The air in Ur was different now. The steady rhythm of the waterwheel, once the city's heartbeat, now sounded like a countdown. The fear was a subtle poison, carried not in the water, but on the wind from the north. It was in the way mothers pulled their children a little closer, in the sidelong glances at a neighbor's cough, in the silence where Lulal's confident voice used to ring out.
Enki stood before the council of elders in the E-Abzu complex. Anu, the elder, looked older than his years.
"The Chancellor is gone," Anu said, his voice heavy. "And the Coughing Death is at our doorstep. What do we do, Enki? You who brought us water from stone, can you not ward off this spirit of sickness?"
All eyes were on him. They didn't want a Witness. They wanted a savior.
Enki felt the phantom pressure of the Divine Interdiction in his chest. He could not speak of pathogens or immunity. But he could speak of walls. Not of brick, but of principle.
"We cannot build a wall high enough to keep out the wind," Enki began, his voice calm, a deep counterpoint to their anxiety. "But we can learn its language. When the hot wind from the desert carries dust, do we not cover our wells?"
He pointed to the city's schematic, drawn on a clay tablet. "We will create a house of healing outside the walls, near the river where the air moves. Those who show the fever will go there, not as exiles, but as sentinels. They will be cared for by those who have already survived the sickness. It is a hard choice. It is a choice that asks for courage. But it is the choice that guards the heart of the city."
It was a brutal, elegant solution. He was implementing a quarantine and leveraging acquired immunity, but framing it in the language of honor, duty, and natural balance. He was asking them to make a sacrifice for the whole, giving their potential suffering a purpose. It was not a cure. It was a strategy for survival.
Anu stared at the schematic, his face a mask of grim understanding. "You ask us to send our sick away. To possibly die alone."
"I ask you to give their struggle meaning," Enki replied, his voice soft but unyielding. "To ensure that if they fall, they do not take the entire city with them. This is how a forest survives a fire. It sacrifices the outer trees to save the heartwood."
The silence in the chamber was absolute. They had asked for a miracle, and he had given them a terrible, necessary calculus. It was all he could give them, and the weight of that limitation settled on him like a shroud. He was not a god who banished plagues. He was a gardener who pruned to save the root.