Eradication 3 – The end of Babylon (Patreon)

A tower the size of a city of ten-thousand, circular segment stacked on circular segment, each with a rim engraved with endless runes and sigils, powered by the gods and the people of Babylonia. That was the Tower of Babel. Or had been, before chaos took its root in the monolithic structure of reddish brown stone.

The unfinished monolith encompassed all it needed to encompass, but nothing more, nothing less. To that end, parts of it had been ripped out and replaced with hastily scribbled runes, others had been added in meticulous detail. If Marduk would still have been clear in thought, he would have been disgusted at the dissonant building, whose base he himself had crafted to bury Tiamat within.

Now the god of words, a tall humanoid figure with thin-limbs and wide robes with a ring of eyes around his head, stood there drooling like an imbecile. A black mass had attached itself to the side of his face, the flesh of Tiamat. Chaos was the ultimate opportunity and the ultimate corruptor after all.

The king of these days didn’t desire her sexually, thus Metra had a body that closely resembled her original one. The key difference was that she had learned to push all the Astrotium in her body into an outer layer, an armour more durable than anything else that could be made by mortal hand.

With the rise of the handless arms of Marduk, which he had sacrificed to Gilgamesh in times past, the spell began. The whole building turned into a giant catalyst as the gates opened to the mana. Energy, gathered from the entire country in primitive mana batteries, seeped into the base of the tower, then travelled up floor by floor making the engraved symbols glow white on the light brown stone.

The circle pulled all the mana out of the ground and all things soulless, including the invisible shackles that forced Tiamat to remain in her hall below. Metra could hear the rumbling of stone, felt the vibrations under her feet, as the mother of chaos rose from her salt-covered tomb for the first time since the Enuma Elis.

She broke out of the highest plateau in an explosion of stone and water, like a massive geyser, leaving only the rim for the Metracana and Marduk to stand on. Wings spreading, she hooked herself into position in that hole. As she roared at the sky, it all came back down like a rain of tears, filled with an abundance of mana that only hastened the process of charging up the circle. 

The pale blue of natural mana shifted into a blinding mix of black and white; wherever the two colours met in the runes, clashes of all colours occurred. It only grew yet more bright until finally it vanished.

There was no great explosion or anything. This spell wasn’t aiming at anything. How would one aim at an all-encompassing concept? There was no way to verify if it had worked or not either.

“Tell me, tell me, tell me,” even in the anticipating dread that most people felt, the mother of chaos wasn’t quiet.

Then everything went dark. The sky vanished around them as they were isolated from reality completely. Not even the illusion of something existing outside their barrier was maintained; the sun vanished. The only light around was the hollow glow of Tiamat’s eyes.

‘Guess we are really dead then,’ Metra thought, looking at the one source of true radiance descending on them in a slow manner.

When people said Gaia, Metra had been imagining many things, but not what she saw. A girl of tiny stature, barely even half the first of wrath’s size, with green hair that was comedically curly growing all the way down to her hips. She wore a black piece of cloth over her toned skin, her green eyes looking sad. That was more surprising than her appearance, Metra had expected her to be full of anger. Resignation, she saw, aforementioned sadness, a tiny bit of annoyance, but not a speck of anger. The one inside Metra was as present as ever; she grit her teeth to prevent herself from jumping straight at the supreme deity.

The mother did not have the same discipline.

“NOW I HAVE YOU!” Tiamat’s mind did not think any of this to be unusual. There was no such thing as something outside the norm for a being that rejected the concept of normal. She raised her blistering claws at the one that overlooked everything. The terrible looking, half-decayed arm swung down.

Gaia needed two fingers to stop the attack of the dragon.

“I really have to wonder why you thought this was a good idea, what part ever made you think this was going to work?” the supreme deity just turned her wrist. A simple gesture, like opening a lock with a key, twisting off Tiamat’s entire arm. “I am the mind of a force beyond strength. You can’t push me off this pedestal no matter how much you try… but I guess talking to you is about as likely to be successful as talking to a gravestone.”

The ripped off arm disintegrated, a phenomenon that jumped over to the stump it had been ripped from. “I WILL RETURN!” Tiamat screamed. “CHAOS IS ETERNAL! ME OR SOMETHING ELSE, IT WILL ALL BE THE SAME! ”

“A new god of chaos would be born eventually… yeah, right, like I don’t have the power to prevent that,” Gaia blew air out of her nose. “All I need is to banish you to another plane rather than kill you. Take your time to think about your sins, if you even understand the concept of those.”

Tiamat, in one last act of spite or desperation, threw herself at Gaia. The giant maw pulling wide open into all four directions. When she was close enough to swallow the supreme deity whole, Metra just heard the snip of fingers and then everything froze, unable to move. “Yucky,” was the last word she heard before the world itself trembled and she lost consciousness.

_______________________________________________________________________

Metra didn’t know how much time had passed between then and her coming about again. Looking around she realized that she was still atop the tower, together with her seventeen present brothers and sisters, also awakening one by one. A quick look over the edge revealed, however, that there was no more tower to be atop off. Only a collection of hovering rubble, roughly in the shape of the tower it once had made up.

There was no more Babylon, she realized, and no more Tiamat. Not even Marduk was around anymore. Only the eighteen of them and Gaia, hovering in the middle of the crater the mother of chaos had burst out of, waiting with closed eyes.

