A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) (11 page)

The origination of the Nephilim begins with a story of the fallen angels. Shemhazai, an angel of high rank, led a sect of angels in a descent to earth to instruct humans in righteousness. The tutelage went on for a few centuries, but soon the angels pined for the human females. After lusting, the fallen angels instructed the women in magic and conjuring, mated with them, and produced hybrid offspring: the Nephilim.

The Nephilim were gigantic in stature. Their strength was prodigious and their appetites immense. Upon devouring all of humankind’s resources, they began to consume humans themselves. The Nephilim attacked and oppressed humans and were the cause of massive destruction on the earth.

—
Judd H. Burton

Encyclopedia Mythica, Judaic Mythology, Nephilim

4

Tactics

T
ylurnis reeled in the ecstasy of her and Uranna’s new exalted status.
We have ridden with the gods in the heart of the sacred disk!
We have reached the glory of Q’Enukki and surpassed all his sons!

It was enough to make her forget the loss of her two titan husbands and the breakdown of their divine father’s plan to crush the Basilisk in Aeden.
Samyaza will recover
—
he’s a god, after all.

She wasn’t so sure about her sister and Isha’Tahar.

Moments ago, the sacred disk had deposited them back at the Great Pyramid in Assur’Ayur, before disappearing into the night.

Tylurnis did not know how long they had traveled through its brilliant other-world spaces
, from the site of the crashed command astra in the Haunted Lands—it could have been minutes or months. Samyaza’s disk had seemed larger from the inside than it had on the outside. The experience was disjointed and phantasmagorical, filled with starry lights and strange voices she could feel, like soft hands caressing her mind and body.
How could the Basilisk be the source of something that felt so full and right?

Her father’s last warning sounded again in her thoughts, growing more distant and unreal each time:
“I’m begging you, ‘Nissa, ‘Ranna, don’t go into that thing!”
A’Nu-Ahki had said.
“The Basilisk owns Samyaza and his Watchers heart and soul!”

Only then
, did the skanky smell of her own sweat hit her nostrils, along with an even fouler sickly sweet reek that also clung to her skin.

Tylurnis shook her head and smiled, while she walked silently toward the Golden Pyramid.
Somehow, the reek slowly became a perfume rather than a stench. She doubted her father and baby brother would escape the Haunted Lands so easily.

Isha’Tahar
needed a stretcher to transport her. Somewhere along the way, Temple acolytes had replaced the attending gods as her bearers.

Uranna had remained dazed and silent since they had broken company with their father at the crash site
.
Tylurnis lost her smile.
He’s probably in the belly of some gryndel matriarch by now. What’s that do to your precious apocalypse, Father? We both lose!

The revelation came just as she stepped into the cool darkness of the Temple.
Why should I have to lose
—
or my sister? Samyaza has taken us as his permanent wives, now that his sons are dead!
Then she remembered what the strange voices in the sacred disk had spoken. Tylurnis thought,
Samyaza grieves for Isha’Tahar, though she is not yet dead. He wants a new first wife and a new mouthpiece not so feeble with age; yet mature enough to know how the world operates
—
and he’s always been attracted to twins!

All he needs is a new model for his vision when he recovers.

The ideas flooded into
‘Nissa’s head, as if heaven’s wisdom emptied itself into her thirsty mind. She thought she heard the rush of mighty waters filling—ever filling—until her thoughts floated skyward and sharpened to perfect starlight clarity. Everything finally made sense.

Tylurnis knew that
Samyaza would visit her and her sister soon, if not that very night.

She would know what to do when the time came.

rch-tacticon Inguska laid his sky-lord uniform aside for the last time. It was too painful to look at. His career had been one long journey of disappointment and defeat, haunted by tantalizing specters of promised success that had always vanished, just as they wooed him into their grasp.

First had been his acceptance into the Demigods during the Century War, then into the Second Sky-lords Division—only to have their mighty
Vimana
airships made obsolete by Lumekkor’s aerodrones, and sent to inner border patrol. When he had risen by diligence and sharp eyes to command his own airship, fate snatched it quickly from him by the cruelest irony.

He’d had the success of his mission in his hands. He had destroyed an enemy spy chariot that had probed Assuri’s borders through the Haunted Lands, which stretched like a vast moat of river, jungle, and swamp, with an inner wall of mountains
, between Assuri and its enemies. Inguska had captured two of the spy chariot’s operators alive for interrogation, even after the vehicle’s sky-cannons had massacred many airships like his own. Then, just as he had returned to his own vessel with his prize, everything changed.

A second enemy war chariot
burst through the trees and had destroyed his
Vimana
, with its crew, in a burst of sky-cannon fire. He and the very commanding titan of Second Sky-lords, who had entrusted himself to his care, had been captured. That was when the real humiliation began throughout some fifty years as a prisoner of war in the distant slave labor camps of Lumekkor.

His two prisoners from the enemy spy chariot became his captors for the remainder of their journey to Lumekkor’s camp. To make it worse, one of them had treated him with pity! Not just pity, but a wholly contemptible kindness unlike anything Inguska had ever known. It was as though the war itself
was meaningless.
An enemy should treat a captured Demigod as the danger that he is!
My lack of stigmata caused him to assume that I was a lowborn man of earth like himself;
though, I didn’t prove dangerous to them in the end, did I?

