This was a turn no one had foreseen—no one, save Rowe, who had prepared for it with deliberate intent.
The temple, moments ago alive with the cadence of prayers and ritual, now drowned in silence. Yet that silence was not empty. Every soul present felt it: the swelling tide of wrath that coiled around the King of Uruk like a storm yet to break.
It was inevitable.
Since his birth, Gilgamesh had never endured insult, never once been scolded to his face. Not by his mortal father, the former king. Not by his divine mother, Ninsun, the all-knowing goddess. To question him was unthinkable. To ridicule him—before god and man—unprecedented.
"Your Majesty, this was… an accident…"
The High Priest, aged and trembling, stepped forward. His lips quivered, words fumbling from a mind gone blank. He could not fathom why Rowe, a young man he had deemed loyal and respectful, would commit such blasphemy. Some part of him clung to the hope that it was a mistake of transcription—that Rowe had not meant to provoke.
Even now, he sought to defend him.
But his loyalty was wasted breath.
Gilgamesh's scarlet eyes slid toward him, pupils slitted like a serpent's. The gaze alone froze the old priest in place. A chill emanated from that stare, like the cold of Irkalla's deepest caverns.
"Did this King give you permission to speak, you mongr—"
The word, so often on his tongue, halted. Gilgamesh's jaw tightened. The insult carved into the clay tablet still echoed in his mind. To utter it now, as though confirming Rowe's barb, felt like conceding defeat. His expression twisted, unsightly with suppressed fury.
The weight of his presence bore down upon the hall. Priests, servants, guards—every one of them fell to their knees, pressed low beneath the demigod king's divine aura.
Gilgamesh was not merely human. His blood carried the essence of the gods. When his anger stirred, it pressed upon the world with an authority that made lesser beings tremble.
All knelt.
All but one.
Rowe alone remained upright.
He had once held power from the very source itself. Though now sealed within the Throne of Heroes, its residue lingered in his soul. Gilgamesh's killing intent was heavy, crushing—but it could not bend him.
Rowe's heart brimmed with satisfaction. The sharper Gilgamesh's rage became, the sweeter Rowe's triumph felt. He met the king's glare with a smile—not placating, but mocking, the smile of one who welcomed his enemy's fury.
Gilgamesh's crimson eyes grew colder still.
"You dare. Mongrel… Have you considered the consequences of provoking me, the great and glorious King? You lowly worm." His voice was ice wrapped in thunder.
The crimson lines etched across his body began to glow, divine circuits igniting with god-born might. The temple quaked as though nature itself answered him.
Yet Rowe did not flinch.
"Who can claim not to be lowly?" he retorted, voice steady and bright. "Greatness is always relative, but lowliness—lowliness is eternal. I may be weaker than you, but you are weaker than the gods. And the gods themselves are but insects before the vastness of the Root and the universe. Who, then, can claim eternal greatness?"
His words struck like steel against stone.
"But at least," Rowe continued, his tone rising, "I possess this understanding. You, oh so-called King, do not."
His smile gleamed like a blade.
"Tell me, Gilgamesh: do you only brandish your weapons at your subjects? Do you only wield your crown to crush those who kneel to you in loyalty? What is the worth of such rule?"
Gasps rippled through the kneeling crowd, but Rowe pressed forward, his voice now ringing through the temple.
"I will tell you what a King should be."
"A King is the protector of his people. A King is the one who shelters his nation, who bears the weight of its destiny. But you? You call yourself King, yet you trample your citizens beneath your heel. You revel in tyranny, measuring all things by your whims, blind to their suffering. You strip them of dignity, treating them not as people but as toys, property for your amusement."
Rowe's voice sharpened, conviction surging like a tide.
"Are you fit to be King?"
His words rose to a crescendo, each syllable a hammer strike against the golden tyrant.
"Gilgamesh—"
He cast aside honorifics, calling the King by name before all of Uruk. It was rebellion, pure and unmasked.
"You are nothing but a mongrel!"
The temple seemed to quake at the declaration. Rowe's face flushed with passion, his eyes alight. He stood not as a priest, nor even as a man resigned to death, but as one who had seized the moment to carve words into history.
