Chapter 39: I Clash Head on with the Bull
Rowe's message to Gilgamesh had absolutely been written with mischief in mind. He wanted to irritate the King, just enough to make that famously short temper flare and then settle into focus.
But the content was not a lie.
When Rowe returned from his diplomatic circuit, he did not yet know anything was wrong with the beast descending from the heavens. He only felt the abnormality once he passed through the eastern plains of Uruk.
And once he felt it, indifference was no longer an option.
Where there was danger, Rowe went.
Where danger sharpened into a blade aimed at the throat of life, Rowe ran toward it even faster.
Whether he could die a glorious death here was another matter. But the principle remained the same.
Do not waste a single chance.
So he followed the pull of that looming presence, straight toward the Bull of Heaven.
…
East of Uruk.
Near the Euphrates, one of the two great mother rivers that fed the Mesopotamian Plain, Rowe stepped onto land that no longer felt like land at all.
The earth was bone dry. Each step crunched against cracked soil and jagged stone. Ahead, desolation spread without end.
The ground had split into countless ravines, deep and sprawling, like shattered pottery left to rot under a merciless sun. The sight alone made the throat feel dry.
Rowe slowed.
He could not deny it. As the strongest divine beast, the Bull of Heaven carried a weight that dwarfed the present world. It was almost like an idea given shape, a god concept pressing down on reality.
Divine beasts were not gentle guardians.
Gods were nature made human by worship, phenomena shaped into personalities by faith. Divine beasts were the same, only one step lower in rank, born from the same authority and the same cruelty.
The Bull of Heaven was disaster given hooves. Drought, violent storms, sand that scoured bone, all of it was part of its essence.
So of course the world began dying the moment its body started to condense.
According to Gilgamesh's earlier explanation, divine beasts, like gods, needed a vessel to descend.
Once, the gods could directly gather the Aether of the sky and shape bodies at will. Now the Age of Gods was in decline. The Aether had thinned, and possession had become the primary path.
Yet divine beasts were still close enough to the divine to do what gods could no longer easily manage. They could still seize atmospheric Aether to forge a shell, and during that forging, the concepts they shed would become phenomena.
Here, that phenomenon was drought.
"All things have life and death."
Ziusudra spoke beside him, voice deep and ancient as the desert wind.
"Beneath the grandeur of the star filled vault, life is always fleeting."
He paused, then added calmly.
"You need not mind it."
The old man had remained at Rowe's side since that night of slaughter. His tone held no malice and no pity. It was simply the way someone who had watched civilizations drown and rise again spoke about corpses.
Rowe withdrew his eyes from the cracked earth and looked at him.
"You say where there is life, there is death. Fine. Then will you die?"
Before Ziusudra could reply, Rowe spread his hands in mock invitation.
"How about we fight?"
He could not say seeking death out loud, not with this man. So he pushed it forward in another form.
"This old man does not kill those whose destiny has not arrived," Ziusudra said evenly, "nor does he kill those without destiny."
Rowe's mouth twitched.
"Are you afraid you cannot beat me? It is okay, old man. I will go easy on you."
It was a crude taunt, but even crude tools sometimes pry open sealed doors.
Rowe had been prodding Ziusudra for days, in tiny ways, looking for a crack he could slip through. If the Grand Assassin truly struck him down, even Ereshkigal's blessing might not be able to drag him back out of death's grip.
A death by that blade would be worthy of any epic.
But Ziusudra had lived too long to be baited by childish words. Insults and provocation rolled off him like rain off stone.
"Hahaha. It is good for young people to have energy," he said instead, almost indulgent. "But this old man is old, and I truly cannot keep up with your generation anymore."
He sighed, then added with perfect sincerity.
"And this old man does not know how to fight at all."
You do not know how to fight, you only know how to kill.
Rowe did not say it aloud. He only glanced sideways, the lack of surprise already settled in his eyes.
