The Nameless City Between Two Rivers: Eternum, Part three. Eternum, #3.3

The boat stops without striking stone, sand, or timber. Beneath the black water, something has closed around the keel-and at the center of the current, a white foundation rises from the Flood, blank, wordless, and forbidden to name. Namsin, a young scribe carrying fragments of dangerous evidence, has already learned that some records do more than remember. They can open doors. They can summon kings.
They can turn the dead into procedure and the missing into numbers. When the ruined boat is dragged toward the erased city between the rivers, his instinct is to write what he sees. But in this place, even shape can become a name. Around him, a wounded engineer reads the water, a survivor-captain guards children and seed, a king begins to question the meaning of deathlessness, and an old blind scribe keeps choosing which truths must be broken before they can be saved.
Behind them lie Uruk, Shuruppak, the Low City, and the institutions that made disaster look like order. Ahead waits a system old enough to turn memory, clay, water, and royal names into a false return. The Flood is no longer only rising. It is reading. And some answers are too complete to survive.