Enki moved before the thought was fully formed. He shoved past the startled guards and sprinted into the dust-choked ruin.
"You! Stop!" Kur's command echoed behind him, but Enki was already gone, his mind shifting into a different, terrifyingly efficient mode. The voice of Kaelen was no longer that of a historian, but a rescue operations AI from a dead world, feeding him real-time data on debris stability, load distribution, and acoustic triangulation of whimpers from below.
"Lulal!" Enki yelled over the chaos, his voice cutting through the panic. "I need levers! Long, strong timbers! And men who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty!"
Lulal, who had been frozen in horrified indecision, jolted into action. The King's apprentice began barking orders, his natural authority rallying a group of stunned laborers who were torn between fear and the desperate hope in Enki's eyes.
What followed was an hour of terrifying, precise effort. Enki directed them like a conductor, placing levers at exact points to shift immense weights without causing a secondary collapse, ordering supports to be hammered into place with brutal speed, his head cocked, listening for the faintest tap or cry from beneath the rubble. He was a whirlwind of applied physics and desperate hope, a stark, living contrast to Kur's static, cold logic from the safety of the perimeter.
Finally, with a groan of protesting timber, a cavity was opened. One by one, a dust-covered, coughing family was pulled out alive—a man, a woman, and two small children, their faces masks of terror and relief.
As the last child was cleared, Kur was there. His fury was not a hot rage, but a controlled, plasma-hot thing. "You risked the lives of my best workers. You compromised my city's security. You defied a direct command. For this?" He gestured with a contemptuous sweep at the weeping, grateful family. "Four lives against the stability of ten thousand. Your calculus is sentimental. It is insane."
Enki, covered in dust and sweat, his chest heaving, stood his ground. His voice, when it came, was steady, layered with the weight of six thousand years of future history.
"Your calculus is the very reason the Ikannuna are coming, Kur. You build a world of numbers and you call it life." Enki took a step forward, his eyes locking with the King's, the gardener confronting the architect. "You asked me my purpose." He took another step, the dust settling around them. "If you can build a perfect world, then what is the purpose the Ikannuna spoke of? Why are we here? To be gardeners of a sterile park, or witnesses to a wild, growing forest? You have all the answers for how to build, but you have forgotten the first and most important question: why do we build?"
The words hung in the settling dust, simple and devastating. Kur stared, his lips parted slightly. For the first time, his perfect, logical, all-calculating mind had no equation to process this. No data point for a "why" that was not about efficiency, survival, or control. He was a master architect who had just been asked the purpose of the sky.
He had no answer.