Eron shifted, trying to ease the pinch of the hard surface against his knees. Right at that exact moment, the singing ceased and the group fell into reflective silence. He recoiled at the coarse sound his pants made against the smooth glass. Seder threw a sharp sideways glance, his thin lips curling with displeasure. Eron dipped his head in supplication, but even Seder’s sourness could not disturb him.
It was a momentous day. Which made Captain Nex’s absence all the more disquieting.
Gren tilted his head, catching Eron’s eye and mouthing something at him.
The captain? Gren shrugged his narrow but muscled shoulders, strands of his loosened black hair shifting with the movement.
Eron shrugged in return. Cym?
Gren shook his head and returned to silent prayer, confusion edging thin lines into his smooth dark skin.
Cym’s absence might be accounted for, with the preparations of the carapaces, but the captain’s was far more curious. Though, truthfully, Eron did not find himself entirely disappointed. He returned his concentration to the floor, where the emerald Waters streamed beneath them.
In this very shrine, two days past, the goddess’s Messenger, the stuttering and awkward human Tamas, had received the Word they’d waited on. Azrael had proved the stability of the carapaces and the ability of the artificial shells to sustain the gallu on Earth. At Azrael’s expense, the Syranians had mastered the mea stones – the reins, as it were, that would enable them to control the immensely powerful gallu soon to arrive.
Today, these divine hunters would step foot again in this world. Absent for millennia, the Four would search for Dumuzi, the immortal soul bound inside a fragile human shell.
Eron stared into the shadows dancing within the light in the Waters. He liked to imagine what appearance Dumuzi’s mortal shell might take. Robust, or frail? Indeed, male or female? What did a demigod wrapped in a human look like? Dumuzi was the last remnant of a different time here on Earth. The demigod husband of a great goddess who had long since departed these corporeal worlds, abandoning her lover to a fate that should have been hers. Inanna and Ereshkigal might be divine sisters, but their relationship was as fraught with difficulty as the one that existed between Kira and Blake Beckworth. Mere mortals.
Eron closed his eyes, attempting to shut out the image of Kira that rose. He pressed his fingertips to the glass, focusing on the energy emanating there. Perhaps it was ludicrous to compare the humans to the goddesses. An argument between Kira and Blake did not threaten worlds, or universes. Their contempt for one another did not continue unabated for time immemorial. It did not drive them to grasp at any opportunity, however miniscule, to humiliate and hinder the other, as it did for Ereshkigal and Inanna. But what fuelled the ferocity of the relationship was not so different. Blood.
A connection that could not be undone. Whatever might be the desire.
But where grief fed the flames between Kira and Blake, it was a lust for power that burned between Ereshkigal and Inanna.
After Inanna’s failed attempt to take her sister’s throne and rule the underworld, Ereshkigal had imprisoned Inanna’s divine soul in the pathetic shroud of a human body and sentenced her to an eternity on Earth. But Inanna was not so unlike Kira.
Eron smothered a wry smile. Inanna was a master manipulator and wily negotiator. When Ereshkigal sent the Four to imprison her, Innana offered up her husband Dumuzi’s soul instead and fled the corporeal worlds for the next realm. But grudges between the deities lasted eternally. And so, here Eron knelt, thrust into the ongoing conflict by the will of his god Lahar. One of the last Living Gods – a meagre group of three – who battled to ascend from the mortal worlds to the next realm. Lahar had chosen a side, hoping to be granted favour by a far more powerful god of the realm. He’d allied himself with Ereshkigal, providing the Waters, the Syranian god-soldiers, and the mea stones, all required to enable the Four to find the human shell holding Dumuzi and destroy the demigod’s soul. If so done, Inanna would be forced to take Dumuzi’s place.
Rules were rules, no matter how ancient or rusty they had become. Innana would be forced into a human prison.
The goddess of war, locked in a foreign, unwanted body.
No. Kira was not so different to Inanna in many ways. Eron leaned his full weight upon his fingertips, and the minute muscles within his fingers protested. Who knew what would remain of this world with Inanna imprisoned within? Subtle coils of guilt rose, cool and unpleasant, through Eron’s core, as they often did when considering the strife he and his Lord brought with their mission. He rubbed at the mea stone embedded in his forearm, a sudden ache pulsing through the muscles surrounding it.
The stone’s hue resembled that of the desert surrounding them. Its rough edges were now buried beneath his own flesh. A week before he’d left Syrana, it had been embedded just below the prominent veins in Eron’s wrist, deep enough to attach to bone. The woman who had conducted the procedure was likely deceased now. Eron’s parents would have passed long before her. It had taken twenty-seven Earth years to propel them from Syrana to the blue planet. Most of those years had been spent in the unmemorable blackness of stasis, and as Eron and his brethren had glided through the emptiness of space, sixty years had passed by on Syrana. Time widened the gap between Eron and home until it was stretched beyond all repair. His life there, the people he cared for, all now gone.
‘Eron.’ The whisper, so close by, caused
