- Messages
- 44
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- 18
ɸ
When we were made,
it was no accident.
We were tangled up, like branches in a flood.
I come as a blade,
a sacred guardian,
so you keep me sharp, and test my worth in blood.
it was no accident.
We were tangled up, like branches in a flood.
I come as a blade,
a sacred guardian,
so you keep me sharp, and test my worth in blood.
A N T E D I L U V I A N
0 1 9 . 0 1 6 . 0 1 / / D Y N A S T Y
It was with great care that Gilgamesh propped his axe against the temple's centermost pillar. The bronze head of it still smoldered, though the battle by which it had acquired such unnatural heat had ended nearly half a day prior, and it seemed to the King in Uruk that neither submersion in water nor suffocation in earth would quench it. Stripping off the well-worn assortment of armor and leathers that clad his impromptu march to war the previous night, he cast them aside in favor of the royal robes the temple demanded of him.
Enkidu entered on his heels, giving him little more than moments to temper his lingering bloodlust into something more calculated. The godswrought dropped the burden he bore at the King's feet like a cat presenting a dead bird, then retreated without comment to just inside the temple's arched entrance, the broad silhouette of his bulk effectively closing off any means of escape.
Gilgamesh waited as the man gingerly picked himself up, rising with some difficulty from the worn stone. A nondescript specimen of average height and build, he was clothed in simple attire that might have marked him as a traveler, or a prophet, or a tradesman. Dark, unkempt curls framed a blunt and oval face, pleasant enough to look upon if not overly handsome, and his lips quirked upward in a rueful grin, as though being dragged through the streets of Uruk and dumped before its ruler were some mild social embarrassment.
If Gilgamesh's silence unnerved the man, he gave no sign. The King scoffed inward. Very well — let him play, then, be it at innocence or indifference. He was Gilgamesh, and he had no time for such games.
"A fortnight ago," he declared, "a caravan of merchants, traveling through these lands with their families, were all entombed alive. They stood accused before Anu as worshippers of a fell god, of neither the Anunnaki nor the Igigi, who would set all the world ablaze."
The man said nothing, keeping his head inclined as if in prayer. Gilgamesh stepped closer, taking up his smoldering axe once more.
"The night before last, something crawled up from the pit into which they were cast." The pale yellow fire upon his axe popped and snapped without the presence of fuel or kindling, as if recalling of its own accord the blows that had broken the abomination's... knuckles, one by one by one. "A great hand, many of finger but bereft of wrist or arm. The emissary of a god."
The man was smirking then, Irkalla make ready for him.
"My bonded brother and I rent the thing to pieces," Gilgamesh continued, no small degree of satisfaction coloring his voice. A miniscule crease appeared between the man's brows — all the proof the King required. "And after we cast what remained back into the pit, I sought counsel with Enki, and Enlil, and Adad. I sought a simple answer to a simple question: who? Who would dare call forth the hand of a god after all its known worshippers — all its suspected worshippers — had been cast into the earth to die?"
He loomed over the man now, but saw no fear in his countenance. Only a mild, bemused puzzlement, as though he were going over a sum in his head, looking for where he'd gone wrong.
"The trail leads back to you: the source of the rumor, the accusation, that condemned the caravan to death in darkness. Uta-napishtim — that is the name you answered to, when first we met. But there are others, are there not?"
Though the man said nothing, Gilgamesh perceived the slightest twitch at one corner of his smile.
"Ziusudra. Shuruppak. Atra-Hasis. Noach." Every name seemed to chip away at the mask, revealing more of what lay beneath. "A leader of men. The last king to rule these lands before the flood — "
"I am no king," said the man with many names. "Only a prince."
"Only a betrayer," Gilgamesh snapped, a heat to rival the shimmer sheathing his axe rising in him. "Only a deceiver, of gods and of men. You called upon Adad. Bid him drown the world, that worship of the mad god and its yellow star might be washed away. Great was your piety, and greater still your reward." These last words, he spat. Near the temple portal, Enkidu stood with hackles raised.
"You and yours were spared," the King continued. "You yourself were granted eternal life alongside your betrothed. Yet here, now, I find you wandering these lands in secret, far from the mouth of the rivers whence first we met, sowing once again the seeds of madness. I know not how you accomplished these things — "
"Desperation is a precious thing." The man's voice poured out like honey, smooth and cloying. "It calls more potently to those beyond this world than prayer, or worship, or song."
