The dust of the trade route tasted of betrayal. Each grain on Lulal's tongue was a memory of Enki's failure, a phantom of the lie that had shattered his world. He had traveled for weeks, his chancellor's robes traded for the durable, anonymous wool of a caravan guard. The guide, a silent man of the deep desert, asked no more questions. The set of Lulal's jaw was answer enough.
And now, Uruk.
It rose from the plain not as a city, but as a verdict. The walls, terrifyingly straight, were a manifestation of a will that knew no doubt. The perfect, geometric fields were a denial of everything Enki's garden in Ur represented—wildness, adaptation, chance. From this distance, it was silent, a sleeping beast of brick and law.
Lulal stood on a low rise, the wind pulling at his cloak. The words Enki had spoken, the ones that had curdled in the air between them, echoed in his mind.
"A judgment on Kur's arrogance… The cure is not in a herb, but in the fall of his pride."
Nonsense. The desperate, superstitious babble of a priest, not the clear logic of a master. Yet, the memory was tainted, not just by the words, but by the feeling that had accompanied them—a cold, formless dread that had seeped into his soul, a psychic scar where understanding should have been. Enki had not just refused him; he had violated the very nature of their partnership, replacing reason with a cryptic, cruel oracle.
His family was in there. Or their bones were. Was his father's final breath a curse against the king who sealed the gates, or a prayer to the god who built them? The not-knowing was a physical pain, a hollowed-out space beneath his ribs.
He could enter. He still knew the guard rotations, the passwords. He could demand an audience with Kur, fall to his knees and beg for news, for the bodies to bury. But to do so would be to accept the world as Kur had built it: a place where a single man's design dictated the value of a life. It would be a betrayal of the four dusty, grateful faces Enki had pulled from the rubble. It would be a surrender.
As he stood paralyzed between a past he could not save and a future he could not see, the main gate of Uruk groaned open.
A squad of guards marched out, their formation flawless. And behind them, a blur of motion.
A boy. He couldn't have been more than ten years old. His hair was a wild, dark mane, and he moved with a jarring, explosive grace that was utterly alien. He wasn't running; he was testing. He kicked a loose stone, and it shot across the plain like a sling-bullet, cracking against a distant marker post. The guards flinched, but did not break formation. They were not there to escort him. They were there to contain him, to herd this force of nature away from the perfect fields.
The boy—Gilgamesh—ignored them. His eyes, bright and fierce, scanned the horizon as if looking for an enemy worthy of his strength. They landed on Lulal.
He stopped. The guards halted a respectful distance away, their tension palpable.
Gilgamesh looked Lulal up and down, his head tilted. He saw no threat, no weapon. He saw a man standing alone, covered in the dust of a long journey, his face etched with a grief so profound it was a language the boy seemed to instinctively understand.
"You are not from the city," Gilgamesh stated. His voice was young, but it carried the same unnerving authority as his father's, a birthright of command.
Lulal found his own voice, rough from disuse. "No. I am not."
"Where do you go?"
"To find a Green Lady in the west." The words felt foolish, a child's fantasy spoken to a child who was half a god.
A flicker of interest crossed Gilgamesh's face, cutting through his restless arrogance. "A goddess?"
"A power," Lulal corrected, the bitterness leaking through. "One who deals in life, not stone."
Gilgamesh took a step closer, his guards shifting uneasily. He was now looking at Lulal not as a curiosity, but as a puzzle. "My father deals in stone. He says it is the only thing that lasts. He says I am to be a part of his great design." The words were recited, but the tone was one of rebellion. "I find it… small."
In that single, simple word—"small"—Lulal saw it. The crack in Kur's perfect world. Not an external threat, but an internal flaw. The heir himself was the flaw.
The boy was a question made flesh. And Lulal, who had just abandoned the man with all the answers, realized he was now the only one who could pose it.
"The world is much bigger than these walls," Lulal said softly, his gaze holding the boy's. "And a design that cannot hold a single, restless boy is not a design worth building."
Gilgamesh stared at him for a long, silent moment. The wind whipped between them, carrying the scent of the wild plains and the sterile dust of Uruk.
Without another word to his guards, Gilgamesh fell into step beside Lulal. It was not a request. It was a decision.
The chancellor and the prince walked away from the mountain of brick, their silhouettes merging against the vast, untamed horizon. The search for answers had found a new, far more dangerous question. And the journey had truly begun.