Seventy of the one hundred and twenty years passed, while A’Nu-Ahki and Na’Amiha had three sons. A’Nu-Ahki’s abducted daughters remained missing even after the Century War ended and E’Yahavah revealed nothing further about the coming world-end.
The Watchers soon began to squabble again, pushing the world powers toward another global clash of demigods, giants, and men.
In The Paladin’s Odyssey, the corrupt Archon of Seti illegally conscripted A’Nu-Ahki and his son U’Sumi to fight the invading forces of Aztlan. U’Sumi had heard about the prophesied World-end from the comfortable hearthside stories of childhood. Faced with mass death and mechanized war, questions about his father’s God soon overwhelmed him, with the only immediate answers so unthinkable as to threaten his sanity.
Captured by Aztlan, U’Sumi and his father found themselves taken to the distant capitol of the titan Psydonu. When confined in the temple complex of the techno-sorceress Pandura, a young priestess named Pyra T’Qinna befriended and aided them. U’Sumi, his father, and the young priestess escaped across the wastes of a dying world, forced by warfare to circumnavigate the globe to reach home. After crossing the treacherous Great Outer Ocean, they endured the toxic sands of the Desolation of Nhod. There, in a land of religious mass-murder, disease, and population control, U’Sumi faced the terrible necessity for cataclysm—that when evil is unchallenged, it eventually grows to consume entire worlds.
Escaping Nhod, A’Nu-Ahki, U’Sumi, and Pyra T’Qinna entered Assuri, where they became prisoners of the Samyaza Cult. In the city of Samyaza, A’Nu-Ahki discovered that his lost daughters were not dead, but had become willing slaves of the Samyaza Cult—wives of the Watcher’s titan sons. Aboard the command craft of Samyaza’s flying fleet, U’Sumi and his fellow travelers watched as the mysterious Guardians of the sacred Orchard of Aeden annihilated the Watcher’s misguided winged assault against what he thought was the Basilisk’s stronghold.
When Samyaza’s airship crashed in the dragon-infested Haunted Lands, it forced A’Nu-Ahki to face the truth about his two daughters; that ‘Ranna and ‘Nissa chose freely to stay with Samyaza rather than come home.
Meanwhile, all was not well in the Valley of the Seer Clan during A’Nu-Ahki’s absence. The descendants of Q’Enukki had broken further into quarreling sects, each with opportunistic visions of World-end and rescue. Self-proclaimed “Comforters” now competed for converts and financial backing, while hope dwindled for A’Nu-Ahki’s wife and other two sons.
Book 3, A Broken Paradise dropped us into the stormy life of Tiva; an abused girl in the house of the Seer Clan’s most respected Dragon-slayer—chief of a bitter rival sect opposed to A’Nu-Ahki’s tribal leadership. With A’Nu-Ahki reported dead in the Aztlan War, Tiva’s father seized control of the Seer Clan, while lawless migrants, war deserters, and religious zealots from the outside world pushed into their tribe’s secluded valley.
Fed up with the abuse and hypocrisy, Tiva ran away to a group of war deserters that had settled in the foothills at a tiny glen called Grove Hollow. There she fell in love with a mysterious fire-dancer named Khumi, who had lost his father in the Aztlan War.
When Khumi’s father suddenly returned from the ashes, Tiva was shocked to discover that he was A’Nu-Ahki—her father’s arch rival, and rightful heir of Q’Enukki. Khumi’s father now claimed to have directions from E’Yahavah to build a great ship—in an inland valley—for the rescue of those few who remained faithful.
Khumi worked with his father, but lived with Tiva and their deserter friends up at Grove Hollow. Tiva found herself in a tug-of-war with A’Nu-Ahki for Khumi’s affections during the years of the ship’s construction. All the while, dark conspirators in high places made the Valley of Seers the center of a hidden global power struggle between men and gods. The Watchers and now even the Archon of Seti promised an era of enlightenment and tolerance for all. Tiva noticed a dark force taking shape among the Seer Clan youth that threatened to consume both her and her husband if she didn’t make an unthinkable choice.
