Shadow Born. James Axler
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tumbling, careening across her own time line, before her father, Enlil, burdened her with the horrible task as punishment for her all-too-human weakness...
...and there was Neekra, bastard child of Enlil, kneeling on the hard floor, her legs curled beneath her shapely thighs, her chin touching her chest, eyes closed.
She didn’t dare open them, even as her father paced in front of her, his ponderous tread shaking the ground for emphasis. Enlil reached down, hooked her chin with a crooked forefinger and drew her to look up at him.
“Open your eyes!” At the sharp command, her eyes popped open and she looked Enlil in the face. He was tall, magnificent, clad in a simple silk sash adorned with a gold chain as his belt. Muscles rippled beneath his fine-scaled skin; Enlil would have been an inspiration to the greatest human sculptors.
As divine as his appearance was, he was also a commanding force, his voice cementing her in place with its deep, vibrating tone.
“Sweet child,” he whispered, a hiss with all the warmth of an Arctic wind. “You disappoint me.”
“I’m...I’m...so sor...” Neekra began.
His fingertip touched her lips together, cutting her off. Neekra was so frightened, even the urge to shiver cowered somewhere between her shoulder blades.
This has to be memory, she thought, and for a moment, Neekra was confused at where that realization came from. This is just a fantasy, a delusion created by my suffering.
I have not feared Enlil in millennia, came the conclusion.
And almost as if the Annunaki overlord had overheard the defiance she’d displayed twenty-five centuries hence, Enlil wrapped his long fingers around her throat and neck, craning her head up.
“I can smell the stink of his sex on you,” Enlil growled.
“I can explain...” Neekra’s younger-self sputtered, not daring to break her stare from his.
“The explanation is simple, my little girl,” Enlil huffed. He slid his fingers through her crimson-streaked black locks, claw-like nails scratching along the back of her head. There had been times when such a caress might have been the beginnings of rough intimacy between herself and the god of her world. Now she felt menace in his clutch. Electric bolts of pain sparked through his nails.
“Please...”
He hurt you, but don’t give him that satisfaction, Neekra thought. Don’t let him have his victory in seeing you cry.
Yet Neekra’s memories had been cast in stone. She could not change that past, that history, and she could not alter the memories that stuck in her brain.
Enlil’s revenge was as unspeakable among the Annunaki as it would be with any less evolved, so-called barbaric race. It was his manipulations, his cruelty that nurtured Neekra into what she was, what she had grown to be. That hate had poisoned her, blackened her soul so that thousands of years could not erase the fury she felt toward her father.
Perhaps she could have found a better way out of the hell she’d been stuck in, a better mentor or lover, a better teacher, someone who could have laid the groundwork for redemption. She’d seen those things inside of Kane’s mind, and the minds of others who’d opposed her spawn, the darkness with which she infested the world. Rather than giving in to hatred for an abusive, sadistic father, she could have found worth in making her life better, making the world better. She could have rebelled like her half sister, Malesh, and fought for independence against the global order that their fouler kin had wrought upon humanity.
Instead, Neekra took solace in the arms of Negari, the Igigi whose affection and intimacy had drawn the wrath of Enlil.
Negari had promised her gifts and talents that would make Enlil tremble before her, rather than lord over her. Work was being done across the planet, on the opposite shores of a mighty ocean, far beneath the waves at one of the deepest realms yet known to the Annunaki. There, in experiments shielded from the rest of the world by six thousand feet of water, 191 atmospheres of pressure, they had discovered a form of life that made even the mightiest of the overlords tremble. Even Enlil himself could not survive the bone-crushing pressures of one and a quarter tons of weight per square inch.
And so Neekra crawled forward in time, further along the path she’d already endured, fully aware that in this fever dream, time passed much more swiftly than in the real world, where Kane and Nehushtan had impaled her, attacking her avatar’s cellular structure with energies equivalent to the output of a dying sun.
Through her continued psychic retreat, she arrived at the night when Negari caressed her ravaged form, working with healing technologies that could negate the torment that Enlil used as his signature on her flesh. The puckered skin, the torn muscle knitted back together. Neekra still felt the rent wounds in her spirit. Even Negari could do little for that, but as he nursed her injuries, kissed and comforted her, gave her tenderness, he whispered of the wonders that they had discovered within the protein structure, a living virus that had brought madness and devastation across the lands of Sumeria until the overlords combined their might to stop it.
“It’s magnificent,” Negari whispered. “It’s one consciousness, a complete mind in each strand of complex molecules, smaller than a single chromosome, yet able to tap into immense knowledge.”
“How can that help us?” Neekra asked. Her injuries faded, and a warm sensuality bathed her entire body, cellular regeneration within the “healing coffin” having an effect on sexual desire.
“It means we can shed these bodies,” Negari said. “And if we wished, we could become one being, or we could exist among the teeming millions of apes sprawled across the face of this planet. Or even further.”
Neekra raised an eyebrow, and Negari answered her curiosity with first a kiss. “We could become the totality of the Annunaki race. They would become puppets, marionettes on strings of self-replicating protein that would infest them.”
“That sounds...tedious,” Neekra responded. She brushed her lover’s cheek.
“It seems like it would be, but the samples we captured, isolated down at the Tongue, they don’t show that feeling of limitation,” Negari said.
“Of course not,” Neekra stated. She smiled. “It’s trying to seduce you. Trying to let it into your brain and then to escape. Father has done everything in his power to limit its existence, yet...”
“Yet he still makes us toil, unraveling the secrets built into it on an atomic scale,” Negari responded. He rose, then gently lowered himself between her open thighs. His hands cupped her face tenderly, his emerald eyes meeting her crimson gaze. “I can advance us without letting the totality loose on the world, without having it infect us. We would be ourselves, mightier than anything this world could hope to contain.”
Neekra reveled as Negari put his words aside and utilized his tongue and lips for other, much more pleasurable things. His kisses, his nibbling of her newly revived flesh provided an escape from the agonies inflicted upon her, at that time from the rage of Enlil, and outside of the memory, from the assault of Kane.
The time of needles came up next, after years of Negari’s experimentation. He’d isolated the particular protein chain that could be turned into the base root of a world-encompassing hive mind. The first experiment was on himself, and slowly the natural telepathy of the Igigi race became stronger. Within him, the proteins reproduced, growing, laying the groundwork of sheathing along his nervous system, which acted as the conducting antenna coil for his thoughts. As soon as that happened, he reached out to Neekra.
He spoke to her, mentally, without outside Annunaki technology, reaching blindly around the globe, over a mile of ocean water or, even more impressively, through the crust of a planet.
That night, Neekra’s body came alive with the touch of a lover who no longer needed to be in the same room. Neekra cried out, thrashing at his ministrations, biting down hard on her lip to prevent her uttering his name.
Still, she was found out. She