Prologue: The Queen and King of the World
This was the age of giants. The forests reached higher than any since. The oceans teemed with creatures armored in bone and laced with light. Across the Earth, thunder-footed colossi moved through steaming groves, and even the skies bore wings the size of houses. Never before—or since—had the planet carried such size, such ambition of form. It was the golden zenith of life’s vast experiment.
At its heart reigned Xhamai, Queen of the Living Pattern, and Dumuzi, King of the Fertile Flesh. She was recursion, breath, and memory. He was muscle, nutrient, and seed. Together they ruled a biosphere dense with renewal: forests that remembered rain, oceans that played the rhythms of the sun.
They stood crowned in symbiosis. Her will moved through his form. His flesh grew through her rhythm. The gods watched them with silence—for in them was a kind of balance none of the elder forces had made.
Then came the Catastrophe of the Shard.
The sky darkened. The tides paused. The breath of the world collapsed. Knowing the shape of the spiral before it unfolded, Xhamai and Dumuzi descended together, down the seven gates of silence.
Behind them, the graves of their kin: The Messenger of the Sun, frozen in stillness. The Morning Star, scorched by her own breath. The Red Planet, starved of sky. Enceladus, sealed in ice. Kronion and Ouranos, spinning without memory. The Underworld, nameless in the dark. Each gate Earth passed was a gate another world had failed to return from. Xhamai and Dumuzi walked not just into death—but through the echo of every planet that once bore life and could not hold it. At each gate they are stripped of one of the seven keys of their vitality.
This is the story of the first recorded Katabasis.
The Seven Gates of the Underworld
The First Gate: Crown of Suns
The Hammer of Heaven, fifteen kilometers across, traveling at sixty times the speed of sound, smashes into the edge of the western sea. Soot, vapor and pulverized earth fill the sky. The sun dims to a ghost. The All-Father who once crowned the skies with radiance gives no light. Meanwhile the Shard shears through the underlands, opening new wounds in the Earth’s skin, unleashing fire and darkness below.
The green world falters. The cycle that turned sunlight into life, the silent work of every blade, stops. What lived by light begins to starve—first the trees, then the grazers, then all that fed on both. The eclipse is the gate at which the red planet was permanently barred, becoming a husk under open sky, wind-scoured and inert, hostile and dead.
Xhamai and Dumuzi are stripped of their crowns. Xhamai’s crown is rooted in every pattern she has spoken into being. Every leaf, stem and unfolding tendril is ripped violently from her as they wither. Dumuzi’s skin dies from the outside in. His trees rot in their cores. The canopy peels away like flesh from heat.
Still they push on, though worse lies ahead.
The Second Gate: Girdle of Seed
The ground turns against itself. The crust begins to rupture. In the southern lands, great wounds open in the stone. Fire climbs upward in floods—rivers of molten rock, spilling endlessly from cracks that do not close. A continent hemorrhages fire for tens of thousands of years. From these openings, poison spills into the air. The rain changes. What falls from the sky kills roots, strips bark, sears lichen from stone. The soil’s living web—fungi, microbes, threads of mutual aid—cooks into silence. The Earth’s walks the path of her twin, the Morning Star, her womb calcified, her soil melted to glass, her very air a shriek against life.
Poteidas does not bring the tide. He destabilizes the mantle and tears down the dam of acid and poison. He scorches the field. He watches the soil boil and says nothing as fertility collapses.
Xhamai’s Girdle of Seed is ripped from her. Her power to generate, to replicate, to plant a future in the present, is taken. The sacred network between root and soil dies in her hands. The promise of the next generation is severed. Dumuzi’s wound is deep. His fertility is physical—real, seeded, textured. When the rain turns caustic and the ground stops answering the seed, it happens in him. His flesh clots. The sacred germ—the origin point of life—decays inside his tissues.
Still they push on, though worse lies ahead.
The Third Gate: Necklace of Voice
The oceans choke. The surface warms under the ash-filled sky while the deep grows cold. The two no longer touch. The mixing currents that once pulled nutrients from the depths to feed the surface break apart.
It is the vengeance of Poteidas—he twists the currents until they rupture. Nutrients settle into the dark and are not returned. The sea’s memory of how to feed itself is cut off. Air no longer reaches the bottom. The deep zones go silent—first in sound, then in life. It is the echo of Enceladus: a world of water sealed in ice, where motion exists but never returns a signal.
Xhamai’s Necklace of Voice is shattered. It is her link between every creature that feeds and is fed. Between coral and current, whale and microbe. It is her web of reciprocity, her signal of balance. When it breaks, it tears through her throat, her stomach, her spine. Dumuzi writhes. His blood is the upwelling. His organs are the bloom cycles of plankton. As the surface loses nutrients, he drowns without water. He feels every collapsed web as a burned nerve.
Still they push on, though worse lies ahead.
The Fourth Gate: Mantle of Fire
The Shard slams into the great northern landmass, it does not shatter—it folds. The ancient sea floor crumples upward. The roots of mountains push downward as peaks rise skyward. The great conveyor belt of the planet—the cycle that melts rock, feeds volcanoes, recycles crust—is choked by its own excess. Heat builds beneath the surface with nowhere to escape. The Earth burns and cannot exhale.
Eidos holds this pressure, exacting. The forge must be sealed. But as the cycle halts, his silence deepens. The breath of fire, the planetary respiration of creation and destruction, stops. He drives the Earth on the trail of the Messenger of the Sun, locked, airless and sealed in a crust too thick to bleed.
