, not a magus, and that is enough.
Do you see, now? Do you see?)
Tiamat is Gorgon, and Gorgon is Ana, and so Ishtar stands aside. It is only right. But she offers a blessing regardless: this ugly, vicious thing calling herself Tiamat—holy mother of the world, whose corpse is the earth and sky—is an insult that cannot be borne.
Victory, as Ishtar has come to expect from this world, only makes things worse.
But that is not important. Ishtar will continue to fight; Ishtar will deny the Laḫmu their place on the Earth as they seek to supplant humanity; Ishtar will stare the primordial Tiamat in the eyes and refute her love.
And in the end—the terrifying, tragic end—it will be enough.
Ishtar will hold her sister in her arms as she dies for love and she will not cry because the war for the whole of humanity has no time for tears. But she would not have wept regardless; she has waited her whole life for Ereshkigal to choose to be selfish. She has waited her whole life for her sister to find something beyond the Underworld.
Even if it kills her, how could Ishtar dishonour that choice?
So she does not tell the boy that Ereshkigal is dead. Death is the end of hope. As long as he believes he will one day see her again, it will be enough. Love, Ishtar knows, is the mightiest thing there is. What is the cold calculus of the universe against two hearts each trembling to the other's beat?
Even Gilgamesh fades. He gave too much of himself. As expected. He has never done anything except in excess. She loved that about him, once. What else could she do? His avarice was beautiful—not a moment spent that was not enjoyed to the fullest. He was as reckless as a lazy summer day: without thought or care for where he was going and without hurry to get there.
But those days are long gone, and soon so is he. So are the rest of their merry band of misfits. Just like Ereshkigal. Just like Kingu. Just like Tiamat.
After the end of all things, this is the truth:
Only Ishtar remains.
Behold! The Queen of Heaven, the Queen of Earth, holy Ishtar!
Her voice was not enough; her breath cowed no-one and nothing; her hands broke on the face of her enemy. Her footsteps were pale and faltering—her frown was a thing to be mocked. Who would hail Ishtar, who watched from afar as love saved the world and whose war was at best a desperate delay?
Behold! She has won!
Scraped into a jar of bones and skin, bereft of all but the barest Authority, side-by-side with the man who spurned her and the sister who killed her: did she give up? Did she surrender? Did she do anything except throw herself into the war again and again and over and over, even when she knew it was hopeless, even when she knew nothing could be done? Did she do anything except keep fighting until she had exhausted every way to lose and all that was left was victory itself?
Do you see, now? Do you see?
She was the first to come when her faithful called her name. She will be the last to leave when they no longer remember that they once did. She is their mother, their daughter, their sister, their god. She is rude and greedy and arrogant and she bled every inch of her body before a threefold apocalypse to buy Uruk even one second more of life.
She is Ishtar.
Behold!
I love the Babylonia singularity, as Defiance no doubt suggests, but I will die fucking mad about parts of it and by parts of it I mean Ishtar.
Every time I think about the way it treats her I find something else silly to yell about. Maybe I'd be less mad if it was consistently silly but every so often there's a time that actually takes her seriously, or Nasu drops a hint that he knows what he actually should be writing, and I scream even as I shovel those little flashes into my brain and hoard them for all time. He got me. That fucking mushroom boomed me.
Speaking of booms, hey Nasu, what happened to the 30% of all Gilgamesh's gems ever that Ishtar had? You know, the catalysts she could have used to hit Tiamat as hard as Quetz did or wipe every last Bel Laḫmu from her sky? The exact things she'd have needed to have her crowning moment of glory that you set up for her well in advance and then never called back to?
Even if not ever relevant in-game, they'd have been really useful in, say, that one scene in the anime where the literal actual goddess of war fighting in her homeland for her homeland is having the shit beaten out of her by Bel Laḫmu like she's in a crappy doujin while a British incubus who's just run there from London is styling on them with a sword. I love Merlin, and I can definitely buy that he could outplay a Bel Laḫmu the way he does in the anime, but also what the fuck.
Go take a look at some of the things the Sumerians wrote about Inanna-Ishtar—the Exaltation of Inana, Inana and Enki, the balbales to Inana, a tigi to Inana—and realise that frankly that isn't even scratching the surface. Compare them to what we got in the game: compare them to, say, the Ishtar who somehow can't beat the shit out of Quetzalcoatl while rocking four thousand years on her, while in her home territory, while near the city she's a patron deity of, while supplied with 30% of Gilgamesh's jewels to channel her power through, and while summoned for the express purpose of saving her people from the apocalypse.
Is this how the British feel when they see Fate's take on Boudica?
Anyway: Inanna-Ishtar is fucking based, we stan Strange/Fake in this house and Narita is the only one of Fate's writers allowed to write about her, Ereshkigal NP Interlude when.