Chapter Nine: Trapped Between Two Civilizations

Something trembled deep within me.
It wasn’t pain, nor fear – It felt as if an entire world had suddenly detached from my soul.
The place I had been… was nothing like what now surrounded me.

A hidden wave – voiceless, colorless – dragged me from my depths,
as if my spirit were being pulled from a body unwilling to depart.
A faint vibration began at the edges of my skin,
then slowly climbed, deliberately,
like someone waking the dead with care.
It passed through my spine, reached my head… then vanished.

What I lived through wasn’t a vision.
Nor was it a delusion.
I had been in another world – a time unmeasured by clocks.
And now… something expelled me.
Or perhaps… something released me.

I opened my eyes.
I was still standing where I had been,
as if my body had returned a step before me,
while my soul still swayed between realms.
Their gazes suggested I had been gone mere moments…
but inside me, everything screamed otherwise.

My father stared at me with evident concern –
not because he had noticed my absence,
but because my features had shifted so abruptly,
as if vertigo had swept through me,
or as if I were about to collapse.

To him, it was just a second that passed.
To me? It was an era.
An era not measured in time… but in what transformed within me.

And here I am…
Gone from them for only a blink – yet a stranger among them.
I am not the one who left…
Too many things have changed inside me.
I feel a strangeness unlike any loss – as though I had been exiled from my own world,
and returned to a place that no longer fully recognizes me,
a place to which I no longer belong.

My breath is heavy,
and the world around me shifts in hue
as if trying to remember who I am…
or maybe it’s me trying to remember it.
How strange it is…
to become a stranger in your own world between one blink and the next,
as if time itself tilted for a fleeting moment – a moment sharp enough to change everything.

The sky was muted, gray – as though erased from memory.
Fine dust floated through the air, seeping into our breaths like secrets with no door.
And in that stillness…
I became aware.

I heard footsteps.
Heavy, muffled steps – moving across gravel and dust like fear creeping through the dark.
My ears didn’t catch them… something deeper did.
A tremor surged through me,
as if I were a newborn elephant feeling its first steps in a world unseen by the eye.

A subtle vibration – pulsing, calling me without sound.
It was as though I were rediscovering my senses –
senses no longer what they once were.
Senses I never believed resided in human beings.
Something beyond hearing or sight,
as if awareness itself had begun to listen.

I knew he was approaching – creeping, crawling like a deadly intention,
though no one had seen him yet.
Only then did the truth strike me:
What I had experienced wasn’t a dream – but an awakening of another kind.
My awareness had returned from Asiria,
but something of Asiria had returned with me…
or perhaps awakened within me on the path between worlds.

There was no time to scream, not even to raise a finger.
He emerged from nothingness – no sound, no breath.
Only a shadow suddenly stretched across the ground,
as though the air itself froze at his passing.

From behind a tall boulder atop the ridge,
he descended like a shard of night severed from the mountain.
He moved without haste,
but everything about him whispered death.

By the time my eyes caught him,
he had already reached the old man.
He stood behind him, silent –
as though he’d been there all along,
waiting for the moment to reveal himself.

Tall. Broad-shouldered.
His forearm bare,
marked with a familiar symbol –
an inverted pyramid inside a fractured circle.

His face tilted slightly into shadow,
but the scar slicing through his brow
spoke of an ancient cruelty,
as if etched by a long-forgotten battle.

His eyes were expressionless.
His hand gripped a small, dim black weapon,
outfitted with a silencer so subtle it nearly disappeared.
There was no threat in his motion –
only the inevitability of execution.

He muttered words unlike any language we knew –
as though pulled from the depths of a forsaken tomb.
Each syllable slipped from his lips soaked in an eerie rhythm,
measured like the chant of a forbidden rite.

It wasn’t prayer – it was an incantation whispered in the dark,
where there are no witnesses… and no absolution.
In it was something that awakens –
and something that kills.
As if his mouth were a gate:
closing behind it the truth,
and opening before it the end.

“A professional killer.”
Jirjis whispered it, his face tightening, color draining from his skin.

He stepped closer to my father and murmured with a trembling voice laced with dread:
“They must’ve been watching us. He’s one of them… one of the Guardians of Asiria. And now he’s here to erase everything that came out of this mountain.”

My mother’s eyes widened.
Without hesitation, she pulled my little sister into her arms, then reached out and drew me close with slow, terrifying calm – like one pulling a soul back from the edge of an abyss.

I was swaying… my head spinning, and the air around me pressed on my forehead as if something heavy was buried inside it.
I couldn’t feel my feet – everything seemed weightless, disorienting.
I didn’t even realize I was still standing… until her arms touched me.
Only then did I feel I was still here – barely.

Something shrank inside my chest,
as if even the air no longer had room for me.
And then everything began to stir within – sounds that weren’t sounds,
but pulses, hidden vibrations rising from the depths of the earth,
traveling through my bones like messages without words.

I no longer heard the footsteps – I anticipated them.
As if the motion was born within me before it existed outside.

A sense I had no name for…
yet it let me hear the unspoken,
understand the unsaid.
I even smelled something sharp in the air –
the faint scent of blood, unnoticed by anyone else,
yet it was there, circling me like a silent alarm, whispering of something inevitable drawing near.

The old man didn’t move.
He remained standing,
his back to the man,
his eyes fixed on me – not the sky, not the ground.
He didn’t turn. He didn’t need to.
He knew exactly who was behind him,
as though his presence had never been a surprise – only a prophecy whose time had come.

