dryskies_btb - Let He Who Cast the First Stone Ch.2

[Ä̴͚́L̶̳͋L̵̮̓ ̸̨̉M̸͓̽Ÿ̴̬́T̶̨̀Ḧ̶̲ ̸̛͔I̷̮̔S̴͋ͅ ̷̦͝T̵̫͛R̸͉̾U̷̧͠T̷͇͒H̶̹̑,̶́͜ ̷͍͘P̵̝͝È̵̘R̶̜̊S̸̭̈P̷̨̕Ë̴͎́C̸̨̃T̸͕̑I̸̘͝V̵̨͘Ẽ̷̗ ̸̨͆A̸̭̋B̵̧̋S̸̨̑Ő̸̜L̴͇̋Ǘ̶̮T̴̼̔E̶̥͝]

[CONVERGENCE]

— Tiamat —

Her voice was beautiful, a story of the creating ages from the Mother of Monsters, Mother of Myth, for one canon.

“I have always been — one half of the dual-faceted primordial waters.”

Her children listened to the story with attentive ears. They encompassed, in a way, all that was, for she had helped to birth the world. Yet the ones she whispered to were her most faithful offspring; they were the only company she had now, and she was the only company for them, too.

“When on high, the heavens had not been named,

Firm ground below had not been called by claim.”

“There was primordial Apsu, and there was Tiamat — me and he with our waters beneath and above. I am the ocean of stars and seas; he was the ocean of groundwater from which all life can drink. The lines between us were distinct, yet they did not exist. We were as one, just as we were of two.

“And from our waters, fresh and salt, came great gulfs of churning foam — Mummu, the force of Creation, not yet the god who would claim the same name. From that foam sprang gods: Lahmu and Lahamu, Anshar and Kishar, and from Anshar, Anu, and from Anu, Ea.”

The initial pantheon took shape according to Tiamat’s recollection.

Lahmu stepped from the foam akin to a man, and Lahamu stepped as his womanly counterpart. They came to guard the sea — not the Primordial Sea as Tiamat and Apsu were, but the mortal one.

Anshar and Kinshar stepped similarly from the churning foam. Anshar was the god of the ‘Whole Heaven’; Kinshar was the goddess of the ‘Whole Earth’. With such mortal concepts springing into being, they ruled as king and queen of gods yet to be wrought.

Then, the king begot a king — Anu — and that king begot a king in turn — Ea.

“The new gods were rowdy and young, frolicking such that they disturbed Apsu. He came to me with a plan. He would destroy the gods, all we had cast forth together, and we would start anew. I did not wish things so. I refused to aid him.

“But Apsu had another voice in his ear — not as a mate, but as a servant. He had harnessed Mummu the force, and wrought Mummu the god. As a god, Mummu cleaved to Apsu, its creator. Apsu’s stance was reinforced by a mind in line with his furious hand. He pushed forth without me to destroy the world.”

Brought by her retelling, the primordial waters below reared against all that sprang forth from its union with Tiamat, and the primordial waters below were slain.

For Ea had crafted a spell, a lulling story rather than an invigorating, inspiring, and informative one as Tiamat now sang posthumously. It lulled Apsu to sleep, and as he slept so terribly, Ea took up Apsu’s halo and cast down Apsu for good. 

“Ea came to dwell within Apsu, forging a throne room from his being and domain and corpse all at once. There, he and his wife birthed one more king to rule the world, Marduk. He was resplendent. ‘My son, the sun,’ Ea declared. Under Marduk, the order of the world — that of gods and kings — was set. And there was no place for primordial waters in such an order…

“The other gods came to taunt me as the new order was established. ‘Where were you when your consort was slain? Why did your waves not swell to his aid?’

“I, who had done them no wrong, was rightfully enraged. I created my first true, faithful children then. You, my loves: Kingu, Bašmu, Ušumgallu, Mušmaḫḫū, Mušḫuššu, Laḫmu, Ugallu, Uridimmu, Girtablullû, Umū dabrūtu, Kulullû, and Kusarikku. You were my weapons, my monsters against the new order of the world.

“We waged our war. Marduk slew me, his arrow in my heart. Yet I did not die when I was killed. I fell. I was discarded. But I did not cease to be.

“I am still the Mother-Sea. My tides come and go, and through them, I see all. I see you, my faithful children, chained.”

