The rocky ground passed in a blur of jostling movement, the city of Idib retreating on the horizon under their steady loping gait. Though each of them had very different occupations; a Tomb Guard, a dungeon delver, a battle teacher and a criminal bruiser, all four vocations lent themselves toward physical fitness so none struggled to keep up the pace as the miles stacked one upon another, building a pyramid of distance beneath their feet.

  The desert night was cool, a gentle breeze wicking away the sweat on their brows. On Heshtat and Maatkare’s, anyway—Harsiese was looking none the worse for wear from the hours-long run, his grey-streaked hair not even out of place with all the jostling. He carried two massive bags, one slung over each shoulder, and still jogged beside them with an ease born only by those of higher cultivation. Neferu was likewise unaffected, though her physicality was much closer to the mortals’ than it was to the Tomb Guard’s.

  Heshtat found himself grimacing as he watched the man and the effortless grace with which he moved. Something akin to jealousy coiled in his stomach, and he turned away, spitting to one side as if that would help him wrestle down the destructive feelings.

  Still, emotions were there to be faced, not surrendered to.

  “So,” he began, turning to the Tomb Guard. “What is your story?”

  Harsiese turned to him with a raised eyebrow. “You wish to know the whole thing?” he asked.

  Heshtat grunted. “You can summarise, can you not?”

  “True enough,” the older man replied. “Well, I started as a fishmonger. Papa worked the Nikea from a small fishing village not far below Idib; used to bring his catch up every Saturday for market. I always liked being out on the water with him, but the early mornings weren’t my favourite, you know?”

  Heshtat glanced at Neferu, askance, as the grizzled veteran began to waffle on in far too much detail about his childhood and his father and a dozen other characters in his small village.

  “Can you summarise a little more succinctly?” Neferu eventually asked, interrupting the man as he waxed poetic about a girl he’d ‘taken a real shine to’ as a teenager.

  “Right, yes, of course. Sorry, easy to get in my own head around such distinguished company.” He coughed, and Maatkare and Heshtat shared a look. “Right,” the man continued. “So, fisherman. Then I trained with the guard. Spent most of my twenties patrolling the city, then got a promotion and started branching further out. Did a stint at the border of Khaemwaset’s province—a joint operation to attempt to curb the smuggling between Idib and some of the northern cities.”

  There was something nostalgic about running in a pack, cold air in their face and the dunes at their side as they rushed through the night towards parts unknown. Heshtat found himself settling into the rhythm of the movement more easily as he listened to his new companion’s story. Not too dissimilar to other men he’d known—the city guard often filtered up towards the palace guard and so on.

  “I caught the eye of a competent commander that gave me some pointers and sponsored me to the priesthood for awakening a second aspect. Took me a while, but once I got there, it was a quick rise through the ranks. Ended up seconded to the Palace Guard.”

  “And that’s when you caught the queen’s eye?” Maatkare asked.

  “Aye. Frightening luck, it was, really. Assassins from some far-off province attacked the palace while the General and most of his legion were away. The palace guard and the Tomb Guard fought side by side that day, and I must have done something right, because the next week I had a summons to see Queen Cleosiris.”

  “No,” Heshtat found himself saying, before really being aware of it. “She would have had her eye on you before that. She was the one that setup the joint taskforce to tackle the smuggling gangs. That benevolent commander was likely as not in her employ, too.”

  Harsiese frowned. “Well, can’t say I’m not pleased with how it’s all worked itself out. But you really think she has that much foresight?”

  Heshtat nodded, gaze fixed on the band of glittering water off to their east that snaked in and out of the moon’s glow on its endless journey from the heart of the desert to the heart of the ocean.

  “I do. She’s the smartest woman I have ever met,” he said simply.

  “Well,” the older man said. “With respect, it never struck me as particularly smart to exile the ones that kept her father safe for a decade before she ascended.”

  Heshtat scowled. “She didn’t have a lot of choice in that. We failed when it mattered. There were many enough within the priesthood, guilds, and merchant houses calling for our heads.”

  Harsiese grimaced. “Politics.”

  “Some realities cannot be ignored, no matter how distasteful,” Hehstat replied sadly.

  “True enough,” the big man agreed. Then he brightened. “I might not understand all the moves she makes, but at least we know she has Idib’s interests at heart. If she is as smart as you claim, we should have nothing to worry about.”

  Heshtat nodded, though internally he wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t her intelligence he doubted, but some of her recent actions were hard to square with the woman he once knew. Where did her true loyalty lie? Looking out to the great sand dunes rolling past on their right, he found no answers as they continued ever onwards with their journey.