“Finally, took you long enough to get up, I have other things to do, you know?” the green-haired deity complained.

“What words do you even have for us?” Semiramis was the last one to fight to her feet but the first one to speak. “You will smite us all for our insolence.”

“No, you will survive, just the eighteen of you,” Gaia’s opened her eyes just a bit, shook her head. “What a senseless loss of life and energy. Every fifth person from here to Egypt. I won’t be able to mask all of those deaths as completely natural. Going to kill a lot of livestock and send plagues and stuff like that. Guess that will give religious people of the future something to write about.”

“Why would you let us live?” Metra wanted to know. “Such a puny looking thing as you.”

“Do you really want to banter with the being that just eradicated your whole civilization and is going to completely wipe magic from your society over the next few years?” Gaia wanted to know, then she sighed. “To answer the question, you are immortal in the first place, so you are the perfect messagers. It is almost guaranteed that somebody who could try to start something like this again is going to get his hands on at least one of you, so you can be the ones to warn him. Something like this doesn’t even hurt me. You are playing with things you don’t understand.”

“You could have just prevented it,” growled one of the shards of hate. “YOU COULD HAVE JUST STOPPED US. You are clearly strong enough, so why, why would you just let us fail?!”

“Because if I did whatever I thought was right rather than acting upon rules I put up to remove myself as much as possible, I might as well take away your free will,” Gaia told them. “I don’t want to be the architect of fate. I could use my powers to be effectively omniscient and omnipotent, but I decide not to. I am the forces of nature around you, who I stand free to redefine as I wish, but I leave them as is to leave you all to the paths you decide to travel. Not my fault when you decide to violate the rules I do put up.”  She closed her eyes completely again, a single tear rolling over her face. “Now excuse me, I have the death of hundreds of thousands to enact.”

“Why do you kill them if they are no threat to you?!” Metra shouted.

“Because those are the rules.”

“You just said you could change them!”

“Once I change this rule, I change the rule about the borders, then you live alongside each other, normal and magical alike, then I have to keep everyone weaker from being exploited, then I once again design fate for everyone,” Gaia began fading away. “A level of cruelty is necessary to keep humans in line, for they are creatures of chaos and order. In my realm you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in place.”

With that she was gone, leaving eighteen desolate Metracanas atop a tower of rubble.

“She really left us…” Semiramis mumbled.

“What now?”

“There are no more kings to serve, the bloodlines are gone. Our people…”

“The civilization that made us…”

“The monuments we helped carve…”

“Our goddess… our mother…”

They each spoke to each other, but mostly to themselves, lost in their individual despair.

“Whatsoever king I shall serve after you, who shall exalted after you,…” the words rang silently through the desolate space, the Metracanas falling silent and looking at the one who spoke, “I will let him rule, tell him the secrets of the black-headed peoples. He will prove his worth to me, mighty mountains I will let him destroy, from the stones he shall rebuild; let him ascend the upper mountains, with craftiness he will succeed; let him break through the lower mountains, with the wrath of a titan that blinds the sun. Three times he shall besiege his enemies as such and three times he shall succeed. Then, I, the first one, shall take him to Dilmun, to great Dur-ilu we rise as servant and king and the bones of chaos I will wield in protection onto his dying breath.”

The words of their original creator rung inside the Metracanas’ ears. It was the original oath. The competition of their existence.

“Brothers and sisters, our home lays wasted, our goddess dead, our people now nothing but mana-less fools blind to the ruined Abyss that surrounds them,” Metra grinned at them with the unwavering determination and rage that filled her essence to the core. “So, what?”

Semiramis was the first to answer that question, “Right, our purpose stands. To find a candidate, to observe, to feed our strength by taxing mana of the unworthy, to live and to find a new king. If he reigns these lands or the lands beyond that of the Akkadians, it shouldn’t matter.”

Over the course of her speech, the life returned to each of the Metracanas. One by one they rose from their desperate cowering. One by one the lights in their eyes reignited. Their mana was running short. They all understood what they needed to do.

“To find our king,” Metra repeated. “Even if he is not Akkadian.”

“To find our king,” one by one they repeated as they left her standing on her own. They scattered, leaving the empty space, where Gaia had left them, into different directions. Only those with birth-partners remained together. In the end, it was only Metra and Semiramis.

“Where will you search? I need to make sure I won’t see you again,” the first of patience asked with a well-meaning smile. Mocking until the end.

“Likewise, I will go north, beyond the Caucasian mountains. Or as far as these feet can carry me. What is your intent? The usual scheming to fail at against someone better?”

“I will carry the knowledge of this day to Gilgamesh.”

“Ah, an easy candidate to be our king, but not one I consider worthy. That fool will probably be like ‘Can you tell me more about that failed circle’ and try to rebuild it but bigger. Go on then, get out of my sight, you and your endless tranquillity get on my nerves.”

“Whatever you say, eldest,” Semiramis said; for the second time in their entire relationship she sounded like she had something like respect for Metra. The first time had been when she had just been born. Once she bowed, then she too was gone.

Metra, left alone, mumbled one last prayer into the quiet. “Mortal maker, fallen Abzu, gone are you two, missing Enki, ravaged Marduk, fools were you too, Tiamat, chaotic one, help me on my travels. For your mind was always unstable and your body is now gone as well, but your principle will stand eternal.”

“Let me find a new man to guide us all.”