Inguska sealed the lid on his uniform in its ivory box. He would never forget the face of that liberated prisoner who had stripped him of his dignity.
They had at least crippled my titan by smashing his kneecaps and cutting his horns! Me they had thought so little of that they left me tied with common rope in the care of a kindly philosopher, who protected me as if I was a woman! I was ready to die for you, Samyaza!

For fifty years
, Inguska languished at one of Lumekkor’s easier labor camps, half glad and wholly humiliated for avoiding a sentence to Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi’s Tartaros mine pits, where the Alliance chained titans like mere beasts in hard labor, flame, and torment deep beneath the earth.

Inguska’s repatriation after the war had only added to his weight of shame.
Lumekkor disbanded the Demigods, and had Samyaza’s armies publicly stripped of their weapons and authority. Many had hidden, only to be turned-in by mobs of angry city dwellers that months earlier had worshipped them as gods and heroes. It was not until the entire region threatened to collapse into lawlessness that the occupying overlords agreed to allow the Lord of Heaven a force of priestly constables to help keep order.

Thirty years
, Lumekkor had stayed to “re-organize” things. They thought so little of Samyaza that they even allowed him to keep his Temple at Assur’Ayur. They cared only to rob Assuri’s bounty, and rebuild his sacred industries just enough to milk them forever. They still robbed Assuri of his rightful place in the world—still trampled the Lord of Heaven under their feet—though now they shod their feet in velvet instead of iron.

Assuri’s people ate their fill and thought no more of the Eternal Struggle and the Great God’s Mouthpiece on Earth—except in certain outlying districts, like the one Inguska had grown up in. The rural peasants had retained some fear of Heaven’s Mouthpiece, while the rich ports and rubber plantations had coddled every enemy vice.

The Final Assault was supposed to have changed all that.

After the overlords from
Bab’Tubila left forty years ago, Samyaza had quietly regained control of the sacred industries. Slowly, he had found and punished the malcontents in the cities, one by one, until the people knew that their true lord had taken shape again. That was when the old sky-lords had been called together, and after a few years more, openly re-instituted with a ragtag fleet of ancient
Vimanas
and a few old aerodrones that had just barely survived the Century War.

It had been enough sky power to crush a major rebellion among the rubber plantations between Meldur and Satyurati, however.
Inguska himself had led the raid that killed the insurrection’s leader—a fat rubber farmer named Telemnuk—who burned with the last of his usurpers inside his own tree mansion, when the missiles from Inguska’s ship detonated. That earned Inguska the next-highest possible rank he could achieve with his bloodline.

He
remembered his recommissioning at the beginning of the Plantation Rebellion as a sub-tacticon. The honor seemed dubious, and his promotion only slightly less so, until the High Titans, Ivvayi and Ayyaho, had briefed the Demigods on their new strategic goal after putting down the Rebellion.

Instead of flailing uselessly at the Great Basilisk’s many strong arms, as they had done in the Century War, they would crush its head—just as the Prophecy of Hope had predicted from the dawn of time.

For the first time, Samyaza’s Temple enthusiastically began to encourage trade and technical assistance from Lumekkor. It had allowed select Assurim emigration to other parts of the world—especially to places where Tubaal-qayin’s Industrial Guild had key manufacturing facilities and interests. Within a few short years, the plans for an advanced astra engine were smuggled into Assur’Ayur. Samyaza then enlightened his priestly engineers accordingly for the new work at hand.

The construction of the Great Phoenix Air Fleet had taken another twenty years, during which Inguska had made the rank of
arch-tacticon, and trained in the new form of sky chariot. After ten more years of additional tactical training and development, the Day of Glory had arrived.

Inguska had been so sure of success. They all were.
The strike on Aeden should have been a higher form of victory—not achieved by muddy land army rabble, but clean and swift—where Demigods of mingled human and divine blood fell upon their enemy from the sky like true sons of heaven.

The twin titan sons of Samyaza
should have landed in what had once been the Sacred Orchard, to reclaim it in their father’s name for E’Yahavah A’Nu, to fulfill the prophecy that the dragon-slaying Woman’s Seed
would crush the Basilisk’s head! Yet again, the spectral sirens of success and victory had danced before Inguska’s eyes, whispering their hollow promises in his ears with their whorish skill.

Again
, he had dared to believe.

Nevertheless, the Great Basilisk had somehow been too strong and too well dug-in
—again. The Final Assault had failed; Ivvayi and Ayyaho died, enveloped in the Serpent’s fiery coils, crushed from the sky like swatted flies. Inguska’s astra had made it back to Satyurati with its control surfaces barely intact—the only survivor from his division.
Why am I always doomed to survive?
He slid the ivory box into his wardrobe, and closed the door on it, fighting a bitter tear that threatened to escape his eye.

When Inguska turned, he
found one of his concubines standing at the arch of his private chambers. “How long have you been standing there watching me, Dhiva?”

“Forgive the intrusion, my Lord. There is a Temple messenger in the greeting alcove with a summons from Assur’Ayur.” She looked down at his feet lest their eyes should meet.
A woman should not see her Lord when tears are so close to his eyes.

“See to his comfort. I shall be out presently.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

Inguska took a few minutes after Dhiva left to wipe his eyes and compose himself.
What can the Temple possibly want of me now? They must be rounding up the survivors to make us pay for failing the Lord of Heaven.
Perhaps I can go to die with the dignity that fate has denied me in life.