  ***

  Their campfire burned low, the embers crowned in a dizzy haze that made the dunes behind them swim in Heshtat’s sight. It had been two days of travel without any interruption, just blazing sun, hot sand, and blessedly cool nights.

  “So, my friend,” Maatkare called over to Harsiese, as he scrubbed the burnt crust from the bottom of a pan, “you mentioned your father was a fisherman, yes? Did you spend much time on the Nikea as a young man?”

  Heshtat looked over and caught the slight smile on Neferu’s face as she watched the man struggle valiantly with the pan. He rolled his eyes. Harsiese was straightforward and muscular—two things that Neferu seemed to have a soft spot for if her stories over the last few years were anything to go by.

  “Aye, out on the skiff before I could walk, as my mama tells it. Always loved the water. Something about the glint and the roll… feels like home.”

  He sounded wistful, a feeling Heshtat knew well.

  “Do you miss it?” Neferu asked, unrolling her tool bag and pulling out a rag and a small pot of oil.

  “Sometimes.” He grunted, gathering sand into the pot and working away at a particularly obstinate spot, face screwed up in exertion as the muscles in his forearms bunched and flexed. Neferu hummed in appreciation. “I try to get out for an afternoon every few weeks. Mama loves monkfish, so I keep her well-stocked when there’s time.”

  Neferu shot Heshtat a wicked look, before wiping the expression away when Harsiese wandered over. She blinked up at the big man innocently. “No lovely wife at home waiting for you then?” she asked.

  The man sighed as he plopped down. “Not for me, sadly. The life of a Tomb Guard is a solitary one, I fear.” He flicked his head over at Heshtat. “He can attest to that. Must be loving the opportunities now, though, hey?”

  Heshtat scoffed. “You don’t know of what you speak,” he said, far harsher than he had intended.

  He saw the hurt on the older man’s face and cringed internally. Cursing, he walked away to the edge of their camp and looked out over the endless sands beyond.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean nothing by it…” he heard Harsiese call after him, but Maatkare shushed him.

  “Do not worry, my new friend. It is nothing you said. Leave him to his grief.”

  Heshtat sighed as the voices faded away behind him. There it was again, that same bad habit breaking through. He just couldn’t seem to hold it back these days, ever since she’d come to him that night. The bitterness, the hurt, the guilt. It swirled within him, like a leviathan from the Bleeding Sea rearing its many heads above the surf, dark fangs glistening.

  Movement caught his eye, and he squinted towards the crease where one dune met another. He had thought he’d caught a flash of turquoise. He wasn’t sure what exactly that could herald, but the desert was dangerous and far more active than foreigners would assume, given how empty the sands appeared on the surface.

  He took a breath, focused, and pulled essence towards Sah and the pathways he knew lay broken and twisted within his soul. His eyes glowed, and the world changed as he fed essence to the aspect of the Spiritual Body. The sun vanished and the desert dimmed immediately, lines of glowing colour shooting through the dunes beneath his feet. He tried to turn towards the crease where he had seen movement earlier, but his vision was overwhelmed by the wealth of essence on display. He reeled back, unable to see where the sands and the sky delineated.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  All was twilight and swirling colour, his senses far too weak to distinguish between the riotous dance of different energies. His backfoot caught on something and he stumbled, only halting himself with a windmilling of his arms. They moved sluggishly through the rippling air before him, as if parting water.

  His gaze was drawn up from the chaos beneath his feet towards the expansive heavens above. The black sun—a ghastly inversion of Isaric’s golden chariot—loomed large in the sky, dominating the scene with its ghostly corona of pale purple light seeping across the horizon. This wasn’t right. He should have been seeing bare hints of the essence in the Waking World with his minor working of Sah, not viewing the Otherworld in truth.

  He blinked, trying desperately to push the sliver of essence he had stolen from the amulet through the correct pathways, but it was like wrestling eels in muddy water. This had been a mistake. There was a reason cultivators didn’t wield essence without the guidance of a deity to channel their power through. The Other was no place for a mortal, and no matter his experience, without an awakened aspect he was nothing more than a plump prize for any enterprising predators that may be lurking nearby.

  And in the Endless Desert of Amansi, predators were always lurking.

  Just as he cut the flow of essence to his soul, he heard a disembodied clicking shiver through the miasmic air of the Other. It was deep, sonorous almost, and it was a noise that he recognised. Hard to forget the Desolate once they’d made your acquaintance.

