‘These past weeks I have done nothing but serve my penance, Bel.’ Eron pulled his arm away, hiding his wrist at the small of his back, keeping the proof of his inadequacy from sight. When he had been discovered by the captain, Eron had been as high as the proverbial Earthly kite after an evening spent in a place of music and flashing light. A place where his own oddness had been misconstrued and embraced by the humans around him, mingling with their own. A place where he could indulge his predilection for the finery and delicacy of the clothing of Earth’s females without remonstration.
‘You need to leave, Eron. You cannot be here when they arrive for service. They will be here within the half hour.’
Bel stooped to pick up the jacket Eron had discarded at the foot of the stairs hours ago. Eron chose to risk his question.
‘Was the First Meld completed?’ Eron said. ‘Will you tell me that much, Bel?’ He took the jacket from Bel, barely noticing the weight of hit in his hand.
Had they succeeded in moving a soul from the ethereal domain of Kur to this Earthly plane? A great part of the task their god-soldier lives were devoted to.
Bel did not look at him as the maladroit moment stretched out. All at once, Eron was achingly tired. Too tired to stand there like a desperate animal waiting for a scrap. So he walked away. Making an unsteady line for the door, he’d almost reached it when Bel finally answered.
‘It was a success,’ Bel said. ‘The First Meld was a success. The goddess succeeded in releasing a gallu from Kur, and the carapace entombing him appears structurally sound.’
His sensory endings tingled with the revelation, and Eron dared another question. ‘And Ereshkigal’s Messenger, the boy, he survived?’
Tamas Cressly. The Facility’s owner, inheriting the place at the death of his mother several years earlier. Tamas’s mother had spent a better part of her life doing the goddess’s bidding, only to die as most did, unremarkably. Her body consumed by its own treachery. Cancer at her breast. The family descended from a powerful lineage, the Abgal Utuabzu, seven sages created by the greater gods themselves and sent to instruct the humans thousands of years ago. Messengers. A bloodline so rare now the boy was considered to be the very last with any true strength. The last of the pure Messengers: human conduits, living bridges between the divine and the human. But the bloodline did not grant immortality. That was reserved for the gods alone.
‘He survived,’ Bel said. ‘Drained, as one might expect from such an effort, but he lives.’
Eron stood in perfect stillness, his hand raised over the sensor which would release the doors. Quite possibly, Tamas was the only one in the Facility who felt worse than he did.
‘I understand.’
The hush of the opening doors swallowed his words, and he could not be sure Bel had heard them at all. Eron stepped into the main corridor, and the doors closed behind him. The First Meld was a success, and Eron had not been a witness to it. The bitterness of it swept through his dual stomachs. A creature of Kur had been raised into this world, sent by the goddess Herself, and his shortcomings had deprived him of witnessing the very reason for being on this world at all. Eron pinched the tatto, dug his fingernails into his skin, willing it to hurt. There was nothing.
Eron spoke to no one as he made his way back up to level eight, to his own quiet room. There was no one in his elevator for the short journey, and when he stepped out onto the silver-carpeted foyer of level eight, the security guards there gave him a nod but said nothing. Which suited Eron just fine. He made his way to his room, furthest down the arched corridor. The walls were painted in the starkest white, and framed paintings of landscapes, various locations around Earth, had been hung along them. The air-conditioning unit hummed around him, pushing out filtered air, never altering from its steady pattern. Entering his room, he pulled off his jacket and threw it onto the apparently expensive but incredibly uncomfortable leather couch that took up most of the space in the main room. He had two intentions. Shower. Sleep.
He stripped off the rest of his clothes and stepped into the cubicle. Jets of hot water rushed at him from vertical and horizontal angles. If he were honest with himself, he’d admit he was not sorry to be missing service. Exclusion from that daily session of worship was the least vexing of his punishments. But being honest with himself had not served him well of late.
Eron watched his slow-to-colour skin move to a soft pink shade beneath the water’s heat, his thoughts drifting to the First Meld. It must have been a magnificent sight, after thousands of years of absence, the gods stirring once again on this miniscule, lonely world. He stared at the droplets of water streaming around the stone embedded in his right forearm. No moisture clung to the mea stone, repelled by the power of the relic. A power that would have coursed freely at the First Meld. Igniting the energy of the stones each of them bore.
Eron stepped out of the shower, wiped
