The moment Šarru Dara and Šarru Gir's feet touched the ground, they instantly knew something was off.
The air clung to Šarru Dara's skin. Too heavy. Too quiet. Not the calm of peace, but the pressure that gathered just before something snapped. He could taste it, metallic and sour, like blood left too long in the sun. It coated his tongue like regret.
His boots slid slightly in the sand. The ground felt loose under the crust, as if the bones of the place had rotted. Hollowed out, not by time, but by intention. He paused.
Behind him, Šarru Gir's steps slowed. Then the thought brushed across the Blood General's mind. "Feel that?"
It wasn't a question. More a confirmation. A pulse of awareness shared between soldiers who had survived too many dead zones. The kind of hush that settles when a battlefield remembers what it was.
Šarru Dara's jaw clenched. He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he knelt beside a splintered slab of ancient limestone, fingers hovering just above the surface. Cold radiated off it. Not from nature, but from memory. Or more precise, residue. The stone remembered what the world wanted to forget.
"Of course, I feel it," he sent back, tight. His throat itched with the scent of scorched cedar and something older. Bitter herbs. Dried blood. Sacrificial oil soaked into earth that had once been holy. There were notes of iron beneath that, tangling with ash.
His eyes tracked the way moss had overgrown a carved threshold. A spiral pattern, half-erased by time, barely visible. But he knew that pattern. The Akkadian God had cut it himself.
This place wasn't just wrong. It wasn't just desecrated. It was violated. And it remembered them.
They stepped forward, boots crunching over shattered marble and sediment, deeper into the oldest parts of Qal'at. Nothing about the surface reflected the weight buried beneath. Above them, fortress stone jutted out awkwardly from broken walls. Military, crude and cold.
"That's colonial stone. Portuguese, I'd wager," Gir noted. "Wrong era. Wrong energy." He gave it a disgusted glance, as though even looking at it tarnished the memory of what used to be here.
It made Dara grit his teeth. He remembered when that section had been a sanctuary of light, lined with oil-lamps and salt stone. There had been chants that echoed down those halls once—tones of devotion and power braided together. Now it was a remnant of empire, bolted into history like a parasite that fed on memory.
They passed through a collapsed corridor. Dara's fingers trailed across the flaked remains of a fresco, once vibrant with depictions of Dilmun's priest-guardians, now faded to ghosts. Some faces were still visible beneath the grime. He could name them.
"The Egyptians touched this part," Gir said aloud. His voice echoed under the collapsed vault, flat and cold. "See the lining of the columns? Sun disc carvings. Ankhs. Ra and Osiris etched over older marks.
They repurposed everything."
Dara didn't respond.
The gods of Egypt came late. And greedy. Dara hadn't seen the ruin firsthand. He'd been locked beneath flame and stone when the Egyptians arrived. But the scars were easy to read. The foreign magic etched into sacred ground. The theft repackaged as reverence.
They had melted Akkadian idols. Recast them into amulets bearing symbols that didn't belong here. Marked the walls with gods who had no claim on this soil. Worse, they acted as though the desecration sanctified the space. As if their erasure was a blessing.
It happened while he and Gir were sealed in realms that didn't sleep. Far from the world. Far from Dilmun. That was the real sting. Not the destruction or the helplessness. But the silence. Its slow unraveling of something they had once chosen to protect with blood.
Gir ran a hand along the defaced altar. His voice dropped. "They turned gods into souvenirs," he said.
"And fed the bones to sand."
Dara didn't reply. He didn't have to.
—
They reached the excavation's heart.
The descent revealed the ruins of a Dilmun chamber. Original and untouched, save for what had been torn open by recent hands. The energy shifted. Subtle, but sharp. Like a blade half-buried in salt.
Dara felt it first. Then Gir froze, his gaze locked on a collapsed section of wall now half-exposed by shifting stone. An icy breeze slid across their skin despite the heat.
"This was the Temple of Thresholds." The latter said it like a curse. "I carved part of that ceiling."
The former nodded. He remembered. He remembered the ceremony when it had been built. The walls etched in black-lacquer runes. Gir had shaped them with fire and ocean magic, hands blistered and raw, eyes lit like dying stars. The weight of the work had carved a part of his cousin, too.
