Truth Engine. James Axler

reaching down her back like claws.

      “I saw there,” Ullikummis continued, “that you have exceptional knowledge for an apekin, a…” he stopped, as if trying to recall the word “…human. And yet you never questioned what it was you fought.”

      “Tried,” Brigid replied, the single word coming out as a gasp between her gnashing teeth.

      “They acted like you,” Ullikummis said. “My father and the other overlords were aliens to your world, yet they behaved like you, like actors on a stage, dressed in masks and rubber suits. Humans in everything but appearance,” he mused, adding as if in afterthought, “and perhaps stamina. Yet you never questioned this.”

      “They had technology,” Brigid began, her words strained. “They differed from—”

      “No, they did not,” he interrupted. “The Annunaki are beautiful beings, multifaceted, crossing dimensions you cannot begin to comprehend. Their wars are fought on many planes at once. The rules of their games intersect only tangentially with Earth and its holding pen of stars. What you have seen is only a sliver of what the battle was, and the Annunaki have shamed themselves in portraying it thus.”

      Brigid listened, wondering at what Ullikummis was telling her. She recalled travelling to the distant past via a memory trap, and seeing the Annunaki as their slaves, the Igigi, perceived them. They had been beautiful, just as Ullikummis was telling her, shining things that seemed so much more real than the world around them, colored beings amid a landscape of gray. But when she had faced Enlil, Marduk and the others in her role as a Cerberus rebel, they had been curiously ordinary. Yes, they were stronger, faster, supremely devious, but they were—what?—the thing that Ullikummis called them? Actors on a stage? People dressed in masks and rubber suits like some hokey performance designed for children? Had Brigid and her companions been taken in by a performance, a show designed to entertain the feeble-minded?

      As Brigid considered this thought, Ullikummis spoke once more in his gruff, throaty growl. “They started their current cycle as hybrids, half human, half advanced DNA. The human part clings, holding them back. If you saw the true battles between the gods, if you had witnessed the ways they fought across the planes millennia ago, you would never even recognize the creatures you fought as the Annunaki—you would think them a joke.”

      “Why are you telling me this?” Brigid asked, baffled.

      In reply, Ullikummis gave a single, simple instruction. “Open your eyes, Brigid.”

      She did so, found herself staring into her own green eyes in the mirror as the agony in her back abated, faded to nothingness. The mirror was like a drawing, a picture that could be falsified, that owed no one the truth.

      Brigid let out a slow breath, felt her heart still pounding against her rib cage. The pain in the back of her neck was gone as if it had never been.

      “Do you understand now?” Ullikummis asked, his voice coming from above her head.

      Brigid nodded. “I’m beginning to,” she said.