Chapter Forty-Eight
Nero saw his brother coming, his enormous bat-like wings carrying him across the vast chasm so fast he nearly blurred. A cloud of black magic encircled him, wispy and terrifying. He was a beautiful and terrible site to behold.
My brother?
The term echoed strangely in his mind. It was followed by an odd, confused silence. He was left mind-boggled as he struggled with the Entity for control of his own body. At the moment, they stood invisible atop the sarcophagus, silently waiting for the king and queen to come rushing to the child’s rescue.
The king pulled a fast one, however. The Entity sneered at the man’s rash but brave act. Apparently the king planned to take him on alone. He found this amusing.
Nero was not quite so amused, but he was admittedly baffled by this as well. Why would Nicholas choose to leave behind a woman like Adelaide? He’d seen her soul; he knew who and what she was and all she could be. Her kind of selflessness was beyond rare.
So much confusion played about his head, like snowflakes fluttering on a mad breeze, but overriding his questions, overriding the chaos, was his desperate need to regain control. The Entity was drained; he could feel it. The son-of-a-bitch was like a chain with a weak link. If he could simply find that link and push against it with all his might, he stood a chance at taking the reins once again.
So he searched frantically. He railed at the bastard who would use a child the way he was planning to. He was planning to kill Mimi Tanniym. Outright. He was going to kill her just to stun the queen long enough to slice Adelaide open. Her bloodletting was a necessary component in the spell meant to awaken the sleeping goddess.
It was all convoluted and insane. As far as Nero was concerned, this plan was nothing more than the dangerous ravings of a mad man. That’s what the Entity was. A man – thing – driven cuckoo by hatred. So much hatred.
He knew the whole story.
Long, long ago, there were three celestial beings. Brother gods, and the one woman they both loved, the goddess. The brothers were Amun and Kamun, also spelled Amon and Kamon. They were day and night. Amun was the night, cool and calm, the breeze that eased the sunburn, the brilliant stars, the song of the River Nile as it churned its steady way across the land. But he was also the shelter taken by criminals, and the darkness that hid evil deeds.
Kamun was the day, harsh and deadly. Demanding and vain. He was the sun and the heat and the endless burning sand. But he was also the light that made crops grow, and allowed scribes to tell their stories.
Amunet was married to Amun. But she was neither day nor night. She was the sunrise and the sunset, the twilight between them. And because she ushered them both in when it was time, they each loved her. Amun, also known as Amun Re, was proud of his beautiful wife and the power she wielded over them both. Kamun was silently jealous, but steadfast. And the three deities ruled side by side for eons.
But Amunet, being the difference between night and day, the space between light and dark, saw the extremes of both of the brother gods. And because she was kind, because she cared, she saw the bad more than the good.
In the harsh light of day, she saw the drought of summer. She saw men and women kill each other for food. She heard the shaking whimpers and moans of children dying of thirst or heat stroke.
She saw the murders in the night. She heard the screams of victims and the tears of the loved ones they left behind.
And her heart bled.
Over the centuries, it bled dry. Over the millennia, it turned hard as stone.
Until one day, Amunet waited for the day to end, but did not usher in the night. Instead, she moved alone in twilight over the land, gathering up the hatred she felt for all things evil and unleashing it as a plague across the world.
The oceans rose. Water swallowed cities. Insects devoured crops. Diseases swept across populations, wiping them from the planet.
And yet her hatred was not sated. Her foul fury for the depraved depths humanity could plumb was only a fire stoked by wrath. It grew stronger.
Her husband pleaded with her from the black of his night time shroud, but she would not listen. She could not. Hatred, pure and real and red, drove her on. Her only desire was to wipe humanity from the face of the Earth. And start anew.
So Amun closed his eyes. The stars went out. Clouds covered the world as he cried. And with his tears, he cast the spell that would place his beloved bride in a forever sleep.
He placed her in a sacred sarcophagus and laid her to rest in the Land of the Dead. To watch over her, he assigned several guardians, each in the form of a cat. These cats would watch her sleep, making certain the Wrathful Goddess never again awoke.
However, Amun Re’s love for her was strong, and over the years, he continued to visit her in her place of rest… as did her brother.
The feud between the two gods was petty, and according to the Entity, it continued even today. Kamun schemed, attempting to find a way to bring Amunet back to the world of the living so that they may rule together, side by side. Amun simply played defense.
The Entity had at one point considered using Kamun’s desires to his own advantage. But in the end, he’d realized the brother gods simply had no idea what they were dealing with. Not really. Not entirely.
Amunet was not a sleeping goddess. She was resting wrath. She was hatred, pure and clean.
“An endless font from which a soul like mine can drink,” the Entity had told Nero. “She is a wellspring of righteous fury borne of every foul dead ever committed by mankind. She is the result. She is what remains when all is said and done, and humanity is left wondering why.”
Neither of the gods deserved her, as far as the Entity was concerned. Neither knew what to do with her. But he did.
Oh, he had plans.
With the Entity’s help, Amunet would become a weapon. She was a vessel accustomed to containing animosity. As such, she knew how to absorb it, allow it to grow, and then refocus it in an act of terrible destruction.
If Amunet was awoken, the hatred on the planet would find a home within her. Religious, racial, and sexual intolerance, war, terrorism, rape, random acts of insane violence would give birth to abhorrence and loathing. This loathing would then coalesce within Amunet, swirling and building. The Entity would feed. And feed.
And when he was full, he would help her release what was left over, leveling the land and all of the petty creatures upon it. What he’d told Evangeline was true. The violence would end. It would end because humanity would be no more. Anyone with half a brain knew that this was the only real way to create peace on earth.
The problem was that it took a power nearly as strong as Amunet’s to nullify Amun Re’s sleep spell and bring the Wrathful Goddess back to the world of the living. That power, the Entity had learned, was housed inside each of the Thirteen Queens. Once they fully became queens and took their places a the Table of the Thirteen, they were nearly untouchable to the Entity. Each time he tried, he was defeated. And every defeat made him weaker.
Dealing with them at full power would be his undoing. So he’d learned to attack immediately after he discovered who they were. There was a brief space of time between a queen’s “realization” and their claiming of the crown. He had to get to them during that time, or any hope of using them was lost. Thus far, he’d failed consistently.
It was beginning to take a very real toll on him. Nero knew this. The Entity knew this. He didn’t have many tries left, not only because he was weak, but because math was what it was, and the numbers were running out. This was queen number eleven.