music by Alamin Hossain
Inanna stands before the first gate with her crown still hot from adoration. Her mouth is wet with command. She wears titles like they’re edible, dripping from her lips like nectar: Queen. Lover. Untouchable. She’s always been loud enough to be believed.
But the gate doesn’t open to noise.
The guardian says nothing. He only waits.
She tries silence, but it tastes like submission. She tries laughter, but it curdles in her throat. She begins to understand: this is not a gate she can talk her way through.
So she kneels. Not in shame, but in offering.
Her crown slips from her head like a final praise. She unclenches her jaw. Voice becomes breath. Breath becomes heat. She moans—not to seduce, not to speak, but to drop.
The lion arrives without footsteps, tongue thick and velvet, licking the edges of her voice like it’s cream gone sour.
No one is watching.
Which is how the real descent begins.
She sheds the name that once made her come.
She becomes the tremble that doesn’t need a name at all.
The first gate has taken her crown, her voice. Now she moves in silence, the echo of her own moan still warm in her chest.
At the second gate, the guardian holds no weapon— only a mirror. Tall as a doorway, wide as her hunger. Its surface ripples, catching her shape in impossible angles.
She approaches, expecting recognition, but the reflection shifts: her lovers’ eyes layered over her own, the way they looked at her when they wanted, when they left. Her face becomes all the faces she’s performed. Her beauty flickers between worshipped and dismissed.
The guardian does not speak. The mirror tilts forward, until its edge presses against her sternum.
She reaches to steady it and finds her hands trembling— not from fear, but from the recognition that she has never truly seen herself without an audience in her head.