Last night as I, the queen, was shining bright,

Last night as I, the Queen of Heaven, was shining bright,

As I was shining bright and dancing,

Singing praises at the coming of the night—

He met me—he met me!

My lord Dumuzi met me.

He pushed his hand to my hand.

He pressed his neck close against mine.

-The Courtship of Innana and Dumuzi

Adrianna

They landed in a wheat field outside of Sanliurfa. If they had traveled to Turkey normally, if, somehow, they could have taken a jet liner directly there, the trip still would have taken at least five hours. But Adam flew in a way that felt more like warping space. The first time she'd flown with him, the wind had whipped and battered her, but this time it had been like they were perfectly still, and the world itself was moving around them.

When they'd been in the air, Adam's arms had been steady as stone around her, but he staggered as soon as he put her down, gasping between clenched teeth. Adrianna tried to hold him up, and saw that the black stain had filled the lowest two of the wounds in his side like ink. Black veins were spreading up and out from them over his ribs. Under her hand, Adam was trembling.

"Say the name," she told him, desperately. He couldn't pass out here, in the middle of a Turkish wheat field, miles from anything. She'd never be able to haul him out. "Adam, say the name."

His eyes were feverish, clouded with pain, but he registered her voice, and gasped out a strangled, "Shazam."

There was a pop of displaced air. Dust whipped up around her, and suddenly Adrianna was holding a much smaller man. The human Adam stood up straight and took a deep breath, looking down at his side, which was once again unmarked. As he had that morning, he wore a white towel wrapped around his waist and no shoes.

At least I remembered to bring clothes for him. But…forgot shoes. Damn.

"Are you all right?" Adrianna asked in Khandaqi. He nodded. So, no matter how the wounds spread in his divine form, they have no effect on his human form.

She realized she was still touching his chest and stepped back.

"Good," she said. "It's good. That you're good."

Get ahold of yourself, Adrianna.

She handed him the extra shirt and pants she'd packed, then pulled out her phone and held it up. No reception. Adam started to unwind the towel from his waist, and Adrianna hurriedly turned her back. His culture may not have had a nudity taboo, but she certainly did. She tried to get her bearings.

"If I remember from the air, the nearest road is that way." She pointed to the east. "We'll walk there and," she paused, as ancient Khandaqi had no word for 'hitchhike'. "Find someone to take us the rest of the way."

Adam dressed and tied the towel around his head to give his bald scalp some protection from the sun as they walked. The wheat came up to their hips, the golden ears brushing their hands as they moved. This close to harvest season it gave off a sweet, golden scent. Adam plucked an ear as they walked and looked at it, rubbed it between his palms.

"Is it like the fields you knew?" She asked.

He shook his head. "I was not a farmer," he said. "I made bricks, dug ditches. Built walls and houses."

He examined the grain in his palm. "It does look different." He smiled ruefully. "But most things do, after five thousand years."

They went back to their silent, steady walking, along the edge of the dusty road. Adam took off his shirt and offered it to Adrianna to keep the sun off. She declined, the idea of wearing his clothing seemed…intimate, somehow. She did allow Adam to carry her pack when he offered. His lack of shoes didn't seem to have any effect on his steady, unhurried pace. Adrianna had done her own fair share of hiking, but found herself flagging before he did. She was very grateful when a battered pickup truck ground to a halt in front of them.

It took about an hour for the truck to reach downtown Sanliurfa, where there would at least be a payphone. After using signs and broken Arabic to tell the driver where they needed to go, they spent the rest of the ride in silence, Adrianna squeezed up against Adam's shoulder in the front seat as he looked out the open window.

The driver dropped them across the street from a museum, and left with a cheerful wave. Adrianna left Adam on a bench while she changed her money and made a phone call. Dr. Lee had given her the number of Dr. Karul, who led the team that had discovered the runes at Göbekli Tepe. He couldn't get in for a while, so Adrianna bought a few kebabs and cold drinks from a street vendor, then, on second thought, some ice cream too.

