"Annanu, look, this is our child."
Nanshe stroked the sleeping Kurgarru's cheek and spoke to Annanu with a face full of affection.
Annanu's face darkened. He wanted nothing more than to strangle Nanshe on the spot.
"Get lost, get lost. They're just clay dolls I molded. What child?"
He grabbed Nanshe by the collar and hauled her up. "Get up already. It's time to wake them."
Just as Nanshe had said before, Kurgarru and Galatur, as clay figures, possessed immense malleability. Yet for centuries, Ishtar had done nothing to help them become beings with true substance. Now, Uruk—and Annanu and Enkidu before them—had benefited from that.
Still, the method of alteration had indeed been exceedingly crude.
Annanu, Enkidu, and Nanshe had practically remade Kurgarru and Galatur from top to bottom, turning them into weapons that functioned as a single whole and would produce an absolute inert reaction toward divinity. This meant that their pasts had almost been completely denied, and they would be reborn into this world as entirely new lives.
Though perhaps he had no right to say it, Annanu felt—
This wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
Could a life that had never obtained a self truly be called a life?
But even if the three of them truly had no right to do this, Annanu would still stubbornly do it, because the true beneficiaries of this matter were by no means Kurgarru and Galatur. If anything, they would become tools to be used by others.
To protect himself and those he loved, Annanu would erase Kurgarru and Galatur's pasts.
That was the necessary evil they were committing—an evil that required no justification.
"Wake up."
Standing before Nanshe and Enkidu, Annanu awakened the two clay figures.
Kurgarru and Galatur opened their eyes at the same time and immediately sat