XXXV.

Peter I Island, Antarctica – April 23rd, 2239

Val awoke to darkness and biting cold, with air that just couldn’t fill his lungs fast enough. He struggled around afraid and confused. Everything he touched seemed to burn and freeze at the same time, clinging to his skin like hot coals. “Where are we?!” he exclaimed. “Why – why can’t I see?!”

“Calm yourself,” came a voice he didn’t recognize. It was dark and husky, but nowhere near the cavernous voice of the Shassuru Nintu’s. “Your sight will return to you in a moment. It takes time to adjust, even for me.”

“W-who are you?!” Val stammered, barely able to get the words out through the fear and chill. “Is… is this Hell? It’s so cold, but it burns… and I can’t – can’t catch my breath!”

“You’re breathing just fine, little one,” the voice said dryly. “It seems your ears are the problem. No, this is not ‘Hell’. This is the gate to Kur… at least what is left of it, on the island you call Peter.”

Just as the mysterious voice had promised, Val’s vision soon began returning to him. His immediate surroundings were the first thing he noticed, and why it was so cold: they were ankle deep in snow. Having gone from a room of a warm 70 degrees to 30 below zero, seemingly instantaneously, had been the cause of that fiery burning sensation. In truth, Val was surprised it hadn’t just killed him outright, or at very least sent him into shock; part of him even wished it had. He seethed with the pain, clenching his teeth as he stared down at beet red hands. “Quit wasting time,” urged the voice crossly. “You aren’t going to die here.” As the voice rang out, a wave of heat washed over him and with it the pain seemed to fade. Something about being near brought a warmth to him and, second by second, the cold was washed away.

Val crept to his feet, breath steadying at last, and turned to face the voice, uttering as he wiped the snow from his face, “Who… Who are you? Where’s… Nintu?” She appeared to be human, with dusky skin and hair to match her voice, and features that spoke of a West Asian heritage. However, three things heavily suggested otherwise: the strange curving horns growing from her forehead, ebony eyes that shown bright like the night sky, and the fact she stood bare bodied in the snow without so much as a goose bump. Val came to the quick conclusion that this, in fact, was Nintu, which led to an even quicker one that he should avert his gaze.

“What, little thing? Is this form not more to your liking?” She asked snidely, but not without humor. “It’s easier to speak your primitive tongue and traverse your primitive world when you’re not twenty feet tall, as you may imagine. But, I suppose I should look wholly the part for when we meet your contemporaries, since modesty seems to be our biggest problem at the moment.” Within the blink of an eye she was clothed, wearing now a tufted gown of gold that covered all but her right arm in what looked like imbricated feathers. However, she either could not or would not disguise her eyes or horns. Nintu looked herself up and down. The transformation as a whole seemed like an insult to her, but a sacrifice she was begrudgingly willing to make. “Good?”

“G-good…” Val replied, for the first time daring to look her over. “I don’t think they’ll be too… overwhelmed, when we get to the base.”

Now that he wasn’t freezing to death, Val took a moment to reorient himself and look at their surroundings. They were in a cave of sorts, it seemed; deep in the earth, but open to the sky some hundred feet up, due to a crack in the ceiling. The ground was stone, worn flat under the snow and carved in appearance, heavily suggesting that perhaps the cavern was manmade. “Neti,” Nintu’s voice echoed out into the chamber, “rise to my call!” The room shook with her voice, and lines of blue light cut up through the snow-covered floor and across ice-encrusted walls as something tried to activate. Whatever technology she had tried to resurrect only groaned, hissed, and died in the attempt. The blue lights faded, casting them once more into darkness. It was unsurprising, considering anything there was beyond ancient. The fact it had tried to start at all was in itself an astounding feat of engineering.

“Where are we?” Val asked again, his fascination trumping his fear for the moment. “This is… This isn’t just some cave we landed in, is it? Is this where we pulled you from?” The goddess exhaled harshly through clenched teeth as she looked at their surroundings in a distant melancholy manner. “This place, it was once a seat of great power,” Nintu answered solemnly. “The topmost of my temple, this is where your Watchers would convene. From here, they would send the Udug out into the world to guide you, when they weren’t taking on the roll themselves – tch… Unruly things, my children,” she clicked her tongue in irritation. “This was the seat of gods, little thing… Now, nothing more than a crumbling ruin. I was elsewhere, in stasis, far below and far from… what befell this place.”

“This… this must be where they found the books, the workers at the geothermal plant!” Eddy realized in exclamation. He spun on his heels in awe, taking it all in. “Has to be! They found them here and – and just… Just what? Why didn’t they tell anybody about this place? Or the books?” Val’s excitement faded into a weighty bewilderment. “We found them in the inventory of the defunct geothermal plant. The workers had been moved out years before, when the Dyson Grid was complete… There was nothing in their logs about this place, nothing about the books… The workers, we looked for them, but it was thought they moved off-world, to one of the colonies or something. We could never find them.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“You could search all of space and never find them,” Nintu uttered darkly. “They left no note nor sign, because they didn’t live long enough… Those men never left this island. The Watchers may be gone, but it seems to me that the Udug was still alive when they raided my temple. Why it didn’t return my treasures to me, I can only speculate: life enough for the kill, but not the journey home. Oh loyal Udug… tch…”

Suddenly the room shook again with beams of light skittering across the ground. Val now recognized them as pneumatic energies and quickly leapt out of their way lest they ignite beneath his feet. Nintu laughed at his startled retreat and rolled her eyes as if what he had done was the equivalent of jumping at his own shadow. Perhaps blue meant safe? Somehow he doubted that. “Neti yet lives,” she proclaimed cheerfully as the room began to shift, changing both structure and form. What was once a snow-blanketed floor, now melted in an instant, throwing a cloud of steam billowing skyward. The centermost floor itself seemed to rise with it, granulating as it rose, drawn upward into the haze like a pillar of magnetic sand before solidifying once more. What became of it was an obelisk that looked very much like their Gate device, though far more advanced than anything they could have dreamed of. Nanotechnology, or something of the like, had done years of engineering in mere seconds. Val could do nothing but gape in awe.