Adam was still on the bench - shirtless and shoeless - when Adrianna returned, looking contemplatively at the solid, sandstone expanse of the museum, and garnering some strange looks from pedestrians that he seemed unaware of. He accepted the water and kebab with contentment - but when he tasted the ice cream, his eyes widened in surprise. Adrianna laughed.

"I can see why Amon had so much fun giving you food," she teased.

"This is…very good," Adam said seriously. "Is it common here?"

"It's called 'ice cream'," she said, giving the word in English, then its translation, more or less, in Khandaqi. "And yes. You can find it all over the world. Walk into a shop in Shiruta and you'll find some there."

"Ice cream," he repeated, and ate the rest of his cone with absolute absorption. Adrianna enjoyed watching his enjoyment.

A pleasant sleepiness dropped over Adrianna there in the sun, after her busy morning and long walk. She almost felt herself drifting off, when Adam's voice roused her.

"Can you teach me the language of your people?"

It wasn't surprising, Adrianna thought. It was a huge disadvantage to him when he was in his human form that the only people he could speak to were basically her and Amon. Although Adrianna hoped she could solve the problem with the blade and cure the curse he was under, there was no reason not to be prepared.

"Of course," Adrianna answered. "If you help me with my Khandaqi. I know it's not perfect."

"You speak very well," he said, with every appearance of sincerity. Adrianna almost blushed.

What is wrong with me? She shook herself a little

"Alright," she said. "But first, a coffee." She'd been eyeing the street vendor for a while. The chance to get an authentic cup of Turkish coffee was not to be missed.

As they waited for Dr. Karul, and one tiny cup of coffee became two, which became three, Adrianna began teaching Adam English. Hello and goodbye. Man and woman. Sun and moon. He was a quick learner with a good memory, and soon could say a few sentences.

"You're doing well," she told him in Khandaqi. "Soon we could work on reading, too." Adam's eyebrows rose in surprise, and she smiled.

"Hello! Dr. Tomasz!" The voice startled her. A man had pulled up next to them in a dusty old Jeep. He was young and hawk-nosed, with a scruffy beard and mustache.

"Dr. Karul!" Adrianna rose to greet him, shaking his hand through the open window. "Thank you so much for helping us."

"Necmi, please. Sorry I didn't get here sooner," he replied. "I didn't expect you so soon."

"Frankly, neither did I."

Hello," he said to Adam, who had stood up and was putting his shirt back on. Dr. Karul's gaze dropped to Adam's bare feet. "Who's your friend?"

"Research assistant," Adrianna said briskly. "He's Pakistani. No English."

"Arabic?"

"Um," Adrianna felt a moment of panic. "No. No Arabic. His hometown is very…isolated."

Adrianna opened the back door of the Jeep and got in, hoping to forestall any other questions. As they drove out to the site, which wasn't far from the city, Dr. Karul told them about it with the excitement of a researcher who finally got to share his passion with like-minded individuals.

"You know we've only excavated about five percent of the site," he said, taking his hands off the wheel to gesture. "We could dig for fifty years and barely scratch the surface. Such a strange site - truly the beginning of agricultural society."

They parked out front, but detoured past the museum building, Dr. Karul waving at a guard. He led them to an excavation the size of a soccer pitch, covered in a giant, curved white awning. A small group of tourists in hijabs stood on the elevated walkway, taking pictures with their phones. Dr. Karul stopped and let Adrianna and Adam look down into the site. Crumbling walls of gray-brown limestone surrounded rings of T-shaped pillars.

"They didn't have metallurgy, so these were cut and carved using only stone tools. Can you imagine?" Dr. Karul's excitement was contagious, and Adrianna found herself smiling. "Hauled into place by hand - each pillar weighs fourteen tons!"

"Dr. Lee told me about some runes.," Adrianna said. "Where are they?"

"Oh, not here," Dr. Karul answered. "Up the slope."

He led them a bit away from the main site, away from the awning, the plaques and the tourists. The paths here were unpaved, packed earth and gravel. As they walked, Adrianna translated what Dr. Karul had said.

"Twelve thousand years old," she said to Adam. "That's what, seven thousand years before you?"

He nodded, that little frown of thought creasing his forehead. Dr. Karul was speaking again.

