The raids began a week after the hunting party left. Not a full-scale assault, but desperate, probing strikes by bands of starved nomads from the western sands.
Ninsun was in her hut, sorting the last of the dried yarrow, when the shouts began. She moved with a practiced, grim speed, barring the door with a heavy timber. The sounds were a familiar horror: the shrieks of the unprepared, the guttural triumph of the raiders, the crackle of a burning roof.
Then, the pain came. Not from outside, but from within. A vicious, grinding cramp seized her, a fist of agony clenching deep in her womb. Her water broke, soaking the dirt floor. No. Not now.
She crawled into the darkest corner, behind a large storage jar of medicinal salts, pulling a stiff, smelly animal hide over herself. She bit down on a strip of leather to keep from crying out, her body wracked by contractions that synced with the violence outside. She was the village healer, a woman of respect, and she was about to give birth alone on a filthy floor, hiding from marauders.
As another wave of pain crested, her mind, trained to focus under pressure, did not scream in terror. It recited the steps of a breech birth. It catalogued the herbs for stopping hemorrhage. This clinical distance was the only armor she had.
She pushed, her breaths ragged grunts behind the leather strap. The world narrowed to the pain, the darkness, and the stubborn, defiant will to live. She thought of Dagan, his hand on her belly, his voice whispering the name. Enki.
In the suffocating blackness, as her village burned, Ninsun brought a son into the world. She cleaned him with the last of the clean water from her healing supplies, cut the cord with her flint knife, and held his squirming, blood-slicked form against her chest.
And he cried.
It was a thin, reedy sound, the universal protest of a soul forced into a harsh world. It was the sound she had heard in the vision at his conception. It was the sound of life, defiant.
But as the cry left his lips, a strange thing happened. A shadow fell across the doorway—a raider checking the hut. The baby, as if sensing the threat, fell silent. Not a gradual quieting, but an abrupt, total cessation. His tiny body went still in her arms. His dark eyes, wide open, seemed to listen, to assess the danger from beyond the hide.
The raider's footsteps crunched outside, then moved away.
The baby did not cry again. He simply breathed, his gaze fixed on his mother's face in the gloom, unnervingly calm. He had announced his life to her, and then, understanding the peril, had chosen silence.
She named him with the last of her strength, a whisper into the space where his cry had been.
"Enki."
His first breath was a cry of life. His first act was an instinct for survival that bordered on the preternatural. He was here. And he already knew the world was full of wolves.