4.5 - The Avatar

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Dear Readers: Let's check back in with Atria in Mesopotamia...

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Scene 5: The Avatar

2020 B.C.

She had slept well. As well as one could sleep, when dreams were of slaughtering thousands of people with a pair of scissors.

At least the threads that she had cut, on her last visit to the Cave, had been of strangers. In that sense, it’d been no different from her routine snipping, in the time before Ananke had sent her daughters down to earth. The deathly Fate could just stay blind, play deaf. It was just business, as per usual. That was probably best.

But there would be something gratifying in snipping the thread of a soul that she knew was a dark one. Someone evil she encountered here on earth. One whose death would help to save her mother’s life.

Gilgamesh had to be one such man. And since his sin seemed so egregious, with such a widespread effect, surely his death would mark great progress toward diminishing human darkness. Right?

Waking up in the same bed, this time, was an interesting feeling. It made her feel more human, which was revolting and exciting both at once. Before leaving the rest-house, she haggled with the innkeeper for a bite to eat. His price was a peek at her breasts. Fair enough.

Atria inquired for directions to the Cedar Forest as she continued down the road. All the men she asked urged her against venturing there; some even refused to give guidance, on the grounds that it would be too great a tragedy, for one so young and beautiful to walk into a death trap. But there were some women who whispered the way in her ears, as if eager to send her to her doom, so that their sons and husbands would stop staring.

When she at last reached the edge of the forest, she stopped for only just a second. She had been warned by many that these woods teemed with all manner of man-eating beasts and poisonous plants.

But that was of no matter to her—only the human in her hesitated, before forging ahead. She was mostly still a goddess. The deathly Fate, no less, who couldn’t fear death even if she tried.

The forest turned out to be deep and dark and daunting indeed. The cedars blotted out the sun, steeping the whole space in shadow, shielding from view any creature that might suddenly attack. Had she been any more human, she might’ve actually turned back.

But she did not. The shadows felt, in fact, familiar—reminding her of all the shadows in the Cave. Her home. She blended so well in the shadow that potential predators probably couldn’t even see her.

After some indeterminate time, the pervasive darkness started to lighten, as she forged on. There had to be some sort of clearing in the forest up ahead. Either that, or she’d already reached the other end—she doubted it, given how vast the forest was supposed to be.

Sure enough, she eventually emerged into a glade. The cedars in this sunlit circle had been felled, it seemed—apparently, so as to build a grand palatial temple, now standing proud amid surrounding trees.

Gilgamesh. This place reeked of his hubris. She had arrived.

“Stop!” one of the sentinels standing by the structure barked as she approached. “Stop! Who are you, and how have you come here?”

“I am a woman, and I walked,” she stated. “Where is Gilgamesh?”

He gawked at her. “Walked—through the Cedar Forest, all alone?”

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