Oblivion Stone. James Axler

as the sun’s heat pounded down, baking the dusty earth as it had for millennia.

      But it had not always been so. Enlil remembered a time, not so very long ago, when his brother had had a city here—a city called Eridu, the first and most glorious city that the Earth had ever seen. Enlil had had his own city, too, a place called Nippur, located not far from Eridu’s walls, those scant millennia ago. And yet Enlil had chosen to return here, to Enki’s city rather than his own, recalling how its establishment had been a bold statement, the first acquisition of alien ground on the planet that would become their own, a flag in the dirt of foreign soil.

      Enlil’s reptilian skin shimmered as the sunlight played across his scales, their color that of richest sunset, the color of gold bathed in blood. His form was mighty, a muscular, tall figure, imposing even now as he sat in the sand, gazing out across the shimmering surface of the water through his arrow-slit, crocodile’s eyes.

      Tiamat was not dead. She had simply been changed, altered, readied herself for rebirth like everything else Annunaki. To change from one form to another, to enter the chrysalis state and be reborn, that was the Annunaki way. Enlil himself had taken other forms over the centuries. He had been Dagon and he had been Kumarbi and C. W. Thrush and, most recently, he had been Sam the Imperator until, like a snake, he had sloughed his skin and emerged wearing another, each more glorious than the one that came before. All these lives were like a dream, one life told from differing viewpoints, a single life seen through different eyes.

      Beside Enlil, resting on the sand at the banks of the river, was the tiny seed from which Tiamat would grow once more. The tiny seed that would form the heart of his mother, and which, in turn, would begin the cycle anew.

      Enlil glanced up to the heavens, eyeing the cloudless cerulean sky, and slowly a grim, purposeful smile formed on his alien lips.

      It was all beginning again.

      Chapter 1

      Snakefishville stank of death.

      Thick clouds of flies swarmed about the ruins, their furious buzzing echoing like an angry symphony of dying lightbulbs between the debris of collapsed buildings. The remains of bodies—and they could only be described as “remains” now, as most of them were no longer truly recognizable as human—lay in the streets and occupied shadowy corners of the rubble scattered at nightmarish angles within the wrecked circle of the ville’s high walls.

      The walls themselves were destroyed almost beyond recognition, just a few jagged concrete struts remaining here and there, like the last few tenacious teeth in a crone’s rotting mouth.

      Towering above the devastated streets like a two-fingered salute from some blank-faced god sitting in silent judgment, the last struts of the central Administrative Monolith remained, their jagged peaks clawing at the rain-heavy clouds that trundled disinterestedly over the inconstant sky. The Administrative Monolith had once been the radiant jewel in the city’s tiara of lights, but it was now hardly a shadow of its former self, just a few spindly posts all that remained as though marking the place where once there had been high walls. The struts leaned sideways like some ruddy-faced drunkard trying to find his bearings, a few smashed windows and chunks of masonry clinging to its otherwise lost structure as though the building’s body had been eaten away by cancer. The smaller structures around it had fared little better; it was as if the whole fabric of the ville had been struck by some virulent disease, an architect’s cancer.

      Swooping down from above, circling through the jagged shards of buildings, carrion birds cawed their bitter cries of possession as they spied new morsels to feast upon among the rotting flesh that still clung to the bones of those most recently deceased.

      Three living figures trudged among the ruins, masks over their faces to protect them from the corrupted air and the stench of death that hung all about.

      The shortest of the figures looked somewhat like the Angel of Death herself. Her skin was a pallid shock of chalky whiteness, like something carved of bone, her eyes a ruby red like the flaming depths of Satan’s realm. Like her skin, her hair was white as a specter, cut short to accentuate her feral eyes. She was a petite figure, dressed in a protective shadow suit of a light weave that clung to her lithe body like a second skin, drawing attention to the bird-thin limbs and small, pert breasts that jutted from her diminutive form like some perfectly imagined china doll. She had added a light jacket over the shadow suit, reaching down past her hips but still loose enough to allow ample movement, its material the black of the Grim Reaper’s shroud. Her name was Domi and she was one-third of a field team sent out by Cerberus to investigate the remains of the destroyed ville.

      Snakefishville had been one of the nine great baronies constructed across North America under the instruction of the hybrid barons. Once the barons had been revealed to be the chrysalis state for the higher, godlike beings known as the overlords, their baronies had been left leaderless, struggling to fend for themselves. Just a few weeks ago, a terrible earthquake had struck Snakefishville and several other communities, mortally wounding them like an assassin’s final blow. Operatives from Cerberus, a military-style group dedicated to the preservation of humanity in the face of the rising threat of the Annunaki, had been present during Snakefishville’s destruction. But it was only now, a few weeks after the event, that they had returned to survey the full extent of the damage and to scout for salvage.

      Domi hated jobs like this. Though an operative for Cerberus, she was a wildling at heart, a child born of the Outlands. Being cooped up in a ville, even one as utterly scragged as this one was, set her teeth on edge. She looked around her, swatting flies away from her face as she took in the chunks of masonry, the cracked metal ribs of the broken buildings. If there was a Hell, Domi thought, it would probably look something like this—a ville with nothing left to offer but its own festering corpse.

      Clambering over the fractured remnants of the main street came Domi’s two partners. Both of them were dressed in loose clothes with masks over their mouths. The first was a man called Edwards, whose shaved head and wide shoulders made him an imposing form even with his features obscured by the mask. Edwards’s hair was cropped so close to his scalp that his head shone in the sunlight, drawing attention to his bullet-bitten right ear. Edwards had the bearing of a military man and the patience of a raging inferno. Beside him came a man called Harrington, with pince-nez glasses and dark hair streaked with white that fell past his shoulders in a series of neatly layered steps. Harrington was consulting a handheld Geiger counter as the three of them made their way across the wrecked ville, scouring the rubble.

      “Radiation’s at normal,” Harrington confirmed, stumbling for a moment as his foot got caught in a rut in the ruined roadway.

      “Careful there, Poindexter,” Edwards growled, grabbing the scientist’s elbow and yanking him out of the pothole.

      A few paces ahead, Domi stopped in her tracks and stared up at the spindly struts of the Administrative Monolith, watching as tar-feathered carrion birds circled around in its updrafts, nesting in the jutting metal bones that had once held a nearby structure together. Domi’s ruby eyes scanned the broken glass of the last remaining windows, searching for movement among the wreckage. As if on cue, a gull came swooping out of one of the shattered windows, its feathers a smoky gray, its impressive wingspan reaching almost three feet. The gull shrieked its ugly call as it took off, a pinkish morsel of bloody meat held in its claws.

      As Domi watched, a trio of black carrion birds swooped down at the gull, chasing it through the jagged teeth of buildings that were all that remained of the once-proud ville. The birds flew around one of the lopsided building shells, disappearing from Domi’s sight in a clamor of ugly squawks.

      Harrington peered up from the plate of the Geiger counter at the noise, taking in the abandoned ville as if for the first time. “This is weird,” he commented.

      “What’s that?” Edwards asked, glancing back at the scientist as he climbed a mound of rubble that had once been a residential block.

      “This place,” Harrington said. “Like walking through a cemetery.”

      Domi shot Harrington and Edwards a look, hushing them immediately. “People