When the darkness had almost consumed Tiva, Khumi’s father rescued her in a stunning confrontation that proved A’Nu-Ahki’s claim to be the Comforter from A’Nu. The world outside entered its final death spiral, as war, intrigues, plagues, and terror mounted, with human evil showing a growing inventiveness that even dwarfed that of the fallen Eternals.
At present, A’Nu-Ahki’s great ship, Barque of Aeons, is complete. The world watches to see if the Apocalypse Comet returns to fulfill its horrendous omen, or to usher in a golden age.
subduction – the action or process of the edge of one crustal plate descending below the edge of another
—Webster’s 9th New Collegiate Dictionary
The flood was initiated as slabs of oceanic floor broke loose and subducted along thousands of kilometers of pre-Flood continental margins. Deformation of the (Earth’s) mantle by these slabs raised the temperature and lowered the viscosity of the mantle in the vicinity of the slabs. A resulting thermal runaway… through the mantle led to meters-per-second mantle convection. Cool oceanic crust which descended to the core/mantle boundary induced rapid reversals of the earth’s magnetic field. Large plumes… expressed themselves at the surface as fissure eruptions and flood basalts. Flow induced in the mantle also produced… rapid horizontal displacement of continents. Upwelling magma jettisoned steam into the atmosphere causing intense global rain. Rapid emplacement of… mantle material raised the level of the ocean floor, displacing ocean water onto the continents….
—John Baumgardner Ph.D. et al
Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model for Earth History
I saw in a vision how the heaven collapsed and… fell to the earth. And when it fell to the earth I saw how the earth was swallowed up in a great abyss, and mountains were suspended on mountains, and hills sank down on hills, and high trees were rent from their stems, and hurled down and sunk in the abyss. And… I lifted up my voice… and said: ‘The earth is destroyed.’
—2 Enoch 83:3-6 (Slavonic Manuscript)
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
—Genesis 7:11 (NKJV)
Prologue
Worlds spiraled toward collision, with no escape.
Q’Enukki’s eyes widened when the gate-creature he had once thought of simplistically as a “star chariot” slowed in the great void. Through the living portal’s transparent relocation node, he saw the planet Tiamatu swing past—that fifth solid world from the sun where Earth was the third—between red L’Mekku and the innermost gas giant, Khuva. On his other side, the super-comet seethed in volatile out-gassing dust, vapors, and debris, roiling away into an enormous tail driven by the fierce solar wind.
Shortly before the star-gate-creature had re-entered the solar system, its guide—the heavenly Watcher, Samuille—had increased Q’Enukki’s ability to see into two additional dimensions. Simultaneous destinies of even simple objects now bombarded him with new information from a future universe of words and languages yet-to-be-spoken. Somehow, Q’Enukki could process the sensory overload, but he found it difficult to avoid the distraction of even the most mundane of moons. That was not a problem with the two heavenly bodies outside, however.
The comet and the planet were about to impact.
“Are we not too close?” asked Q’Enukki. “The debris will explode outward at high speed!”
Samuille said, “We will be well ahead of the first wave.”
“What will be the results?”
The Watcher’s voice fell. “About a third of the rubble will continue on in a wide belt, just inside the planet’s orbit, at nearly Tiamatu’s current velocity. Another third will absorb the impact, and either spray outward toward Khuva’s orbit, fall in toward the sun, or scatter from the orbital plane on oblique trajectories.”
“What about
the remaining third of the debris?”
Q’Enukki imagined Samuille’s white-less eyes hardening to obsidian ice. “Those are E’Yahavah’s arrows of wrath against Earth. Two super-dense, irradiated inner core fragments, with a spreading stream of outer core asteroids, will intersect Earth’s orbit at nearly the same point as your world.”
Q’Enukki asked, point-blank, “How many people will survive?”
“Eight.”
Q’Enukki felt the end of his prophecy as a blow to the gut. “Is that all—of over four billion people; only eight?” He had expected few survivors, a few thousand, or a few hundred. “I know that I prophesied a great winnowing before the end, but eight!”
