Horizon

It was a day like any other. Irrigation canals crossed the fields, and all around stretched alluvial plains planted with date palms and barley swaying in the wind.

Beyond, in a desert area full of stones and piles of rubble, the sound of a pickaxe striking against the wall broke the silence. There, a beautiful young woman held it firmly.

Of course, that young woman was me.

I’m here because Anu told me about the different types of metals hidden beneath the earth. He said that with them I could learn to craft more artifacts of all kinds, each more useful than the last. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, so I came to look for some on my own.

It’s not like I begged him to teach me—of course not. He simply started talking about it, and I… well, let’s just say I paid more attention than I let on.

Since then, I’ve been striking the rocks of this place for months. I’m not the type to complain, but my hands do hurt. I doubt I’ll be able to continue tomorrow.

Now that I think about it, children, though clumsy at first, with small steps and steady daily runs, manage to keep up a rhythm for hours. Others, unfortunately, aren’t born with the necessary physical abilities.

Luckily for me, Anu took the trouble to examine my condition. He even collected a little of my blood and studied it carefully. What a surprise I got when he discovered that I wasn’t from this place and that my lifespan is extremely long—something I didn’t know.

I’m still intrigued by how he could tell with just a glance…

Over time, I began to organize my thoughts. I took my sheets of paper and filled them with scribbles, drawing crooked wings and strange bodies that I swore could interact with the sky. Of course, most of them were useless.

The first thing I tried was the simplest: building something that could float. I tied cloths and dry leaves to a frame of reeds and climbed to the roof of my house. I jumped, convinced the wind would lift me up… and all I got was a crash against the ground and a few new bruises.

Days passed, and I replaced the cloth with stitched hides, reinforced with sturdier rods. This time, I decided it wasn’t such a good idea to throw myself off, so I let the wind test it instead. Sometimes the contraption would glide for a few seconds before crashing.

Meanwhile, my pages filled with illustrations, calculations, and crooked notes I kept developing. Sometimes I didn’t even understand what I had written the day before, but I would try again anyway, convinced that sooner or later I’d find the right way.

Some afternoons, when the sun began to hide behind the fields and the shadows stretched long like giants, I could feel him there. Anu. He never said anything, never approached, but I knew he was watching me from somewhere, still as a living statue.

I pretended not to notice, though now and then I couldn’t help but ask him to teach me more, some word to confirm I wasn’t as crazy as I seemed. And he, with his calm, would only give me just enough of an answer, as if lending me a thread of light so I could discover the path on my own.

Time began to slip away. The months crumbled one after another, like grains of sand between my fingers, and I barely had time to jot down my ideas before throwing myself into the next attempt.

My yards filled with wooden skeletons, torn wings, and broken balloons. A wrecked craft on the ground; I would run, gather the pieces, and by the next week I already had a new design. Some models barely lifted before crashing, others managed to glide farther.

My hands drawing, cutting, sewing, tying; my feet chasing after the plans the wind carried away; my laughter and tears mixed in with every attempt.

That was when they began to move. Anu’s companions, who until then had remained like statues in the shadows, took a step toward me. First it was advice, then a correction in my sketches, then a strange tool I had never seen before. With each intervention, my understanding grew faster.

My fabric wings turned into more complex gliders. The balloons swelled with greater firmness, capable of holding weight for hours. Then came the propellers spinning in the wind and mechanisms I never could have imagined on my own in a lifetime.

The sparks of campfires became directed flames, and the flames turned into energy. Anu’s companions showed me how metal could be melted in more intricate ways. What once had been simple wings of cane and leather now became bodies of copper and bronze.

In my memory it all happens at once: a glider falling to pieces, a balloon tearing apart, an engine igniting for the first time, an airplane cutting through the air like an arrow. Every failure was a seed, and every seed sprouted faster than the last.

Years passed like an unceasing current. My once-clumsy hands learned to shape metal as if it were clay. The drawings on my pages multiplied until they turned into digital information. The Anunnaki watched me all that time, first in silence, then with deeper and deeper guidance.

Before me now stood a ship almost as complex as theirs: its metallic body gleamed under the sun, its engines roared in harmony, and in its depths lay the sum of every fall, every attempt, every mistake that had marked my path.

By the way, the nano-engineering suit Anu gave me fits me almost too well. The only thing I asked him to modify to my liking was the default design of the mask, and apparently it carries a wealth of information to study, as well as the ability to scan certain things within its scope of understanding. No wonder Anu knew so much about my blood.

Then I climbed aboard with my heart pounding. When I closed the hatch, I felt I was leaving behind not only the ground, but also years of waiting.

The ship first rose slowly. Then, with a leap that seemed eternal, it soared upward. The ground dissolved beneath me, the citizens and fields shrank, the palm trees became green threads, and in the blink of an eye I crossed the horizon that had limited me for so many years.

I gripped the controls and the ship responded with a furious acceleration. The air turned into fire around me, and suddenly there was no sky, only a dark, silent ocean. Before my eyes stretched the curvature of the planet, blue and radiant.

I looked to the sides. Behind me, several lights followed. It was them, who for the first time weren’t watching me from afar, but flying at my side, until slowly they drifted away from me and from the planet.

My throat tightened and my breathing trembled. My eyes burned, but I held it back; all that remained was that dense weight in my chest, throbbing with every breath. I wanted to release it, and still, I forced myself to keep it within a warm silence.