With a jolt of pneumatic energy skittering across the obelisk’s surface and an entire spectrum of colors, an image appeared, blurry and corrupt. What the image was, whether it was a face or simply an emblem, Val couldn’t rightly tell, but, whatever it was, it spoke to them all the same. “Hello, blessed Mother,” the image uttered in Adamic. It’s voice was a smooth overlay of male and female, kindly and natural, without a hint of synthetics to it. “Forgive this one’s untimely response to your summons. I am afraid that this one has been dormant for quite some time. What is it that this one can do for you?”

“Neti,” Nintu said softly, her tone full of adoration, “you are forgiven, my friend. But, I must know… What has happened here? Where are my Watchers? Where is the Udug?”

“Betrayal, divine Mother,” Neti, what Val gathered was some form of A.I. or maybe even something more alive, announced. “My systems were damaged in the cataclysm, but this one remembers that much… We were betrayed.”

“What do you mean, betrayed?” Nintu asked, her stellar eyes dark and narrowed with suspicion. “Neti, what…” She paused on calling it nonsense. “That is unheard of – impossible… Why would you suggest such a thing?”

“Not impossible, dearest Mother. This one speaks the truth as I witnessed it,” Neti stated firmly before continuing. “A sword fell from the heavens upon the Watchers’ council – a mandatory reunion had been called the day prior. This one knows not of the subject matter, but all showed as was their duty, all but one. Which… forgive me, this one does not know. The Udug had been addressing the kings of men at the time, but when it returned to the ruins of this once glorious temple, it brought naught but more tales of destruction. A star had fallen and flooded the world beyond, destroying the kings of men. The great cities were gone, and the people, though they survived, even as the flood turned to ice, were lost and divided. The Udug was lost too, as broken as the kingdoms it had so dutifully guided for countless generations. As broken as the council it had returned to. So it remained here, with this one, awaiting you, great Mother. We knew you would rise from Kur once you felt the pain of your children, heard their cries. A mother always knows, as Tzalmavet is want to say. The Udug will be overjoyed when it returns, as I am.”

Val had never imagined an all-powerful god whose voice could shake, but that’s what Nintu’s did when she spoke next. “How… How long has the Udug been gone?” the God of Man asked, seemingly uncertain whether she truly wanted to hear the answer. “How long has it been since… the Cataclysm, since they lost their way?”

“Judging by the world freezing over,” Val interrupted, “about 115,000 years ago, around the last glaciation – the Ice Age.”

“Your thrall is correct, if only approximately, dearest Mother,” confirmed Neti in a tone that definitely suggested something more alive than a common artificial intelligence. “As for the Udug… It is unknown. I have been unable to reinitiate properly for some time now, I am afraid. My internal clock tells this one of a Greater-Systems failure occurring 1300 years ago, local solar time. Forgive me, great mother, this once has failed you thrice now.”

The goddess Nintu shook her horned head and said firmly, “You haven’t failed me, my friend, not at all. But, there is much we must do to repair the damage this betrayer has done. He is here already, to reap what we sow – as meager of a crop it is. We must do what we can to prevent this – or delay it until I can contact our allies. We’ll parlay if we need to… But, before that, Neti, unlock the gates to my Forge. This one here must be remade.”

“I cannot comply, highest mother,” Neti denied. “The Forge here has been destroyed. The betrayer betrayed us wholly and thoroughly, targeting the Forge specifically in their assault. Only the Gate relay remained in a functional state.”

Nintu seethed and dug her nails into the palms of her hands. Val could feel her anger rise off of her as a dull pneumatic pulse, like the drone of a heavy bass. “Uh – the site here, they were working on something they called the Beacon!” Val began frantically, not wanting to find out what would happen if the goddess became truly angry. “It was supposedly some kind of… quantum communications device, I think. But, it wasn’t all they had here! There was a second site, a secret one… It was just a rumor before, but I saw proof of it when I was digging through the systems. Nothing concrete, but they were working on their own tome for sure. I don’t know if what you’re looking for is there, but maybe the folks over at Peter will know more? Secrets be damned, they’ll have to listen to you – they’ll have to tell you.”

“Then that is where we shall go, little one,” Nintu uttered with a nasal sigh, obviously not seeing much hope in it, but more than they had standing there. “If their attempt at my tools is half as shoddy as your own, we might as well surrender to fate now,” she said dryly. “Across thee wastes we go, then. North… from here. I can sense power. Neti, my friend… You have been bound to this place for far too long. Assemble yourself and bring this Gate relay to this base of theirs.”

“Yes, great mother,” Neti replied, their blue lights retreating once more into the floor. “This one will follow shortly.”