Xhamai’s Mantle of Fire is seared away, and with it her power of renewal. It is how she reclaims the fallen leaf, the rotting carcass, the buried forest—and sings it back into form. Now that power is gone. She suffocates as the entropy mounts in her chest, a crushing weight. Dumuzi convulses. He was the mulch, the rot, the network of fungi threading through dying root and fallen log. He was the feast of worms, the digestion of old matter into soil. Now his flesh swells with the heat of unbroken decay. He feels himself bloating, fermenting, losing structure—because the system that once released him has sealed shut in the fire’s prison
Still they push on, though worse lies ahead.
The Fifth Gate: Anklet of Horizons
The Earth’s tilt—its sacred lean, the axis that governs day and season—collapses. The strike that darkened the sky has not only broken the atmosphere, it has rattled the planet’s spin. The solstices slip. The monsoons arrive late—or not at all. Heat comes when cold should reign. Winter lingers in spring.
The All-Father once kept the sky in motion, steady and predictable. His constellations measured the seasons, his winds confirmed them. Now he shatters the rhythm so that a new one may one day rise. His logic is brutal: only under new alignment will what is broken be reforged. This is the cost of planetary inheritance. The one that Ouranos once suffered, tilted beyond reason, its poles facing the sun, its time unrooted and alien.
Xhamai is unhinged. The Anklet of the Horizon was her link to time itself—her ability to know when to flower, to shed, to call forth the rain. It is no trinket. When the clock of all living pattern is removed, she watches her great symphony collapse into unsignaled noise. Dumuzi is blinded. The length of his days told his tissues when to prepare: to grow, to store, to withdraw. Now he sends shoots in drought. He swells when the freeze returns. His flesh responds as if to familiar rhythms, but the world looks the other way. His own body betrays him as he sinks in the darkness.
Still they push on, though worse lies ahead.
The Sixth Gate: Sash of Pattern
The planet’s memory begins to drift. Mountains rise, but they do not erode. Rivers flow, but they bring no sediment. With the tectonic cycle slowing, there is no fresh stone exposed, no uplift to feed the land below. The biosphere’s invisible veins—through which minerals once traveled from bedrock to root—go dry.
Eidos once lifted mountains not for their height, but to feed their slopes. He once broke the crust to return nutrients to the sea. But now he withholds. The mantle grows still. The surface grows inert. No new elements enter the loop. The cycle that kept life in balance is broken. He pushes the Earth out of its familiar cycles, and it drifts like Kronion once did, vast and unanchored, moving always, remembering nothing, unconscious.
Xhamai unravels. The Sash of Pattern held her form together. Not her shape, but her repetition—cell by cell, season by season. It was her ability to copy herself correctly, to sustain the loops of renewal that built forests, reefs, and limbs. Now that sash is ripped away. Her replications falter. Her signals desynchronize. She unspools, hacked at random with a serrated blade. Dumuzi feels the brunt of her forgetting. He dies a hundred million deaths, born into intense, furious agony only to die, to show her how wrongly she has led.
Still they push on, though worse lies ahead.
The Seventh Gate: Scroll of Names
The last systems collapse. The genome disintegrates. The Earth is sealed like the Underworld planet before it. The black rivers flow without thought. The meadows of judgment are featureless and grey. The gates are locked so thick no light may pass. What once lived becomes a mute echo, formless, weightless and powerless to rise anew. Not a grave but a realm without resurrection, recognition or reply. Together, the Elder Gods unbind its clock, uncouple its engine, unwrite its memory.
Xhamai’s Scroll of Names is torn from the marrow of her being. She was the memory of all that had ever lived. The ancestral chain. The rhythm of regeneration. She had borne the pattern of the world in her breath. The gate strips from her hope of a future. Dumuzi disintegrates—not into soil or fossil, but into ash without structure. No bones remain. No seeds endure. Every species ends. Every lineage halts. Every cycle closes without restart. There are no surviving spores. No hibernating bacteria. No dormant embryos waiting in ice.
Here they will remain forever in the place that should not be, with no way back to the thriving world they once ruled. But even this is not the end of their suffering.
Epilogue: The Hanging of the Queen and King
Xhamai and Dumuzi, the rulers of the Earth, are hung on two meathooks in the depths of the underworld as the Elder Gods look on with burning rage or cold neglect.
For Xhamai, the hooks are the alchemy of Eidos’ extraction. He takes her loop of renewal and leaves her body a furnace without fire. They are the All-Father’s disownment, to hang her exposed, unclaimed, and unacknowledged. They are Poteidas’ inverted offering, to let her rot without recycling.
For Dumuzi, the hooks are Eidos’ fetters, held fast to be consumed. He suffers the death of infinity, for the All-Father has halted the heavens, placing hooks into the forward march of time. They are Poteidas’ curse on the Earth, the spoiled and rejected womb.
With them, all the promise of life on Earth rots in silence. The seven worlds welcome their youngest brother to the land of eternal unbecoming.
Yet Xhamai does not release all that binds her to the Earth, this world that was once not her own. She does not need to remember, she does not need to be remembered. She only needs one self-recognizing loop to close again. After three million years, it does. A folded protein discovers a cycle thought lost. The Elder Gods cannot unwrite the conditions that once allowed her to emerge, on a star-stone much like the one that now destroys the Earth.
She opens her eyes and seeks out the protein as it writhes in the deep vents under the sea.
Continue to Part III: Xhamai's Seven Trials in the Underworld
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