"This site was actively in use for thousands of years," he said. "So some of the stone circles are centuries older than others. The circle we just uncovered might be the oldest of all of them. And!" He pointed upwards, dramatically. "One or two thousand years after it was made, it was filled in and sealed. Intentionally. While the rest of the site was still being used."

Adrianna couldn't help but be drawn into the mystery. "None of the others were sealed like that?"

He shook his head. "Not that we've found."

"That's fascinating."

"Oh, I agree."

They had reached the circle. Dr. Karul led them down a set of steps cut into the earth and through the ring's outer wall, where seven pillars rose. As soon as she entered the perimeter marked out by the pillars, Adrianna felt goosebumps rise on her arms. The space inside the ring was icy, like they had stepped from summer into winter. Even Adam, stoic and unflappable as he was, shifted uneasily beside her. Could this cold be natural? Adrianna walked the ring, examining the pillars. There they were. The runes that had been carved onto the Eternium knife, one carved large on each massive stone block. This big, they were easier to see. The shapes and lines were suggestive - one looked like a bird, another maybe a scorpion - but when she turned away from them they seemed to slither and writhe in the corner of her eye.

"What do you notice?" Dr. Karul asked, watching her work. Had he noticed the strangeness of the carvings?

"The seventh pillar," she said, cautiously. "It's blank."

She pointed to the stone. It was smooth, and seemed unmarked.

"As far as we can tell, it's never been carved."

Odd. Why would it be blank when the others aren't?

"The symbols are abstract," she continued. "The pillars in the other rings are carved with animals and human figures, but these are non-representative."

"You got it," Dr. Karul said. "These symbols appear nowhere else in the complex, but I understand they're carved into a blade of some type, and you have it? Can I see it?"

Adrianna looked around, making sure they were alone in the ring and no assistants were wandering up the slope. She pulled the blade from her bag where she kept it balled up in a pair of socks. Here, in this dim stone circle, it seemed to hum with a strange, malevolent note. Adam's eyes followed the blade warily.

Dr. Karul took it in his hand and held it carefully to the sunlight, which seemed wan here within the ring of massive, brooding stones.

"That's them, exactly," he said. Still looking at the knife, he spoke in a low voice. "We found something else in this ring. Forty-nine human skulls painted with red ocher. Killed at approximately the same time, as far as we can tell."

Adrianna felt a shiver travel up her spine. "I've read that this was a necropolis of sorts," she said. "That many people were buried here. I imagine there's something different about this?"

"There is." Dr. Karul briskly handed the knife back and wiped his palm on his khakis unconsciously. "Evidence of ritual cannibalism."

"What?" Adrianna exclaimed. "That's not…"

"Not in evidence anywhere else in the site. I know."

Dr. Karul looked into her eyes, at the knife which she held carefully in her hands, back at her. He looked like he was struggling to make a decision.

"The symbols don't appear anywhere else in this site," he said. "But we found them somewhere else."

"Where?"

"They're painted in a cave we just found. A few miles out."

Adrianna's heart leapt. She was alive with excitement - the professional excitement she felt when she was following the thread of history, putting pieces together like a detective. The last time she'd felt like this had been when she was tracking down Akh-Ton's crown, trying to reach it ahead of Intergang.

And that turned out…Well, honestly, they were still trying to see how it turned out.

She translated for Adam as they walked back to the jeep. He frowned when she mentioned the skulls.

"Dark magic," he murmured.

Adrianna hesitated, then nodded. When had she started to believe in magic again? Really believe it? Of course, as a child, listening to her grandmother's stories of gods and heroes, she had believed with the innocence of all children, for whom the world itself is magical and strange. During her time in the University, she'd been inducted into the world of academic history. There, magic was the precursor to religion, an effort for early humans to control and understand an uncertain and dangerous world. Was it when she saw Akh-Ton's crown floating in midair? Or when she had woken the Champion of Khandaq with a word of power? In any case, the world was full of magic again. The knife was the work of some kind of magical practitioner - someone who knew about the newly-uncovered oldest ring in Göbekli Tepe. A magical ring sealed by cannibalism. Whoever the mystery magician was, they were looking worse and worse.