Gilgamesh's expression shifted. The frost in his gaze deepened into calm, a calm more dreadful than fire.
Calling the King by his name in the sacred hall was the sort of breach that would have sent lesser men quivering. In Uruk, to name the sovereign without honor was to unmake order itself. Yet when Rowe said it, Gilgamesh did not erupt. Instead his muscles coiled and his expression smoothed into a terrifying calm—the silence before the storm. Those who knew the King best understood that this stillness was the truest sign of his fury.
Rowe's words, audacious and blunt, did something nobody else had dared: they reflected back to the people what they had already felt, whispered in alleys and market stalls but never voiced at court. Gilgamesh's reign—brilliant, violent, capricious—had long been a double-edged thing: it raised Uruk to splendor while crushing those beneath it. The people knew it; the priests knew it; the Old Priest had long feared it. But until this moment no one had spoken thus, under the very statue of Anu, before the King's face.
The realization rippled through the assembly. Eyes lifted from the floor. Faces that had been slackened by fear found a sudden hardness. The Old Priest himself, who had doubted and defended in equal measure, could not hold back tears. Rowe had not been a mistake—he had chosen this moment and laid bare his heart for the city. The old man's relief and pride burst free at once.
Gilgamesh's voice broke the hush—low, cold, and precise. "Are you finished?" The dome trembled with the weight of that single question. The red circuits along his skin glowed brighter, a living sigil of the divine power coiled within him. It was a question that presaged punishment; in Uruk, to enrage the demigod king invited swift and absolute retribution.
Yet Rowe did not bow. Where most men would beg, he leaned into the moment. If the King's wrath was the mechanism by which Rowe meant to make history, then Rowe welcomed the machinery. He had come to this with both eyes open; lightest chastisement would be a failure. So he pushed.
"Finished?" Rowe shot back, voice ringing through the chamber. "Of course not."
He stepped forward, every syllable sharpened by intention. "Gilgamesh—do you believe your crown makes you above consequence? That being chosen by heaven grants you the right to trample the weak? You wield demigod power and call it justice, but justice is not tyranny. No one—no one—can claim the right to crush their own people."
The priests' dances had stopped; the smoke hung in the air like a suspended question. Rowe's words moved through the room with strange clarity, each phrase landing where doubts had been gathered for years.
"Uruk is a city made by human hands," he continued, voice steady. "We built this place from earth and stone. This is our home. Our King should be chosen by the people, should stand as the protector of the people—not their master. You treat this nation as your private domain; you treat its people as playthings, disposed of at whim. Do you deserve the name of King?"
The name—Gilgamesh—left Rowe's lips again, used not as title but as indictment. "You are unworthy." He let the words settle. The declaration was simple; its gravity enormous.
Under the pressure of his grip, the clay tablet in Gilgamesh's hand began to fail. Hairline cracks skittered across its face. With a series of brittle snaps it shattered, fragments scattering like rain to the temple floor. For a moment Rowe felt a flicker of regret—he had wished this tablet might survive to bear witness—but the loss was small. The testament had already been spoken and the air had been altered.
Rowe's eyes swept the crowd. He spoke then the lines he had prepared to leave as his last testament: "Kill me if you must. I am one man. But mark this—after I fall, the people will not lie quiet forever. There will be those who rise when tyranny grows too great. My death will be a seed."
He breathed, the syllables heavy with resolve. "Let it be sung in future generations: that one man stood and named the wrongs done to Uruk. If my blood waters that root, then so be it. I ask for no mercy. I ask only to be remembered."
Silence held for a long moment—broken only by the clink of fallen clay. Around them, the people's faces were no longer only fear-struck. In the old fear there stirred something like recognition: the truth had been spoken at last, and that truth had a weight the King could not erase simply by crushing the speaker.
Rowe's stance was steady. He had not begged for life; he had engineered a moment meant to echo. Whether the Throne of Heroes would notice, whether the Counter Force would find him worthy—the cosmos would decide. For now, he had done what he had come to do: he had made a stand on behalf of Uruk and signed his name with his voice.