Posted on July 20, 2004 by Jenna
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See also
Genealogy: the People of Salt and
Genealogy: the Monster
Lia and Amiel were sisters who survived the destruction of Sodom.
Amiel swore to protect Lia’s family forever.
Lia had children, and they had children, and eventually you wound up with Aerope of Crete. Aerope had children by Atreus and Thyestes, including Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Pelopia. Her line zigzagged off in a couple of directions: for instance, to Priyanka, by way of Menelaus and Helen of Troy, and to the first hero Ella, probably by way of Agamemnon. That’s where we think the ancestry of Liril and Jenna diverged, by the way: Liril inheriting from Helen of Troy and Jenna not so much. That said, there’s plenty of genes in the pool, and certain disreputable scholars claim that just about all the people of salt have a common ancestor in Helen’s daughter Hermione.
We call this family the Nephilim.
Meanwhile, Amiel’s line became the House of Atreus, which hooked together with the people of salt up at that mention of Atreus above. The two bloodlines didn’t become one people, though; genealogy or no genealogy, Amiel’s heirs fissioned off and stayed fissioned off as the line of monsters.
By the time you had Nabonidus in Babylon, the House of Atreus was a pretty serious threat to just about everything. Its branch in India was mysteriously culled back around 583, and the American House had problems of its own, but the Middle Eastern lineage was going strong and educing all kinds of domesticated gods from the Nephilim there.
They were a threat even to the throne of the world!
So everyone breathed a sigh of relief, more or less, when Mylitta was born.
At last! the world thought.
At last, the world thought, somebody would do something!
Because heroes can kill monsters. That’s in the rule book. Heroes can kill monsters. All Mylitta had to do was kill off Nabonidus and cut a swathe of blood through his family and Babylon’s aristocracy, burn the ground and salt the earth, and maybe spend a few decades wandering the earth murdering whatever representatives of her ancestor’s sister’s family she could find, and then everything would be all right forever.
And that’s exactly what she did!
Except for the part where she didn’t do any of it, at all, causing no end of historians who were not there and don’t know what it was like and never had to do anything hard in their entire lives to look down on her.
But it’s OK.
It’s OK.
She won!
It’s like we said a long time ago.
Shame was set 556 years before the common era.
17 years later, in 539 BCE, the hero Mylitta would make an answer to monsters forever and ever;
and they would deliver the world from sorrow.