*Ten Years Ago*

  When she came for him, it was deep beneath the sands and with a face of stone. The brief glance he caught of that face as she entered was enough to shame him further, and he hung his head. His hair was matted with sweat and worse, and he couldn’t bear to see her disgust.

  “Leave us,” she ordered, the queen’s voice devoid of all the warmth he had once known. It barely even sounded like her. The door clanged shut, and there was silence for long moments. Blood dripped from his cheekbone and down to the ground below.

  And then she was there again. Her knees hit the ground, and her hands pulled his face to the light. “Tat-tat” she whispered, and her voice wasn’t cold any longer. “What happened?”

  That was all it took. His sanity had been hanging on by a thread, his honour long since discarded—dead at the feat of his pharaoh in the Otherworld. The barest hint of compassion from anyone had been liable to send him over the edge, but hearing it from her? Seeing not hate, not disgust nor disappointment, but instead still the spark of love in her gaze… that was his undoing.

  He wept for an age, tears spilling to the ground to mingle with the blood and grime, and through it all she held him.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, over and over again. “I failed him. I failed you. I’m so sorry, Cleo.”

  She hushed him, and below the earth they knelt together, sharing in a combined grief only a month raw. Eventually, she raised his face once more and he saw her truly for the first time. She looked… different.

  Stress had carved harsh lines across her forehead, she’d lost weight, but most significant were her eyes. They held grief, fresh and painful, but buried deep—beneath layers of concern both petty and immediate. She was queen now, after all. She’d been elevated immediately upon her father’s death, and the circumstances of the coronation had cost her dearly.

  He nearly broke once more at the sight, but mastered himself with an effort of will. He was an adept of Jb, after all, and an iron-hard will was only one of the advantages he wielded as a consequence.

  Instead of weeping once again and retreating into that pit of despair and self-pity, he pulled himself together, block by block, and delivered his report. He was still the captain of Idib’s Tomb Guard, at least nominally, and he would see this last duty through before they executed him.

  He told her all of it; the journey to the Otherworld itself, the unusual activity they immediately noticed and the onset of the Desolate, how the Dreaming Tide had surged through the broken pyramid before they’d even had a chance to escape.

  He spent longer than was professional detailing the sacrifice of his brothers and sisters—his charges. Their brave heroics, now utterly pointless. He spoke of the final frantic flight through the Other, the awe-inspiring power that her father displayed there in that ancient dreamscape, and finally, of the desperate sprint to reach the Final Door when it became clear there was no returning.

  He faltered as he described her father’s actions at the end. His death had been gruesome, but it was the pharaoh’s final actions that he struggled to describe most of all. They brought shame to him, and despite his wretched opinion of himself currently, Heshtat still had a warrior’s heart and a sliver of the pride that came along with it.

  “He cast me out,” he finally admitted. “At the end, in the face of that monstrosity, he… he cast me through the veil.”

  Cleo’s eyes widened. “How? I thought he couldn’t escape?”

  He shrugged heavy shoulders, the manacles rattling where they were chained to a heavy steel plate fixed to the ground. It was mostly for show, since all knew that simple steel was not enough to contain an adept of Khet with as many awakened aspects as Heshtat. The guards at the door were the real assurance, though why they thought they were needed, he didn’t know. Failure was failure, and he was now a broken man.

  “He was a master of Sah. None of us knew what he was truly capable of.”

  The words were bitter for some reason. He did not blame the man for being unable to protect himself—that was Heshtat’s job, after all, not the pharaoh’s. Still, it hurt to know secrets had been kept from him till the very end.

  “Even still, why would he do that?” she asked carefully. He could see she was searching for answers and equally knew she would not like the ones he had. Still, she deserved the truth. That much at least he could give her.

  “He screamed at me to protect you as he cast me through the veil. He said you would have more enemies than even you were aware of, and wanted someone you could trust by your side.”

  His voice cracked towards the end, and he heard her suck in a sharp breath, withdrawing from him for a moment. She rocked back on her heels and stood.

  “That bastard!” she swore.

  Heshtat looked up sharply, anger roused so quickly he felt his breath leave his bruised chest. “Have some respect!” he hissed, not knowing why he felt such rage, but unable to stop it from pouring out. It was so good to have someone other than himself to direct the hatred towards that he was helpless to stop the words before they left his mouth.

  Her eyes flashed, the silver glow emanating from their depths catching the light and blinding him for but a moment. When his vision returned in the next heartbeat, he was looking at the queen of Idib province, his Cleo buried so deep beneath the mask that he could see her no longer.

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  “Have respect!?” she hissed back, leaning forwards once more with bared teeth. “You don’t know what that bastard of a man has done! You don’t have the faintest idea how many threats he has set at my feet, at the feet of this province. How his greed has cost the people that I am now sworn to protect!”

  “He was still your father!” Heshtat cried, the words coming unbidden. “And he died to protect you. Don’t speak of him so, Cleo.”

  “He died for his own ambitions, nothing more!”

  Her voice rung across around the small chamber with the power of essence infused within. She had proclaimed that truth with the full force of her soul and it shook the dirt and gravel on the ground beneath them. She was only an acolyte when it came to the heart though, and as an adept of Jb, he could see through her weave to the veracity of the statement.

  It was the truth, as she saw it at least.

  “You don’t even know what he was trying to do! You don’t know why he was there, why he built that great pyramid in the first place. All for more power…” she trailed off in a whisper, looking over his shoulder. “You don’t know anything, Heshtat.”

  “I know that he was an honourable man!” he replied, breathing heavily through his nose now. He wanted to stand and pace, to move. Frustration boiled in his gut, but he had nowhere to put it, no way to express it, chained as he was. “This isn’t the sheltered world you knew as a princess, Cleo—power is needed to keep the province and its people safe.”