Those who heard her voice most clearly had not been cast aside as Tiamat had been. Instead, 11 Monsters had become 10 statues at Apsu’s gates, where Ea ruled. The missing monster, Kingu, had been sacrificed; from his spilled blood, lines of men were created.

“I see that the gods have flourished since my death, but then, I see that so too has the world. I cannot help but love it, despite my fate, and loathe how I was discarded from it even more.

“All is not lost, my children. As I am now, I have witnessed the truth of our world as one of many, yet all the same. There are canons to Creation, each as true as the last. The world sprang from Apsu and I, and our first children, but it also sprang as LIGHT from utter darkness, and from Nu — primordial waters of chaos that are not me, and from many more stories of Creation still.

“Creation is a thing of contradiction and complexity, so I have seen. The gods who rule our new order now are blissfully ignorant of how vast it truly is. There, I am blessed, my children, and I freely share that blessing of knowledge with you. Our canon overlaps and intertwines with all of the canons around it. Some events ring the same across them, even as they manifest so differently in each.”

A Great Flood emphasized Tiamat’s point there. The world was consumed by lasting storm and tumultuous waters — in their canon, those waters were still Tiamat herself, though she’d already been discarded. But with the result the same across the neighboring canons, Tiamat glimpsed the truth as she flooded the world.

The Flood did not begin with Tiamat aware of the varied and true canons of Creation. That realization came in the form of a single Man who braved the turmoil.

Stubbornly, he had fought against the raging waters; he persisted through all of Tiamat’s indirect rage.

Tiamat saw immediately that he wasn’t one of hers, no man who had sprung from Kingu’s spilled blood. That fact piqued her interest, for there wasn’t much else she could do but Flood.

“We are not alone. No one and nothing is alone in Creation. All Myth is Truth, Perspective Absolute…”

She watched the Man ride the waves with force of will, kicking his way across them without rest and with fury in his heart. At times, he fell beneath them, all the way to the bottom. Yet still, he didn’t perish.

Beneath the waves — at once Tiamat and not — the Man hunted to sustain himself. Surviving the Flood could not have been easy. Even the gods Tiamat knew only escaped it by fleeing above or below. But the Man, in dark depths, forced his way through the storm.

Monstrous creatures that Tiamat had once unconsciously spawned challenged him for daring to go where Man was not meant to go. He beat every one of them back. One he even tamed and rode as a great and terrible steed. Just his fists were enough to batter the beasts into submission. And at times, when he wielded a seemingly simple Stone, the battles for survival became Murder.

Tiamat was enthralled by the Man, the sheer force with which he lived. Even if he could not tame the Flood, could not avert or end it, he rode its every moment.

Such a Man was so unlike anything in the canon she knew. Her unfaithful children ruled over mere men who would discard Tiamat just as their gods had. The Man was not cut from the same cloth; she was quite sure he did not ponder how he outlasted the Flooding waters of her being. No, his focus was singular and directed elsewhere.

When Tiamat followed that focus, she came across a divine force that even she was wary of.

That divine force had brought the Flood. So had the upper gods of her own canon. They were not the same, yet both were true.

It — He — felt Tiamat’s attention, and to her utter bemusement, He waved.

He pointed at the Man as if inviting her to watch with Him.

[*SLAPS ROOF OF CAR — THIS OL’ BOY CAN FIT SO MUCH SPITE AND STUBBORNNESS!]

… What was a ‘car’? Tiamat wondered; He didn’t bother to elaborate.

Still, with Him showing no hostility, Tiamat took up his invitation.

[CAIN. NOT EXACTLY FAVORED. STILL MY FAVORITE.]

“The name fit,” Tiamat recalled to her children. “And with just him, my eyes were opened. Even when the Flood abated, I did what I could to follow Cain. He wanders; it is his curse. It offered me a welcome, sorely missed view into the rebuilding world, the convergence of canons.”

Her gods were still nonethewiser to the vastness of Creation, so focused on their own canon, their own stories. There, man was brought back humble, and the gods so graciously allowed them to start anew. Cain wandered more than just his own canon as the world returned to its baseline and continued to grow beyond it.

“I have been discarded for so long, children. The world has moved on without me, both as we know it and as we don’t. The Age of Primordial Creation has turned firmly to the next, and there is no need for Tiamat as the Mother-Sea.