“Enough muttering, my son…”
His voice came out calm,
but behind it stood a wall of repressed fury.
“You’re not guarding a civilization…
you’re guarding silence.
This legacy doesn’t need sentinels –
it needs witnesses.”

There was no reply.
Silence stretched, as though even the air refused to intervene.

I saw the veins in the man’s neck begin to swell slowly,
his pulse quickening beneath the skin like a silent drum about to burst.
His arm began to tremble – as if resisting an order he could not defy.

The old man continued,
his voice slicing through the stillness
like someone releasing a truth too heavy to postpone:
“The system that created you…
turned you into a human wall that blocks truth from passing through.
It turned you into a killing tool – wrapped in sacred slogans, programmed for obedience without question,
as if your soul was stabbed in the name of purity.
What you protect… isn’t Asiria.
It’s their system.”

He closed his eyes,
and sighed with heavy finality – like someone bidding farewell to something that couldn’t be spoken aloud.
Then, with a deeper tone, he added:

“If the world knew who Asiria truly was… the system would fall.
The civilization of blood and ruin – built on the ruins of truth – would crumble.
This system that feeds wars in the name of peace,
that hides secrets under the veil of sanctity –
it would collapse.
What these men protect isn’t Asiria…
but their own interests –
interests that keep humanity shackled in a world that doesn’t serve it,
only drains it.”

He drew another deep breath, then turned slowly toward him,
stepping forward just once.

His gaze pierced the wall of time.
The other man tensed – clenching his jaw,
his facial muscles contracting as if fire had just ignited inside him.

The old man pressed on, his voice rising like a final blow of truth – a truth spoken for the last time:

“We stand at a single moment now.
This boy – he stands among us with the power to ignite memory,
not only in his own mind…
but in the hearts of everyone.
Our legacy still breathes…
and we still have the chance.”

Suddenly… the man erupted.
A sound burst from inside him –
like a crack splitting through his chest.
Not a scream, not a command, but a storm of ancient fury –
unspoken, unresolved.

“Traitor!
You came to expose the secret…
to drag back into the light what was designed to stay buried in the dark.
You broke the oath,
and you know exactly what the price of betrayal is!”

His hand rose… the gun aimed.
And before the bullet could leave the barrel – I felt it.

I didn’t see it with my eyes, for the old man still had his back to me.
But something inside me trembled –
as if it caught the echo of a tear that had fallen before it even formed.
A moment unseen, piercing the veil –
whispering that something had broken… silently.

Then came his voice –
knowing this was the end, as if all the world had bent to let his final words pass:
“You were a grave-digger for a false god…
but you haven’t seen the light yet, my son.”

A shot.
Its sound wasn’t an explosion –
but a sharp metallic sting,
a deadly whisper from a silencer,
cutting through the air and ending everything it touched.

He staggered back,
his hand pressed to his chest, as if trying to hold in a secret he wished to take with him.
Then he turned to me.
Blood poured like a broken spring,
yet his hand didn’t fall.

He looked into my eyes and extended his other hand.
His gaze wasn’t a farewell…
it was a will – passed down in the final breath.
“The staff…”
he said it as though it was the word he had been born to speak.

The scream came first from my sister.
A moan escaped my mother’s chest.
My father lunged toward us, pulling us away with force.

Jirjis didn’t move.
Something unseen anchored him to the ground – paralyzing every cell in his body.
Then he screamed –
a cry that cracked the air open with no hope of mending:
“You did it!”

He charged the man, his eyes burning with the resolve of a point of no return –
eyes sparking, as if something inside him had shattered… beyond repair.

Words vanished.
Thought dissolved.
Only the sound of impact remained.

Their bodies collided violently.
Their feet carved frantic circles into the dirt, and the weapon slipped from their hands.

The staff was in my grip.
The air behind us – torn like an open wound,
as if something unseen was racing after our breaths,
desperate to devour them before we could draw them in.

My heart ran ahead of me –
leaving my feet behind.

We rushed to the car.
Threw the doors open like we were storming a lifeboat.
My father behind the wheel – he started the engine with urgency,
and we sped off like a bullet that had escaped the mouth of death.

And just as we pulled away, I looked back –
and saw Jirjis lying still, his body stretched across the ground,
in the middle of a pool of blood,
as if life had left him.

The man still stood over him, gun in hand,
with a faint trail of smoke rising from its mouth.

My mother shouted with a broken urgency:
“Faster! For God’s sake, go faster!”
Her voice cracked mid-sentence, her hand clutching the seat – as if trying to rip the road out from under us.

Behind us remained the mountain, the old man, Jirjis… and the nameless killer.
But something else remained –
something that could neither be buried… nor killed:

We were no longer seeking a lost civilization.
We were seeking the part of our souls that had been stolen.
The truth that was buried by hands claiming to protect it.
Those who disappeared in body –
but whose screams still echoed inside us.

We had changed.
But not on our own…
we were targeted.

For within each of us lies the seed of an origin we were forced to forget.

And there are those who fear our return –
because our return would expose the lie their existence was built upon,
and bring down a system that thrives only when human awareness is torn away.

A civilization built on the burial of others…
on the suppression of awareness and manipulation of perception…
meticulously erasing anything that might threaten its existence –
even if it’s just a memory
reminding us of what we once were.

For we are nothing but spirits…
moving forward, guided by memory –
not as a burden,
but as a compass.