The sand of the desert, fine as milled flour and just as thirsty, whispered against the colossal limestone flanks of the Lamassu. His name, in the tongue of the kings who had conjured him, was Uriyu, which meant “Guardian of the Horizon.” For three thousand years, he had held his post at the great gate of Dur-Sharrukin, the fortress-city of Sargon II.

He was a paradox in stone: a bull’s powerful body, a lion’s predatory paws, an eagle’s vast, pinioned wings, and the bearded, crowned head of a king, his eyes wide with an eternal, placid wisdom. He was not one creature, but five, and his purpose was singular: to turn back the chaos that lay beyond the walls. To let in the caravans of tribute, the ambassadors of vassal states, the faithful; to keep out the desert djinn, the plagues, the armies of enemies.

For centuries, he did his duty. He felt the rumble of chariot wheels between his paws, the shuffle of a thousand sandaled feet. He watched the sun rise and set, painting his stone hide in hues of fire and blood. He knew the city not by sight, for his gaze was fixed forever outward, but by its sounds and smells—the scent of baking bread and incense, the clamor of the market, the rhythmic chants from the ziggurat.

Then, the sounds changed.

The rumble became not that of commerce, but of panic. The scent shifted from bread to smoke. The chants turned to screams. He felt the unique vibration of siege engines, the thud of battering rams against gates he could not see. A strange, cold fear, an emotion not meant for a divine sentinel, crept into his stone heart. He was a deterrent, a symbol of invincibility. He was not made for a fight that had already reached the gates.

The end came not with a bang, but with a slow, grinding silence. The city died. The people were slain or led away in chains. The fires burned out. The wind, his old companion, now had nothing to interrupt its lonely howling. The sand, once held at bay by the traffic of a metropolis, began its patient, relentless reclamation.

This was his new eternity. To stand, not as a guardian of a living city, but as a tombstone for a dead one. He watched the desert swallow the walls. He felt the sun bleach his crown, the wind carve delicate whorls into his wings. Scorpions nested in the crevices of his hooves. A family of foxes made a den in the space beneath his chest.

He was forgetting. The smell of cedar wood from the palace. The specific weight of a royal procession. The sound of the language he was built to embody. It was all fading, replaced by the static of the desert. His great, stone mind, once focused on a single, noble task, was now adrift in an ocean of time. He was becoming what he appeared to be: a strangely shaped rock.

Centuries bled into millennia. Then, one day, a new vibration. Not an army. A smaller, more curious party. Men in strange, impractical clothes, speaking a guttural, alien tongue. They dug. They brushed the sand from his face with a tenderness he had not known since the masons had put down their tools. They looked at him not with fear or reverence, but with a sharp, academic awe.

He felt a flicker of his old purpose. They are here, he thought. I must guard… I must…

But they walked past him. They did not see the king, the god, the guardian. They saw a relic. They measured his wingspan. They sketched his profile. They spoke of “transport” and “museum conservation.”

The day the pain came was the day they arrived with their saws and jacks. It was a sensation beyond anything in his divine programming—a deep, grating agony as the teeth bit into the limestone of his legs. He, who had faced down the imagined terrors of the void, was being dismembered by small men with small tools. With a roar of protesting stone that was lost in the shriek of the saws, his legs gave way. The world tilted horribly. The sky swapped places with the sand.

He lay in two great pieces, his face, with its eternal smile, pressed against the earth it had guarded for so long. He was loaded onto a cart, a final, profound indignity. He journeyed across the sea, a voyage of nausea and profound wrongness, to a cold, stone box in a northern land.

Now, he stands again. Reassembled. Flawlessly lit. In a silent, climate-controlled hall. People file past him. They circle his massive, broken form. They take pictures with small, glowing rectangles.

He guards nothing. He keeps out no chaos. He is a prisoner of admiration, a trophy of a dead empire in a kingdom of ghosts. His wide, stone eyes stare out over the crowds, and in the eternal, placid smile of the king, there is now, for any who could read three thousand years of stone, an unspeakable sorrow. He is no longer Uriyu, Guardian of the Horizon.

He is Exhibit Seven.

*****

And, you know I couldn’t possibly neglect the obligatory shameless self-promotion. New Yesterdays, a very nice Christmas stocking stuffer, is available through the following links: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.