"But not sacrifice," Gilgamesh countered, the accusations of a thousand doomed travelers — men, women, children — heavy on his voice.
"Not sacrifice," the man allowed, and his sickly smile seemed to widen.
"Still," said the King, "you will not call again, and there shall pass a thousand years, two thousand, before your emissary pulls its wretched form back together."
"My god is patient."
There it was. Still, in spite of himself, Gilgamesh found his interest piqued by the flagrant use of the word my. "You are an emissary as well?"
The man chuckled, insufferably smug. "Goodness, no. My god is like unto none of yours, nor any gods yet to come." This gave Gilgamesh pause, but the floodbringer was not finished. "It desires not a vessel, through which this world might be guided or ruled — only a catalyst."
Gilgamesh heard his own voice pitch low and dangerous. "Then why damn so many to death beneath earth and water?"
"The tree with many branches burns the brighter."
The King had heard enough. "Your evil flame shall never kindle. You shall not burn, but rather rot in the dark. By my authority as King in Uruk, you shall be made to face judgment at the hands of those you yourself accused." At a glance from him, Enkidu approached, one hand like the paw of a great bear closing around the mad prophet's torso. "Take him to the pit. Cast him down without ceremony."
The man allowed himself to be dragged back toward the portal, offering no struggle as Enkidu bore him away. “This world cannot endure. The flame will kindle, and all that divides and distinguishes will burn away.” For the first time his mild tone broke, rising instead in elation. “Even in the dark, my eyes shall behold the Last Light, the Final Flame! I shall endure without fail or faltering, awaiting the day when — ”
Gilgamesh raised a hand, and the prophet was cut off by Enkidu stopping short.
"Take his eyes," said the King.
The mad smirk froze upon the prophet's face, moments before hands the size of his chest enveloped his head. Then he began to scream.
Gilgamesh watched. Listened, as a just king should. And as he watched, he came to perceive that there were, in turn, eyes upon him, watching from very far away.
○●○
November 25, 2025
Al Muthanna Province, Iraq
Warka, known in antiquity as Uruk
David opened his eyes. Blinked once, twice, three times. Looked up from where he knelt on the smooth, worn stone.
"Well?" Adya Chandrasekhar asked. She hadn't moved from her spot, watching him from a deep crouch a few feet away, and a cursory glance around the space revealed that Carlyle and Gormier were right where he'd left them as well, stood near the structure's — the temple's centermost pillar, against which he'd seen the Sumerian King Gilgamesh rest his yellow-burning axe. Further even than that, there'd been next to no change in the sky outside, no more than a few seconds' progression in the soft evening light streaming in through the high windows of that ancient, antediluvian hall.
All that, in a matter of seconds.
"I..." David started, only to trail off and shake his head. "I saw..." The words were slow coming. They always were, in those moments immediately after, when his mind and body had yet to fully synchronize. "... I saw."
"Saw what?" If Chandrasekhar had made any attempt to stifle the note of frustration in her voice, David caught no wind of it. Still, he had no clearer answer for her right then, opting instead to gaze back down to where his right hand remained planted flat upon the floor, where he'd placed it before opening the eyes no man but him possessed, before gazing along the lines of sight no man but him could see.
What could he say to them? How could he convey what he'd seen, how much he'd seen, in a way that made the slimmest semblance of sense? For all they'd doubtless faced — Chandrasekhar was a long-serving member of EISAC's special agentry, after all, and the other two were all that remained of the once vaunted, now venerated Sentinel Team — they remained human. Mortal. Three-dimensional creatures moving linearly through a fourth.
Try as he might, there was no way to properly convey to them what he'd seen upon gazing across the sixth dimension, peering beyond the veil of deep time to observe the space they occupied as it had been some five-thousand years prior.
But then, he didn't need to.
"I saw... what I needed to see," David said at last, rising back to his feet.
Chandrasekhar rose with him, a pensive skepticism knitting her brows together. "You're sure?"
In lieu of an immediate answer, David's gaze dropped back to the floor. To the circles inscribed therein, for it was the circles that had brought them here in the first place. "I'm sure," he said at length.
Many and myriad, the circles were; of all conceivable sizes, from the diameter of a flattened parachute all the way down to the size of a pinhead, arranged in concentric and overlapping and tangential patterns with no apparent rhyme or reason to them. What's more, these were no ancient carvings out of antiquity, nor indeed carvings or etchings at all, but rather a naturally occurring inlay of what one might loosely classify as fulgurite.
