Book one
Book one(excerpt)
Nimrod:Lost son of Sumeria
"Our father has sent me here to once again to ask you to come home brother. Sumeria needs you. It is not honorable for you to continue here among the vermin, drinking and marrying, while the heavy burden of Sumeria's very survival rest almost solely on the supreme One's over burdened shoulders."
Nimrod looked at his younger brother with an odd mixture of delight, surprise and a tinge of disapproval. It has been over twenty seasons since he'd last seen his redheaded sibling.
Azazel was just a boy of six summers, when he turned his back on the city and states built by their father to go forth and live among the people he privately called WoMans. He was glad to see his brother after all the time that has passed, still he chafed at hearing Azazel call the little people vermin. And the reasons for that were many.
All Sumerians, he well knew, referred to the little people of the Lowlands as vermin, or sometimes, chattel, but Nimrod had not been among his own people for so long he had forgotten the sound of the word. His ears once took in that sound like his lungs took in air, but now it resounded to him every bit the ugly foulness that it was. If Azazel thought to accomplish more than all the others who had come before him, he couldn't have started off on a worse footing. With one word he had brought rushing back to Nimrod's mind everything he had left Sumeria for.
Nimrod, publicly, called the little people "Halfhighs" because most of them were little more than half the height of the average Sumerian. Some of them, he called wife, son and daughter, and he knew Azazel had to have been made aware of that. But maybe the boy forgot his manners to the subconscious mind of habit.
Anyway, it was still a joy to see the whelp, but he could not help wondering what new thing young Azazel expected to achieve. He had been through this before with others from Sumeria and his response had always, and always will be the same.
Nothing can save Sumeria. The 'Shining City' had been built on the bones, blood, and toil of untold millions of Innocents. It was an abomination in the face of all in the universe that is right, good and just; a cruel, grotesque monument to an insane Magician's lust to play at being Creator. He had no intentions of returning to Ur to help Onanes prop of his illusion for a little while longer. Better the Giants go quietly and swiftly than thrashing about, prolonging the misery for everyone.
The Giants of Sumeria has lorded over the earth since time unknown. They were his people but he never knew them until he was seventeen seasons old. When he finally met their acquaintance, all he ever wanted more to do with them, was to crush them off the backs of the little people.
He had fallen into a deep depression, he discovered that everything he ever believed to be right, good and true in the world were nothing but spokes, in a giant wheel of deception, lies and illusions. He had been stripped of his anchor to reality, learned things about all that he trusted and loved more than life itself, that left him hating life, and himself, for being such a naive dupe of evil.
He thought the darkness that had fallen over his once bright, carefree world was never going to end because each new day, every investigation into the truth, only lead to more disillusionment and more mental anguish. He was young, and had no one to talk to about his feelings because in all Sumeria, he felt like he was the only thing that was real, the only one who could see beyond the glitter and pretensions, into the real core of what Onanes had built.
Then one day, a strange old man suddenly appeared in the high city.
He was born of the Giants, but none in the shining city knew him as father or grandfather. More strangely than even that, Onanes had avoided the newcomer like the plague, even though the gnarled finger the old man pointed at Sumeria was aimed most of all at the great Sorcerer who had created it all.
Nimrod was eighteen seasons old when he first heard the prophecies of the one in Sumeria the Giants called "old Lunatic." The despised one's real name was Sungodyus. He was toothless, bent and possessed of a deep, booming voice that belonged with a far bigger man. The rest of the Giants hated him for what he had to say with such annoying volume, but the man's words struck a chord deep in Nimrod's heart at a point in his life when he desperately needed affirmation that the things he was seeing and feeling about Sumeria wasn't isolated to him and just born of one rare incident. No, it wasn't an anomaly, this great wrong that he experienced and sensed in Onanes' world, it was the real Sumeria, and Sungodyus' message had finally given reality to what he thought no one but he could see.