The comet approached the planet. Tiamatu’s hot plastic mantle bulged up through the crust like a fiery dragon hatchling pushing through its blackened eggshell for the first time. Hours before impact—moments for Q’Enukki—the two bodies almost spiraled around each other in a death-dance, while horrendous quickfire discharges shot between them in an explosive celestial duel. Different charge potentials on the two worlds equalized through lightning arcs that ionized Tiamatu’s atmosphere, and caused chunks of the comet to break off before impact.
Q’Enukki expected it all to end quickly. He was wrong.
It was only beginning.
In Mesopotamian tradition, Tiamat… unleashed a holocaust of destruction before she was… destroyed by the celestial hero, Marduk:
She opened her mouth, Tiamat to swallow him.
He drove in the evil wind so that she could not close her lips.
The terrible winds filled her belly. Her heart was seized,
She held her mouth wide open,
He let fly an arrow, it pierced her belly,
Her inner parts he clove, he split her heart…
…a great plan of world creation began to take shape in his mind. His first move was to split Tiamat’s skull… Then he broke her into two parts ‘like a dried fish’, using one half to roof the heavens and the other to surface the earth…
The ancient civilizations of Central America have their own version of this story. Here Quetzalcoatle… took the role of Marduk while the part of Tiamat was played by Cipactli… Quetzalcoatle seized Cipactli’s limbs ‘as she swam in the primeval waters and wrenched her body in half, one part forming the sky and the other the earth.’
—Graham Hancock
Fingerprints of the Gods
1
Tiamatu
Sutara fought to keep her nerve while she brushed her long walnut hair near the polished brass mirror. She tried to avoid her own large, doe-like eyes, and gazed instead at her husband’s reflection behind her. He pulled his best dinner tunic over a well-chiseled chest to honor her father’s visit.
“At least they’re civil,” Iyapeti reminded her, as he fastened his sash.
“That’s only because my father thinks yours is a lunatic.”
Her husband laughed. “Satori may not be the best judge of character, but he’s not stupid. That, and he loves his daughter.”
Sutara saw the ice freeze over her eyes in the glass, as her thin lips tightened. “It’s only because I remind him of Mahmi. He feels guilty.”
Iyapeti stepped up behind her, a towering man with a thick tuft of wheat-colored hair that fell into a prince’s braid down the left side of his thinly bearded tan face. “Come on, Suta, you know that’s not true.”
She melted back into his arms and let her head fall on the firm pillow of his huge shoulders. “No, ‘Peti, I wish it weren’t true. I may not be all smart like T’Qinna, but even I know there’s a difference.”
Her husband lapsed into a clumsy silence. Suta knew how much he enjoyed his long philosophical discussions with their sister-in-law. T’Qinna was a spotted woman, exotic, and mysterious; everything Sutara was not. She knew Iyapeti would never cheat—and that T’Qinna would never invite him to—but it was hard for Suta not to be envious. It was equally difficult sometimes not to fear T’Qinna’s past. What was it like for her, raised as a Temple whore in Aztlan? Even most of the Seer Clan is deserting the old religion. How much more likely someone who grew up as a barbarian?
Iyapeti and Sutara left their bedchamber, and crossed the courtyard of the monastery-fortress of Iyapeti’s father to the dining hall. The thick castle towers loomed overhead like ghost sentinels squinting out from under stone pyramid helmets into the low evening mists.
From just above the forest haze a smooth rose-hued moon bathed the flagstones in blood, while discordant music echoed in through the castle gate from the revelries up at Grove Hollow.
Too much blood, Suta shuddered. I see it everywhere since Mahmi was murdered. That Grove Hollow crowd had something to do with it, too!
She thought now of her other sister-in-law, and felt another twinge of guilt. Small, dark Tiva used to live up at the Hollow, dressed as a vulgar woodland nymph. But that, too, was long past, and Suta cursed her own catty mood. Just because Tiva ran away from there the same night Mahmi was killed doesn’t mean she knows anything about it. ‘Peti’s father even had to go up there and rescue her. Yet it was hard for Suta to shake her suspicions completely, even after so many years. The timing of events that night had just been too bizarre.