  He returned to the Waking with a gasp, rubbing at his eyes and stumbling away from whatever obstacle had caught his foot. He turned to his companions.

  “…solitary life, huh?” Neferu was saying, leaning closer to Harsiese than any reasonable person could argue was required to reach one of her many tools.

  The man was enthralled, obviously, and she gave Heshtat a conspiratorial wink when she caught his eye as he returned. She turned serious when she saw his expression though, losing the flirtatious mien she’d been wearing like a silk shawl.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Thought I saw movement,” Heshtat said, retrieving his khopesh from his pack and belting it to his waist once more. “Something off in the dunes. Turquoise, maybe?”

  Harsiese seemed perplexed, though he stood and reached for his weapon nonetheless, as did Maatkare. Neferu narrowed her eyes.

  “I wouldn’t expect wraiths out here in the sun, especially not this early.” She hummed in thought. “I’ve not ranged this far from Idib in a few years though-—are there any signs of a recent subsidence?”

  “Not that I can see,” Heshtat replied.

  “And how well is that?”

  “Fair enough,” he acknowledged sourly. “Have a look but be careful. I disturbed something with my attempt.”

  Neferu tutted and stood. “Agile as a cat with a blade in your hand, but I swear by the holy bosom of Wusis, as soon as you sheathe your weapon, you’re as clumsy as a… as a…” She trailed off, plucking at the air as if it would drop the appropriate word into her lap.

  Harsiese returned from his pack, great axe now in hand, but slipped as he came to a stop, thumping into the sand and cascading a small mountain of it over Neferu’s precious toolset. She gasped in outrage, and Heshtat found himself smiling.

  “An oaf, perhaps?” he offered, and his friend only glared at him.

  He reached down to pull the Tomb Guard to his feet but then stumbled himself. The earth had shifted, no denying it that time. He frowned in confusion for a moment, but years of experience dealing with the mysteries of the Otherworld soon reasserted themselves.

  “Move!” he shouted, pulling Harsiese to his feet with enough force to send the man stumbling behind him, even as he reached out to grab the edge of Neferu’s tool bag. The two of them grabbed the canvas and leapt backwards, watching as the sand before them started to shiver. Deep thumping came from below them, and he caught her wide-eyed stare.

  “The bags!” he called, pointing to their equipment, but before he could take more than a few steps, Harsiese was there. The big man gathered the three open sacks into his arms, crushing close to a hundred pounds of equipment to his chest and bolting as if it weighed nothing at all. Neferu, Maatkare and Heshtat followed a moment later, hot on his heels as the group high-tailed it down the sand dunes.

  There was a trick to running down a dune, and it mostly entailed flailing your arms and taking great leaping hops. Heshtat had once seen a strange monkey in the markets back in Sasskania—imported from the jungles far to the east. It was jet black with long thin limbs and had hopped about using its tail to help it spring, leaping from foot to foot in these great bouncing strides. It had terrified and amazed him in equal measure as a young boy, and despite the chaos of the next two decades, he’d never forgotten it.

  He did his best impression of that strange monkey now, leaping out and down the dune as it shivered beneath him, the great grinding screech of sand being crushed between unyielding stone blocks as they emerged from their centuries-long burial beneath the desert filling his ears.

  Harsiese had made it to the crease between the two dunes already, and was sprinting up the other side, shoulders pumping from side to side as he clutched their supplies to his chest in what was no doubt a deathly-strong grip. Neferu was next, her long-legged stride and greater cultivation helping her in the rush. Maatkare had been a little further from their impromptu resting place when the sands shifted, so he was nearly at the crease already and making valiant progress, but Heshtat was far behind.

  His legs were starting to burn, that lactic pulse coming stronger with each ragged breath he drew, with each sucking leap from the sand. It clung to him, like the mud pools that littered the Badlands of Sasskania that every child was warned of. Normally the sand of this desert was a playful thing, tangling itself in your sandals and slipping between your toes. With the sun at its zenith, it could scorch your soles without protection, and to unfamiliar travellers it often warned them away with rashes and chaffing.

  But when the earth heaved and a subsidence was near, it became a trickling, sucking mire of clutching hands. Each grain shivered, falling backwards, and despite him leaping downhill it felt the opposite, as if the sand was sinking away behind him and a great jaw yawned wide to swallow him whole. If only he turned his head he would see it, stone teeth jutting and rotten air gusting from its mouth.

  Just turn around, his brain screamed. Just witness your doom. See it. Make sure it’s real.

