The truth of the mud, sung aloud, had forged them into a people. But Kaelen, whom they called Enki, was a historian. And he was documenting a quiet apocalypse: the slow fading of King Gilgamesh.
He was there when the king's roaring laugh first caught, a small, mortal hitch. He watched, a silent sentinel, as the first lines etched themselves around his friend's eyes—not the work of sun or wind, but of time, a force that had no purchase on Enki's own skin. He was a keeper of records, and the most tragic record was the gradual dimming of the sun around which his world had orbited.
When Gilgamesh died, old and full of years, it was not a catastrophe. It was a quiet closing. The people mourned a king. Enki mourned a universe.
He buried him alone, at dawn, in the memorial grove they had planted together a lifetime ago. He did not speak. Words were for the living. He placed a single, unworked stone upon the rich, dark earth. A marker for a man, not a monument for a legend.
That night, as the new king—Gilgamesh's grandson—was acclaimed, Kaelen of the Sweet Waters walked into the chill waters of the river. He let the current take his clothes, his name, his identity as the city's founding sage. He submerged himself in the silence, holding his breath until his immortal lungs burned with a need that was purely, blessedly physical.
On the far bank, a man named Ziusudra rose, dripping and anonymous. The first death was complete. He was now a ghost in his own story.
He lingered for a generation, a silent, unchanging uncle in the shadows of the palace, guiding the young king's hand with a whisper, ensuring the root was deep, the garden stable. When the king no longer needed his whispers, he turned east.
The other six points of their cursed constellation were out there. He could feel their pull, a cold dissonance in the harmony of the world. He had to see what they had become.
His journey took decades. He followed a trail of unsettling perfection to the Yellow River, to a land being carved into order as if by a giant's comb. He found the mind behind it on a levee, watching laborers pack earth with rhythmic, unchanging precision. Julian. Or the thing that had been Julian.
"The Gardener," Julian said, not with warmth, but with the tone of a scientist noting a persistent variable. His voice was flat, stripped of the human resonance Enki remembered. "I heard a weed had taken root in the west."
"I came to see if the Lawgiver remembered the man he was before the Crown," Kaelen replied, his own voice rough from disuse.
Julian's gaze was a physical weight, analytical and devoid of empathy. "The man was the disease. The Law is the cure. You let them grow wild. I prune. It is the only mercy."
"Mercy?" Kaelen gestured to the rigid landscape, the workers who moved like automatons. "You call this sterile control mercy?"
A flicker of something raw, something human, crossed Julian's face. It was there and gone in an instant, but Enki saw it—a crack in the stone.
"You think you are the only one to suffer this madness?" Julian's voice dropped to a venomous whisper. "You, with your quiet wrath and your precious Scrapbook? I was reborn into a world of screaming, bloody chaos. For millennia, Kaelen. While you were playing in the mud, I was drowning in the filth of their nature! This," he hissed, gesturing to the rigid society spreading out from the river, "is the only thing holding back the scream in my own soul!"
For a single, heartbreaking moment, Kaelen saw him. Not the Lawgiver, but Julian Thorne, the judge from the end of the world, trapped in an endless, bloody courtroom. Then the mask of cold certainty slammed back into place.
"Now," Julian said, his voice returning to its dispassionate monotone. "Get out of my experiment."
As Kaelen turned, a runner arrived, breathless, speaking of a mountain of stone being raised in the west, a tomb for a god-king.
But Kaelen, feeling the chilling, familiar signature of Sebastian's mind in the description, knew it was no tomb.
It was a message. And he knew, with a historian's certainty, that it was addressed to him.