Heshtat hadn’t known what to expect when stepping through the gates of the Temple of Amin-Ra. After witnessing the woman step through earlier, he had assumed it worked more like a portal between places than a regular gate—old magic, but nothing he’d not encountered before.

  It didn’t. The moment he’d taken his first step past that invisible threshold; the weight of all the power that had been spewing from the temple’s open gates came crashing down upon him. He was immolated in it, his soul stripped of essence and flensed of complexity. The temple saw him at his most base, and it judged him.

  He understood now why none with existing channels to the gods could enter. This moment right here. But Heshtat had no awakened aspects and his soul remained asleep; cracked and broken and a far sight from what it once had been, but blessedly free from divine markings.

  And then he was standing in an entrance hall. He had no memory of moving, no awareness of time or space slipping, but suddenly he was somewhere else, as if he always had been. Maatkare stumbled at his side, reaching out to Heshtat to prop himself up. They shared bewildered looks, eyes wild and rolling in the animal panic that came to all when they experienced a complete and total loss of control.

  A brief moment of unmooring, and then their training reasserted itself. Heshtat looked around, taking a careful step forward to interpose himself between his friend and whatever may lie ahead of them. At the same time, Maatkare snapped out a hand to him, bunching in his cloak and pulling him back.

  “Don’t take a single step,” Maatkare said.

  His voice lacked its usual humour. His gaze was fixed on the floor, tracking over the perfectly cut stone slabs before slicing across the walls and then ceiling. No part of him moved save his eyes, and he spent nearly a minute cataloguing the room before relaxing a fraction.

  “We are in a dungeon now, my friend, and it is my skills that are most useful here,” Maatkare said quietly. “Follow me and do as I say, understood?”

  Heshtat had no problem ceding the lead to his friend, and shuffled along behind him with one hand on his weapon. “Understood. But we are surely not expecting too many traps? This temple far predates the Desolation.”

  Maatkare shrugged. “Who knows? If this was a regular temple or tomb, then perhaps we could relax… but it is not. Who is to say the creator did not build this as a test for his most worthy subject to pass?”

  “I pray that is not the case,” Heshtat muttered. “There aren’t many that would accuse us of being worthy or favoured by any of the gods.”

  Maatkare chuckled darkly. “Let us hope they are not keeping score then, my friend.”

  They moved slowly through the entrance hall. It was shockingly tall—well over a hundred feet high, its flat ceiling looming above them with the weight of thousands of tonnes of stone held up by great pillars lining the sides of the room. It felt like a cavernous hallway, built for giants rather than men.

  Heshtat had spent time in tombs before and temple complexes were no stranger to him either, but the scale of this one was impressive to say the least. He’d witnessed four of the seven wonders of Amansi in his short life, and been awed by each, but he would add this temple to their number in a heartbeat.

  It wasn’t just the scale—that in and of itself was not unusual—but the detail that was put into each minute aspect of the temple was commensurate with a far smaller structure. Hieroglyphs crawled their way across the pillars on either side with exacting detail, no inch of stone unmarked. Frescoes and dioramas dominated the ceiling, telling the creation myths of Amansi, though with an unusual focus.

  There was Great Amin-Ra contemplating alone in the void. Here he pulled together the earth from nothing. Heshtat followed his friend’s lead with his head still raised to the ceiling, tracing the images with his eyes as they told the story of the god of gods shaping the earth and creating his Ennead from the sand and the sky itself. None of this disagreed with history, but what came next was shocking.

  Heshtat considered himself well-read when it came to the mythology and history of his chosen home. Amansi was ancient—‘the land that gods once walked’ their people called it—and while Heshtat knew that was not unique to Amansi, he also knew that there was a diamond of truth hidden in the sands of civilisational pride. Amansi was special, and the gods had once walked here in truth.

  Once. Long ago though, in the ancient times, and nobody knew why they abandoned the world. There were theories; gods, there were theories! But as far as Heshtat knew there was no evidence to confirm one way or the other.

  And yet, here it was. The intricately painted ceiling showed in stylised images one after the other how Amansi had fallen. Ships came from the Bleeding Sea, and refugees poured out. Not some overwhelming horde or flood of humanity, but a rising tide that arrived slowly over generations. They brought no gods with them. Music, food, festivals and culture, as all people take with them when they flee cataclysm, but no gods.

  The doom was nothing physical that these Sea Peoples brought, instead it was information. Something was following in their footsteps. Something that the Ennead, even Great Amin-Ra himself, feared above all.

  The God-Plague.

  Maatkare moved with purpose in front of him, occasionally stopping to examine a tile in a mosaic, or the seam of a stone slab. Heshtat had eyes only for the story unfolding above, his neck starting to ache from the strain but the feeling utterly unimportant in the face of what he was learning.

  The God-Plague had been one theory suggested by scholars. Others posited a rival pantheon of unimaginable power that caused Amansi’s gods to flee from the Waking World. The priesthood and divine cults were not fond of either explanation, for obvious reasons, and most of their suggestions centred around a rot in the heart of mortal-kind and that only by purging and overcoming it could humanity show the gods they were worthy of their presence once more.

