Pov Zakiti
A century had passed since Adam disappeared from the world with his sons.
But Zakiti had not spent that century in isolation.
She had remained active.
Where Adam wanted to disappear completely, Zakiti understood that disappearing required work.
People remembered unusual individuals.
Stories accumulated.
Records survived.
Families repeated names.
Priests wrote things down.
Kings kept archives.
Merchants carried stories across borders.
Adam’s existence was dangerous if too much of it remained.
So Zakiti spent the century quietly removing him.
She visited old settlements where the sage had been.
Finding records that mentioned strange immortal men or legends describing such.
Then she would correct them; Replace names, remove descriptions.
She learned which stories had spread too far and which could safely be left alone.
She never erased everything that would itself become suspicious.
Instead, she made Adam ordinary.
Things such as a traveler or perhaps a scholar.
In some cases he would be a wandering healer.
Soon he would become nothing more than a name confused with another.
A story that had changed over generations.
Eventually, the trail became almost impossible to follow.
While doing this, Zakiti continued learning.
She studied healing wherever she could.
She refined her understanding of medicine, anatomy, combat, and the many different methods humans had developed during the century.
She traveled farther than before and collected knowledge Adam would eventually find useful.
She also kept track of her family.
She knew where Adam was.
Zakiti had also kept track of where Cain and Abel were.
Thanks to her evolving powers over her long life, she could now mark up to 5 locations and 3 people.
She simply gave them the room Adam had wanted for himself and his children.
After a century, she finally went to find him.
She found Adam near one of the new settlements.
He was sitting outside a small dwelling, watching Cain and Abel argue about something several yards away.
Zakiti approached quietly.
Adam looked up.
“Mother.”
She smiled.
“You’ve grown.”
Adam looked at himself.
“Have I?”
“No.”
He smiled.
“Then why say it?”
“Because you’ve changed.”
Adam looked toward his sons.
Cain was explaining something to Abel while Abel was very clearly ignoring him.
“I suppose I have.”
Zakiti sat beside him.
“You look better.”
“I feel better.”
“Good.”
There was a comfortable silence.
Then Adam glanced toward her.
“What have you been doing?”
“Cleaning up after you.”
He smiled.
“I knew you’d understand.”
“I understood what you needed.”
Adam looked toward the horizon.
“I didn’t want anyone looking for us.”
“They aren’t.”
That got his attention.
Zakiti explained what she had spent the century doing.
The records she had removed, the stories she had altered, and the traces of Adam’s existence she had quietly buried.
She had made sure that when Adam finally returned to the world, there would be no immediate trail leading people back to him.
Adam looked at her with genuine gratitude.
“Thank you.”
Zakiti smiled.
“You’re my son.”
Adam leaned back. The source of this chapter is g.com.
For the first time in a century, he felt comfortable stepping back into the wider world.
He looked toward Cain and Abel.
They had grown.
Not just physically.
They had become their own people.
Abel was still fascinated by almost everything he encountered, especially humanity and the strange ways it adapted to the world.
Cain remained more distant, preferring to observe humanity rather than involve himself in its development.
Adam found himself proud of both.
He had spent centuries trying to make humanity stronger.
Then he had spent a century learning how to simply be a father.
Now, standing beside Zakiti and watching his sons explore a world that no longer needed to be hidden from them, Adam began to consider returning to the work that had always been waiting in the back of his mind.
Humanity had changed.
The world had changed.
And after centuries of mistakes, restraint, grief, and observation, Adam finally felt ready to begin improving humanity again.
This time, however, he would remember what the world had taught him.
Every change had consequences.
And humanity would always decide what came next.
Over the next 40 years, the changes Adam had made to Humanity began to propagate, and Cain and Abel were free to explore to their hearts’ desire.
They had been doing so for the next 40 years.
Pov Abel
Abel had spent most of his life being told that the world was dangerous.
For the first fifty years of his life, that warning had been reinforced by the fact that he was barely allowed to see it.
His father had kept him and Cain hidden after the war with Greece, and Abel had eventually grown used to the isolation, even if he never stopped resenting it.
By the time Adam finally allowed them to travel beyond the immediate area of their home, Abel had already spent half a century wondering what existed beyond the horizon.
Now, for the first time, there was nothing keeping him inside.
He loved it.
Abel’s appearance made him look as though he had been carved from death.
His skin remained unnaturally pale, his eyes were purple, and his hair had the color of old bone.
Strangers sometimes recoiled when they first saw him, and Abel had learned to find the reaction amusing.
There was something almost funny about looking like a corpse while being one of the most fascinated people in the world by life.
Everywhere he went, Abel found something worth seeing.
He was fascinated by cities.