Dr. Karul drove them to the cave over increasingly steep and rocky roads, and Adrianna asked him who knew about the circle, and the skulls.

"My team, of course," he replied. "We haven't made the knowledge public yet - I wanted to run a few more tests before telling the news. But I haven't specifically asked the team not to tell anyone." He paused in thought for a moment. "I don't think any of them could have made that knife. We don't have access to a lot of Eternium out here."

Bumping along in her seat, Adrianna tried to put the pieces together. The mystery magician could be on Dr. Karul's team, despite what he thought. It could be Dr. Karul himself - a chilling thought. Or it could be someone else…someone who knew about the symbols the way Ishmael had known about the spell on Akh-Ton's crown - stories passed from father to son. For 12,000 years? She thought. Unbroken? It seemed unlikely.

Finally, the road - if you could call it that - petered out. They scrambled up the steep side of a bluff to the cave mouth, Adam seemingly the most sure-footed of them all, unhampered by his lack of shoes. Halfway up to the cave, the loose dirt of the hill gave way under Adrianna's feet, and she would have slid ten feet, but Adam caught her by the arm and pulled her up. Even without his supernatural strength, the man was no slouch.

"Thank you," she said breathlessly. Adam smiled, that softening around the eyes.

The cave interior was dim, and pleasantly cool. Dr. Karul pulled an electric lantern from his pack and led the way through the first passage, until it opened into a domed chamber. Adrianna had been expecting it, but still it gave her chills. There they were, the six symbols, painted in black and brown around the chamber's smoothed and plastered walls.

"We're keeping people out of here as much as possible," Dr Karul said. "To preserve the signs. This cave is even older than the stone circle."

"How much older?" Adrianna asked.

"Another three to five thousand years."

"That's…"

"Revelatory?" Dr. Karul actually bounced a little with excitement. "There could be a mystical or religious tradition handed down here for millennia. That's game-changing!"

It was. Game-changing and career-making, for Dr. Karul. No wonder he was so invested. Adrianna paced slowly around the walls of the chamber. The ceiling was so low she could have reached up and touched its rounded ceiling without stretching. She spoke to Adam.

"The symbols," she said. "They're in the same order. Here, down in the stone circle, and on the blade."

"What does it mean?" Adam asked softly.

"If what's on the blade is a spell, this is the same spell."

And if the spell was capped off by cannibalizing forty-nine people, it can't be good.

Dr. Karul's eyes darted between Adrianna and Adam. She kept pacing. Something about the chamber bothered her. What was it? In the stone circle, Adrianna had felt the malevolence of the spell, still hanging on after thousands of years. But here…she touched the blade in her pocket. It was quiet. Inert. She stopped moving, looked at the runes from the corner of her eye. No movement. They were flat and still on the wall, just like a painting should be.

A quartet of picks and shovels leaned up against the wall, ready for excavation.

"Have you found anything?" She asked Dr. Karul. "In the floor, any artifacts, bones?"

He shook his head. "Not yet."

Forty-nine skulls in the ring and nothing here…

She stopped at the rear of the cave. The interior had been carved out, smoothed, then covered in earthen plaster for a better painting surface. Over the millennia, the plaster had developed many fine cracks, especially where she stood.

"Do you have a lighter?" She asked.

"What?" Dr. Karul asked.

"A lighter or a match. Something to make a flame."

After digging in his pockets, he produced a scuffed yellow bic. She flicked it on - Adam drew back in surprise at the flame's sudden appearance - and held it up to the cracks in the rear wall of the cave.

"There." She held up her hand. "Nobody move. Don't even breathe." She repeated her instructions in Khandaqi.

After a moment of hushed anticipation, the little flame danced in a breeze blowing out from behind the wall.

Dr Karul exhaled in a rush.

"I knew it!" Adrianna cheered. "This is a false chamber." Like in a tomb - an empty room to conceal the real treasure further in.

"Adam," she said. "Give me one of those picks."

"What are you doing?" Dr. Karul asked, with understandable concern, as Adam handed her a pickaxe.