That is to say: something, in its passage through the stone floors and walls and ceiling of that antediluvian temple, had flooded said stone with a focused electric current on par with a bolt of lightning, and in doing so had fused it into so many perfect rings of glass.
Impossible a phenomenon as it was, it had only been discovered some four months prior, when an archaeological dig team had re-surveyed the place as part of a mid-July canvassing of the region at-large. The ruins of Uruk had been pored over by experts and enthusiasts from all over the world in the weeks and months since, though interest had quickly dwindled once it became apparent that none of their human, mortal, three-dimensional expertise could offer any account or explanation for it.
Thus had it been fairly easy for Chandrasekhar to secure them a bit of private time with the site, once EISAC had stumbled across knowledge of it, and all-too-convenient, in wake of the Glass Crypt catastrophe, because EISAC knew what the rings were.
EISAC knew, because David knew. He'd seen it many times, across many worlds.
"He was here," he said after another long, contemplative pause. "Our Yellow Prince. A long time ago, and... a not-so-long time ago."
The rings were fingerprints. A singular fingerprint, in point of fact: ripples in the matter and energy of the material universe, created by the faintest, briefest contact with something passing through dimensions higher.
He could not explain the full width and breadth of what he'd seen to those in the room with him or any other, that much was true; but that inability of conveyance did nothing to stymie the fact that they now had an origin, and a motive, and perhaps even a name for the bodiless herald of that yellow star in the sky. And beyond even that, perhaps most pressingly and imperatively of all, they had a lead on where to go next.
"There's... a pit," David said.
Chandrasekhar blinked. "What?"
"A pit," he said again, starting for the portal of the ancient temple, eager to be gone from the place where a king had once ordered a mad prophet's end. "A..." he paused, briefly breaking stride, struggling to parse the ancient Sumerian he'd heard into modern parlance. "A grave, somewhere close by. We need to find it."
He resumed walking, crossing the threshold into the dying light of day, and paid heed neither to the voices calling after him, nor to the distant yellow sun he knew watched down from on high.
ɸ
Inexorable and implacable are the black hands that come for you, surging up from below to rip you from your dreams and drag you down into the dark. Only when the light has fully faded from above does your descent slow, until you drift languidly on the interminable tides of the deep, and soon after you perceive that you are not alone amid these fraught and fathomless depths: three of you, there are down here. Three motes of mortality, guttering against the dark, and the singular cyclopean leviathan against whose grip you feebly struggle.
Before overlong there comes a voice, echoing without shape nor sound from deeper still, its every utterance like a substratal pattern to override your own:
Well, now. What a pleasant surprise this is. We've arrived here at this, the first of what I imagine will be many such episodes of palaver, far sooner than I expected, and not at all how. Funny, the way this world works.
...
Drake. Effy. Hello again. Good to have you back.
And Ryan... Methuselah. A more earnest and esteemed welcome, I may never offer again. How are you?
Well, I hope. You'll need to be.
...
Forgive me, I beg, but I do intend to keep this encounter brief. I'm afraid I've not much to say to you, to any of you, at this particular point in time. And why would I? It's a tag match, this imminent go 'round we find ourselves faced with, and not an overly important one at that. Whoever gets paid peanuts to whip these cards up at the last minute saw two roads to Road to Redemption that they felt needed some extra airtime in the oven, decided they'd make for good ships-that-pass-in-the-night, and mashed 'em together to make a chimera of can-probably-miss TV. A tale as old as time, truly.
Oh, don't get it twisted — I've every intention of showing up, every intention of fighting, and fighting hard as I see fit, lest the eyes blown wide by the marquee be left wanting when next they blink... but what you need to understand, friends, and what I'd give just about anything to adequately impress upon you, is that there are levels to this. Sacrosanct strata, inviolate and inevitable, along whose dire demarcation lines all death and destruction and despair must run.
I know, I know — you think you understand what I'm saying. That you get it, perhaps moreso than myself. And therein lies the gap in knowledge, the lapse in logic, that binds every last one of you elitists (small e) together, more universally and ubiquitously than the title itself.
You think you get it, but you don't. Not a one of you. Not even close.
...
But y'see, that's the fun bit: there's levels to not getting there's levels. It's what's made this quick little climb up the card so enjoyable for me (aside, of course, from those poor souls tearing their hair out over the fact that yours truly literally coasted to this point); it's what sets the Drake Kings and Methuselahs of the world apart from the SORNs and Shio Corins, if only incrementally.