  “You don’t know what he was willing to sacrifice,” she whispered softly. Her silver eyes turned back to him once more, now hard and flinty. The gaze of a monarch in truth. “And it is Queen Cleosiris now.”

  He flinched and looked down. This was what he had expected, what he had braced himself for. It still hurt though.

  It had all gone so wrong. Not just the disastrous attempt by the pharaoh to seize further power—to finally deserve his taken title in truth—but even this very conversation. It had gone off-track so quickly, and he didn’t know how to bring it back to the goal her father had demanded of him. He had to try though. He had made a promise.

  “Cleo, I—” he cut himself off at her icy glare and tried again. “Queen Cleosiris… come with me.”

  He almost smiled as he saw Cleo beneath the mask once more. She was so surprised, mouth open and eyes wide, like when he had used to scare her as a girl. Gods, we were so young back then.

  The queen reasserted control once more, and her face closed off again, but he tried to capitalise on the moment of human connection he’d seen and ploughed onwards desperately.

  “Come with me, Cleo. Your father cast me out so that you wouldn’t be alone. He never wanted you to be queen like this. You’re not ready, and it’s too dangerous. He asked me to protect you, made me swear it. I can’t do that here in Idib, but we could run away together. Get away from all of this.”

  The words tumbled from his cracked lips like river stones, rolling over one another and mixing until they formed a new road for them to walk down.

  “Come with me. Like you once asked—”

  “Bastard!” she cried.

  He looked up to meet her gaze and saw her shoulders shaking. She was trembling, not with fear at the danger of the proposal, or even joy as he had secretly hoped, but with rage. Barely suppressed, her anger was scalding as she poured it forth.

  “Don’t you dare, Heshtat! Don’t you dare use my own words against me! I have a duty I cannot forsake. The people of Idib need me, and I will not abandon them. That you would even ask—”

  “Fuck duty,” he cried, matching her rage with his own desperation, but her eyes flashed and she overruled him.

  “Coward! Bastard! Fucking cur of a dog!” She shouted loud enough to rattle the chains of his manacles, her anger eclipsing all. “I begged you, Heshtat. Back when we both could have left without consequence. Before all of this!”

  Her hair streamed around her head in a non-existent breeze summoned by her soul. The skin on her arms was pimpled, each hair standing on end with her passion. Something in his words had lit her afire with righteous anger and she burned him with the full force of her newly empowered soul.

  “But no! You were so obsessed with duty. With becoming a great man, with forging a life to be proud of. I wasn’t enough for you then, Heshtat, and only now that you’ve lost everything, now that you have no legend or legacy to cement… now you ask me to give up my duty, my honour, and run away with you?”

  There was a moment of silence between them after that. He didn’t know what to say.

  “You bastard,” she whispered as she turned away, wiping at her face with both hands, smearing some of the heavy kohl that she was so fond of. ‘Makes me look mysterious’, she used to say. He felt tears staining his own skin, tracking their way through the grime and blood that marred his face.

  Her words were raw and meant to hurt, but it was their truth that cut him. He had refused her request last year, and he knew she had been hurt by it. He had tried to mend that wound, had thought he’d managed to show her that it wasn’t a case of commitment, but one of honour.

  As captain of her father’s Tomb Guard, he was not a suitable match for her. They could have their moments, and he would always be by her side as more than just a simple lover. But they had needed to wait until she gained the throne, until she could legitimise him as a consort and do away with the politics of it all. A beautiful dream that now lay in ashes, burned up in a single cursed day.

  Clearly, he had failed at that task, based only on the pain he heard in her voice and read into her words; the things she did say, and more importantly, that which she didn’t.

  “There is much you don’t know, Heshtat. Much I have learned in the last month. It does not cast my father in a pleasant light…” her voice was somewhat muffled, and she still faced away from him. “You were due to be executed.”

  “I know,” he replied, surprised at how even his voice was. He had accepted it by now, but there was a difference between knowing something, and feeling it.

  “I commuted your sentence,” she said softly. “Seti pushed for exile, but that is a death all the same, just slower. I overturned that too, and now you are to be released, given leave to stay within Idib, though your titles and position will be stripped.”

  Heshtat frowned. His relief was short-lived, and he asked a question he didn’t want the answer to. “Just my titles and position?”

  Queen Cleosiris sighed, but she did not dissemble. “No. Your soul will be broken, and you will not be given leave to cultivate. Monthly checks by the priests.”

  His shoulders slumped. He searched for words but found none. Still, at least he had his life. He might have lost his strength, his soul, his charge and his purpose… but he still had his life. And perhaps one day…

  “I am due to marry,” his queen said, and just like that, all hope was lost. “A general from the Aquiline Empire. His legion will reinforce Idib and my rule. He will be here in two weeks, and you must be gone by then, for a time at least.”

  He raised his head to meet her gaze. Silver and cold, with just a hint of pain buried deep beneath, met hollow brown. The gold that had previously stained his irises whenever he drew on vital essence had fled during his captivity, starved as he was by his manacles. It would soon leave forever.

  Her pain might be buried deep, but his shone forth openly. Failure after failure. First her father, now her. But that wasn’t quite right, was it? You failed her far earlier, didn’t you? That original failure was at least a year old, and he hadn’t even noticed until now.

  “I’m sorry, Cleo.”

  “I know. As am I, Tat-Tat.”

  There was nothing else to say.

  They stared at one another for an endless moment, and then she turned, and the door clanged shut once more. Leaving him alone, with his nothing but his failure. It was cold comfort.