Ten summers had passed since the raid. The memory of the desperate lie had faded for most, becoming just another story of survival. But for Ninsun, it had become a quiet, constant truth. The hope for Dagan's return had finally, gently, been laid to rest in her heart. Her life was here, now, with her son.
And her son was the wonder of the village.
Enki, now seventeen and nearing the cusp of his eighteenth summer, was a puzzle. He was quiet, often found staring at the flow of the river or the path of the sun with an intensity that bordered on conversation. The strange dreams that had begun at seven had never left him—flashes of a world of impossible light and a profound, aching loss for a woman named Ninella. They were no longer terrifying, but a familiar, melancholic landscape of his sleep.
But it was what he did while awake that had changed their lives.
It started small. A simple lever-and-fulcrum system to lift the heavy stone that covered the village well, making it safe even for children to draw water. Then, a series of cleverly placed mud-brick channels that diverted the rare, precious rainwater from their roofs into covered storage jars, protecting it from the relentless sun.
He didn't proclaim his ideas. He simply did them. He would spend days observing a problem—the inefficiency of the grain grinders, the spoilage of fish in the heat—and then, as if the solution had always been obvious, he would build.
He designed a fish trap for the river that allowed the small ones to escape, ensuring future catches. He showed the weavers how to create a tighter, more durable pattern by altering the loom's tension. His latest project, one that the elders watched with a mixture of awe and suspicion, was a series of shallow, interconnected ponds and channels on a sun-baked plot of land. He claimed it would let them grow more grain with less water, but it relied on the distant, unreliable river.
"The boy speaks with the earth," the villagers would murmur. "Enki is a blessed name."
Ninsun would smile, a proud, sad smile. She knew it was more than that. She saw the distant look in his eyes when he worked, a focus that was ancient and knowing. He was not just her son anymore. He was a vessel slowly being filled with a wisdom from a place she could not comprehend.
One evening, as they shared a meal of flatbread and stew, she watched him sketch a complex design in the dirt with a stick—a system of gears and weights.
"What is it?" she asked softly.
He didn't look up, his brow furrowed in concentration. "A way to grind grain without someone having to turn the stone all day. The river's current, miles from here, could do the work."
He said it with such simple certainty, as if harnessing the power of a distant river was the most natural thing in the world.
Ninsun reached out, stilling his hand. He finally looked at her, and for a fleeting moment, she saw it—not just her boy, but the ghost of the man who had named him, a man who had believed in a blessing from the earth. And something else, something vast and old and terribly lonely.
"You are a gift, Enki," she whispered, her voice thick with emotion. "A strange and wonderful gift."
He gave her a faint, preoccupied smile, then returned to his sketch, already lost in the world of his own making. The final pieces of a forgotten mind were clicking into place, and the garden he was building was just the beginning. The true harvest was still to come.