Chapter 1
The price of a God
The moon was a sliver of bone in a sky choked with stars, casting a sickly silver sheen across the endless expanse of the Sahara. In the profound silence of the desert night, broken only by the sigh of the wind over dunes that looked like frozen waves, a single figure moved. Priest Seth was a ghost in his own story, his white robes now grey with dust, their gold embroidery tarnished by sand and despair. He sat slumped upon his camel, Kadesh, the beast's great head drooping with a fatigue that mirrored its master's. They were the last. All his followers, the men who had believed in his vision of a world remade, were gone—their faith and their bodies consumed by the desert's indifferent hunger. Only this animal, this last spark of life he had raised from a foal, remained.
The cold of the desert night seeped into his bones, a deep chill that his robes could not block. His thirst was no longer a fire but a hollow, aching void. His lips were cracked maps of a dying land. He knew the signs. The water in the skin hanging from the saddle was little more than a damp memory, the food long since vanished. The vision that had driven him from the libraries of Giza—the promise of a temple older than Egypt, housing the unified, whole statue of Exo—now felt like a mirage, a final cruel joke played by the cosmos.
He looked down at Kadesh. The trust in the animal's weary, plodding gait was a weight heavier than any sand dune. That trust was now the only currency he had left to spend.
"Forgive me," he whispered, the words a raw scrape in his throat, meant not for the beast, but for the last vestige of his own humanity.
His hand rose, not with speed, but with a dreadful, final certainty. His fingers curled into a talon, and from them erupted a vile, amethyst energy that seemed to drink the moonlight itself. It was a magic of absolute taking, a perversion of all life. The energy did not flash; it crawled, wrapping around Kadesh's flank.
The camel's head jerked up, a silent, open-mouthed scream of shock and betrayal trapped in its throat. A violent shudder wracked its massive frame. In the span of a single, horrifying breath, its body desiccated. Its skin shriveled and tightened over sudden, sharp bone, its eyes drying into dull, milky orbs. The life that had warmed it for years was violently siphoned away.
Seth gasped, his spine arching as the stolen vitality flooded into him. It was not a gentle refreshment but a violent invasion. The cold that had gripped him vanished, replaced by a false, thrumming warmth. The agonizing void of his thirst was filled not with water, but with a corrupt power that left a metallic taste of blood and ozone in his mouth. Strength, alien and unclean, returned to his limbs.
When the flow ceased, the silence was deeper than before. He opened his eyes. They now gleamed with a cold, predatory light, reflecting the countless, indifferent stars. He looked down at the grotesque, shriveled carcass that had been his last companion. A monument to his resolve. He felt nothing but the cold certainty of his purpose. This was the price. This was always the price.
He dismounted, his movements fluid and powerful with his stolen strength. He did not spare the husk a final glance. He retrieved the near-empty waterskin from the saddle, draining its pathetic contents without ceremony. It was irrelevant now.
Pulling his hood up against the wind that now felt merely cool, not lethal, Priest Seth began to walk. His figure, a stark shadow against the monochrome desert, was soon swallowed by the darkness between the dunes. He left behind no footprints, only a dead thing, and the absolute knowledge that to grasp a god, one must first become a monster. The world slept on, unaware that its would-be master was coming, baptized in the silence of a sacrifice only the stars had witnessed.
The wind whispered its ancient secrets across the endless sands, its breath tugging gently at the priest's robes as he stood in perfect solitude. He was alone now—the camel was gone, its life force spent to sustain his own. Between two towering mountains of sand that rose like sleeping giants, their ridged slopes glowing with ethereal starlight, he remained as the last sentinel of his forgotten expedition.
Above him, the night sky unveiled its glory. This was no ordinary darkness dotted with stars, but a celestial tapestry embroidered with brilliant jewels. Three points of light—Venus and Jupiter transformed into radiant beacons—hung in solemn procession, their collective brilliance so intense it seemed to vibrate through the very air. The cosmic display felt intentional, as if the universe itself had paused its eternal motions to arrange this spectacle for one man alone.
Seth faced the heavens, his head tilted in contemplation. His white robes, now tinted with the cool blue of twilight, billowed around his ankles, their movements echoing the gentle undulations of the sand beneath his feet. A profound silence enveloped the desert, broken only by the wind's soft murmur. In this magnificent, stark landscape beneath the extraordinary stars, he appeared both insignificant and utterly central—a mortal soul communing with the infinite.
As the celestial bodies rested in their brilliant display, words from an ancient text surfaced in his mind with sudden clarity: Between two mountain peaks, the King and Queen of the Sky would dance, and the Sun's light would find its counterpart. The prophecy he had studied in scrolls older than Egypt itself now unfolded before his eyes. The memory moved through the chambers of his consciousness like a long-awaited revelation.
A grim determination settled in his soul. He who had endured all barriers, who had survived the Sahara's cruelest hardships, would he not endure for this ultimate prize? The Sun's light—the primordial power of Exo—awaited its counterpart, and he would be the vessel to claim it.