After Gilgamesh sealed the saga away, a profound silence fell between the king and the immortal. It was in that quiet that the final piece of the puzzle clicked into place for Enki.
He looked at the fledgling city, at the people slowly daring to hope again, and his mind bridged the chasm between the mud of Sumer and the sterile glass of 2999. He thought of the Ikannuna, those self-appointed judges who saw humanity as a failed experiment. But they were merely creations themselves, powerful but fallen. The earth, this world—it was never theirs to give or take away.
A memory, sharp and clear, surfaced from Kaelen's life. Not of the Archive, but of a forbidden historical text about Old Earth. It spoke of a truth his own era had buried: that the world was originally a gift. A garden. Fruit hung for the taking, animals roamed for sustenance, water flowed clean. It was all provided, a bounty meant for humanity to steward and enjoy in freedom.
But then came the 'Shakers of the ant jar'.
The thought formed in Enki's mind with the clarity of a revelation. In every age, they arose—the powerful who were not content to live in the garden. They had to own it, control it, and most of all, control the people in it. They shook the jar, keeping the ants—humanity—in a state of constant, distracted labor, making rules that benefited the shaker, not the ant. They convinced people that the fruit was not free, that the water was not clean, that they must work endlessly for a scrap of what was already theirs by right of existence.
His own world, the Great Sterility, was the ultimate victory of the Ant Jar Shakers. They had shaken the jar until all the wildness, all the freedom, all the God-given chaos was smoothed into a peaceful, passionless, and utterly controlled efficiency. They had monopolized not just resources, but hope itself.
That was the true failure the Ikannuna witnessed. Not that humanity was flawed, but that it had allowed itself to be tricked into building a cage and calling it a paradise. The purpose was never to serve the system, the Jar Shakers, or even the Ikannuna. The purpose was to live. To be free in the garden they were given.
He looked at Gilgamesh, now building a wall to protect, not a ziggurat to challenge. He looked at the seed breaking through the mud. This was the true "Living Verse"—not a song written on a hide, but a life lived in defiance of the jar. His purpose as the Witness was now clear: to ensure that this new world would remember the difference between a garden and a jar, and to fight, forever if he had to, for the freedom that was humanity's birthright.