Now they were nothing. Crushed beneath thousands of years of greed.
They stepped into what remained of the inner sanctum. All traces of the Dilmun ritual had been scraped away. Someone had rewritten this place, brick by brick, as if editing a memory.
"Egyptian over Akkadian." Gir didn't bother hiding his disgust. "This is deliberate defilement. They took two incompatible magicks and forged a lie out of them."
Dara's gaze narrowed. The layering wasn't just false. It was surgical. Someone had done this not to protect the tomb… but to rewrite it.
He lingered. He didn't rush. Not here. Not after what they'd seen. Every step felt too easy, too placed. He circled once. Studied the cracks. This wasn't just vandalism—it was theatre.
He stepped toward the central sarcophagus. It sat partially cracked, its lid broken at an angle, like someone had pried it open with violence and purpose. The stone didn't feel dead. It felt ashamed.
Inside, there was nobody. No bones. Only a thin coating of golden ash still faintly shimmering under his light. The particles shifted slightly, as if stirred by presence alone.
Dara reached inside. His skin lit with blue ether. The tomb didn't resist. It recoiled. Not aggressively. More like shame. More like someone trying to forget.
"They used our ground."
Dara turned to the walls. Beneath the Egyptian glyphs, he could still see the bones of Achaemenid Persian architecture. Their angular signature and fixation with walls that outlasted gods.
Then, even further down, behind the seams of the foundation, the curve of the Kassite burial chambers. A faint ghost of rounded stone and ritual circle that once channeled half the spiritual traffic of the known world.
His hand pressed flat against the back wall. It vibrated faintly. Like an echo through time.
"This was ours." His voice was quiet. "And they layered over it like it never mattered. Like we never existed."
Gir stepped beside him. "What do you think this is?"
He nodded toward the empty sarcophagus. "It's too clean. No soul print. No decay. Just absence."
Gir reached out with his power. Nothing. No resistance. Not even deflection. Just… silence.
"Not a grave." Dara's voice sharpened. "It's a message."
He looked around. Saw how the layers fit together. Witnessed how the magic flowed wrong on purpose. Knew how the path here was too easy, too exposed, and just hidden enough to feel like a secret.
He looked at the obsidian again. "This is bait."
Gir's lips pressed into a line. "The Mavromino wants us to chase ghosts."
Dara's gaze didn't move from the shard. "Or each other."
The air suddenly changed.
Dara felt it first. Not a ripple. A compression. A vacuum where reverence should've been. Presence walked into the bones of Dilmun, not with deference, but with direction.
He turned away from the cracked sarcophagus, dust trailing from his movements like ash from an old wound. Gir had gone still beside a half-excavated pillar, his fingertips pressed lightly to Akkadian sigils half-swallowed by time.
"Visitor," Dara muttered.
Gir didn't lift his eyes. "Shouldn't be possible."
"This must be Acheron's minions."
"That Atlantean better be ready to bleed."
A shimmer opened at the eastern threshold. Controlled and surgical. The air parted as if the ruin itself reluctantly made space. Light touched down softly, filtered through moonlight and pride.
He stepped through. Steel-lined boots. Lean, cut frame wrapped in dark battle leathers with crescent blade holstered at his back. His eyes glinted silver beneath his hood.
Sin. Nanna. Suen. He had worn more names than most gods had followers.
Dara's gaze flattened. "Didn't expect a scavenger to come himself."
Sin's mouth curved faintly. "Didn't expect to find Akkadian and Persian relics still breathing down here."
Gir straightened slowly, voice quiet but sharp. "You came to defile the ruins?"
Sin's silver gaze swept across the chamber. "Hardly. I'm here to make sure you don't raise something that should've stayed dead."
"Qal'at al-Bahrain," Dara said. "You Sumerians used to call it something else. Back when you were kin."
"Still am," Sin answered, eyes locking with Gir's. "Like it or not, we're cousins. You just chose a darker throne."
Gir stepped down from the ledge. "And you married a goddess of contradiction. Don't talk to me about thrones."
"Artemis didn't raise me," Sin said flatly. "And I didn't choose her. I chose Katra. I chose to stand between this world and the demons crawling under it. Same as you."
"Then you've forgotten where you came from," Gir growled.
