Nearing midnight, that same day (Thursday, May 19, 2022) Undisclosed location, New Jersey, United States

Tauthe stared at the clock. She knew it was ridiculous, that none of the seconds, the minutes, nor the hours that she watched mattered. But they did. She waited, and waited, and then the hour ticked over. She had passed the first trimester since she had conceived. Longer than any Aqrabuamelu had ever made it in thirty thousand years, pregnant from another of their kind.

Ella had done it and Tauthe could feel her programming kicking in, the desire to serve Innana. Others had already felt it, but Tauthe had held on to her denial. The baby was alive, and that meant Innana had truly returned.

Etana and Tauthe came back from their most recent patrol. The drow assassin had taken out another guard and both of them were exhausted by the constant stare of alert, the lack of sleep, and the grief of their kind being hunted.

If would be almost three more weeks until they had caught the assassin but neither knew that then.

They had stripped off their gear and stumbled into the showers. Etana was so tired, he was drowsing in the cold water. She had looked over and poked him hard to wake him.

“Hey!” he rasped. His poor voice. It had been beautiful once, like the rest of him, until a chance blow by a training sword, wielded by his crechemate inexpertly had hit him across the throat.

Tauthe still remembered the feeling of the hit, the feeling of cartilage crunching through the wood. Them racing him to a nearby emergency room in Cairo. And the hole they had cut into his throat to restore breathing, that had damaged his vocal chords.

He had never been angry at her.

She smiled gently, “Wake up silly. We have patrol in six hours, no bunk time to waste.”

Etana looked back at her and smiled. And without quite knowing what she was doing, she had moved towards him and they were in each other’s arms kissing deeply despite the freezing cold showers that Zaidu insisted on.

The next patrol had been done on no sleep but they had a nervous, goofy energy nevertheless.

She remembered what Ella had told her a week ago, the promise she had made.

“Your baby will survive. I will do whatever it takes to make that happen.” Ella had told her.

“I’m pregnant!” She had repeated dumbly. The Aqrabuamelu would not recognize a pregnancy from a union between two of their kind. But Tauthe couldn’t help it, she knew that there was some part of Etana with her.

And Ella had moved in with her. Tauthe had always found her annoying, the human who somehow was allowed into their inner circles. Who Arcsa, the Prophet(!), even treated respectfully. And she was Ekerri’s heir. Tauthe had wanted to kill Ella when hearing that. More than once, she had stood over Ella’s bunk, knife in hand, sometimes hovering just millimeters from Ella’s throat, debating.

And now Ella had moved in to the same hospital room and had applied her own unique madness, that of an insane drive and work ethic. It had bothered Tauthe so much when Ella had continually trained even when there were breaks. How she slept and worked and did nothing else. How she was happiest when doing so.

Ella had said, “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.”

And now she applied that single mindedness to Tauthe and the fetus inside of her. She followed Tauthe everywhere. Her eyes constantly glowing. Tauthe had to kick her out of the bathroom to relive herself more than once.

And then, one day Ella cried out, “Got it! You little bastard.”

She had run back to the growing library of biology books at the back of the bunker and started throwing books on the ground and finally pulled up a ragged printout.1

“That bastard Ekerri,” Ella growled. She went up to Tauthe and commanded, “Lie down now!”

Tauthe was about to complain, she was sick of Ella’s insanity. But Ella’s eyes were almost manic and Tauthe was feeling tired and a bit nauseous.

She lay down and Ella laid her hands on her belly. Her eyes flashed just a little bit.

“There. Done. Your baby will be fine.”

“That’s it?” Tauthe said bewildered.

“Well, yes. No.” Ella stopped to think, “I will probably have to do that to all the Aqrabuamelu.”

“Do what?”

“Let’s get Arcsa and Bahu. I’ll tell you all at the same time.” They quickly had made their way to his office

Ella had a whiteboard in front of her.

“This is chromosome 14 of a human.” She pointed to a squiggly X she had drawn, “and this is the Aqrabuamelu version.” A very similar X but with one arm conspicuously longer.

Ella frowned and then wrote, “NOT TO SCALE” next to them.

“Chromosome 14 does a lot of things. But one thing it definitely does is control microRNA production during the first trimester of pregnancy.”