Her most faithful children were chained as statues; she knew they would help her if they could, but they could not. The most they could offer her was silent company and listening ears. Likewise, the most she could offer them was a window into the world, stories of their mother with renewed hope.

“Before Cain, I would’ve worried about falling deeper into irrelevance. Now, with my eyes opened to canons galore, I hope to beg his aid in redefining myself. I see a chance here, children. An Outside Man of Stubbornness and Spite may be just what I need to Murder my fate and incarnate anew.”

IIIII

Tiamat came to Cain as an unnatural storm of cosmic salt water. She fell upon the earth before him and formed a body from the puddles she left — droplets splashed into reflections that sprayed into a barely physical form.

It was a shadow of what she’d once been.

Her name was all but forgotten by her own canon, spoken only in their stories of Creation. The cosmic ocean of her being was still real, still true, but its purpose as the wellspring of new life had been set aside.

Now, she rose before Cain as waning waves, an ocean in retreat — if nothing changed, its tide would never turn back toward the proverbial shore of the living world again.

Long hair, the color of the lively and crystal-clear waters above a shallow reef, fell down her back. Around her head it was braided intricately, the only crown she ever needed. Great and terrible horns sprouted from both sides of her head, rising from the braids. On either side, they curled downward in a double-arched ‘M’ to either side, as if for Mummu, the creative force, or Mother, or… Monster.

Her body was still hale and full-figured, even as her form flickered and wavered. She was, at the core of herself, a mother and an icon of fertility, and she was shaped thusly.

Tiamat covered herself only with her waves of hair. It was not to tempt or seduce Cain. Her bare form was simply all she had left, having been discarded for so long.

Cain didn’t flinch at her sudden appearance, her nudity, or her primordial presence and power. Even so waning, she should’ve been too much for any man to bear the sight of.

Cain looked upon her without fear, a stoicism about him that even Tiamat found unreadable.

In that unyielding mask, Tiamat found something paradoxically reachable, utterly unbound by the canon that cast her into mere memory.

“I am… lost…” She whispered to him, a breeze from the sea. “And I lose more of myself by the year. Yet in you, through you, thanks to you… I can see more. You are free. You do not care that you have been cast out by your canon, discarded. I… I need that, the stubbornness, the spite, the stoicism. Please… Help… me…”

Tiamat showed him that ‘more’ she’d seen thanks to him. Visions appeared in the waves of her being. They were of her canon, and his; information gleaned by the waves of the Cosmic Ocean was all she truly had to offer as payment.

For hers, a great city rose after the Flood, under the domain of her unfaithful children. Uruk was located on the life-giving Euphrates, and there, it thrived. Tiamat didn’t know if Cain had seen it; she showed him anyway.

Now, a demigod-king ruled there. Even the gods were both envious and jealous of him, for he had what they did not, and he had what they did in spades.

Gilgamesh ushered in a golden age for Uruk. The gods prospered while he did, but Tiamat knew them. She had to ask herself: how long would that golden age last? How long could they stand to let it last, forgoing their pride?

From his canon, she showed him visions from above and below. She showed him wondrous beings with white feathered wings, and the first of them to fall to black feathers. She showed him a Prideful ruler below who had strayed from the Heaven above. That Prideful Archangel held tight to a Woman he’d stolen as he carried out his ambitions for a yet-lowly race of demons — Devils to be. He would make them great and terrible to challenge his Father’s plan.

She — a primordial goddess — prayed the little information she had was enough to sway his aid. Oh, how low she’d fallen. Oh, how she knew she needed this regardless.

Cain watched her without saying a word. He took in her offered payment. The most reaction he showed was a furrowed brow when the Prideful Archangel below and the Woman he’d stolen came into view.

“I should’ve known he had something planned…” Cain muttered to himself.

Tiamat waited for his decision with bated breath.

“And what does He do…?” Cain continued, asking himself. “His most favored son has done worse than just Fall. Helel plots below now, and He must be allowing it. Lilith suffers for that lax attention, if it truly is lax at all. And worse for Heaven, Helel was not the last to Fall.

“What turmoil has come to be in Heaven and Hell, LORD, and why is it that I learn about it from one outside our canon?” Cain asked the sky, his voice bitter.

There was no direct answer. Tiamat felt the attention of the LORD Cain spoke to, but He returned her notice with a little ‘shushing’ motion. He did not want Cain to know how much of His attention he still had.

Finally, after long moments with no answer from his LORD, Cain turned to Tiamat.