"If you will not fight, then teach me your assassination techniques," Rowe muttered. "Then I can teach others."
So someone else could kill him.
"You have no talent," Ziusudra replied without hesitation.
Rowe exhaled through his nose and let it go.
He turned back toward the horizon.
To be honest, his mood was not good.
Along the road here, he had passed skeletal remains scattered through the dust. Animal bones. Human bones. Some half buried. Some laid bare, bleached and broken.
Natural disasters were always like this. A thousand li of barren land, piles of corpses, lives erased without ceremony.
He thought he had grown numb to that kind of thing.
He had not.
Seeing it with his own eyes struck far deeper than hearing it in a report. Shock came first, then the slow, bitter surge of empathy that no amount of cynicism could fully crush.
Ziusudra's earlier words were meant for this.
To the old hermit who had walked through the flood of Utnapishtim and lived, death on the roadside was only the usual cost of living in an age ruled by the divine.
But Rowe felt a reason to stop this disaster from spreading further, even if his own selfish end waited somewhere inside it.
"A sound ahead."
Ziusudra's voice sharpened. His steps halted. Beneath the black hood, his ancient eyes lifted toward the distance.
The sky was a brutal blue, clean as if washed. The sand plains ran out like an ocean under the sun.
Then Rowe saw it too.
People.
A group of refugees fleeing in panic.
They were far away, but Rowe's sharpened senses still caught every detail. Bodies shriveled from dehydration. Faces pale as dried clay. Movements already staggering on the edge of collapse.
Behind them, the air was twisting.
Wind screamed across the plain, trampling the land. A pale storm tore through everything in its path, devouring moisture as if it were starving.
Where it passed, earth cracked further.
Life dried out and died within breaths.
"The Bull of Heaven."
Rowe recognized it instantly.
It was not yet fully formed, only a storm like silhouette, but it already moved like a mad beast. It chased down the helpless and crushed them beneath its wrath.
One refugee fell.
Another wailed.
Bodies collapsed into withered husks as the storm drew nearer, stealing the last water from flesh and blood.
"I am really being underestimated."
Rowe's lips curled, more irritation than fear. He glanced at Ziusudra.
"Old man. Want to go?"
Ziusudra shook his head.
"This old man has not heard the bell of that divine beast's destiny."
Until destiny arrived, he would not draw a sword.
"Then do not interfere with me."
Rowe was satisfied with that answer.
Ziusudra kept his word.
Rowe let out a slow breath. He patted the dust from his plain robe, and in the instant his eyes closed and opened again, the shadow of a burning Key of Heaven flickered deep in his pupils.
He stepped forward.
The raging wind snapped at his sleeves. The sand bit at his skin. An invisible door opened in the air before him.
He seized it with both hands.
Light gathered into a brilliant torrent, a colossal gate shaped from authority rather than stone.
Ziusudra stood still, watching.
Rowe spread his arms and welcomed the storm's descent, as if he were about to clasp hands with calamity itself.
Part of it was the usual hunger for death.
Part of it was the anger he had been swallowing since his journey north.
Those who wielded great power always looked down from above. It was the oldest cruelty in the world, older even than Uruk's bricks.
Rowe was displeased.
He was displeased that non human entities decided the fate of all living beings based on whim.
He was displeased that they called themselves rulers of heaven while treating the earth like a toy box.
Oh gods who unleashed the Bull of Heaven upon this world.
Do you think only you possess power?
His voice cut into the roaring wind.
"Mere scoundrels, daring to trample this land without restraint."
"Who gave you the courage?"
The words did not plead. They mocked.
Rowe stepped forward again.
Thunder slammed through the plain.
The fleeing refugees looked back, half in terror, half in disbelief.
What they saw was something no one in their lives had ever imagined.
A wall of light, vast as a door to the sky, blocked the howling storm. Above it stood a single figure, arms spread wide, unmoving.
A flesh and blood body raised against a natural disaster that was still condensing into divinity.
Then they collided.
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