At their quizzical looks she restated, “It helps make proteins for early pregnancy. Chromosome 19 does it for later parts of the pregnancy.”

“Anyway, this arm of the chromosome,” she said pointing to the elongated one, “is something that the Aqrabuamelu have that humans don’t. And Ekerri bound it.”

“He did what?”

“He took a small, tiny thread of magic and attached it to a histone, the part that controls when that DNA is used or not, and made it so it wouldn’t activate.”

“So we were never truly infertile?”

“No, in fact if magic had entirely faded, you would have been able to reproduce. But…” and she smiled wryly, “you would probably be stuck in your human forms if there was no magic.”

“This protein, in particular,” Ella pointed at an imaginary spot on the elongated arm, “expresses itself very soon. It was actually trying to unravel the portion of DNA it needed to, when Ekerri’s magic stopped it from working. I was just lucky to be there and looking at Tauthe’s chromosomes when it happened and could see the flare of magic.”

Tauthe started laughing, “There was no luck about it. You’ve been following me around for days now. I think I was about to go crazy. I’d wake up in the night and you would just be standing there with your eyes glowing. I was about to have you thrown out.”

“I wouldn’t have let you.” Ella said.

“So this is bound in all of us?” Bahu had asked.

“Well all the Aqrabuamelu I have seen this far. Well except for Tauthe, and the two of you who I just removed the lock from. And the guards outside Tauthe’s room.”

Ella thought, “And the one Aqrabuamelu who passed us in the hall on our way here.”

Bahu and Arcsa fell to their knees, “Blessed Innana,” they intoned.

Arcsa had made the call. He brought them to a conference room with a large screen and started dialing.

Squares appeared on the screen as worldwide, various Aqrabuamelu leaders from around the world appeared. Some drowsy from having been pulled from their beds. Tauthe noted when the North Africa leader aopeared, he had been the chief of her home after all.

He was an irritable sort, much like Tauthe, and was the first to snarl, “What is it Prophet?”

Arcsa said nothing and waited until all of the leaders were there.

The rest waited especially once they realized this was a conclave of all rhe Aqrabuamelu.

When everyone was on, Arcsa finally spoke.

“I am Arcsa, the Prophet of Blessed Innana. And in that role, I tell you, Blessed Inanna is here and has fulfilled prophecy!” his voice was quiet but commanding in its intensity.

“Is this a joke?” again it was North Africa.

Arcsa said nothing. He did not need to. He was not known for his levity.

North Africa looked and then paled, “I only ask because… because I would have dressed appropriately. Not worn my pajamas.” He trailed off lamely.

“I had heard rumors she was here. That she was a young human.” The East Europe leader was a woman, dressed in Ukrainian fatigues, observed.

Arcsa motioned and Ella walked from the side of the conference room.

“I am Eesha Jindal-Witten. I have cured one of you of infertility. She will carry her baby to term now. I will cure the rest of the Aqrabuamelu.”

“That is not all,” Arcsa said, “It is time for the entirety of the truth.”

Ella knew what he meant. She relaxed her control, and the crown manifested and her eyes glowed. Idly she wondered why now she had to block it from manifesting whereas before she had to expend effort to have it do so.

“I am Crown Princess of the Thousand Kingdoms, I am also Innana-Reborn. I call you to service.”

Oddly enough the silence that followed was broken by the low chuckle of North Africa, “That bastard Utu crowned our prophesized goddess, heh? What a fuck up.”

He followed up by formally bowing as best as he could on a webcam, “What is your will, Blessed Innana?”

Arcsa stayed in the room with the other regional leaders, most of them who were either in military uniforms or pajamas both. They immediatley began scheduling Aqrabuamelu to come to New York to be cured of their infertility.

Bahu’s name was attached to Ella and before she could protest, she had lost her name and was invested as High Priestess. The first Newborn Aqrabuamelu to be one. And if people wondered why she had a wicked looking high heel with dried brown on the stiletto heel placed on a pedestal, she merely answered it was a holy relic. Ella could now laugh at that and not absent-mindedly rub her hand.

And now Tauthe could finally believe as well.

Légaré, C., Clément, AA., Desgagné, V. et al. Human plasma pregnancy-associated miRNAs and their temporal variation within the first trimester of pregnancy. Reprod Biol Endocrinol 20, 14 (2022).