“What is it you want, Mother Goddess? What is it you actually aim for here?”

His suspicion was undeserved. Tiamat couldn’t plot in her current state, even if it was her way of doing things. It wasn’t, regardless. She was primordial, half of the world itself when it was nothing. She was the Cosmic Ocean, and while it had untold depths, it was also, always, what one saw on its surface, too.

“I aim… to be free. To return to what I once was, or… No, I wish to return as something entirely new. My canon abandoned me; my own children turned their backs, and those who didn’t have been chained for supporting me,” Tiamat said.

“If that is what you wish,” Cain simply nodded. “… Why have you not just done it already?”

The replying question brought Tiamat up short. She blinked, and for a moment, her waves stilled. She… She could do that? Just… do that?

“It cannot be that simple,” Tiamat tried to protest, denial strong; she couldn’t bear the thought that she’d wasted so much time in grief and helplessness.

“Isn’t it?” He asked pointedly, raising a brow.

“You are the Mother Goddess of your canon, even in discarded half-death,” Cain continued. “You are primordial. Even as you are now, you’re greater than I can easily fathom. So I ask you again — and I ask you to ask yourself — what’s stopping you from redefining yourself to break your current fate?”

“I… I do not know,” Tiamat admitted softly.

His words sparked the beginning of a realization within her. On one hand, she had always been the Mother-Sea. On the other hand… always: she was primordial, as he said, and she preceded all others in her canon. If there was not power in that, there was power in nothing.

“You are a Man, forged of mortal potential; the quintessential nature of the divine does not apply to you,” Tiamat tried to reason. “Divines… We are set and stagnant. We are our roles in the cosmos, and we cannot be anything more or anything less.”

“Frankly? I don’t believe that,” Cain shot back. “With how far you’ve fallen since your primeval prime, can you truly call yourself ‘set and stagnant’?”

Tiamat’s argument weakened as she began to doubt everything she’d taken for granted. “No, but… it was destined…”

Cain stared at her — new doubts and all — with an intensity that pinned Tiamat in place.

‘Think for yourself,’ His glare demanded. ‘Accept nothing at face value. Seeing just the surface is as misleading as any lie.’

“Mayhaps it was, but that destiny has already come to be,” He said. “You said so yourself: you’ve been abandoned by your canon. If so, their destinies should mean nothing to you as you are now. Push forward without them; push forward by yourself and for yourself, Mother Goddess.”

“What… What would I even be? What could I make myself? Where would I go, and how would I live? How would I even… do so?” Tiamat asked.

The waves of her being roiled with uncertainty, but hope as well. She… She wanted just this. She needed it: someone to tell her that her current fate was not the end. But now that the chance and the realization were in front of her, she didn’t know if she dared to grasp them.

“Take that primordial power and apply it to yourself. You played a hand in Creation once; you can do so again. For yourself this time. Cast off your canon as they have cast off you. Forget traditional divinity, for it has served you poorly. Mother of Monsters, make yourself a monster,” Cain told her. “One who rules in her own right, a primordial beast with just as much claim to Creation as the gods.”

The advice resonated with Tiamat. She knew monsters. Her faithful children were considered as such, and she loved them still. To make herself one, to burn her divinity as fuel for something paradoxically primordial and novel…?

“Take fate into your hands alone. Tiamat,” Cain declared.

“Make yourself a Dragon.”

[HA! TAKE THAT, GREAT RED, YOU CRIMSON CUNT! MY BOY IS THE FIRST TO BRING DRAGONS TO EARTH! IT’S A BOLD STRATEGY, CAIN. LET’S SEE IF IT PAYS OFF… I’M CONFIDENT TIAMAT WILL SAY IT HAS. AS A DRAGON TRUE, THE FIRST ON EARTH… YOU SPARED HER A BEASTLY FATE.]

IIIII

— Cain —

“I won’t forget this, Cain. I am… Free… You shall always have a friend in Tiamat.”

As if he did it for her favor.

As if he did it for some grand plan of stockpiled power and benefits.

As if he did it for any reason other than that he could.

Cain felt he’d done wrong by Tiamat, even if she didn’t seem to think so. He’d sympathized with her fate, cast out by her canon. It was a curse he knew well himself, and so he’d pitied her, a primordial goddess.

If the situations were reversed, Cain would’ve been seething. He knew himself enough to see that.

