Chapter 553: The Curse Of Khemet [Bonus - ]

Chapter 553: The Curse Of Khemet [Bonus Chapter]

SPLAT!

The sound was wet and sickeningly flat, but it did not come from freshly pumped blood spraying out of their own chests.

’We weren’t attacked...?’

The interlocking slabs of crystalline golden sand that Pharaoh-President Menes Al-Mansur, his son Tariq, and Lady Safira had violently thrust into the air hung frozen between the stone ceiling and the Persian rugs for three agonizing seconds.

The runes etched along the perimeter of their shields hummed with an unstable high-pitched whine, vibrating under the expected pressure of the impact above them.

Slowly, the golden barriers lost their internal tension.

The compacted mana bled out of the particulate matter, and the golden shields began to disintegrate, sloughing away into thousands of loose dry granules that pattered against the polished flagstones like dry summer rain.

Shshshshsh!

The three sand-weavers dropped their trembling hands.

Their gazes dropped in unison, locking onto the center of the sandstone room directly beneath the blackened iron slats of the exhaust vent.

What had dropped from the dark duct was not an explosive elemental cluster or a slug... It was a dense shifting globule of yellow coarse sand that had already begun to rot in mid-air.

As it hit the stone, the physical laws governing basic earth manipulation seemed to warp and curdle as the compacted mass began turning into blood.

’What the fuck is going on...?’

The blood was dark-crimson and rancid with the foul reek of dead cells, the fluid weeped from the core of the mass, bubbling outward in greasy concentric ripples that soaked the edges of the imported silk rugs and stained the carved stone tiles a deep rust-colored brown.

’I still don’t understand what’s going on... Are we being attacked...?’

The sand absorbed the moisture, held it in a pressurized hydraulic lock, and was now vomiting it back out onto the floor like a ruptured sponge.

And sitting right in the center of that glistening gore-slick mire, rolling twice before bumping against the gilded claw-foot of an ivory divan, was a severed head.

It was Malikar.

The Third Prince of Khemet looked unrecognizable to anyone who had known his golden arrogant profile in the pleasure palaces of the Nile.

His rich sun-baked bronze flesh had been totally drained of all moisture.

The skin was drawn taut across the skull like parchment stretched over an iron frame, blackening around the cheekbones, shriveled and cracked until the teeth jutted out from receded gums in a grotesque, mocking grimace.

His dark kohl-rimmed eyelids were sunken deep into hollow leathery sockets that looked vacant and dried out like an abandoned wasp’s nest.

THUD!

Pharaoh-President Menes Al-Mansur’s knees simply gave out beneath him.

The current ruler of Khemet... a man whose mana had carved riverbeds through mountain ranges and forced continental armies to negotiate on their knees hit the cold flagstones with a hollow bone-jarring impact.

"Fuu..."

His fingers, heavy with solid gold scarab rings and raw emerald cabochons, dug into the blood-soaked floor as he crawled forward on all fours with his immaculate white uniform dragging through the cooling gore and his breath catching in his throat with a dry wheeze.

"Malikar..."

The whisper tore through his cracked lips sounding small and shattered. The man really looked nothing like a President.

"My boy... Malikar... no, no, no..."

He reached out.

His trembling fingers hovered over the shriveled leathery brow of the severed head, hovering an inch away as if terrified that the illusion would break if he touched it but the metallic stench in the room was too thick and the heat rising off the dark blood was too real as well.

He touched the matted black hair.

Fsssshhhh!

The instant the skin of his thumb brushed the dry follicles, a soft dry whisper broke through the room.

The hair simply dissolved.

The flesh of the scalp, the desiccated brow, the sunken cheekbones... all of it gave way beneath the light pressure of his fingertips, crumbling into a stream of ultra-fine powdery grains of pitch-black sand.

Black sand.

Tariq choked on his own breath, stumbling backward until his bronze scale-mail slammed against the carved wall with a loud clang while Safira’s hands flew to her mouth, her eyes bulging with horror.

In the sacred ancestral codices of Khemet, black sand did not exist in nature.

It was not an elemental variation, nor was it a volcanic impurity.

Black sand was the undisputed mark of the Void-Devourer... It meant that the person had not merely been slaughtered by blade or spell, It meant the physical and spiritual vessel had been unmade at the cellular level, the core hollowed out and the soul eradicated without leaving behind a single spiritual filament to enter the ancestral halls that were meant for where the people of Khemet went.

Before Menes’s widening eyes, the crumbling accelerated.

The dry jaw collapsed inward and the hollow orbits caved in with the sound of snapping dried reeds.

Shshshshshsh!

The black sand spilled through the open spaces of Menes’s trembling fingers, cascading over his rings like dry gunpowder.

It hit the wet crimson puddle below, but it did not mix with the blood... it was almost as if the black grains repelled the gore completely, sitting on the surface of the fluid like floating oil.

A sudden sharp draft whistled through the high lancet window from the stormy sea outside.

The gust dipped low into the chamber, catching the black powder from the floor and Menes’s open palms, lifting it in a swirling shadowy vortex before carrying the dark remnants of the Third Prince out through the iron bars and scattering them into the endless rain-swept sky above the Citadel’s outer trenches.

Nothing was left on the stone except the cooling pool of blood.

Menes remained on his knees with his head hung low between his broad shoulders while his dark eyes were wide and fixed on his own stained hands.

His teeth clamped together with a force so violent that the sound of enamel grinding against enamel echoed like cracking stones through the sepulcher.

The tendons in his thick neck stood out like steel cables beneath his dark skin with his knuckles turning chalk-white against the floor.

’Why me...?’

The question was a silent venomous scream tearing his ribs apart from within.

’Why now?! Why during my reign?!’

