The Queen

Chapter 1

Long before human history was written, they came—golden-skinned, towering, their eyes burning with the fire of distant stars. The Innunaki descended upon Earth in vessels of shimmering metal, their ships cutting through the atmosphere like falling comets.

The first civilizations trembled. The Sumerians called them gods.

They arrived in a time of chaos, when Earth was young and humanity was little more than scattered tribes. The Innunaki stepped onto the red sands of Mesopotamia, their armor gleaming under the sun, their voices resonating like thunder. They claimed this world as their own, not for conquest, but for survival. Their home, a dying planet beyond the stars, had cast them into the void. Now, they would shape Earth in their image.

They taught men to build cities, to chart the heavens, to forge empires. They ruled as kings and queens, their blood mingling with the sons and daughters of men. Some worshipped them. Others feared them.

But the Innunaki were not eternal.

As centuries passed, their power waned. Some say they returned to the stars. Others whisper they sleep beneath the earth, waiting.

And one day, they will wake.

---

The last thing Queen Veyra remembered was the sky cracking open.

One moment she stood on the balcony of the Royal Spire, her starlight gown whipping in the superheated winds as Thea tore itself apart. The next—

—silence.

Darkness.

Then pain.

A scream tore from her throat, but what emerged was the shrill cry of a newborn. Cold golden hands lifted her, and when her blurry vision cleared, she found herself staring into eyes like molten suns.

"Fascinating," rumbled a voice that vibrated through her tiny bones.

Veyra—no, not Veyra anymore, she realized with dawning horror—tried to speak, to demand answers, but only infantile gurgles emerged. The golden-skinned giant holding her wore a crown of blackened steel, his face all sharp angles and terrible beauty. Behind him stood others of his kind, tall and radiant, their features carved from nightmares and dreams alike.

Annunaki.

The word surfaced from some deep, instinctive memory. These were the gods of ancient Earth, the beings who had seeded humanity's first civilizations. And now... now they held the soul of Thea's last queen in their hands.

**+++**

They named her Ninsha.

"Reborn Star," the silver-masked priests whispered as they anointed her brow with oil that burned like liquid starlight.

She grew in a palace of impossible geometry, where corridors bent at angles that hurt the eyes and towers stretched into a sky that was never quite the right shade of blue. The stronghold of the Annunaki existed *between* spaces, hidden from human eyes, anchored to Earth but not entirely of it.

Her memories did not fade.

If anything, they grew sharper.

At three years old, she drew the skyline of Elyndor in the sand of the palace gardens, her tiny fingers tracing the elegant spires with terrifying precision. The attendants whispered behind their hands.

At seven, she corrected an Annunaki scholar's star charts, pointing out celestial alignments that hadn't been seen since Thea's destruction. The scholar's golden skin paled to dull brass.

At twelve, she sliced open her palm with a ceremonial dagger and let her golden blood drip onto a holographic map of Earth, reciting Thea's death chant as the droplets sizzled against the projection.

That was when Enlil, Sovereign of the Annunaki and the being she had been forced to call father, finally took notice.

**+++**

"You're frightening the court."

Enlil's voice echoed through the vaulted chamber as Ninsha traced the surface of a core crystal. The shard pulsed faintly at her touch, its inner light quickening like a heartbeat.

She didn't look up. "Good."

The vault beneath the palace held the remnants of a hundred dead worlds—artifacts and relics of civilizations the Annunaki had encountered, cultivated, and in some cases, consumed. But these particular crystals... these were different.

They hummed when she entered the chamber. They remembered her.

Enlil moved silently across the obsidian floor, his shadow stretching long in the eerie blue light. "You know what these are."

It wasn't a question.

Ninsha finally turned, meeting his burning gaze. "Pieces of my world. My people's memories. Their souls." Her voice shook with barely contained fury. "You took them."

The Sovereign tilted his head, considering. "We salvaged what we could."

"Salvaged?" The word tore from her throat like broken glass. She gestured wildly at the rows of glowing shards. "You turned them into trophies!"

A flicker of something like regret passed over Enlil's face. "Thea was never meant to fall. Its destruction was... an accident."

"An accident?" Ninsha laughed, the sound jagged and unhinged. "Your people diverted Thea's orbit. You used us as a stepping stone to Earth!"

Silence stretched between them, thick and suffocating. Somewhere in the vault, a crystal emitted a low, mournful chime.

When Enlil spoke again, his voice was softer. "We are not conquerors, Ninsha. We are refugees."

He waved a hand, and the air shimmered with holograms—images of a dying world, its surface cracked and bleeding light. Annunaki fleeing in great arks, drifting through the void for millennia.

"Our home perished long before yours," he continued. "We have wandered the stars, preserving what life we could. Sometimes..." He hesitated. "Sometimes sacrifices must be made."

Ninsha stared at the images, her chest tight. "You could have asked."

"And if your people had refused?"

She had no answer for that.

**+++**

That night, she returned to the vault alone.

The largest core crystal stood on a pedestal at the chamber's heart, its surface fractured but still pulsing with faint light. Ninsha pressed her palm against it and pushed, not with physical strength but with something deeper—the remnants of her queen's power, the echo of Thea's dying breath.

The crystal screamed.

Light exploded through the vault, searing her vision white. Images flooded her mind—

—a child in Mesopotamia, barely five years old, singing a melody that hadn't been heard since Elyndor fell...

—a woman in a distant land, her violet eyes reflecting stars no human should recognize...

—a man, old and frail, tracing Thean runes into the dirt with shaking hands...

Survivors. Her people. Scattered, diluted, but still there.

And deeper still, beneath the rush of memories, something vast and ancient stirred.

Veyra.

The voice was the whisper of solar winds, the groan of tectonic plates.

You have come home.

Ninsha gasped as the connection severed, collapsing to her knees. The crystal's glow faded, but something had changed—in the vault, in the air, in her.

Above the palace, Earth's moon turned the color of burning amber.

Somewhere in the deserts of Sumer, a child awoke screaming in a dead language.

And in the darkness between stars, something that had been sleeping for a very long time began to stir.

**+++**

Enlil found her hours later, still kneeling before the crystal, her golden tears cutting tracks down her cheeks.

"Ninsha—"

She looked up, and the Sovereign froze.

Her eyes—once the violet of Thea's twilight sky—now burned with the same fire as the Annunaki. But where theirs was the steady glow of stars, hers was the incandescent fury of a supernova.

"Father," she whispered, her voice layered with something older, deeper, "did you truly believe you could contain a star?"

Far below them, in the world of men, the first temples began to tremble.