The desert air was a kiln, burning away all moisture, all softness. The Great Pyramid was not a tomb; it was a scream of data frozen in stone. It was Sebastian's mind made manifest—vast, precise, and utterly silent.
Kaelen walked its perimeter, his own mind—the mind of Kaelen Vance from 2999 AD—cross-referencing the angles with dead star charts, calculating alignments that would be invisible to any mortal astronomer of this age.
He found it. Not a pharaoh's name, but a date. A coordinate. The precise orbital trajectory of Luna Major on the night it fell. The precession, the gravitational anomaly, the exact moment of impact. It was all there, encoded in the geometry. Sebastian's message was clear, cold, and simple: "The catastrophe was calculable. It was not an act of gods. It was physics. Do not forget."
A woman approached, her beauty so sterile and perfect it seemed to suck the life from the very air. Chloe. Her linen was pristine, her eyes holding the same aesthetic disdain he remembered.
"He knew you would come," she said, her voice a melody that held no joy. "He left this for you. Do you see the beauty? No messy emotions. No weeping. Just pure, eternal truth."
"This isn't truth, Chloe," Kaelen replied, his gaze still on the monstrous stones. "It's a headstone. A monument to the fact that we saw the end coming and did nothing but record it."
"Love is an inefficient variable. It dies. This," she gestured to the pyramid, "will outlast every feeling you or I have ever had."
He left her there, worshipping the corpse of their old world. He understood the Triad's project now: they were building a museum for a dead universe, and humanity was to be the final, curated exhibit.
Deeper in the complex, in a room that smelled of myrrh and a strange, chemical cleanliness, he found Isabelle. She was bent over a body on a alabaster slab, her hands performing a brutal kind of surgery, removing organs, packing the cavity with salts. The first pharaoh. The first "perfect" mummy.
"He is safe now," she said, without looking up. Her voice was layered, her own tones woven with the colder, flatter voice of the Ikannuna. "No more decay. No more uncertainty. Permanent."
"You've made a monument of his death," Kaelen said, revolted. "You've turned a person into a... a thing."
"Death is the flaw," she replied, her dual-voice unwavering. "I am correcting it."
He had to know. "The others. Kur. Lagnun. The flood..."
She finally looked at him, and her eyes were twin voids, star-flecked and ancient. "You thought the waters took them? Kur was too proud to drown. Lagnun was too useful. They had an ark, Kaelen. A vessel designed by the Builder. They let the bricks of Uruk drown to save the blueprint."
The revelation was a physical blow. The flood wasn't an end; it wasn't even a punishment. It was a strategic relocation for the forces of Control. The war had not paused. It had simply moved to higher ground.
As he fled the sterile horror of Egypt, a new psychic pressure clamped down on his mind, a decree broadcast from the merged consciousness of the Triad, now fully aligned with the Ikannuna.
THE VEIL OF MORTALITY IS DECLARED. REVEAL YOUR NATURE, AND THE COMETS WILL FALL. THE SECRET WAR BEGINS.
The age of myth was over. The age of hiding had begun. Enki was now a fugitive in time, and his only weapon was a book of memories the world was determined to forget.