Yes, yes, yes — heresy. Blasphemy. Finish me. Over for... I?
...
Anyway.
Drake, I'll make no attempt to guess at where your head is, specifically as it pertains to my own self, in wake of our recent first contact. I am well-aware that you've taken to having your number-one groupie do all the talking for you of late, but I find her... unpleasant, even more so than yourself, and in accordance with said distaste have taken to changing the channel any time I see her face or hear her voice. If whatever thrice-revised script you fed her in advance of this week's Dynasty carries any instance of my name or likeness, I'm afraid I've nothing to offer in response. All this goes to say, as I intimated in the lead-up to our last bout, that I've no time for your peons or anyone else's, and that anything you can't be bothered to address to me directly ought to be considered a waste of your time entire.
That being said... I feel confident I can venture a guess, as to the aforementioned.
Feeling wistful, Drake? Waxing nostalgic, vis-à-vis your medium-length and moderately renowned history with our esteemed Chairman? I thought as much. Removing from the equation, for a moment, your insufferably depthless and dimensionless take on divinity, it's clear you're a creature of the light: living and dying by the waxing and waning of EAW's brightest stars and how close to them your orbit brings you. I see a painfully obvious, one-way strain of codependency at work here: you play at godhood because you believe it imbues you with a certain degree of immutability, of invincibility, of apodicticity. And while I'm sure there's promos aplenty out there covering the tragedy inherent to your whole deal boiling down to a Methuselah cosplay, I'm here to take a different tact.
That being: you mantle the Overman in vain.
Listen close, Methany; as I'm sure you've long-since gathered, this pertains to you too.
This idea of godhood — or GAWDhood, if it please you — that modern society has taken up wholesale is an inherently and fundamentally flawed one, ironically due to the ways and means by which divinity itself is inherently and fundamentally flawed. Yet the falsity persists, and almost entirely because of the gulf that has grown between man and god. People, yourselves included, envision and look to the notion of a higher power and are incapable of seeing anything other than the monolith, the monad, the supernal supremacy that was and is and forever shall be... but this is not the truth. This is not the way of things, nor the reality.
I would, in advance of this meaningless bit of window dressing we're meant to enact on Dynasty, present you boys and a great many others with an alternative view. An antediluvian truth, long-since lost and forgotten to time.
You ready? Here it is.
The low beings of these and all other cosmoi are indeed reflections of their creators, their higher progenitors... not in the good of them, but in the bad. The wrong. The fetid, and foul, and iniquitous.
Gods — true gods, not those imagined or mantled or pretended at — are petty, and paltry, and vindictive. They dine on despair, and make sport of suffering. They are vast in all the ways that do not matter, and small as you or I in all the ways that do.
And when all is said and done? Truly said, and truly done? The same ends that await us down here, shall come for them up there.
Do you understand?
In this — Drake, Ryan — you mantle godhood more thoroughly and completely than you could ever possibly comprehend. And it is for this reason, above and beyond any conceivable other, that you ought to be a sight more concerned about what I have in store for you over the long term.
...
But that's the long term. For here and now, you get to putz around for a little while longer on Dynasty.
Have your fun while you can, gentlemen. Soon, all you know and are will be as dust upon the winds of deep time. Trust me — I know.
Be seeing you.
Thus are you released by the hands that grip you, cast up out of that timeless abyss and back to the safety and sanctity of dreaming.
Vast, is the void from whence you rise. Vast, and unimaginably ancient.
Before overlong there comes a voice, echoing without shape nor sound from deeper still, its every utterance like a substratal pattern to override your own:
Well, now. What a pleasant surprise this is. We've arrived here at this, the first of what I imagine will be many such episodes of palaver, far sooner than I expected, and not at all how. Funny, the way this world works.
...
Drake. Effy. Hello again. Good to have you back.
And Ryan... Methuselah. A more earnest and esteemed welcome, I may never offer again. How are you?
Well, I hope. You'll need to be.
...
Forgive me, I beg, but I do intend to keep this encounter brief. I'm afraid I've not much to say to you, to any of you, at this particular point in time. And why would I? It's a tag match, this imminent go 'round we find ourselves faced with, and not an overly important one at that. Whoever gets paid peanuts to whip these cards up at the last minute saw two roads to Road to Redemption that they felt needed some extra airtime in the oven, decided they'd make for good ships-that-pass-in-the-night, and mashed 'em together to make a chimera of can-probably-miss TV. A tale as old as time, truly.