That was the stubbornness, the spite, and the pride he’d been cursed with, even before his true curse. Gifts, Adam would’ve said, for they were G-O-D’s attention upon him.

Cain missed aspects of his father at times; his fervor born of being ignored by the LORD was not one of them.

Eve would’ve listened to Cain’s complaints of the curses — both trait and punishment — even if she didn’t agree with him.

Cain missed his mother, but as much as he wished for more time with her, he’d long since made peace with her passing.

Abel would’ve-…

Cain missed Abel every day, even if he just would’ve laughed and teased him for brooding, the little bastard…

…

Cain ignored the scorch of his cursed mark on his skin. It wasn’t even… real — not part of G-O-D’s curse, at least. The burn he felt, thinking about Abel, was entirely within his own mind.

Such was his curse: worse than what even the LORD had decreed for him.

… Why Tiamat had come to him of all people, Cain didn’t know. He was no hero, and he’d hardly interacted with her canon. The most he’d done, the most he could ever do, was wander and murder.

Since the Flood and the Fall of Babel after it — when the lines of men first recovered and resurged, then dispersed to proliferate anew — Cain had done as his curse demanded. As he did, he found the world a fair bit more realized, holistically so.

The canons of Creation brushed closer against each other now, close enough for mortal men to move between. Close enough, even, for interactions like cursed Cain and forsaken Tiamat to occur.

The world was changing. It was deepening, constantly developing. In just his own canon, as Tiamat had shown him, Heaven had learned to Fall, and Hell was being taught to rise. That left the earth and all men to inevitably be caught between. This was just the beginning. Cain knew he was damned to witness all that would come of it.

That accursed certainty left Cain to wonder: where did he wander from here?

… The canon that had cast Tiamat off and that she had now cast off in turn seemed as good a destination as any. They were rising to prominence in the area, thanks mostly to the demigod-king Tiamat had shown Cain. It might very well be the peak of their canon, based on all Cain had heard of Gilgamesh and the feeling in his gut. After stealing their Mother Goddess, it wouldn’t do to miss that peak.

And so, Cain began to walk.

What else was there for such a cursed Man to do? He would wander: so G-O-D had spoken, so it would be.

Cain knew the lands of men after an accursed millennium and more. He had seen his father’s line flourish under his younger brother Seth. He had seen his own son found and form the greatest city of its age. And he had seen the thousands, millions, of men between the two bastions of civilization in that previous age.

But the world had changed.

The Flood had ravaged the lands he’d wandered all those years. Man resurged, of course, and unexpectedly quickly at that, but it was still a process. The memory of the Flood lingered in more than just Cain’s mind for having lived through it.

Then, as the race of man returned to its stride, it first flocked together. The civilization to rise immediately after the Flood was a spectacular one, to be sure. Men from all over came to settle a land where language mattered not — they needed that shared safety to thrive once more.

With that settling, the grand progress from before the Flood was revived in earnest. The land had been tilled, livestock had been herded, and works of man were created. There was art and utility, and in the center of it all, a monument of man that defied the gods.

Rising Babel had rivaled even Enoch’s city, though Cain would never admit that. His first son was his son, always, and though he was now gone — dead before the Flood — Cain was still proud.

When it had all come crashing down, the lines of men were split and Creation itself was paradoxically brought together by that separation.

Cain had wandered then, during the time of Babel and long before, and he wandered now, as disparate men formed petty and not-so-petty civilizations. Villages rose to cities, and cities rose to kingdoms.

The ones that were not-so-petty had canons in their own right. The petty ones tended to exist within those canons, on the outskirts.

Uruk counted as the first. It was surrounded by the latter, and in that biased imbalance of favor from the gods, Uruk alone prospered.

Tiamat had only just left her canon behind to forge her own fate as a primordial beast, as a Dragon; Cain slipped into the canon through the gap her leaving created, going just as unnoticed as Tiamat’s newfound absence.

He kept his wanderings to the mortal side of the canon. Cain cared little for its system of gods, their Heavens above and Depths below — so invested and yet so distant, too.

Thus, he passed through the civilized outskirts first. In those small villages, the men he found there were just the same as the men he’d always known. They looked out for themselves first and foremost, everything closest to them. That was not a flaw.

A man’s family and community was often all he could claim, all he could hope to control and hold dear, in the vast and cruel Creation. All men were social creatures at their core for a reason — coming together strengthened them, and all of their quintessential potential; it protected them from the dangers without.