  Heshtat had always assumed that whatever the truth was, he’d not be around to find out. And yet… the God-Plague. Delivered by a foreign people.

  Unease twinged his guts. Were this secret to travel beyond the temple, many would die. Amansi was no longer the premier power in the world, but three True Thrones still lived, and many foreigners made their home within the Nikean embrace. He knew, with a certainty born of bitter experience, that were word of this to escape the island, foreigners would be put to the sword. Immediate banishment would be the greatest mercy they could expect from anywhere.

  Even Idib would follow, Cleo forced to allow the purge or be deposed along with it in a furious flood of hatred from the populace. They lived in a faded reflection of past glory, and if given someone to blame, the children of Amin-Ra would lash out violently.

  No matter that the Sea Peoples had long ago integrated. Heshtat doubted there was a single mortal alive in Amansi without foreign influence somewhere in their ancestry, based on the slow diffusion of blood as a people intermingled. No matter that it seemed to be no fault of the people themselves. Simple accusation would be enough to blame them. Sasskanids, Helexians, men and women from Namor, and more distant shores besides. All would be blamed for this original sin.

  “Maatkare, you must look at this.”

  His friend turned, followed his pointing finger and stopped. He frowned, then looked at Heshtat askance. Nodding, Heshtat indicated the ceiling behind them as well, and Maatkare took time to stalk backwards, following the diorama to its beginning and then back again.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Eventually, he spoke. “Well, my friend, it is nice to have confirmation, if nothing else.”

  Heshtat frowned. “You understand that this cannot spread, yes?”

  “And why not?” Maatkare asked. “It is already a known theory.”

  “Surely you are not this dense?” Heshtat asked, a little more harshly than he intended. “Foreigners brought the plague that banished the gods. The events that set Amansi on its current trajectory, that caused the collapse, were the fault of foreign refugees. What do you think will happen when the poor and downtrodden find out about this? When the wealthy realise they can use this to divide the peasants and the educated guilders and artisans?”

  “But they did not bring the plague. Heshtat my friend, you are reading with half an eye. I understand this is close to your heart as a foreigner yourself, but you mistake this painting. You see the style? This is from the first era, when the gods still walked the land, yes? Look at the brush strokes—intricate and blocky. Stylised. You are in the centre of the story, my friend, and you are building sweeping narratives about what it means without seeing the full picture.”

  Heshtat hesitated, looking back to the ceiling once more. “What do you mean?”

  “There is a flow to paintings and wall art from this era. A narrative that flows through all of the examples we have uncovered, and its structure is clear. Three acts; a setup, a tragedy, and a conclusion that weaves it all together. This is the setup. The Sea Peoples are not to blame for the fall—they are not the tragedy. We are still in act one, Heshtat, and the tragedy—the point of failure, the moral lesson to be taught by this story—has not yet appeared.”

  Heshtat sucked at his teeth.

  “You are not convinced,” Maatkare said with a laugh. “That is okay. We shall uncover more, but first we must focus on the present, yes?”

  Heshtat reluctantly nodded. He had become far too distracted. They were still in a dangerous place, and he could not afford to let down his guard, no matter what he learned. Satisfied, Maatkare turned back to his work, checking their path forward with impressive focus. Heshtat felt the desire to look up once more, to continue the story, but he pushed it away with an effort of will and surveyed the surroundings instead.

  They still moved through the impossibly long hallway, pillars lining either side, but something felt off about it all. It was too long, too tall, too large. Who was this built for? And how did this all fit within the pyramid? They had been transported somewhere, and so he supposed it was possible that they walked within the very centre of the pyramid complex right now, but why would an entrance hall be located so centrally? Where did it go? This whole design made no sense to him. It almost had a dreamlike quality to it with the way the hallways stretched on into the gloom.

  Sconces were mounted on each pillar at roughly head height, and torches burned merrily within, letting out a soft orange glow that splashed shadows all around them. The air was crisp and clear, but the weight of ambient essence was so strong that to breathe felt almost cloying. How this much power was concentrated in the Waking World was a mystery to Heshtat, and he sighed in frustration at his lack of ability to use it. So much power, so close to hand.

  “Do you smell that?” he asked of his friend after a moment.

  Maatkare paused, lifting his head from his examination of the floor to sniff the air. “Yes. It’s familiar, is it not? Sour and sickly… like carrion.”

  Heshtat nodded. “I cannot place it though.”

  “And what a relief it is, my friend, that we are equally useless!” Maatkare barked, prompting a smile from Heshtat in turn.

  It was good to see his friend in high spirits at least. Heshtat was riddled with unease, but he’d not share his nerves with nothing concrete to back them up. A nervous mind was a slow one, after all, as Heshtat well knew. Still, he couldn’t help but notice the way the shadows waved and danced, something subtly off about them.

  They continued on, and eventually they made it to the end of the grand entrance hallway. It felt like they’d been moving for a mile by that point, but it was hard to tell. The hallway opened out into a wide square room, shockingly vast. There was a depression in the centre with stairs descending down towards three identical archways beneath them. Between each was a yawning portal of darkness—stairways to the abyss. Clearly, there was a choice to make here, but it would be foolish to proceed without first confirming things. At Maatkare’s nod, they backtracked, then slowly retraced their route with gazes pinned to the ceiling.