“Look, there’s the comet!” Iyapeti pointed up into the starry night above the foothill mists, near the planets of Tiamatu and red L’Mekku.
Sutara noticed the beginnings of a tail on the heavenly intruder, though it was still small to the naked eye. “Yesterday your father told me it’s almost one-hundred and fifteen years to the day since its last visit, and the dawn of the Great Apocalypse.”
Iyapeti nodded, the red moonlight pooling in his sad brown eyes.
“We have less than five years,” she added, more to herself than to her husband. Her shudder became an ongoing tremor.
Iyapeti wrapped his arms around her. “Don’t be afraid, Suta. We’ve seen it coming all our lives. My father knows what to do.”
However, Suta’s nerves had little to do with the comet or even her two sisters-in-law. Her father’s visits always left her bottled up with an urgency to say to him the only words he found utterly intolerable. She was glad Iyapeti’s father was there to do the talking. She just would not know how. Still, she wished there was something she could do or say to her father that would make some kind of difference. But Satori had heard it all before, and nothing she ever did made any difference.
Iyapeti held the great oak doors open to the stone vaulted dining hall, and Suta saw they were the last to arrive.
Satori made his way toward her, and clutched her in a hug that seemed to hold her away from him at arm’s length. “How’s my little girl?”
She looked up at her father’s gray eyes beneath his enormous forehead that shined in the cool light of the hall’s phosphor lamps. “I’m fine,” Suta answered, breaking free of his grip.
They turned at the noise of Iyapeti’s mother rolling Grandfather Lumekki’s wheeled chair to the low stone dinner table. Na’Amiha had a wiry strength that belied her pale, slender form—Lumekki was no small man. He fumbled with his good arm for his wax writing tablet, probably to scrawl out a greeting. Half his face hung limp, scarred by a wartime head injury.
T’Qinna and Tiva sat with their husbands, U’Sumi and Khumi—who both looked very different from Iyapeti; dark like their father. Only T’Qinna waved, whether to her or to Iyapeti, Sutara was not quite sure she wanted to know.
Satori spun away from his daughter, and rejoined an ongoing conversation with Iyapeti’s father. “As I was saying, Nu, I should have listened more to Galkuna. She was right about the attacks—E’Yahavah rest her. I call her prophetic, and rejoice that common sense is breaking out. Archon Tarbet is showing a strong, but even, hand to the Samyaza Cult at last.” He glanced back at Sutara. “Your mother was a prophetess, she was.”
Always the same words. Suta glowered. Is that all you have, Father; glib words, and a glowing stone to remember her by?
Iy
apeti’s father nodded. “Galkuna was a remarkable woman. But I wonder if the situation with the Samyaza Cult is really that simple. To make matters worse, Tarbet often plays both sides. Assuri seethes with insurgency, while the Samyaza Cult speaks with two mouths—Samyaza’s latest wives…” A’Nu-Ahki’s eyes clouded over, as he let the thought hang. “At any rate, I’m not sure we really have the whole picture.”
Satori waved his hands. “No doubt you’re right, there, Nu. Comets bring out fear in everyone. Still, I doubt it will do more than light up our skies. It violates common sense to make too much of it.”
A’Nu-Ahki scratched his short salt-and-pepper beard and chuckled, “Common sense has been in such short supply for so long that I wonder if we would completely recognize it if we saw it.”
“Isn’t it sensible to put things in a positive light as much as possible when there’s so much unrest?”
Iyapeti’s father raised a heavy eyebrow. “Maybe I am.”
Satori glared at A’Nu-Ahki. “Common sense tells me that E’Yahavah is a principle of life, not destruction!”
A’Nu-Ahki answered softly. “E’Yahavah is not a principle at all. He’s a person who is right to be angry at what he sees. Now, let’s eat.”
Sutara’s stomach acid erupted halfway up her throat. She could tell her father was about to launch into one of his tirades.
The crash came from the other end of the table. Everyone turned to see old Lumekki convulsing in his seat. His head banged like a hammer against the wheeled chair’s tall back, and then flopped over onto his chest. His wax writing tablet clunked to the floor without breaking.
The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4) Page 2