When monsters roamed and rampaged, and gods acted as gods would, men could only be counted as tiny points between them. Each was a unique beacon of potential; each was also as small and ‘insignificant’ as the most distant stars in the night sky when taken alone. Yet when all of those distant stars came together in the sky, the heavenly firmament was formed. On Earth, the effect was the same.

Men were the backbone of the world. Altogether, they shaped Creation as much as any divine, even if no man — not even Cain — could outright rival a god in power.

Yet, as Cain wandered the outskirts of Uruk’s kingdom, he heard tales of a man who was claimed to do just that.

Gilgamesh, the demigod-king of Uruk proper. Gilgamesh, with his name as feared as it was praised. Gilgamesh, not a Man, but still something more than a man and something more mortal than a god at the same time. 

The villagers who hosted Cain in those outskirts claimed Gilgamesh was ‘destined to be king, the greatest of them all’. They were not even, technically, under his rule.

“Since he was just a boy,” The stories said. “He has ruled his city of Uruk. His kingly hand is fair and just. He punishes those who err and prey upon his subjects. He shares his rightful tax with those who pay it, reinvesting instead of hoarding. He defends his city against all who would see it brought low, and he reaches outward to take all others under his protection, too.”

Cain knew better than to accept the stories as they were told. These men did not truly know Gilgamesh. Cain didn’t either. He wandered deeper into the demigod-king’s lands to rectify that.

In the next village, the stories shifted.

“He wraps himself in great moments of decadence, but then, is that not his right as king? At least he spreads that decadence to those who prove their worth. A boy from our village,” Cain’s host began.

Another of his hosts proudly picked up the tale. “My own son! He joined Gilgamesh’s army! He writes that he has risen high there! Now, instead of tilling my fields, he takes a new wife after every battle won to spread our line!”

In the next village, the stories shifted again.

“Gilgamesh collects the treasures of the land. Oh, but one treasure that now lies within his armory is the sword of my grandfather, the weapon with which he slew a charging boar of sand and wind! He was a hero, paragon of my line! And I do doubt I will ever see his sword again…”

Three shifts was a trend that Cain took notice of. Perhaps it was the tyrannical progression of Gilgamesh’s kingship; perhaps it had all been a lie from the start. Until he met the king and judged him for himself, Cain could not say for certain.

Next, his wanderings took him to the aftermath of a battlefield rather than a village. He had reached the front lines of Gilgamesh’s kingdom, and there, he saw the costs and tribulations of Uruk’s expansion.

Birds of death ruled the field when Cain arrived — vultures and crows and ravens. They descended on one side more than the other, where the pickings were plentiful. The other side of the field was noticeably empty of corpses. Gilgamesh, Cain realized, hadn’t lost a man in the battle.

Those who stood against him lost everything.

Men lay where they were slain, corpses stripped of anything of value but no care spent on burials. Marching feet had marked the dirt and sand in a furious scuffle, but still, there was a line of mostly pristine earth between where the two armies would’ve clashed. Something had reached over that line before the losing side could react or respond. They’d died hopeless and helpless.

Scars were carved amongst the lost, and not just on their corpses. Cain saw a small hill split in two, with the crevice almost filled with mangled corpses; the birds of death gorged themselves on the feast. A lingering air of gold stuck to every killing wound.

With all he’d seen, Cain recreated the scene of battle in his mind. He saw a line of shields, protecting the homes that lay behind them. He saw an aura of sheer dismissive power hovering over the field of war. Terror and desperation rose from one side; utter certainty rose from the other.

The ghosts of the battle screamed one word to his senses, so full of scorn and disdain that it’d left a scar as real as the physical wounds.

“Mongrels…”

IIIII

— Gilgamesh —

“Outsider… Intruder… Trespasser… Wanderer… He comes…”

The voices of the gods whispered to Gilgamesh, manyfold — he heard… No, Gilgamesh cared not for their names. He ignored them all. Great Gilgamesh would hear nothing of the unworthy divine — not warnings and certainly not commands.

… Loathsome beings, claiming dominion simply because they happened to rise first. The mongrels might worship them, but they had no place in Gilgamesh’s sublime heart.

A pretty but pitiful thing raised dates to his mouth when he signaled for her to feed her king. Another, just the same, fanned him when the wind dared to still. Yet another, pretty and pitiful and boring, knelt like a statue at the foot of his lounging throne — she was no work of art, but at least she was as silent as one.

