The desert wind carried the taste of bitumen and blood.
Nightfall painted the horizon iron-black, and the moon looked like a shard of broken pottery hung above the dunes.
That was where I found them. Nergal and Ereshkigal, crawling out of old Sumer like thieves in the night.
Behind them stumbled slaves and concubines bound by hemp ropes, their wrists raw, eyes vacant from heat and fear. hundreds of them, perhaps more. Servants stolen from temples, farmers dragged from riverbanks, girls taken from reed houses along the Tigris.
Nergal held his golden scepter like a cudgel, guarded by warriors with lion masks carved from hammered bronze. His mighty shoulders trembled.
Ereshkigal, pale and lifeless as the tomb, draped in veils woven from grave-cloth, held a single obsidian blade resting lightly against the throat of a boy too young to understand why he was trembling.
They saw my wings first, embers on the horizon, burning slowly I wanted them to know fear.
I came to them, and my wings burned like torches, and the sand scorched beneath mt bare feet.
I demanded the mortals be released.
Ereshkigal’s jaw tightened, her lips curling like something dead drying in the sun.
She pressed the blade harder against the child’s skin, just enough to draw a single line of blood down his neck.
I decided then that her blood would wet the sand.
“They are ours. Our protection. You won’t strike while we hold them.”
Once again, I demanded they be released.
Ereshkigal laughed, like brittle, hollow bones tossed in a crypt.
“We know what you did in Eridu. In Byblos. We know what happened to Ninurta, to Inanna, to Enki, to Enlil, To Anu, To the fools Marduk called gods. You would murder us all”
She tilted her head, eyes catching firelight, pupils dilated with something that was almost madness.
“We keep them,” she whispered, “and we live. Because you won’t risk them.”
Her blade slid from the boy’s throat to his jaw, softly, almost tenderly.
“They are shields,” she said.
She would feel pain before she died.
Nergal stepped closer, his face twisted brazen and sticken with fear.
“You can’t kill us both before we kill half of them,” he growled. “And half is enough.”
I looked at the mortals then, the dirty faces, the ropes, the bruises, the hopelessness.
And for the last time, I demanded that Ereshkigal release them.
“Oh I will not,” she whispered. "But listen closely, fire-thing, so long as they keep us alive, their lives are extended beyond the collapse. They are precious. Bargaining tools. Memory. If we die, everything dies with us.”
She leaned her forehead against the boy’s hair in a gesture that pretended to be affection.
“This world falls apart, Mušen,” she murmured.“We fall with it unless we carry pieces with us.”
Nergal swallowed, voice cracking.
“Let us walk. We go east. Beyond Elam. We start again.”
I fanned my wings high as I looked at them.
I told them that they would not poison another city.
Nor would they lord themselves over mortals.
Nergal’s eyes flickered toward the mortals again.
“Then perhaps we take the wilderness,” he said. “Maybe we build new ones.”
Ereshkigal’s smile was thin as a knife.
“Tell us no,” she breathed, “and watch them die first.”
For the first time, I let silence stretch long enough for the wind to return.
And then I spoke slowly, my words heavy as stone placed onto a burial mound.
“I do not bargain with the dead.”
Nergal raised his scepter.
And every mortal holding their breath suddenly understood, one way or another, death had come.
The boy with the obsidian blade against his throat flinched.
My wings snapped outward so fast the air cracked like thunder, and in the space between one heartbeat and the next, I was beside Ereshkigal.
She reacted with a reflex born of centuries of ruling the underworld.
The boy’s throat opened like a second mouth, bright arterial red spilling into the sand. He fell without a sound, eyes wide, fingers grasping at nothing.
Ereshkigal gasped in triumph.
I answered with a whisper:
And I tore her arm off at the elbow.
No flame, no dramatic blaze, just the raw strength of my rage.
And my rage unraveled gods.
Her old bone cracked in my grip like river reeds. Veins and sinew snapped in wet ropes. Her hand still grasped the obsidian blade even as it hit the ground.
Her scream was a jagged, shivering sound, half fury, half disbelief.
Then came the second and third.
Nergal’s lion-helmed guards surged forward with bronze swords and painted shields, roaring prayers to their dying pantheon.
Two of the mortals tried to run, a mother and a little girl.
A guard cut them down from behind before you could reach them.
One thrust, two bodies in the dirt.
And my voice was colder than the stone under the rivers of the dead.
By his next breath, my hand closed around his throat.
So slowly he realized what was coming.
His eyes bulged bloodshot red.
“Two,” I murmured as his first scream broke.
“Three,” as the bones in his neck began to give.
I crushed him until there was no more sound left in him.
Then I dropped what was left.
The fourth through ninth.
Some fell to their knees, praying to me.
Ereshkigal, still clutching her stump, shrieked.
“Kill them! ALL OF THEM!"
Her lion-helmed warriors obeyed.
One stabbed a man in the belly.
Another slit a concubine’s throat.
A third, while laughing, speared a little girl in the back as she tried to crawl away.
Each number was a promise.
Just precision. A surgeon’s cold arithmetic.
For every mortal death, one lion helm was shattered in my hands, skull and metal crushed like eggshell.
For every scream, one servant found his voice stolen permanently.
For every drop of human blood spilled, there was a price, paid in torn limbs, broken spines, and eyes pushed in until the screams died.
One guard tried to run, dropping his sword and fleeing toward the dunes.
I didn’t have to chase him.
I speared him with his own discarded weapon.
His body twisted from the blow.
He died before my fist even passed through him.
By the time I reached Nergal, there were fewer than ten mortals left alive, and half of those were bleeding too badly to see sunrise.
Nergal’s voice broke into cracks and ash.
“Enough—enough—Mušen, STOP!”
I stood over him, wings folding in tight, my face and body dripping with dust and blood that was not my own.
He thrust his scepter out, shaking like a cornered animal.
You stared down at him without emotion.
“I do not bargain with the dead.”
And with the same motion someone might use to snap a reed, I ripped Nergal’s right arm off at the shoulder.
Blood sprayed across the sand in a wave of red heat.
He collapsed, choking on his own breath.
“Ten,” i whispered softly.
Ereshkigal crawled toward the dying mortals, dragging her stump, face white with pain and madness.
“You think you’re better,” she hissed. "But you counted them. You counted them.”
She smiled then, a gruesome, broken thing full of teeth and blood and hate.
“You and I are the same.”
I knelt beside her, my hand closing around her jaw, not cruelly, precisely, clinically, like a potter deciding whether a vessel is cracked beyond repair.
My voice carried none of the rage I felt inside, just truth older than kings.
“I remember every mortal.”
I left her beside the dead boy she killed.
And the desert, for a long moment, felt… still.
