Babylon, 553 BCE. An ageing priest climbs the ziggurat at dawn and counts the steps, as he has done for forty years. Today, there are more steps than yesterday.

Beneath Etemenanki, the great ziggurat that towers over the most magnificent city on earth, something ancient stirs. Something older than Marduk. Older than the names we use for darkness. Something that was sealed beneath the foundations long before the first brick was laid, and has been waiting ever since.

When King Nabonidus unearths a tablet that no living scholar can read, he flees Babylon for the desert, leaving behind an empire and a secret that will outlast them both. In his wake, seven ordinary people discover what sleeps below: a canal digger's daughter, an astronomer, a slave, a soldier, a midwife, an engineer, and an exile. Bound together by a ritual older than civilization itself, they sacrifice their mortality to become the eternal guardians of a seal that must never break.

They will not age. They will not die. They will not be remembered.

Spanning five centuries from the fall of Babylon to Cyrus the Great, from Alexander's conquest to the slow decay of empire, The Eyes of Babylon follows seven immortal guardians as they watch the world forget their names, their language, and the reason it still exists. Empires rise and fall above them. The ziggurat crumbles. The river shifts its course. And beneath the stones, the Eye grows patient, probing the cracks in a seal that was never meant to last forever.

Part historical epic, part cosmic horror, part meditation on the cost of heroism no one will ever know, this novel braids archaeological precision with mythic dread to tell the story of the greatest sacrifice in human history: the one that was never recorded.

The Ishtar Gate still gleams.

The stones are still warm.

And seven people are still holding the door.