"You think the gallu and dimme just leash themselves?" Sin's voice cracked. "You think they respect prayers and warnings?"
Dara's voice stayed glacial. "We didn't leash them. We fed them to the Abyss."
Sin's stare sharpened. "After my pantheon fell. After the Greeks wiped us out. The Gallu were made to keep Apollymi's Charontes in check. The Dimme were fail-safes—unleashed only when everything collapsed. We didn't lose control. We were erased."
Gir's voice slid in, low and sharp. "And the monsters left behind? We buried them. While Olympus played empire."
That silenced the room.
Sin stepped forward, arms loose at his sides, not threatening but not retreating. "I'm not your enemy. I'm here to support. Acheron thinks this place might hold a key."
"Acheron," Gir hissed. "He still uses our bloodlines like chess pieces."
"And you think Nick doesn't?" Sin asked.
Gir's personal weapon appeared without movement, no warning, no chant. It simply was dragged from the place inside him where compassion used to live.
Abzu's Fang settled into his grip in its trident-sword form, the edges rimmed with salt-rime and quiet fury. Forged from the rib of a drowned Leviathan and tempered in chaos, mother's own grief, the blade didn't shimmer or gleam. It absorbed light.
Even still, it pulsed once like the tide holding its breath.
Sin moved.
His crescent blade flashed up, steel singing as it met Gir's in a shower of sparks. The crash rattled through the ruin, igniting half-dead glyphs with pulsing blue heat.
"You shouldn't be here," Gir said, pressing forward.
"I'm not the threat," Sin grunted, parrying low and twisting.
"To us? No. But you are the distraction."
The next clash blew wind through the ruin, cracking the frescoed wall behind them.
Dara didn't interfere. He stood apart, not even glancing at the clash. His arms remained still, but his senses roamed. Eyes half-lidded, attention locked on the shift in air, the ground's tremble, the invisible wrongness threading through the ruins beneath their feet.
Sin rolled away from a slicing arc, landed crouched. "If I meant harm, I'd have brought my brother."
Gir advanced. "Zakar has honor."
"And I don't?"
"You have strings. Set's, Acheron's… Artemis's."
Sin's eyes flashed. "I don't answer to Artemis. I tolerate her, for Katra's sake. Nothing more."
Gir didn't back off. "Tolerating the hand that once gutted you isn't strength. It's leash wear."
Sin stepped forward. "She ordered Katra to steal my powers. I haven't forgotten. I just chose not to burn the world for it."
"Shame," Gir said coldly. "You'd make a better god if you did.
They crashed together again.
Steel shrieked. Time twisted in on itself for a blink. The very floor buckled beneath them, Qal'at moaning as if the soil remembered the gods that once bled here.
Dara's voice cut through the tension like tempered steel. "Enough."
They froze. Not because they obeyed, but because Dara rarely spoke when blood was drawn. When he did, it was never wasted breath.
He stepped forward, gaze locked on Sin like a weight being measured.
"You think we're here for a relic? You think we came to scavenge ruins and poke at ghosts?"
He circled once, slow, controlled. "Tell me something, moonborn—what is it exactly that you and Acheron are hoping to find here? What warrants your interference? What makes this your business?"
Sin's jaw locked. Muscles ticked at his temple. He didn't answer, not because he couldn't, but because the words sitting in his throat were heavier than he wanted to speak aloud.
Dara's voice dropped colder. "Because from where we stand… all I see are trespassers who don't trust the monster they helped raise. And a leash-holder trying to clean up a mess that was never his to begin with."
Sin inhaled sharply, but still said nothing.
Not yet.
He wasn't here to defend Acheron. And he sure as hell wasn't going to explain that part of him agreed. But silence was its own answer. And Dara read it perfectly.
Dara moved to the sarcophagus again and lifted something from within.
The shard. Obsidian. Its edges still bleeding ether. A word scorched into the center:
TRAITOR.
Sin's jaw tensed. "You think this is about me?"
"No," Gir said. "But whoever left this wanted us to find it. Wanted fight us to fight. They know you will burn if that happens."
Sin straightened slowly.
"You're saying this was a decoy?"
"No," Dara said. "This was a trap. And it's already been sprung."
Gir turned his blade and drove the tip onto the stone floor. Symbols glowed around it—ancient warning runes, not Akkadian, but something older.
