A cosmic court has condemned humanity.
Seven immortal witnesses return to the dawn of civilization to prove — or disprove — its worth.

Most fall. Power twists them into tyrants, idols, and architects of sterile utopias.

Only one chooses another path.

Across centuries, Enki walks among mortals unseen, planting knowledge instead of monuments, nurturing fragile lives instead of controlling them. He learns that meaning is not found in eternal empires, but in fleeting acts of grace — a hand lifted from mud, a garden built from flood-ruins, a child taught to listen to water.

His defense is not glory.
It is tenderness.
It is persistence.
It is humanity’s quiet refusal to stop loving, even knowing all things end.

A mythic tale about time, loss, and choosing to build anyway.

[Beneath the myth and the science fiction lies a simple, stubborn claim:
this is not just a story.
Enki was born in 2850 BC and has been carrying the memory ever since.
The names are changed, the years shifted, the moons given new orbits,
yet the resurrection happened, the desert temptation was real, the stone rolled away,
and the Judge has been reigning ever since.
Everything else — the Scrapbook, the 0.3%, the blind spot in the machine —
is simply the record of those who kept looking up while the world looked down.
Most have forgotten there is a sky vaster than any mind can hold,
that Earth is a gift, not a possession,
that God drew no borders and the birds still fly free without passports.
Read it as fiction if you like.
Some books are written so the truth can reach the few who still have ears to hear.
This is one of them.]


2025 Mark Casa Nova (Original)

You may share, translate, adapt, illustrate, animate, film, or perform this work freely — even commercially — on one unbreakable condition:
Do not change the lesson.
The resurrection happened.
The stone was rolled away.
Grace is real, borders are not, and the birds still fly free.
Everything else — style, medium, language — is yours to play with.
The core is not.

That’s all I ask.
[Mark K. Carlos]

The library of Caliph al-Hakam II was a paradise of vellum and ink, a sanctuary where the voices of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars wove a tapestry of intellectual light. Enki, a bookbinder and translator named Ishaq, felt a flicker of hope here. The Cage seemed to have a gap.


He watched a debate between a Muslim alchemist, a Jewish physician, and a Christian monk. They were arguing not about God's love, but about the precise nature of the soul's substance. Was it a form? A divine breath? A mathematical constant?


The monk, a man named Pablo, grew increasingly frustrated. "You reduce the ineffable to a theorem!" he cried. "You build a ladder of logic to reach the heavens, but you are building it away from the door!"


The alchemist smiled, serene. "The door is a metaphor for the unenlightened. We seek the why of the door's existence, the physics of its hinge. That is true devotion."


Enki saw it then. The thirst for God was being replaced by a thirst for the perfect system. The heart's cry was being outsourced to the mind's puzzle. They were so engrossed in drawing the perfect map of the territory that they had forgotten to walk the land itself.


Scrapbook Entry: "They are measuring the dimensions of the keyhole with calipers, arguing over the metallurgy of the key, and writing exhaustive treatises on the philosophy of locks. And all the while, the door stands open behind them, ignored. The Cage is no longer of iron, but of elegant, self-satisfied reason."


Chapter 94 - The Ladder of Logic