The Nile was not a river; it was a slow, green artery pumping life through a stone body. The city of Men-Nefer was not built upon the land, but was an extension of it, its massive, half-constructed monuments lying against the horizon like sleeping giants. After the raw frontier of Sumer, it felt terrifyingly finished. Ancient.
Where Uruk was a shout of control, this was a whisper of permanence.
Lulal and Gilgamesh were not stopped at a gate. They were processed. Guards with faces of polished indifference directed them to a vast, dusty plain on the city's outskirts, a designated zone for petitioners, traders, and refugees. It was a city in its own right, a sprawling, transient wound against the stone perfection of the inner metropolis. They were nobody here.
For days, they lingered. Lulal, his leg still a fragile curse, used his skills as a chancellor to barter, to listen, to learn the invisible pathways of this new world. Gilgamesh simply watched, his restlessness hardening into a cold, observing focus. He saw the endless lines of laborers hauling stone, the precise geometry of the rising foundations, the unchanging northern axis of every new construction.
"Their gods are not in temples," Gilgamesh observed one evening, his gaze fixed on the distant, stepped silhouette of a tomb-in-progress. "Their gods are lines and angles. They worship the north star."
Lulal followed his gaze. He saw the order, the scale, but he also saw the cost. The human labor was a river of suffering flowing into the foundation of eternity. "They build for the dead, not the living."
Their inquiries about a "Green Lady," a goddess of life, were met with blank stares or dismissive gestures toward the inner sanctums—places they could never enter. The powers here were not accessible. They were facts of nature, like the annual flood.
The Triad were not rulers to be petitioned. They were forces to be endured.