The walls vibrated. The sea beyond the tomb rumbled.
"They used you," Gir said. "Just like they used the Greeks. Just like they used the Atlanteans. Layering interference over interference until even gods choke on the echoes."
Sin said nothing. His blade lowered, but didn't vanish.
"My great grandson told Acheron not to interfere," Dara said. "You're still breathing because Nick trusts you. Barely."
"And because I came alone," Sin said. "No army. No politics. Just questions."
"You've got your answer now," Gir said, voice low. "Leave before the real enemy arrives. I don't want to
be the bearer of bad news to your family."
Sin frowned. "You found something worse?"
"We didn't find it," Dara said. "We felt it the moment we arrived."
Sin's brows lowered.
Gir knelt beside the exposed base of the sarcophagus and touched the soil. His fingers came away slick with warmth. Not blood. Not magic.
Heat.
Rising.
Like something buried for eons was finally stretching.
The ground vibrated beneath them.
Gir stood and faced Sin. "You know who Kingu is."
Sin didn't blink. "Tiamat's most prized champion. The creature she bred to rule after slaughtering the others. The one the gods murdered to silence her rage."
Dara nodded once. "He wasn't just her fave. He was the flame before all others. They didn't kill him. They buried him. And someone just woke him up."
Sin's expression tightened. "That's impossible. His seal was crafted by the Seven (referring to the primals). They made sure of it."
Gir's eyes gleamed with old fire. "And it held. Until now."
The ruin groaned again. Not from instability, but resonance. Dara felt it in the stone. Not magic. Not malice. Primordial.
Sin took a slow step back, his hand unconsciously grazing the hilt of his blade. "You're saying the flame is loose?"
Dara's voice was barely above a whisper. "No. I'm saying it's stirring."
Sin's jaw clenched. For all his arrogance, this wasn't bravado. This was blood knowledge. History clawing at the back of his skull like a locked vault cracking open.
"I'll tell Nick."
"You'll tell Acheron," Gir corrected. "That he's too late. The war started while they were still debating who was in charge."
Sin looked between them. Two gods not resurrected, but returned. Their fury hadn't faded. It had fermented.
He vanished in a flicker of moonlight, the air still shivering from his departure. Silence followed, deeper than before. Because this time, it wasn't empty. It was listening.
Dara turned back to the sarcophagus. His knuckles grazed the obsidian again. It pulsed faintly in response. It's like a heart refusing to die.
He narrowed his eyes at it, then glanced around the devastated chamber. The layers of betrayal, the mimicry, the forced trail. All of it had been orchestrated with precision. Whoever had done this hadn't just wanted to deceive them.
They wanted them gathered. Vulnerable.
He muttered darkly, "Whoever among the Mavromino engineered this… was brilliant."
Gir cocked his head. "Took the bait, didn't we?"
Dara exhaled hard through his nose. "It wasn't just bait. It was a massacre site in waiting. Designed to lure every one of us to one place. For a killing blow."
Gir stepped up beside him, eyes tracking the lines of the fractured seal embedded into the floor beneath the sarcophagus. "Well," he said with a shrug, "good thing we're used to battling angry primordial gods, hmm?" His mouth curled slightly. "Would've been nice if Seth was here, though. This kind of trap's his bedtime story."
Dara grunted. "Leave the poor boy alone. He's been freed from holding Azmodea together. This is our fight."
Gir's smirk faded. "And the others?"
Dara's eyes stayed locked on the glyphs. "Warn them. This whole place was rigged. We need to pull out, now. I'll try to reforge the seal. If I'm lucky…" he flexed his fingers, then pulled his weapon—his blood—forged blade, humming faintly as it fed off his aura.
"…my blood will work. Like it did with Azmodea."
Without another word, he sliced his palm and slammed it down onto the cracked seal. Words fell from his lips—not spoken, but torn from memory, old and cruel and exact. Ancient older than time itself, etched in pain and birthright.
The floor lit beneath him. Briefly, violently.
Gir's eyes snapped to the outer threshold. The wind had died. The sand outside stilled.
"Too late," he said flatly.
Dara didn't look up.
Gir's hand tightened around Abzu's Fang, and the blade groaned like it remembered what was coming.
"It's already been unleashed."