Читать книгу Oblivion Stone - James Axler - Страница 7

They had thought them dead—the Annunaki, for whom forever is but the blink of an eye.

It was said that Tiamat, their mother, had committed suicide.

Ultimately, her graceful form, shaped like a dragon of ancient myth, had been consumed by a fireball so glorious that it had lit the firmament above and shaken the Earth below. Some thought that the fireball had been of Tiamat’s own making, that she had chosen to expire in that dazzling tumult of flame.

Enlil knew better.

Enlil was one of Tiamat’s children, the Annunaki. They had called her mother, the spaceship womb. Her offspring were the rightful overlords of the planet Earth and all of her resources, the kings of all of her people and all of her things.

It was said that Tiamat, the spaceship womb, had taken her own life when she had seen the bitter disputes, the spite and viciousness that her own offspring had exhibited as they squabbled among themselves. For it was true that the Annunaki were never willing to compromise, even when carving the Earth up between themselves.

But in his heart, Enlil knew better.

The Annunaki had suffered their most devastating defeat at the hands of the apekin, the humans. Tiamat had been consumed by fire, her essence fragmented across the skies high above the Earth in a final display of brilliance. And some had thought her destroyed, that the final chapter of the Annunaki legend had been written.

The Annunaki, whose dominion over the Earth had lasted millennia, had controlled the nine fabled baronies that had emerged from the Deathlands to bring security and a future to humankind—a security and a future that man himself had been unable to achieve.

“Such fools these apekin be,” Enlil muttered to himself as he sat on the banks of the timeless Euphrates, gazing out across the great river as the sun played across its glistering surface. Around him, the land was a windswept plain of sand, lifeless but for Enlil himself as the sun’s heat pounded down, baking the dusty earth as it had for millennia.

But it had not always been so. Enlil remembered a time, not so very long ago, when his brother had had a city here—a city called Eridu, the first and most glorious city that the Earth had ever seen. Enlil had had his own city, too, a place called Nippur, located not far from Eridu’s walls, those scant millennia ago. And yet Enlil had chosen to return here, to Enki’s city rather than his own, recalling how its establishment had been a bold statement, the first acquisition of alien ground on the planet that would become their own, a flag in the dirt of foreign soil.

Enlil’s reptilian skin shimmered as the sunlight played across his scales, their color that of richest sunset, the color of gold bathed in blood. His form was mighty, a muscular, tall figure, imposing even now as he sat in the sand, gazing out across the shimmering surface of the water through his arrow-slit, crocodile’s eyes.

Tiamat was not dead. She had simply been changed, altered, readied herself for rebirth like everything else Annunaki. To change from one form to another, to enter the chrysalis state and be reborn, that was the Annunaki way. Enlil himself had taken other forms over the centuries. He had been Dagon and he had been Kumarbi and C. W. Thrush and, most recently, he had been Sam the Imperator until, like a snake, he had sloughed his skin and emerged wearing another, each more glorious than the one that came before. All these lives were like a dream, one life told from differing viewpoints, a single life seen through different eyes.

Beside Enlil, resting on the sand at the banks of the river, was the tiny seed from which Tiamat would grow once more. The tiny seed that would form the heart of his mother, and which, in turn, would begin the cycle anew.

Enlil glanced up to the heavens, eyeing the cloudless cerulean sky, and slowly a grim, purposeful smile formed on his alien lips.

It was all beginning again.