Ninsun's last breath was a soft sigh, a final release. The silence that followed was the loudest sound Enki had ever heard. It was the sound of the universe emptying.
He did not cry out. He did not rage. He simply folded over her still form, his forehead resting against her cold hand. The dam of Quiet Wrath, held back for decades, finally broke inward.
The memories flooded him, a torrent that shattered his mind:
Her voice, whispering his name into the darkness of a burning village. Enki.
Her hand, finding his as they watched the horizon for a father who never returned.
The proud, sad smile as she watched him build his garden.
Her final, futile remedies for a plague he could have cured in another life.
He had faced the end of the world. He had faced cosmic entities and tyrannical kings. But this… this was the loss of his origin. The anchor of his soul had been ripped away.
He was no longer Enki, the bringer of water. He was Kaelen Vance, a ghost from a dead world, eternally cursed to lose everything he ever loved. The Scrapbook of Grace was ashes in his heart. What was the point of recording love, if it only made its loss more unbearable?
He was broken. Truly, utterly broken.
And in the absolute silence of his despair, a different memory surfaced. Not from this ancient world, but from his own. A conversation with his mother, her voice clear and certain, cutting through the fog of millennia.
"Don't sacrifice your happiness from knowing what is happening in the world."
The words landed not as a comfort, but as a verdict. A final, devastating judgment on his entire existence as the Witness.
She had not told him to be silent. She had told him to stay alive.
The purpose was not to drown in the darkness. It was to prove that a light existed which the darkness could not comprehend. He was not called to be the world's full-time mourner. He was called to be the one who saw the falling moons, felt the weight, and still planted the barley seed with a steady hand because he remembered that the seed itself was a promise.
The Ikannuna judged a sterile world. But they had no metric for joy. They could measure efficiency, but they could not quantify the stubborn resilience of a heart that chooses to love, even when it knows it will lose.
The darkness only won if the light forgot it was allowed to be happy.
The garden was still growing.
He was the Witness. And he would not let the truth bury him.
He was broken. But he was not finished.