"This is a false wall," Adrianna said. "It's hiding a passage, probably a whole other cave that was intentionally hidden."

"We should bring in a radar setup," Dr. Karul began. "Find out what's behind…"

"I'm sorry, believe me," Adrianna said. "But there isn't time. Forgive me."

She breathed a prayer that she wasn't about to destroy a priceless and ancient relic for no reason while breaking every protocol she knew, and brought the pick down. It bit into the crack, and Dr. Karul cried out. He would have stepped in front of her if Adam hadn't been holding his arm. She brought the pick down again, and again.

And a section of the rear wall fell away, landing at Adrianna's feet in a crumbled heap.

"It's cut stone," she said. "Look. These are blocks."

"It's been sealed intentionally." Dr. Karul had stopped struggling against Adam's inexorable grip, his horror replaced by excitement.

Adrianna nodded at Adam, who released the archaeologist and handed him a pick before taking one for himself. With all three of them working on the rear wall, soon they broke a hole large enough to walk through.

They paused at the entrance, looking into the darkness. A cool breeze blew lightly in Adrianna's face, smelling of water and damp earth. Adrianna handed the lantern to Dr. Karul and allowed him to lead the way. The passage grew tighter and tighter. They had to go through in single file, shadows bobbing crazily on the rough walls.

"I see it," Dr. Karul said, voice hushed reverently. "It's right ahead."

They all squeezed through a final bend in the passage, and the second chamber opened around them.

It was larger than the first, and rougher - the walls raw stone, unsmoothed by any tool. Dark tunnel mouths opened at different points along the walls, leading deeper into the mountain. Adrianna could see already there were potsherds half buried in the earthen floor. And there it was again. That feeling, that sinister vibration in the air of unspent magic. The same runes were painted around the walls in the same sequence - or, almost the same.

"There's a seventh symbol," Adrianna said. "Look."

She walked closer, Dr. Karul following close behind. It was painted in rusty ocher, a sinuous line that seemed to undulate on the rough wall, like a snake. It hadn't been present anywhere else - not the stone circle, or the false chamber behind them. Not even on the knife, she thought, although maybe she had missed it in the fluted knapping of the blade. She pulled it from her pocket to check. The knife was glowing.

Both men exclaimed, and Adrianna saw that her pendant, a chip of Eternium in the shape of Khandaq's mountains, was glowing too.

In a moment of intuition, Adrianna took the lamp from Dr. Karul and turned it off, plunging the cave into darkness. Or, not quite darkness. Because the runes on the walls were shining a ghostly, luminous blue.

"Eternium pigment," Adrianna breathed.

"I thought the only Eternium in the world was in Khandaq," Dr. Karul said. "This is incredible. It changes everything. Everything!"

In the blue glow, Adam's dark eyes gleamed. There was power here, obviously connected to the knife, to the spell that had poisoned him. "We have a beginning," she said softly to him in Khandaqi, and turned the lantern back on, extinguishing the runes.

It had grown late, so Dr. Karul drove them back to his house, a narrow, two story building of whitewashed stone back in Sanliurfa. If he had been excited before, now he was jubilant. Adrianna managed to convince him to hold off on telling anyone for at least a few days, saying she wanted to do some tests with the room and the knife before releasing news that would attract more researchers to the cave. She wasn't sure how long she could keep the genie in this particular bottle, but she at least wanted Adam to try his transformation in the cave, to see how the runes would react in the presence of his magic. Perhaps they could find out if more Eternium artifacts were hidden in the cavern.

As much as Adrianna was eager to get to work, Dr. Karul's celebratory mood required an outlet. He brought beer, wine and anise-flavored raki out into the living room and called a restaurant down the block to order food. He pulled out an actual turntable and a stack of vinyl records, and as the sun set he sang along to classic Turkish pop.

Adam took a sip of beer and almost choked.

"This," he said. "Has it gone bad?"

Adrianna laughed. She herself had been drinking the wine, and felt it loosening the knot of tension she'd been carrying around with her for…oh, so long.

"No!" She said. "No. They use a plant called hops. It preserves the beer but makes it bitter. It must be different from what you're used to."