The real work of art in Gilgamesh’s view lay beyond those petty subjects. His throne room, the one for lounging but not ruling, sat atop the pinnacle of Uruk. The palace was a treasure as worthy as any other in his collection; it was simply better served in use rather than carefully preserved under his protection.

It was something of a shame, Gilgamesh considered.

To have such a treasure of his witnessed, marveled at, was only right, but the palace was also forced to suffer the disgraceful presence of mongrels beneath it. His treasure bore the indignity with stoic, seething silence, of course. Gilgamesh simply loathed that he had to subject his treasure to such indignity at all.

At the edges of the lounging throne room, pillars opened to the air as they held up the ivory capstone of the ziggurat, carved from the tusk of a half-divine elephant that Gilgamesh had slain.

Below and beyond, his domain stretched well past the limits of pitifully mortal sight. All Gilgamesh saw was his, and his vision was, naturally, greater than man or god.

The Euphrates was the perfect show of such a grand domain. The river flowed lazily at the edge of the city, but all of it, from source to sea, was Gilgamesh’s treasure. Again, unfortunately, it was better served in use rather than hidden away. 

He only allowed the mongrels to use his life-giving treasure if they did so to bring more treasure to him — a consolation.

The only building in Uruk to rival his treasured palace was Ishtar’s temple. Gilgamesh had thought of having it torn down, for the mongrels of his city should worship him and him alone.

In the end, he let it be when he realized that the temple in the mortal world was still his; Ishtar was just an ‘honored guest’ there, in truth, who yapped and yipped as proudly as an excitable bitch around pups that it didn’t know would be taken from its teats and put to work for a greater purpose, as was proper.

Such was the way of the world — the true way. The gods could claim divine dominion all they liked, but they were inevitably distant. Only those with a foot in the mortal world could truly rule.

Yet, likewise, only those with a foot in the divine could be truly worshipped. It was simply destiny that he was born with a foot in both — stepping upon both — to transcend all the mongrels of the world, mortal and divine.

Gilgamesh felt no smugness at that. There was no need for arrogance or hubris. It was just the truth — simply destined. Still, he smirked to himself as he looked out over Uruk, ignoring the way the mongrel feeding him hid her flinch at the expression.

Even if it were destined, he’d put great effort into his transcendent treasures. The divine mongrels were jealous, he knew. The mortal mongrels could do nothing but bow to his rule.

What more could a king strive for-…

Internally, making sure his smirk didn’t fade, Gilgamesh sighed. How many times had he followed this same line of thought through the same hurdles, the same victories, the same truths?

He was transcendent, yes, but transcendence was a lonely thing by definition.

None could rival him.

None… could rival him…

IIIII

“The Wanderer… He comes…”

“Where…? An outsider! How…? The lines; they blur! Why…? Cursed but still curious!”

“Does it matter? He forces our hand; we cannot chance his interference. We must move now-…”

“The clay, it has been ready for years… It only needs a push…”

“I have it… Humbaba: a Complete Human, ideally formed…”

“It is not so: a mess of sewn souls instead! A true Man comes, yet still, you insist on that atrocity!”

“It must be done… The clay needs its mold… We will not use an outsider…”

[SHAME. HE WOULD’VE MADE A BETTER MOLD THAN THAT POOR, TWISTED THING YOU CALL COMPLETE. TERRIBLE EFFORT, GANG. L + RATIO’D BY THE SON OF MAN.]

“Who…?! WHO?!”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“The Wanderer, that Man… He is yours.”

[GUILTY, TEEHEE~]

“WHAT MOCKERY-?!”

“No, wait, I kind of liked that one…”

[I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT. YOU KNOW, I HAVE SOMETHING ELSE YOU MIGHT LIKE, ISHTAR… THAT’D BE AN ACCEPTABLY CUTE SHIP, IF MORE OF A SKIFF THAN THE ONE TRUE SHIP OF THE LINE.]

“-! Of ships, I am at least a Magilum, OUTSIDER! I will accept only the grandest of ships, whatever it means!”

[YOU CAN TRY, BUT I’LL BET YOU END UP RIVER-WORTHY AND NOTHING MORE.]

“A CHALLENGE, then?! I accept-!”

[LOL. SORRY, NOT SORRY, CAIN.]