Dragon City. James Axler

      Prologue

      We are water.

       The composition of the adult human body is, on average, about sixty percent water. In children the figure is higher, frequently as much as eighty percent. That is to say, up to four-fifths of the human body is water. Which means that every living, breathing person is little more than water sloshing around inside a skin suit like waves against the beach.

       Enlil saw this. Enlil, who saw all of eternity laid out in front of him when he closed his eyes. Enlil, overlord of the ancient Annunaki, the superior race who stood as masters of the Earth.

       The Annunaki had ruled the planet for millennia and their history had been incorporated into human culture as Sumerian myth. Some would argue that, before the Annunaki, there had been no human culture to speak of, that it was all just cave paintings in blood and clubbing one’s fellow apekin with a blunt rock for the duration of each man’s very short life. The Annunaki, by contrast, were an incredibly long-lived race, whose lifespans had been extended even more so by two developments. The first was that each Annunaki shared a group memory of the past, so things that had happened a thousand or a hundred thousand years ago were as vivid to each individual Annunaki as things that had happened just minutes ago. The second development came in the form of their increased longevity courtesy of an artificial rebirthing process, a memory download into their next body shell. In essence, dead Annunaki were reborn, over and over, in new forms, to pick up where they had left off when their previous body had withered and died, their memories infallibly complete.

       In another race, these incredible developments might have led to some form of enlightenment, a mutually agreed upon concept of a higher purpose, a philanthropy even, or perhaps a philosophy that was as far beyond the ability of mortal creatures to comprehend in their own abbreviated lives as the nature of the combustion engine is beyond the ability of a termite to understand. This was not the case in the Annunaki, however. Instead, the near-infinite memory cycles had stultified the whole race, bringing about only a boredom so pervasive, so bone-deep that the whole race seemed destined to die from sheer apathy, the indifference to their own lives consuming them like a flame. That was until Anu, forefather of those who would walk the Earth, had ventured beyond the skies of their home planet of Nibiru, carving a trail through the cosmos in the sacred starship Tiamat and discovering the primitive planet he had named Ki. The planet, known today as the Earth, had been bursting with life, primitive protohumans just dropping out of the trees to make their homes within the warm, dark, womblike embrace of the caves. It must have seemed like a game board to Anu, with pieces beyond number to be placed and tinkered with based on the whims of the bored Annunaki.

       Shortly thereafter, the bored Annunaki had followed Anu, traveling through the starscape until they reached this planet, this Earth, to rediscover what it was to be surprised, even if it was just a little, just for one fleeting second of interest in a lifetime that was beyond measure. The Annunaki had landed in the territories known today as Syria and Iraq, where they had settled. Mistaken by the locals for gods, they had built great cities that acted as expressions of themselves, cities that seemed to challenge the very heavens that they had descended from. The first of these cities was called Eridu, and it nuzzled at the banks of the River Euphrates like an embassy, a piece of foreign real estate amid the humans’ otherwise unspoiled world. Eridu belonged to Enki, brother to Enlil and a prince of the Annunaki royal family. Soon Enlil had his own city, Nippur, and the other members of the royal family established similar territories: Babylon, Ngirsu, Kish and more. Housed within those cities, as the Annunaki found new creatures to toy with, new places to acquire, they began to squabble. Boredom had given way to greed and greed led to envy, and if hate was the only thing keeping boredom at bay then the Annunaki hated wholeheartedly and fought as if their very immortal lives depended upon it.

       But that had all ended approximately four thousand years ago, when the Annunaki seemed to disappear from planet Earth.

       They had not died, these so-called gods. They had merely retreated into the shadows, their squabbles become too overblown. And so their charges—the infant race known as humankind—came to be more prolific and more advanced on the surface of their planet as the Annunaki turned their attentions inward. In a final gesture, Enlil had sought to destroy humankind along with his own slave caste, the Igigi, to wipe this blight from the planet with that weapon of such exquisite irony—the weapon called water. The events that Enlil had set in motion came to be known as the Great Flood, but it had been a simple exercise in pest control, an exercise that had failed thanks to his own brother’s interference.

       And so, from the shadows, Enlil and his brethren watched and waited and secretly guided the events on Earth until they were ready to reveal themselves once more. In the first few years of the twenty-third century, two hundred years after nuclear war had ravaged the planet almost beyond repair, the starship Tiamat had reappeared above planet Earth, and the cycle had begun again. The catalyst was set, the Annunaki had been reborn, emerging from the chrysalis shells of the nine hybrid barons who ruled the old territory that had once been known as the United States of America. The Earth, it seemed, was primed and ready for their takeover; humankind would be crushed once and for all beneath their heel. The Annunaki would rule the Earth once again.

       Yet within two years, the plot had failed. The Annunaki, an immortal race who had waited almost four thousand years, guiding humankind’s development from the shadows, orchestrating a nuclear war to thin the population, to cull the herd, had turned on one another once more, and so their promised reign as kings of the Earth was aborted before it had even begun.

       In a final act of despair, Tiamat herself, the wombship that had orchestrated their rebirth, had died, sacrificing herself rather than allowing her wilful children to continue taking shots at one another.

       Or so it had seemed.

       Despite being on board when Tiamat had exploded, Enlil had escaped the fiery destruction via lifeboat, plummeting back to Earth’s soil and bringing with him one single seed that formed the essence of Tiamat herself. The Annunaki were masters of organic technology and they had developed devices that seemed both sentient and lifeless, crossing the boundaries of what it means to be living. Tiamat was one such thing, a dragon-shaped spaceship that was semiliving, that watched and emoted, that felt pain and wished for death. If a spaceship can be said to have a soul, then the seed was that soul.

       Enlil had planted the seed beside the banks of the timeless Euphrates, that place where the Annunaki had first established themselves with the city of Eridu many millennia ago. And all those millennia, all those changes and acts and ticking seconds on the clock, had seemed as nothing to Enlil, who viewed time in terms of his own immortality, and so understood how dull time really was.

       So now he stood on the banks of the rushing Euphrates once more, as he had thousands of years before, his scales glistening in the sunlight like gold washed with blood. A spiny crest probed the air above his head, plucking at the material of the hooded cloak he wore over his majestic form, the golden armor of his own body. The Euphrates rushed on, timeless and ever-mobile, hurtling to its destination as water will, thriving in the journey, not caring about its end.