Behind him, Tariq scrambled forward, dropping to one knee and reaching out to touch his father’s trembling shoulder with a trembling armored hand.

"Father!" Tariq shouted, his voice cracking with panic. "Father, speak to us! What was that?! Who breached the ventilation conduits?! Was it an imperial assassin sent by the King?! Did Columbia hire a death-squad?! Tell us what to do!"

Safira’s hand gripped the hilt of her curved khopesh so hard the leather wrapping creaked.

"Pharaoh, we have to sound the alarm! The World Council’s inquisitors are in the corridor! We can seal the sector and demand an immediate inquest into the breach! A foreign prince has been executed under the Council’s own roof!"

Menes did not turn around.

He didn’t acknowledge his second son’s touch, nor did he hear Safira’s frantic demands.

His eyes, usually burning with the fierce radiant gold of a midday desert sun, were slowly losing their luster.

Second by second, the light in his pupils died out, dulling into a flat muddy brown that looked dead.

The silence dragged on for twenty suffocating seconds.

’Why did the Curse of Khemet have to wake up at this time...?’

He knew what this was and he knew what that black sand meant... It wasn’t an assassin hired by Vanderbilt and it wasn’t a strike from the King of the World.

It was the rotting ancient sin of House Al-Mansur, wasn’t it?

The horror buried four thousand feet beneath the Great Dunes of Khemet, an apocalyptic terror that his ancestors had sworn under blood-oaths had been put to sleep forever.

And now, at the precise moment humanity was standing on the precipice of another succession war, the ancient plague had crawled out of the dark, bypassed the defensive wards, and took the skin of his favorite son like a cheap linen tunic.

Slowly, Menes Al-Mansur pushed himself up from the floor.

His movements were mechanical and unnervingly quiet as he didn’t look at Tariq or Safira at all.

He smoothed down the gold pectoral around his neck, adjusted the cuffs of his white military tunic with cold precision, and turned his hollow, dead eyes toward the double doors leading to the Grand Assembly Chamber.

"Not a word," Menes said, his voice dropping into a flat toneless rasp that sounded like gravel dragging across iron.

Tariq froze.

"Father...?"

"You speak of this to no one," Menes commanded, his gaze sliding over his son with the cold indifference of an undertaker. "Clean this stone... Burn the drapes... If a single rumor of this breach passes your lips before the tournament concludes, I will sever your tongue myself. The Exhibition begins in eight minutes. Stand tall, or die where you stand."

He turned and walked out the door with his boots tracking faint dark-red crescents across the pristine white marble of the outer hall.

...

In the Great Assembly Chamber, the temperature felt like the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft.

More than five hundred diplomats, guild arbiters, military attachés, and high scribes occupied the tiered risers, but not a single page rustled and not a single pen scraped across vellum.

At the center of the room sat the Grand Table of solid celestial marble.

The King of the World sat upon the massive star-iron throne at the Royal dais.

Princess Kiera was no longer perched casually on his armrest; she had taken a seat on one of the vacant star-iron chairs immediately adjacent to his throne with her slender hands folded neatly over her lap.

She looked a bit too excited.

To the King’s left and right, the governing bodies of the world were fully assembled.

The World Council Heads occupied the high northern arc.

All of them remained shrouded in heavy light-absorbing cloaks of midnight-silk, their faces completely obscured by smooth uncarved masks of polished white porcelain that caught the light with a dull bone-like finish.

Beside them sat the Magistrates, including Magistrate Bloom, whose hawkish features were cast in shadow as he leaned forward over his sheathed saber.

Around the rest of the celestial ring sat the nine heads of state.

High Marshal-President Valeria Da Silva sat back in her heavy iron chair, looking for all the world like an empress who had just conquered three continents before breakfast.

Her dark scarred face was relaxed, her muscular arms folded across her broad ribbon-covered chest with a quiet smirk playing along the corners of her lips as her amber-brown eyes occasionally flicked toward the empty lower benches where the First Princess had previously been seated.

Directly across the circle, Pharaoh-President Menes Al-Mansur was the antithesis of her poise.

He looked like an exhumed corpse propped up in a chair.

His bronze complexion was drained of all color, taking on the sickly translucent gray of spoiled milk.

His gold-ringed fingers were curled around the edge of the marble with such unconscious terrifying force that the stone around his fingertips was creaking with microscopic fractures.

His liquid-gold eyes were fixed forward, staring into the middle distance with an unmoving glassy vacancy that completely ignored the holographic documents floating before his seat.

The King of the World leaned slightly forward with his deep sapphire irises shifting downward and fixing directly upon the ruler of Khemet.

"Pharaoh-President Menes," the King’s baritone rumbled across the stone, carrying that deceptive polite weight that preceded an execution. "You appear remarkably unsettled... Does the deployment of your people to this tournament affect you or is there another issue?"

Menes didn’t immediately move.

For two seconds, it seemed as though he hadn’t heard the supreme monarch at all.

Then, his head jerked slightly with his gaze dropping to the table as he avoided the King’s eyes entirely.

"A minor disturbance within our group, Your Majesty," Menes answered. "It’s a private matter of state and it most definitely does not affect the readiness of Khemet’s banner."

Before the King could speak again, a soft dry rustle of silk broke from the northern arc.

One of the masked World Council Heads leaned forward.

The white porcelain mask was completely blank with no painted features, no eye slits, and no mouth line yet the aura radiating from beneath the dark cowl rolled across the Grand Table like a suffocating wave of swamp air.

"Your third son, Prince Malikar, was terminated inside a commercial district within Valoria City twenty-five minutes ago," the masked figure stated.

[Author’s Note]

The Discord has been set up! Feel free to come along, the invite link is below...

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