He became a student of the old prophet and for two years sat devoted at his feet despite the fact that those bloody and scarred feet were ever without boots or sandals, and any other Sumerian would have found the old pauper, whose tattered clothes and unkempt hair, which had twisted into thick ropes that hung shamefully past the length of the glory of most women-- too contemptible to spit on, much less, look up to as a mentor. To Nimrod, a beloved mentor was exactly what Sungodyus the "lunatic" became.
Nimrod had once offered the homeless man everything afforded the son of the richest Sorcerer on earth and the old Sage had not just refused his heartfelt proffer, he aggressively accused Nimrod of being a stumbling stone in his path.
Nimrod hated with a passion to see the prophet getting thinner and more bent every day. He hated to see the battered feet and angry bruises that yet another attack from the Giants of Sumeria, had inflicted on the weak old man. Many a day, in the beginning, he wanted to fight and avenge Sungodyus for all the pain and shame, the Giants heaped upon his head. He had transferred all the love and reverence he lost for Onanes and Sumeria, unto Sungodyus. Then he began to notice that Sungodyus reveled in his treatment as he traveled up and down the length of Sumeria, subsisting on nothing but ridicule, abuse, and the grubs and sparse offering, freely taken of the earth. The worse the assaults, the louder and more animated Sungodyus performed in his speeches, and the harder he attacked Nimrod for his pity and concern.
It was Sungodyus, who taught Nimrod how to understand and live with his growing ability to see and do things no normal man could. When it became clear to Nimrod that his beloved teacher was dying, he had risked again being painfully chastised by trying to help the old man. He had by then, made up his mind to leave Sumeria to live among the Halfhighs. He wanted Sungodyus to come with him, into the comfort of his care and away from all the hate and abuse, which was all he ever got from the Giants of Sumeria. Sungodyus, again refused him, this time with less vigor, saying only that he was sent to preach to the doomed, not the blessed. Like a lot of things Sungodyus said, which Nimrod didn't understand until later, he didn't know, then, what Sungodyus meant by calling the Halfhighs blessed. If the little people were blessed, he couldn't begin to imagine what a curse on them would be like.
Three days after that conversation Sungodyus died, but not of the old age, and poor health that was a clear harbinger of his immediate future; it was to the wrath and stones of the Giants, who had finally reached their fill of his incessant disturbance, that Nimrod's beloved teacher lost his life.
Three weeks after Sungodyus' death, Nimrod left Sumeria for good. He was twenty summers old, thrice married, a father of one, and as he set out for the Lowlands with nothing but a pack on his back...determined never to return...he was also alone.
Nimrod never did sort out in his mind how much his mentor's stoning had on his decision to leave Sumeria, to live with the Halfhighs. He intended to abandon Onanes' city on a hill, even before the murder of the prophet, but to link his fate with the Halfhighs meant more than just breaking all ties with the high city, much more. He had a vision of himself, leading the Halfhighs in an attack on the gates of Sumeria. He knew that was his destiny. He hadn't quite reconciled himself with it yet, but the one thing he did know was that even if he resisted helping the little people destroy Sumeria, he wasn't going to help Onanes destroy the little people.
Sungodyus' cruel death was a factor in his decision to leave his father's creation, but it was only one of many, and maybe not even the most prominent one. He and Sungodyus had more in common than just the ability to see through Onanes' illusion; they both could see, and feel the energy building against Sumeria. The great Will of creation, had determined Sumeria's fate. Sungodyus had his role in fulfilling what was destined. So did Nimrod.
Weeks before his death, Nimrod had witnessed Sungodyus, glowing with the atoms of the Will of creation, as he pronounced a terrible curse on the Giants of Sumeria. It was then that he understood why Sungodyus had lived out his waning years in such a state of self-denial and hardship. He did not curse the Giants out of anger, or from a spirit of vengeance at how they treated him; he was announcing the desires of creation. He was compelled to give voice to terrible things and the more the Giants mistreated him, the easier it made it for him to live with being a prophet of such horrible judgment and doom.
Sungodyus was just the first harbinger of the bad news regarding the future of the Giants, for soon after his curse, the skies began to foretell more of the fate that awaited the lords of the earth.