2/2

"By the look of you I would hazard to guess that you're an Akkadian," I said.
With a thought I gave him his tongue back.

"You can kill me, but we will never stop until we give you your final death," the man said in English that sounded American, or nasal enough to pass as such.

"We have an opportunity here for a palaver and that is what you have to say to me?" I asked.

The Akkad descendant -how many generations down his line would he be- gave me his best sneer of proud defiance. I started the outboard engine and forced him to return to his seat and steer our course further out to sea. Akkad children did not always work alone, some of my worse encounters had been from sibling pairs.

I raised my voice over the wind and the engine noise. "Do you even know why your family has spent so many generations hunting me?"

"We have to save the world from you," the Akkad assassin glared at me with zealot intensity.

"I've heard that one from your family before," I nodded. "But you have been saying that for millennia now. Has your family long forgotten why you hunt me? Because I certainly have if I had ever known why."

Confusion on his face, but only for a moment before the sneer and pride reasserted.

"You want to trick us, make us think that this is all some kind of mistake," the Akkad man tried to spit at me but I did not permit him to. He settled on calling me a bitch, then a cunt, then a few terms I had yet to learn but were most likely more of the same.

"Spell it out for the old bitch then," I prompted. "What did I do that makes all these tens of centuries worth it?"

"What? No, it's not what you did because you haven't done it yet," the Akkad man said.

"Come again?" I prompted.

"You are going to be the ruin of the entire world if we don't stop you," the Akkad man said. "We're running out of time, but fuck it. I bet I came closer to killing you today than all my ancestors. Maybe it will be one of my grandkids or-"

I cut his speech short with a thought to freeze his face for a moment. I forced him to cut the engine so I could speak lowly, and slowly.

"Am I to understand that more than four thousand years ago your family took up this fucking hunt because of some vague prophecy?"

Even after I gave him his faculty of speech back the man took a few moments to compose his words. "The last of our line sent a dream to our progenitor, every new age something from the dream comes true. Every century we see proof. We can't stop until you can't take away the future of everyone yet to be born."

For a moment memories overwhelmed me. Memories of all the children I had lost, the husbands, the wives, and all of their futures taken from them in order to get to me. I wanted to rend the man before me, to flense his flesh away and dip him in the salt ocean to hear his screams. I took a breath and set those feelings in the field they belonged in and not in this moment.

"Have you considered that this is is becoming a self fulfilling prophecy?" I asked.

"It is because of your family I stopped having families. It is because of your hunt that I have to distance myself from people. From love. From my own humanity. What if, some day far from now, I just can't take it anymore and I burn down the entire granary just to get you, the rats, out of my life? Has that been explained away in whatever dream your ancestor had?"

The man stared at me, uncomprehending. What had I expected of him, some epiphany? Some doubt for the cause he had been born into, raise for?

"We are going back ashore," I said. "You will go home and you will hold your children in your arms. I want you to think hard on how you would feel were they to be taken from you. I want you to think on how that would feel to happen again and again. And when your family's mind sickness makes you want to turn those feelings into redoubling your pursuit of me, I want you to reflect on how long before you turn me into the hunter. Just so I can have someone to hold in my arms again without waiting for your family to take them from me."

I sat down next to him while I made him turn on the engine and turn the skiff about.

"A dream sent from the future," I said to myself. "Some Akkadian has a nightmare and passes that on to his entire line. Who has he made suffer more I ask you. Has it been me or has it been his descendants giving their happiness generation after generation to make that nightmare come true. Just something to think about when you see your family."

"But if I can kill you that all goes away," the man said to me.

"Of course," I patted his knee and put my head on his broad shoulder. "Because if you can't tell yourself that what else did all your ancestors die trying to accomplish? Just like everyone else. One more conquest. One more genocide. One more ethnic cleansing. Then, oh then, the nightmare will be over and all will be Elysium. Please tell me of any such success."

The man brooded, his body locked in my spell.

"Of course," I sighed.

The docks were a few minutes more away. I could at least enjoy some simulacrum of company with the man, as a symbol of another constant in my life even as the centuries rolled on like seasons.