The air in the vast Hollow Earth cavern was thick, heavy with the scent of ozone, unknown minerals, and an antiquity that oppressed the senses. The group that had crossed the shadow portal from Cancún now found themselves in a landscape of nightmare and wonder: crystalline formations emitting a pale phosphorescent light illuminated vaults that disappeared into the gloom above, and strange, giant mushrooms pulsed with a life of their own. The silence was almost absolute, broken only by the distant dripping of water and the bated breath of the newcomers.
As Merlin, Quetzal, and the others assessed the immediate surroundings, securing the perimeter of the portal's unstable exit point, Enki stood motionless, his golden Anunnaki head bowed, his eyes scanning the strange rock formations and distant tunnels that could be glimpsed in the gloom. An expression of deep, almost painful recognition crossed his perfect features.
"This place..." Enki murmured, his voice barely a whisper, yet it cut through the tense silence. "The Scars of Ki... so we called it in the forbidden annals of Nibiru. The echoes... are unmistakable. I have been here before."
Aria, who stood nearby trying to attune her magic to the strange energies surrounding her, turned to him in surprise. "Do you know these depths, Enki?"
The Anunnaki nodded slowly, his gaze lost in a past of eons. "Yes, magician child. Long, long ago, before your kind walked upright beneath the surface sun, my people, the Anunnaki, walked these very bowels of Gaia."
The scene around him seemed to fade from his mind, replaced by images from a distant and brutal past. He saw himself, younger, yes, but already burdened with the responsibility of being his people's foremost scientist and explorer, leading a vast Anunnaki mining expedition. They were here not out of curiosity, but out of desperate need: gold. The "Gold of the Gods," as they called it on Nibiru, not for its monetary value, but for its unique properties, essential to repairing the dying atmosphere of their homeworld.
"We sought the precious metal that Anu so craved," Enki continued, his voice now resonating with the echoes of those times, as if addressing not only the present group, but the ghosts of their past. "And we found it here, in these depths, in an abundance beyond our wildest dreams. But the price... the price was terrible."
The images in his mind were vivid: Anunnaki, his brothers and sisters, clad in heavy exoprotective suits that barely withstood the inhuman conditions. The pressure down here wasn't just that of the weight of miles of rock upon their heads. "It was a psychic, dimensional pressure," Enki explained, his voice tinged with an ancient horror. "Gaia's young heart beat with a primordial fury, its raw, unfiltered energies crushing the senses, eroding sanity. The very air seemed to vibrate with the whispers of subterranean entities watching us from the shadows."
He saw again the Anunnaki, many of them Igigi of lower castes, but also pure-blooded Anunnaki unused to such physical labor, collapsing under the exertion. Their advanced digging tools failed under the strange energy fluctuations; the tunnels they bored with lasers and sonic waves became unstable, claiming lives. "Our biology, attuned to the energies of Nibiru and the serene emptiness of deep space, rebelled against the suffocating density of these depths. We saw our people waste away, their spirits breaking before their bodies. Some went mad from the isolation, the oppressive darkness, and the echoes of Earth's mind. Others succumbed to strange subterranean diseases, or to accidents in the treacherous galleries we dug in search of gold."
Enki visibly shuddered, a very human gesture for a being of his nature. "Anu demanded ever-increasing quotas from Nibiru. Enlil, my brother, overseeing operations from the surface of Terra, sent down relentless directives, indifferent to suffering as long as the gold flowed to the transport ships. But I was here, in these jaws, with them. I saw the price of our planetary survival, and it was the slow annihilation of my own people."
He stopped, his golden gaze meeting Aria's, then Merlin's, and finally those of the humans on Elena's team. "I was presented with a choice," he said, his voice now heavy with the weight of a decision that had changed the fate of two worlds. "To continue sacrificing the Anunnaki deep within this starved Earth, watching them wither and die far from the light of our own sun... or to find another solution. A solution that, back then, in my desperation to save my people, seemed to me
Pragmatic, even... merciful toward the Anunnaki."
"Our explorers on the surface had identified the Lullu, the 'primitive men,' your direct ancestors, who roamed the valleys and savannas. They were... malleable. Incredibly adaptable. Connected to the energy of this planet in a way we aliens never could be."
Enki took a deep breath, and the final confession came out with a mixture of ancient sorrow and cold Anunnaki logic. "It was then that I made the decision that has indelibly marked your history and mine. I proposed to the Council of Nibiru the genetic 'enhancement' of the Lullu. Yes, to accelerate their evolution, to endow them with heightened awareness so they could understand complex instructions. But also... to adapt them specifically for the grueling work in these mines. Strengthen their bodies to withstand pressure and toxins, simplify certain higher cognitive functions to ensure obedience and resistance to the psychic trauma of the environment, and increase their work capacity to superhuman limits."
"We gave them the strength to endure what was killing us," he said, his voice now devoid of emotion, as if reciting a scientific report. "We instilled in them the purpose of serving us, of extracting the gold we needed. We converted them, yes," and his golden eyes darkened for a moment, "into your enslaved ancestors. And so, we stopped sending the Anunnaki to die in these depths. The gold flowed toward Nibiru." And your species, humanity, was born in its present form from that necessity, from that decision of mine to no longer allow my own race to suffer in these devouring maw."
A deathly silence followed his words. They stood in the same place, or a very similar one, that had witnessed humanity's birth as a servant and the relief of the Anunnaki. The implications of being there, at the source of that ancient wound, were overwhelming.
"Yes," Enki repeated, his gaze lost in the dark immensity of the cavern. "I have been here before. And this place... this place has never failed to take its toll, in one way or another." The history of humanity, and that of the Anunnaki, was inextricably linked to the blood and gold of the Hollow Earth.