He loved the way thousands of people could live together and somehow create routines that made the entire place function.
He would stand in a market and watch merchants argue over prices, craftsmen work with their hands, children chase one another through the streets, and families carry food home.
To Abel, none of it was boring.
Every person was doing something different, and every group seemed to possess its own little world.
He was especially interested in the places humanity was now beginning to inhabit because of Adam’s environmental improvements.
Mountains no longer seemed as impossible as they once had.
Harsh deserts could sustain people for longer periods.
Cold regions were no longer immediately hostile.
Communities could settle in environments that would have once demanded enormous preparation just to survive.
Abel found that wonderful.
“Father changed all of this,” he said one evening while looking over a settlement built in an otherwise unforgiving region.
Cain glanced toward the settlement.
“Yes.”
“They shouldn’t be able to live here.”
“They can now.”
Abel smiled.
“That’s amazing.”
Cain shrugged.
“It’s useful.”
Abel laughed.
“You really don’t see it, do you?”
“See what?”
“The wonder.”
Cain looked at him.
“I see people living there.”
“Exactly.”
Abel gestured toward the settlement.
“They weren’t supposed to be able to do that before.”
Cain considered the thought.
“I suppose.”
Abel shook his head.
He could never understand how his brother could look at something so extraordinary and treat it like an ordinary fact.
To Abel, humanity’s ability to survive in new environments was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.
It wasn’t just his father’s improvement.
It was what humans did with it afterward.
They adapted the knowledge.
They built homes.
They planted crops.
They developed new tools.
They made the unfamiliar familiar.
Abel wanted to see all of it.
Now that their father had finally stopped keeping them hidden, he intended to see as much of the world as possible.
For the first time, Abel felt as though the world belonged to him too.
He wasn’t thinking about becoming a ruler.
He wasn’t thinking about becoming powerful.
He wasn’t even particularly interested in his own strange appearance.
He simply wanted to know what was out there.
And, unlike his father, Abel did not find humanity exhausting.
He found it endlessly entertaining.
Pov Cain
Cain saw the same world very differently.
He was fascinated by it, but not in the same way Abel was.
Humanity felt distant to him.
He could stand in the middle of a crowded marketplace and watch hundreds of people pass around him without feeling particularly connected to them.
He understood them.
He could appreciate their accomplishments.
He could recognize the significance of what they were building.
But he rarely felt the need to interfere.
That was perhaps the greatest difference between him and his father.
Adam had been unable to see humanity suffer without feeling compelled to act.
Cain could watch humanity change and simply observe.
He noticed how people were adapting to environments that had once been too dangerous for them.
He saw settlements appearing in mountains, deserts, forests, and regions of extreme cold.
He saw people develop different ways of living depending on where they had chosen to settle.
Cain found it interesting.
Not inspiring.
Not horrifying.
Interesting.
One afternoon, Abel watched a group of workers constructing a settlement near a mountain and pointed excitedly toward them.
“Look at that.”
Cain followed his gaze.
“They’re building.”
“I know. Look where they’re building.”
“On a mountain.”
“They couldn’t have done that generations ago.”
Cain shrugged.
“They can now.”
Abel sighed.
“You’re impossible.”
Cain smiled.
“You’re dramatic.”
He continued walking.
Cain’s luminous creatures followed him quietly.
A great feathered wolf made of light walked at his side, its halo hovering above its head.
A radiant bird circled above him.
Their presence attracted attention wherever he went, but Cain never seemed particularly concerned.
He was more interested in watching humans react.
Some people were amazed;some were afraid.
These same people tried to understand what they were seeing.
Weather that be to contain or look upon in wonder.
Cain found all of those reactions equally interesting.
Humanity was changing.
His father had given them the ability to survive environments that had once been deadly, and now humans were deciding what to do with that new freedom.
Cain did not think much about whether they were using it correctly.
That was their choice.
He simply wanted to see where they went.
He and Abel began traveling farther.
They followed roads and crossed mountains.
They visited cities.
They spent time along coasts.
Observing merchants moving between settlements.
They saw places that Adam had never described because Adam himself had never bothered to visit them.
For Cain, the greatest pleasure was simply being somewhere his father had never taken him.
He could finally see the world without Adam standing beside him explaining what everything meant.
That freedom mattered.
Sometimes Abel would stop to ask questions.
Sometimes Cain would walk ahead without saying anything.
They were different in almost every way.
Abel looked like death and loved life.
Cain looked almost impossibly pure, with porcelain-white skin, golden eyes, and black hair, yet he viewed humanity with the detachment of an outsider.
Neither of them considered that strange.
They were simply brothers.
And for the first time, they were free to discover the world on their own terms.