"The Harrowed One," Ella whispered.
Selkaris gave her a warning glance, sharp and immediate, but Ella did not retreat. She straightened instead, her human presence somehow steady amid the gathered weight of gods.
"It's time we share what we found," she implored the god.
She stepped forward, hands clasped in front of her, her voice calm but charged with urgency. "Selkaris and I searched the oldest archives," she filled us in. "Not the curated records. The fragments. The pieces that were never meant to survive translation."
Selkaris didn't look happy about Ella divulging this. But she continued, unafraid. "We found repeated references to two names," Ella continued. "Ashera and Caelor. Arkhevari that didn't join them when they entered the Abyss."
The other gods didn't show surprise or recognition. To them, it was just a story; none of them understood its importance yet. Not until Ella looked at me and continued. I wasn't sure what she expected; she almost looked at me like the names should mean something to me. "There are old, ancient stories on Earth referring to a mother and a father of all gods, their names are El and Asherah."
A shiver moved down my spine. Now I understood her meaningful glance. "How ancient?" I asked.
Ella didn't answer right away. She glanced at Selkaris first, then back at me, as if gauging how much truth a human was meant to carry. She drew in a slow breath, as if the answer required care.
"The oldestsurvivingmentions," she explained, "date to the end of the last Ice Age. Roughly twelve to fourteen thousand years ago. Just after the great melt. Just after the seas rose and entire coastlines vanished."
The gods remained quiet; twelve to fourteen thousand years didn't mean anything to them, which only served to make my head spin faster, because… that was a lot of years for us humans, for me.
"But those records aren't written," Ella continued. "Not in any language we'd recognize. They're symbolic, etchedstone, repeated motifs, oral fragments later absorbed into pre-Sumerian cultures."
"Pre-Sumerian," I echoed.
"Yes. Before cities. Before cuneiform. Before history learned how to keep itself tidy." Her gaze sharpened. "What survives are titles, not names.The Luminous One.The Dawn-Bearer.She Who Walks Between Stars."
I felt something click into place. "And the names?"
"They come later. Much later. As cultures fracture and memory degrades." She folded her hands. "Caelor becomesIl,Ilu, then simplyEl. Ashera fractures even more:Asherah,Astarte,Ishtar,Inanna. Her cosmic role stripped away, reduced to fertility, war, anything small enough to survive."
That sounded about right, for one reason or another, history had always tried to negate women's accomplishments. Tried to make them irrelevant.
"That doesn't happen by accident," Dravok picked up, and I felt a wave of love rush through me for him. He would never behold a woman as anything other than magical.
"No," Ella agreed. "It happens when knowledge becomes dangerous."
I had a hard time digesting her words, but I had to ask. "So you think there was… something before that."
The words tasted wrong in my mouth. Not false, just structurally unsound. My mind resisted them the way it always had when faced with claims that threatened to upend established frameworks. I wasn't a historian, but Ibelievedin history. In stratification. In timelines that built forward, not sideways. Believed that what I'd been taught was part of the scaffolding that kept my thoughts ordered, measurable.
And yet.
That scaffolding had been bending for weeks now, since Dravok, since the Abyss, since I'd felt equations fail whereresonance succeeded. Hell, in actuality, since the moment aliens invaded Earth.
I forced myself to continue. "You're saying there were other… civilizations. Before us. Before what we call the beginning."
Ella didn't hesitate. She nodded once. Simply. "Yes."
Something in my chest tightened, not fear, exactly, but vertigo. The sense that the ground beneath everything I'd ever assumed was quietly shifting.
"I wouldn't have believed that a few weeks ago," EIla admitted. "I would've dismissed it as myth layered over coincidence. Cognitive pattern-seeking."
My mouth curved, faint and knowing. "So would I."
Our eyes met, and something passed between us, not agreement, not certainty, but recognition. Two women trained to trust evidence, finding themselves standing in the space just beyond it, aware that understanding sometimes arrived before proof. I exhaled slowly.
"My mind is… adapting," I admitted, half to the hall, half to myself. "I don't know if that's progress or survival."
Ella's gaze softened. "Probably both."