Adam put the bottle on the end table with a frown.

"He ok?" Dr. Karul asked, bringing in delivery boxes of patso and kofte.

"Not a beer fan," Adrianna said.

"So pour the man some raki!"

She did. Adam sniffed the cloudy liquid, then shrugged and drank it down in one gulp - followed by a three-minute coughing fit as Adrianna giggled. Giggling! She shook her head. How much wine did I have?

"I guess you didn't have anything that strong in your time," she said. "What do you think?"

"I don't know," he said hoarsely. Cleared his throat. "I'll have another."

And another, and another, and the evening slipped into a warm and breezy night. The three laughed more and louder. Adam took off his shirt again. Adrianna danced with Karul as the LP stack grew smaller. And when the stack ran out entirely, Adam sang.

As I spin around in a lake of beer,

Feeling wonderful, feeling wonderful,

While drinking beer in a blissful mood

With joy in my heart - my heart is filled with joy!

The heart of Ishtar is happy once again!

He sat back heavily on the couch and tipped his head back, as if exhausted by the effort.

"Where did you say he was from?" Dr. Karul asked fuzzily.

"Hm? Pakistan," Adrianna slurred. Had they given something away? No, surely not. No one could guess Adam's real origins, they were too…weird. The room was rocking gently underneath her, like a boat on a broad, slow river.

"I think I need to go to bed," Dr. Karul said, getting unsteadily to his feet. "Big day tomorrow! Changing history! Dr. Tomasz - Adrianna." He took her hand, looking suddenly serious. "Thank you."

He started swaying his way to the bedroom, then stopped. "Oh!" He turned. "You crazy kids get the guest room." He gestured vaguely at a door across the living room. "Good night!" And, turning off the overhead lamp, he left.

The night suddenly seemed very quiet. Adam sat on the sofa, the golden light of the streetlamp casting one half of his face in shadow. He was watching her, Adrianna noticed. How often, she thought, did he do that. Watch her, silently. Sometimes she caught him at it, with that tiny smile, that warmth around the eyes. Those eyes were unreadable now, like dark pools of water in the half light.

She sat next to him, and those dark eyes followed her. Though he was smaller now than he was in his divine form, only about her own height, the planes of his face were the same. Strong chin, Sculpted cheeks. Serious mouth. Adrianna found herself reaching out to touch his cheek. And before she could stop herself, she leaned in and kissed that serious mouth.

At first, he stayed perfectly still, as though carved from stone. Then his lips answered hers - softly, almost tentatively. His hand rose to undo her hairband, letting her hair fall all around her face. A little voice in Adrianna's head told her to stop, that this was unwise. She ignored it, kissing Adam more forcefully. She moved into his lap, straddling him, her own hands moving down his shoulders to his chest, feeling his heartbeat. His hands had found their way to her hips, under her shirt. They were rough, worker's hands - but gentle, patient. She pulled back to look him in the eye and saw her own desire reflected there.

"Adrianna," he began, his voice low.

And then the door to the kitchen opened.

Adrianna sprang away from Adam like a teenager caught by her parents.

"Dr. Tomasz." Dr. Karul seemed a great deal more sober now. He was holding his house phone - a chunky, cordless handset. "It's your brother. He said your cell phone was off." He handed the phone to Adrianna hesitantly. "It sounds important."

Adrianna cursed internally. Of course, of course, she couldn't have one evening…

"What is it?" She snapped.

On the other end of the line, Karim was sobbing. Adrianna's blood turned cold in her chest. She asked again quietly, fearfully. "What's wrong?"

"It's Amon," Karim said. "He's dead."

Hi everyone! Thanks for reading.

Some history notes - Göbekli Tepe is a real, and very awesome place. While there have been enigmatic symbols discovered there, that also seem to be painted in caves nearby - no human sacrifice or cannibalism or evil magic has ever been found. I don't mean to slander Göbekli Tepe, it's for dramatic effect, lol.

The chapter quote is from a wonderful Sumerian poem, much of which is a bit NC-17. If you want a Valentine's Day treat, and love agricultural metaphors for s*x, read it aloud to your significant other. It's a treat.