  Once more, Heshtat found himself getting lost in the narrative, the images seeming to come to life before his eye. Great Amin-Ra creating the mortals from mud and clay, the arrival of the Sea Peoples and the God-Plague… and then they reached act two. Amin-Ra began to plot. The refugees had not brought the plague themselves; they simply brought warning of it. They were heralds of an impending catastrophe, but they had bought the gods time.

  The Ennead were of no use. Osirion dead at the hands of his brother. Wusis inconsolable in her grief and seeking to revive her lover from beyond the Final Door. Sutekh gone, lost in his quest for atonement by defeating the great demon Apopis. Haruw seeking to mend bridges and join that struggle at Sutekh’s side, and Nebet shepherding her herd of minor gods through the chaos. Toth and Sebek both uninterested in anything beyond their pursuit of eldritch knowledge, and the two elder elemental gods of earth and sky too bound by their own domains to assist in the task.

  So great Amin-Ra was left to plan alone. Were the gods to do nothing, they would surely be killed; cast into the Afterworld at the hands of the God-Plague. They could abandon their worshippers and divine forms and flee through the Final Door to the After if they wished, or they could remain in the Waking—become mortal in truth, and when the God-Plague came for them, they would die as mortals too.

  Neither choice was particularly enviable for beings that had ruled the lands for millennia. So Amin-Ra, in his infinite wisdom, created a third way for his children. With the aid of the finest mortals—Imhhotep first among them—he created a new order of things. He cleaved the Waking and the After in twain and carved a new plane of existence from the abyss to fill the gap. And thus came into being the Otherworld.

  The gods could disperse themselves through the Other, let their power fill that realm and carry their influence. They could inhabit avatars, craft bodies from essence and live as they once had, only in the Other instead of the Waking.

  And it worked.

  The God-Plague swept through Amansi, and while some divinities remained with the mortals in the Waking and were killed, most decided to flee. The Ennead escaped through the Final Door into the After, leaving shreds of their great power in the Other for mortals and gods alike to find, but otherwise left the mortal and magical planes to the mortals themselves. Their roles would be to shepherd souls through the Field of Reeds, to sit in judgement of the Heart, and to safeguard the Afterworld from the predations of the abyss.

  The minor gods though—most of those stayed in the Other, carving new domains for themselves, influencing and guiding mortals from the new magical plane, interacting with their followers and shaping events in the same way they always had.

  “So why is this a tragedy?” Heshtat asked. “What is the lesson here?”

  “I could not say,” Maatkare said. “It seems to have worked, but…” Heshtat gave his friend time, looking over to see Maatkare pursing his lips. It also gave his neck a rest form the uncomfortable position. “It is strange, is it not, my friend? That this magical Otherworld described above does not resemble our own.”

  Heshtat paused. A noise caught his ear, though when he strained it vanished once more. “Yes. The Other is a dangerous place now. It is filled with spirits and monsters, and while the gods’ power remains, there are no true avatars that I have met, no guiding influence or towers of knowledge. How they have let this fall to ruin…”

  There it was again. That sound, like a clicking that echoed further than it should.

  “So what happened to the gods?” Maatkare asked, continuing on his thought. “What could have driven them away?”

  “The Desolate?” Heshtat offered, mind still on that sound.

  “Too early,” Maatkare disagreed. “The Desolation occurred a few hundred years ago. The Other was created centuries before that. We are talking of ancient history here my friend, not events within living memory.”

  “There are some who remember. Khaemwaset. Iset. Arguably even Hefatiti,” Heshtat murmured, hand drifting unconsciously towards the hilt of his khopesh. “Though if we include the immortal Pharaohs, everything is within living memory. The hint is in the name.”

  “Not everything, my friend,” Maatkare countered. “They were not around at the cleaving of the world, were they? Even Khaemwaset is young compared to Imhhotep.”

  Heshtat chuckled. “I bet that rankles. To be an undying Pharaoh, a peer of great powers who has dedicated his life to designing and building great structures, and it is a mortal that bears the title of the Great Architect.”

  Maatkare hummed. “Mortal no longer,” he said, pointing up at the fresco above. “Amin-Ra raised him to divinity for his help with the cleaving. Are you not even looking?”

  “Sorry,” Heshtat said, distracted. “There is something here. I heard… I am not sure.”

  Maatkare stopped. Now that the slap of sandals against stone vanished, the silence was deafening. The soft rustle of their armour as they breathed was interrupted by that same clicking Heshtat had heard earlier.

  “You hear it now?” he asked, and Maatkare nodded.

  The ring of blades scraping free of iron rings rebounded in the cavernous hallway as both Heshtat and Maatkare drew their weapons. Heshtat’s obsidian khopesh gleamed in the firelight, its surface strangely bright. More white than black now; an inverse of its true colour. His handaxe was more mundane in his off-hand, but the weight of the iron head was reassuring. Maatkare’s twin tulwars looked heavy and deadly in his hands, and his face was set in a determined grimace.

  They knew that sound.