A Divine Spark - 1. Suicide

Ashran stood at the edge of the cliffs, watching the black river waves crashing against the lime infused rocks. The river was so black, the boy could see every swell, crowned by white foam, race towards the shore. Black water, white rocks, black heavens above, and nothing in between but him and the city of Kutha a few miles farther inland.

He could hear the distant shrieks of stones weighing up to three talents— as much as a grown man— being thrown by the giant ballistas, and he could feel the thunder of those stones impacting the city walls in his bones. The Babylonian siege was coming to an end, and in a few hours’ time every man, woman and child would be enslaved and all the elderly sacrificed to their multiple gods.

Ashran had served at the temple of Anu long enough to know that the fate he’d suffer wouldn’t be slavery or a simple sacrifice. Temple servants and priests were valued as the greatest gifts a faithful victor could give to his own gods; their deaths would quite surely be drawn-out, bloody and painful.

His gaze wandered back to the angry, uncaring river in front of him and the merciless, calm, black heaven above. There was nothing he could do to save his small city from its fate. The only thing left to do was to steal one of the great gifts and deny the new gods their prize of his immortal soul.

With a fearful, last breath filling his lungs, Ashran jumped.

His body smashed into the rocks hard enough to expel his life force, just as the priests had warned him. What had been Ashran was no more, reduced to a priceless speck of divine energy, drifting weightlessly over the roaring waves and up into the night breeze.

This time, the goddess Anu wouldn’t come to pick up the freed soul and take him to her chamber. By denying the victorious gods their gift, he had also denied himself the entrance to afterlife. It was a price he was willing to pay.

~*~

Kutha was finally taken when the first stray beams of sunlight crept over the horizon. Pungent smoke rose from the destroyed walls and buildings, keeping away the sunlight longer than usual as the victorious Babylonian soldiers went about collecting their bounty. They drove people out of their huts and buildings to corral them on the market place like livestock, threw dead bodies onto big funeral fires and took every bit of gold, copper and silver they could find.

The city had been home to only about 15.000 people, standing against 25.000 well-armed soldiers from Babilim— which you now may know as the ancient city of Babylon—, but the advantageous location of Kutha, situated in a massive valley right at the river Tigris, had made it hard to conquer with any amount of soldiers.

Kutha was not a victim of a political war, but a religious one. There had been a longstanding debate about the gods of the heavens and the gods of the underworld, and every region in the Babylonian empire had their own version of beliefs and doctrine. Different opinions on which god was one of the heavens and which one was of the underworld brought the priests to a boiling point that quickly took over their monarchs’ minds, and so fate went on its way.

It was always dangerous to disagree with more powerful neighbors, but as religion evolved so did the stubbornness of its respective priests; and their fear of divine revenge.

While the Anu cult taught that Nergal was one of Anu’s followers and a servant to the goddess of heavens, Nergalites were fonder of their version, in which Nergal cut his ties to Anu and went on to marry the goddess of the underworld to reign at her side.

When the Kuthan priests of the goddess Anu had finally decided to back up the beliefs of many of the other, more distant cities of the Tigris region and declared Nergal a lower deity, they hadn’t taken into regard the volatility of a big hub like Babylon. And they certainly hadn’t anticipated the reaction of the Babylonian followers of their then-popular god Nergal, who were most displeased with the lack of respect Kutha held for their divine shepherd. It was that simple a disagreement.

Monarchs and priests, priests and monarchs. The fight for power was as old as humanity itself, and outrage by such a big number of fanatics had been enough of a shove to have Babilim go to war with an enemy a third its size.

Now the victorious Nergalites had a city all to themselves and finally were able to shake off the bonds of the Babylonian multi-religious maelstrom.

It was not yet his temple, but The God Nergal couldn’t stop himself from looking around, consecration or not. He was not a minor deity, but being who and what he was- a god having come to power by the ways of blood-shedding, violence and fearsome rituals- he also knew that he’d never become a major deity. Thusly, he had found his ways and tricks to keep the more powerful divine forces away out of sheer self-preservation.

Straying into Anu’s domain uninvited was definitely a way to get oneself killed, but chances were that the goddess had already left this place and abandoned her subjects to their fate.

The city beneath the limestone clad walls of the temple sang with blood, fire and pestilence. It was Nergal’s hymn, and hearing— feeling— it filled him with vigor and euphoria. The frightened souls in the temple were like a siren song, intermingling with the chaos outside, calling to him. It was so much sheer energy to feast on, he could have easily foregone the sacrifices his high priest Madrak had planned and still have lived nice and comfortable, but he was The God Nergal. The Never-sated, the Bringer Of Fire, the Eater Of Entrails, the One Who Devours.

He would not turn down sacrifices and he wouldn’t discourage his subjects from bringing him more and more.

There was no logic behind his greed, because there was no need for it. After all, he was a God. A God, shaped like any other god in the image his subjects had given him, hewn out of the divine clay by need, hopelessness and prayer, brought to existence in just the way the people needed him. Humanity had wanted, needed a devourer, a god they could fear and worship with the greatest motivation of all— devotion for safety. If you worked, breathed, dreamed and spoke for evil itself, it would never do you harm. Belief didn’t need logic; it didn’t need arguments or understanding to develop its power, it just was, and it shaped gods, whether the praying mass had intended to do so, or not.

It was hard for The God Nergal to understand how humanity could be so blind, to not understand that it was their creativity, their own thoughts and wishes that could create gods. How they hadn’t fathomed the depth of their own divine power in all the eons they had walked the earth. Granted, a few humans were getting close to understand their own power, making their leaders into demigods, half-gods with the ability to die and be reborn, but it was nothing but a glimpse of the possibilities they were born with.

Nergal wandered deeper into the temple, following the steady flow of fear and desperation until he reached the inner sanctum. There, he found the last dozen Anuites cowering in front of her giant effigy, reciting desperate prayers for salvation, begging Her to take their souls into Her chamber before the Nergalites got them.

As soon as The God Nergal got too close to the beautiful obsidian and marble effigy, it cracked with a piercing sound and he hastily drew back. The consecration in Anu’s name was weakening already, proving his assumption of her absence correct; but still.

It was her temple, he was the intruder, and if he overreached himself she’d rip him into pieces without so much as a second thought.

Stepping back out of the inner sanctum, The God Nergal grinned. He could move in between worlds and realms with but a thought, as all the gods could, but he still hadn’t developed a taste for global recognition. He also liked to stay with his believers and he didn’t want them to split up and scatter in the winds. Since staying with this group of Nergalites didn’t leave him with many things to do, he often tended to walk their dreams or even give them omens and signs, treating their lives and actions like a big game. A dangerous game, addictive even to gods.

Right now, he wanted them to consecrate the temple in his name and bathe it in the blood of the few Anuites that had survived. It was what his followers imagined for him and the pull to give in to their wishes was hard to resist. With a thought, he joined minds with his high priest Madrak, sending him vivid pictures of the things he had just seen and the things he wanted to see soon.

It prompted a panic-like buzz of new found haste in the group of priests accompanying Madrak. For the next few hours, The God Nergal bathed in the calls of his name all over the city and the screams of Anuites skinned, burned and draped over the floors of His new temple.