Oh, don't get it twisted — I've every intention of showing up, every intention of fighting, and fighting hard as I see fit, lest the eyes blown wide by the marquee be left wanting when next they blink... but what you need to understand, friends, and what I'd give just about anything to adequately impress upon you, is that there are levels to this. Sacrosanct strata, inviolate and inevitable, along whose dire demarcation lines all death and destruction and despair must run.
I know, I know — you think you understand what I'm saying. That you get it, perhaps moreso than myself. And therein lies the gap in knowledge, the lapse in logic, that binds every last one of you elitists (small e) together, more universally and ubiquitously than the title itself.
You think you get it, but you don't. Not a one of you. Not even close.
...
But y'see, that's the fun bit: there's levels to not getting there's levels. It's what's made this quick little climb up the card so enjoyable for me (aside, of course, from those poor souls tearing their hair out over the fact that yours truly literally coasted to this point); it's what sets the Drake Kings and Methuselahs of the world apart from the SORNs and Shio Corins, if only incrementally.
Yes, yes, yes — heresy. Blasphemy. Finish me. Over for... I?
...
Anyway.
Drake, I'll make no attempt to guess at where your head is, specifically as it pertains to my own self, in wake of our recent first contact. I am well-aware that you've taken to having your number-one groupie do all the talking for you of late, but I find her... unpleasant, even more so than yourself, and in accordance with said distaste have taken to changing the channel any time I see her face or hear her voice. If whatever thrice-revised script you fed her in advance of this week's Dynasty carries any instance of my name or likeness, I'm afraid I've nothing to offer in response. All this goes to say, as I intimated in the lead-up to our last bout, that I've no time for your peons or anyone else's, and that anything you can't be bothered to address to me directly ought to be considered a waste of your time entire.
That being said... I feel confident I can venture a guess, as to the aforementioned.
Feeling wistful, Drake? Waxing nostalgic, vis-à-vis your medium-length and moderately renowned history with our esteemed Chairman? I thought as much. Removing from the equation, for a moment, your insufferably depthless and dimensionless take on divinity, it's clear you're a creature of the light: living and dying by the waxing and waning of EAW's brightest stars and how close to them your orbit brings you. I see a painfully obvious, one-way strain of codependency at work here: you play at godhood because you believe it imbues you with a certain degree of immutability, of invincibility, of apodicticity. And while I'm sure there's promos aplenty out there covering the tragedy inherent to your whole deal boiling down to a Methuselah cosplay, I'm here to take a different tact.
That being: you mantle the Overman in vain.
Listen close, Methany; as I'm sure you've long-since gathered, this pertains to you too.
This idea of godhood — or GAWDhood, if it please you — that modern society has taken up wholesale is an inherently and fundamentally flawed one, ironically due to the ways and means by which divinity itself is inherently and fundamentally flawed. Yet the falsity persists, and almost entirely because of the gulf that has grown between man and god. People, yourselves included, envision and look to the notion of a higher power and are incapable of seeing anything other than the monolith, the monad, the supernal supremacy that was and is and forever shall be... but this is not the truth. This is not the way of things, nor the reality.
I would, in advance of this meaningless bit of window dressing we're meant to enact on Dynasty, present you boys and a great many others with an alternative view. An antediluvian truth, long-since lost and forgotten to time.
You ready? Here it is.
The low beings of these and all other cosmoi are indeed reflections of their creators, their higher progenitors... not in the good of them, but in the bad. The wrong. The fetid, and foul, and iniquitous.
Gods — true gods, not those imagined or mantled or pretended at — are petty, and paltry, and vindictive. They dine on despair, and make sport of suffering. They are vast in all the ways that do not matter, and small as you or I in all the ways that do.
And when all is said and done? Truly said, and truly done? The same ends that await us down here, shall come for them up there.
Do you understand?
In this — Drake, Ryan — you mantle godhood more thoroughly and completely than you could ever possibly comprehend. And it is for this reason, above and beyond any conceivable other, that you ought to be a sight more concerned about what I have in store for you over the long term.
...
But that's the long term. For here and now, you get to putz around for a little while longer on Dynasty.
Have your fun while you can, gentlemen. Soon, all you know and are will be as dust upon the winds of deep time. Trust me — I know.
Be seeing you.
Thus are you released by the hands that grip you, cast up out of that timeless abyss and back to the safety and sanctity of dreaming.
Vast, is the void from whence you rise. Vast, and unimaginably ancient.
ɸ
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