The news reached Ur on the wind, whispered by traders with wide eyes. Lulal was back. Not as a broken supplicant, but as a herald. He stood at the gates of the garden city he had helped build, but he did not enter. He stood outside, and with him was a force—a ragged, desperate army of refugees from the plague-ravaged lands, the very people Enki's quarantine had been designed to keep out.
Gilgamesh was a silent, formidable shadow at his side, his presence a magnet for the disaffected and the strong.
Enki walked out to meet him. The two men stood facing each other, the irrigation canal Lulal had designed flowing between them like a symbol of all they had shared, and all that now separated them.
"Master," Lulal said. The title was no longer one of respect, but a weapon.
"Lulal," Enki replied, his voice heavy with a foreboding he had carried for months.
"I went to the west," Lulal began, his voice loud, carrying to the refugees and the people of Ur who had gathered on the walls. "I sought the Green Lady. And I found her. I found them all. Seb, who watches plagues like a mathematician watches ants burn under a lens. Cleo, who preserves perfect life in a garden and calls the suffering outside 'aesthetic noise'. And Ava, the Mother, who would rather let a forest burn than risk a single, un-approved sapling."
He took a step forward, his eyes blazing with a pain that had curdled into fury.
"And they told me why you let my family die."
Enki went very still. The dilemma of the wall in Uruk had been a choice of action. This was a dilemma of the soul.
"It's not that you couldn't save them," Lulal shouted, his voice cracking. "It's that you were forbidden! A law! A 'Divine Interdiction'! You lied to me not to protect me, but because some cosmic rulebook told you to! You let my sisters, my mother, my father... you let them burn to ash to stay in compliance with your wager!"
The crowd murmured, confused but sensing the seismic shift.
"All of this," Lulal swept his arm towards the thriving city of Ur, "is just evidence for your trial! We are not your people! We are your scrapbook! You are not our guardian. You are the Ikannuna's scribe, taking notes on our suffering!"
The Divine Interdiction was a physical pressure in Enki's chest, a stone in his throat. He could not explain the cosmic court, the stakes of the 6,000-year thesis. To do so would be to break the rules. His silence was a wall, and Lulal was shattering himself against it.
"You see?" Lulal yelled to the refugees. "He has no answer! His garden is a lie! It is a pretty cage where he nurtures us until the day we are judged and found wanting! Uruk offered you control and death. Ur offers you a pretty lie and death. I offer you the truth!"
He paced before them, a conductor before a broken orchestra. Then, he stopped. A terrible, performative calm settled over him. He looked directly at Enki, a cruel smile twisting his lips.
"But he did teach me one true thing," Lulal announced, his voice dropping to a intimate, venomous pitch. "He taught me that truth has a shape. That memory can have a sound."
He began to hum. It was a low, familiar drone that coiled through the tense air. Then he started to sing, not with the awe of a student, but with the sneer of a prosecutor.
It was "Enki's Hailstorm."
But he corrupted it. The resilient, hopeful theme—the melody of the green shoots that had inspired a city—he sang it slow and dragging, a funeral dirge. The chaotic, percussive notes of the storm he turned into a sharp, mocking rhythm, clapping his hands together like the cracking of a whip, a sound of divine punishment.
"See the green shoot, so proud and tall," he sang, his voice dripping with false piety.
"Here comes the hail, to make it fall!
The gardener watches, so wise and grand,
with a notebook open in his hand!
He writes the sound of breaking stems,
For the Judges in their cold, starry realms!
So bend your head, and know your place,
You're just a line of grace… in his case."
He had taken the song of resilience, the anthem of their shared struggle to build Ur, and turned it into a nursery rhyme of nihilism. The beauty was stripped away, leaving only a skeleton of bitterness. It was a spiritual vandalism, a defilement of the most sacred artifact of their partnership.
The refugees, who had never heard the original, heard only this cynical, catchy taunt. A few, caught in the rhythm of his rage, even began to shuffle their feet to the mocking clap. The twisted melody was etching itself into their minds, replacing a potential memory of grace with one of betrayal.
Gilgamesh, standing behind Lulal, watched with narrowed eyes. He heard the original song in his memory—the complex, powerful dialogue of struggle and hope that Enki had played by a campfire. What he heard now was a petty, hollow echo. It was in that moment he saw the true depth of Lulal's break: it wasn't just a fracture of trust, but a corruption of the soul. The demigod's fists clenched, not at Enki, but at the desecration he was being forced to witness.
Enki did not react with anger. He stood, utterly still, as if each distorted note was a physical blow. Lulal wasn't just accusing him. He was murdering their past, turning a memory of shared beauty into a weapon. The Quiet Wrath in Enki's heart did not burn; it froze into a core of absolute, desolate sorrow. He was witnessing the death of a song, and it was a more profound loss than the death of any city.
Lulal finished his grotesque performance, his chest heaving. The silence that followed was colder than any hailstorm.
"That," Lulal spat, his voice raw, "is the true song of this garden. A pretty lie, hiding the storm of indifference. I offer you a different truth! A truth that does not hide behind pretty music!"
The song, now poisoned, hung in the air. It was no longer a hymn of Ur, but the anthem of the disillusioned. And Enki could only bear witness to the destruction of one of the most beautiful things he had ever created. The evidence for the defense had just been weaponized for the prosecution.