On the mud-flats of Mesopotamia, Enki froze, a seed half-planted in the muck. A pressure, vast and alien, clamped down on his mind.
In the Anatolian highlands, where Kur was drilling the survivors of his escape into the hardened core of a new, militaristic Hittite kingdom, he stumbled, his vision of conquest scattering into static.
In his new enclave by the great river, Julian, The Lawgiver, looked up from drafting the foundational principles of ordered justice. He did not resist. He was a willing vessel.
And in Greece, where Marcus, The Builder—believing himself the last of his kind—was showing local tribes how to fit stone together for the first Mycenaean citadels out of sheer intellectual habit, his stylus slipped.
The voice came to all five of them at once, a psychic broadcast from the merged consciousness of Isabelle and Julian, amplified and given chilling purpose by the Ikannuna.
"THE WAGER CONTINUES. A NEW LAW IS ENACTED. THE VEIL OF MORTALITY WILL BE WORN."
Images flooded them: their faces, revealed to terrified, kneeling mortals. The adoration. The worship. Then, a new image: the sky, darkening not with rain, but with a hail of burning comets, scouring the earth clean once more, leaving no mud, no seeds, no hope.
"YOUR IMMORTAL NATURES ARE FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE. IF REVEALED, THE NEXT CULLING WILL NOT BE WATER. IT WILL BE FIRE AND ICE. THE COMETS WILL FALL. THIS IS NOT A WARNING. IT IS A SYSTEMS UPDATE."
The pressure vanished.
The message was clear. The Flood was a lesson. The comet hail would be an extermination.