He found Gilgamesh by the great foundations, where the boy had been hauling stone with a relentless, silent fury. Lulal's face was a mask of hollowed-out calm. All the fire of his quest was gone, replaced by the cold ash of absolute truth.
"We are leaving," Lulal said, his voice a monotone.
Gilgamesh looked at him, and saw that the man who had left Ur was gone. "The Green Lady?"
"There is no Green Lady," Lulal said. "Only gardeners who prune. Our family… your city… was a branch they cut away. They were watching it die. They called it data." He looked at the massive, perfectly aligned stones. "They have a language. A God-Writing. They kept it for themselves. All of this… it is not for life. It is a monument to their own power."
Gilgamesh absorbed this, his young face hardening into something ancient. The restless energy that had defined him was now a focused, chilling purpose. He picked up a rough, unworked stone from the ground, a reject from the Egyptian perfection.
"Here," Gilgamesh said, his voice devoid of passion, filled only with a terrible, clear resolve.
"Here what?" Lulal asked, his spirit gone.
"The foundation," Gilgamesh stated. He placed the stone on the barren plain west of the Egyptian splendor. He used a length of gutstring and a weighted stone to find a plumb line, orienting it precisely north-south, just as the Egyptian masters had. "He is building a tomb," Lulal whispered to himself, the truth a physical blow. He was not building for life, for a future. He was building a monument to defiance, a challenge to the very cosmos that had deemed his father's design, Enki's garden, and Lulal's family all equally insignificant.
The first stone of the great ziggurat of Uruk was laid not in triumph, but in despair. It was the only answer they had left.