The mud had dried into a hard, cracked skin over the world. In the weeks after the flood, as they scoured the high ground for other survivors, Gilgamesh found it.
It was in Lulal's travel pack, wrapped in oiled leather and miraculously preserved. Not a clay tablet, but a series of cured hides, covered in Lulal's precise, elegant script. The title was simple, stark: The Saga of the Wild Bull.
Enki watched as Gilgamesh sat by their meager fire, the hides trembling in his hands. He was reading the story of his own life, written by the man he had watched drown.
"He… he started it after I killed the mountain lion," Gilgamesh said, his voice hollow. "He said… 'A story is a different kind of immortality.' He never finished it."
Enki moved closer. "What does it say?"
Gilgamesh read, his voice flat, reciting the ghost of his own past.
FROM THE SAGA OF THE WILD BULL (by Lulal, Chancellor of Ur)
"And lo, the Wild Bull of Uruk, whose strength was like the river in flood, did walk with the Man of Sorrows, whose wisdom was as deep and silent as the well.
Together they faced the Sand-Walkers, and the Bull's wrath was a storm upon them. Yet the Sorrowful Man stayed his hand, and with clever words, turned enemies to servants.
They journeyed to the land of the Stone-Builders, where gods sleep in pyramids. And the Bull saw that their perfect order was a cage for the spirit, and his heart rebelled.
He took up a stone, a rough and unworked thing, and he said, 'Here. The foundation.' For he would build a challenge to the silent, uncaring sky…"
The text stopped there. It ended with Gilgamesh placing the first stone of his ziggurat, a moment of pure, youthful defiance. It said nothing of the plague, the shattering truth of the Triad, or the bitter war that followed. It was a story of a boy's heroic journey, forever frozen before the fall.
Gilgamesh let the hide fall into his lap. "He never wrote about the end. He never wrote about… me turning into that." He gestured vaguely towards the memory of his own camp, his own cruelty.
"He couldn't," Enki said softly. "The story of the heroic boy was one he could tell. The story of the broken man… that was a song he was living. He no longer had the heart to sing it."
The unfinished saga was a testament to Lulal's own broken faith. He could mythologize the beginning, but he could not bear to record the tragic middle. He had left the story, like his own life, incomplete.