"Go up to the ancient ruin heaps and walk around; look at the skulls of the lowly and the great. Which belongs to someone who did evil and which to someone who did good?"

- ancient Sumerian proverb

I hold you in/
like a deep breath/
I feel you like/
the last beautiful touch/
before the final rest/
I know I'll see you forever/
I want it painted black and red/

It's so beautiful to me/
It is everything I see/
It's so beautiful to me/
But it's nothing that I need/

And I can't taste anything less/
Every time I'm forced down/
To be with yourself/
Take all the blood you want/
But not me from here/

Not a hand/
Not a finger/
This is my home/
I'm dying here/
I hide in the corner/
That look on your face/
I'm accustomed to it/

- Demon Hunter - "The Gauntlet"

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Zayne Kazem Hasan al-Mahdi strolled with purposeful steps above what once was an old canal, an artificial tributary of the Euphrates River. The ancient channel no longer flowed near this site, this solemn tomb, but the sand cat, nevertheless, remembered it all too well. Zayne was not his real name, of course, but the man he was, and the name that was given him, was now buried beneath the arid, reticent wastes of the Al-Hajarah in Southern Iraq.

Some five millennia deep.

Warka was much the same. Warka, after all, was not its true name, but the people who filled these now empty streets with life were entirely extinct. Uruk, his birthplace, had been deserted for two thousand years. Zayne’s native tongue was now a dead language spoken only by scholars and philologists. Little by little, regimes and empires altered the landscape over time to suit their needs and glorify their ambitions. Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucids, Parthians—each and every one had replaced innumerable planks on this Ship of Theseus. Mud bricks and wooden planks. The milieu of his mortal life rendered lifeless and kept in stasis as subjects of academic pursuit.

In much the same way, Zayne al-Mahdi was merely an abstraction. A complete reinvention necessitated by the extraordinarily long life fate had afforded him. After all these years, Zayne was merely the sum total of one improbable story, ever shifting like windswept sand. This same story had now come full circle. The story’s relentless passage and the cyclical journey it foretold had, at last, inexorably goaded the sand cat back to where it began—back home. Or, more accurately, the remnants of home. Uruk had not truly been his home for what felt like eons, but all the same, nobody had called this once great, proud city home in just as long. Time had mostly eroded the mud bricks of what little remained of Eanna, the place where he served as a gala, a temple priest to the goddess Inanna. In life, Zayne had chosen a feminine name in religious observation once he’d attained the priesthood. In short order, the androgynous young man had grown accustomed to the mutability and impermanence of life.

Standing before the shrouded mounds of dust and detritus, the sand cat felt an inexorable yearning that, even after all these years, felt like an open wound spurting fresh blood, refusing to heal.

Absently, the sand cat felt the steady vibration shiver up his body from his left pocket as he walked.

“Even now, you haunt me,” he said, a whisper in the night. “My Lady…your great house is gone, but still, you haunt me.” The shadow of a wry smile played upon his lips, but a cold sliver still slid into his ancient heart. “And who is left to mourn such loss…but a meager wretch like me?”

As he passed, the placid darkness remained tranquil in the man’s wake—the sand and sediment all but unblemished. This talent, like most skills, came with time and practice, but Zayne’s preternatural poise and focus were altogether unattainable to mortal men. The sand cat glided across the ground like shadow, furtively flitting among the ruins. Swelling like a wave, that same steady vibration piqued with intensity. In eons past, that vibration came paired with a sweet, pleading voice like an echo petitioning for clemency. For deliverance. Thankfully, the sand cat had been able to bestow that petition in time, but in recent days that portentous vibration had returned, and with it came a sense of dread that beggared description.

His pace slowed as he approached a blue sign beneath the moonlight. Emblazoned in both English and Arabic, the sign read: “The first written words started here.” Perched atop that garish sign was an Arabian eagle-owl, its golden eyes seeming to reflect and redirect all the stray light in the cosmos toward him as it stared at him, unblinking.

“My Lady, what omen is this?” he asked, amused, hand reaching down toward his pocket.

Being sired in his middle years at nineteen, the sand cat had become literate as a result of his devotion. As a temple functionary, he received some semblance of an education as an administrator. Zayne was afforded opportunities in life that many were unjustly denied, and it was his status and the opportunities it afforded that had sealed his fate. In the end, Zayne’s training and visibility had made him a tempting target.

“What message do you have for your servant?”

Zayne began to walk toward the sign, and as he did, the owl held his gaze for a moment longer, cocked its head, and then took flight. Arcing over him like a pensive specter, the owl bled into the unyielding darkness of the deep desert. Zayne watched its passage with a keen mixture of bemusement and trepidation.

“Perhaps,” he said, a wry smile taking shape, “this old wretch has some worth yet.” He then eyed what the ruined ziggurat behind him and considered both his next steps and the reason why he came here in the first place.

Again, the egg within his pocket hummed its dire warning, and Zayne steeled his resolve.

“I must pray. Seek guidance. For soon, darkness will descend upon this world.”

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I just want to thank  aerokat for all that you see here! This art piece would not exist without her talent and hard work. I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to commission her yet again. If you haven't had the opportunity yet, please check out her gallery for more great art!


art is ©  aerokat
Zayne al-Mahdi is ©  nazcapilot