  Heshtat was many things. He was weak. He was slow. He was bitter and jaded and cynical. And if he was particularly honest with himself, which he often didn’t like to be, he was still a little idealistic. But he was no fool, and he was no greenhorn.

  Heshtat was experienced. He’d seen things that would make most men blubber in terror. He knew fear—had felt its creeping tendrils a hundred times before—and so he knew what he was feeling now. This wasn’t emotion, primal though it might seem. This was compulsion. Though of a kind more subtle and a scale far more grand than Senusret’s pitiful working back in Idib, it nevertheless was of the same ken.

  He put his head down and sprinted on, breath wheezing as he reached the crease between dunes and began to climb up the next one, knowing he had only seconds left before his momentum halted and his feet began to slip on the tumbling grains beneath him. Then strong arms were hauling him up and his gasping exhalations were accompanied by Harsiese’ even breaths. In what felt like only moments, he crested the rise, wrist aching from the iron-hard grip of the Tomb Guard.

  Still, far better than dead.

  He turned, standing beside his companions as they looked at what had only moments before been just another sand dune behind them. Now, it was closer to a city. Long dead, long abandoned, and likely nothing more than a few temple-complexes made to receive offerings and pilgrimages from faithful subjects. But it had been created in a different time. A time of myth, when the gods walked among men and a colossus of coloured stone could be raised in a mere handful of years. When masters of the soul-arts flourished, when Pharaohs was so common the word was used as a title of achievement rather than political position, and when Great Amin-Ra had not yet cleaved the realms in twain.

  Heshtat’s breathing had evened out and the ache had left his wrist before anyone spoke. They spent an eternity staring at the architectural wonder. The sun flashed against opal-inlaid mosaics larger than houses. Jewelled scarabs capped uncountable stone pillars, carved with such loving detail a scholar could categorise each species by the shape of their horns from a hundred yards away. Sand was still sloughing from the edges, no doubt still covering the greater bulk of the structure from view, but even its top was awe-inspiring.

  A statue of Osirion, thirty feet tall and still rising, stood proudly at the forefront of the temple, eye-level with the top of the enormous stairs carved into the primary pyramid, so that each pilgrim would have to pass beneath his gaze before entering the main complex. The Lord Of The Dead stood regal, human-headed in this rendition but green-skinned. Heshtat was amazed to see the colour, impressed in any dye or paint that could survive a millennium underground without wear, before he realised that the head and the hands—any hint of skin not covered in clothe—was in fact covered in unbroken emerald.

  “Shit,” Neferu breathed. “I know it nearly killed us, but I’d say it was worth it for a sight like this.”

  Heshtat laughed, relieved to finally expel the emotions that had built up in his chest. “Never change, Neferu.”

  She sent a mock glare his way but quickly turned her head back in study of the complex, eyes flicking back and forth as she catalogued the myriad structures. A three-layered pyramid, steps carved into its front with a structure on top to receive visitors.

  “See the baths, there?” she pointed. “Filled with sand now, but they would have stretched all the way through the three main temples. You remember the temple of Nebet?”

  Heshtat snorted. “Hard to forget.”

  “Perhaps for one with such a boring life as you. Still, the water, yes? It connects all the temples, and would serve as a means of communication in sequence between them. We still have not come close to replicating the wealth of knowledge the ancients had with regards to waterways. I hear there is a Helexian scholar that has risen to prominence for his great understanding of such systems, but I would bet on an ancient Amansi architect any day of the week, eh?”

  Heshtat let the words wash over him, taking the time to appreciate the artistry and grandeur of the stonework. They’d be getting no closer than this, and he knew it would hurt Neferu to leave this place unexplored. Maatkare, too, even if his tolerance for risk was much lower now. He would at least allow them a few moments to enjoy it.

  “You do not intend to explore it, captain?” Harsiese asked uneasily from his right.

  “I have told you before, Harsiese; I am captain no longer. But no, we do not have time. Besides, I felt a compulsion from there. It is not a place devoid of magic and warding.”

  Neferu jerked her head over to meet his gaze. “But it is ancient. It clearly pre-dates the Desolation…”

  “Exactly,” he confirmed. “That means whatever is being guarded is also equally ancient. The Desolate are a scourge I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but they are not the worst thing that lurks within the Otherworld.”

  Neferu harumphed, but he didn’t need to say more. She had likely figured that out already but felt the need to put up a token resistance to leave a find this big alone. Chances are it would be submerged once more by the time they returned. If they returned.

  He pushed the doubts aside, just like always. With the temple at his back, he turned towards the open horizon.

  “Onwards then—we have a priest to recruit.”