Lulal stood paralyzed on the hill as his camp dissolved into screaming chaos. The rain was a hammer, the wind a scythe. This wasn't the cleansing fire of truth he had envisioned. This was mindless, wet, screaming entropy.
"THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED!" he roared into the storm, his voice tearing from his throat. "NO WALLS! NO LIES! JUST THE RAW, UNMEDIATED TRUTH OF EXISTENCE! WELL, HERE IT IS!"
But the storm didn't care about his manifesto. It was not a philosopher. It was physics.
A section of the hillside, oversaturated and undermined, gave way with a sickening, muddy groan. It was not a dramatic landslide, but a slow, inexorable slump, carrying tents, possessions, and people into the rising brown waters.
Lulal's feet went out from under him. He slid down the collapsing slope, mud filling his mouth, silencing his screams. He flailed, not with the strength of a revolutionary, but with the blind panic of a drowning animal.
For a single, terrifying moment, he saw Gilgamesh—a pillar of strength in the maelstrom, actually saving people, doing what Lulal had only ever talked about. Their eyes met across the churning water. In Gilgamesh's gaze, he saw not betrayal, but a final, devastating assessment: You are not part of the solution.
Then the current took him.
It did not take him with heroic fury. It sucked him under with a casual, indifferent power. The cold water was the ultimate, unfeeling truth. It did not hate him. It did not judge his philosophy. It simply filled his lungs because they were there.
His last thought was not of Enki, or his family, or his grand ideals. It was a purely biological, desperate, and utterly futile need for air. The great deconstructor of lies was deconstructed into his most basic components by the very force he had unleashed.
The water washed him away, a broken piece of flotsam, his truth drowned by a truth far greater and more terrible than his own.