Chapter 841: Nitocris...

Silas didn’t move and for three long seconds, he didn’t even breathe.

’Is this real...?’

A slow chill crawled up the back of his scalp.

He’d seen plenty of strange things... He was the Lord of Blessed Land... He’d fought monsters in the wilds and wrestled a horned demon onto the marble just a few days ago.

If a spirit or some other Lord’s summon had jumped out at him in the Sovereign Realm, he wouldn’t have batted an eye but this was Earth.

Deep beneath the city, the Suppression Engines hummed away day and night, crushing anything from another world that tried to set foot here.

Spirits, beasts and summons were supposed to be ground into paste the moment they crossed into the human world so how was a talking cat sitting on a sunny sidewalk in Silverleaf?

...What the hell was going on?

The cat lifted its chin, its golden eyes narrowing with royal impatience.

"Speak, mortal, Nyaa~," it commanded. "State your name before my presence, Nyaa~!"

Silas let out a long breath through his nose and ran a hand through his hair.

"I haven’t been sleeping enough," he muttered. "I must be hallucinating..."

He stepped around the cat and kept walking... Silas made it exactly three steps before the black blur launched itself off the pavement.

CHOMP!

"Ow...!"

Sharp little teeth sank straight through his pant leg into his calf, and she hung on with all four sets of claws for good measure, dangling off his leg like a furious black ornament.

"Ow, ow, ow... let go...!"

Silas hopped on one foot and shook his leg hard, and the cat finally let go, flipped once in midair, and landed on all four paws with a soft tap.

TAP!

She spun around to face him, her tail lashing back and forth in pure, furious outrage.

Silas looked down at her properly for the first time.

She was, by any measure, an extremely cute black cat.

Her fur was dusty but glossy underneath, her ears were small and delicate with tiny tufts at the tips, and her eyes were huge and golden and burning.

...She was clearly an adult, slender and compact, with the graceful lines of a tiny panther and she was glaring at him like a queen whose royal robe had just been stepped on by a stable boy.

"Insolent peasant, Nyaa~!" she hissed, every whisker trembling. "How dare you turn your back on my royal person, Nyaa~! I demand your name at once, or I shall have your bones ground into dust and scattered to the four winds, Nyaa~!"

Silas rubbed the bite on his leg and sighed.

"Silas," he said. "Silas Graves..."

The cat froze.

Her tail stopped mid-swing. Her ears swiveled forward, and her golden pupils went wide and round.

"Silas Graves...?" she repeated quietly. "Nyaa~?"

’Silas Graves...’ she thought, staring up at him... She knew that name.

By the ancestors, she knew that name better than she knew the royal records of her own dynasty.

For weeks, she had lived inside Harper’s soul as her teacher, and for weeks, that girl had thought about this boy every single waking second.

During sand drills, during meditation, during meals and baths and every quiet breath before sleep, it had been nothing but Silas, Silas, Silas...

’...Silas has the prettiest eyes.’

’...Silas would look so good in that coat.’

’...Do you think Silas noticed my new earrings?’

It had tested her royal patience more than any siege in the history of the Dominion.

Once, in the middle of a lesson on shaping sand into spears, Harper had stopped completely, stared off into the distance, and sighed.

’I wonder what Silas is eating for lunch right now...’

Nitocris had nearly wept.

The cat straightened her back, tucked her front paws neatly together, and lifted her small head with enormous ceremony.

"Then you stand before supreme divinity, Nyaa~," she declared. "I am Nitocris-Hathor, the First Per-aa of the Khemet Dominion, Nyaa~ Ruler of the black sands and queen of the golden horizon, Nyaa~"

Silas tried very hard not to laugh and he failed.

A soft chuckle slipped out of him.

He couldn’t help it... Watching a tiny cat with dusty paws announce herself as an ancient empress, only to end every single sentence with a squeaky little meow, was more than any man could take with a straight face.

Nitocris bristled, but her chest only puffed out further.

"Laugh while you can, ignorant child, Nyaa~" she sniffed. "You stand before the greatest mind of the southern deserts, Nyaa~... I am also the one who claimed Harper’s magnificent body, broke the sacred seals, and allowed Ititius to rise and eliminate th—"

The air changed.

The warm afternoon breeze died as the leaves on the trees went still... The bright sunlight on the sidewalk dimmed and darkened, as if a cloud had passed over the sun, and the shadows of the street stretched out and pooled together until the whole block seemed to sink into a deep heavy dusk.

Silas’s right hand was pointed straight at her.

Water was gathering in the air around his fingers, pulled out of nowhere, twisting into dozens of thin spinning spears of dark blue that hissed and whined as they turned.

...Every single one of them was aimed directly between her eyes.

The man who’d been laughing at her a second ago was gone. His face was cold and blank as carved stone, and the golden ring in his dark blue eyes was blazing.

WHUMMMM!

A wave of crushing darkness rolled off him, flattening the grass along the curb and rattling the iron fence beside them.

"Repeat what you just said..." Silas said quietly.

The ring in his eyes burned brighter.

"...Ititius...?"

Nitocris went cold all the way down to her bones.

Every hair on her body stood straight up.

Her tail puffed out to three times its size, and her claws dug into the cracks in the pavement as the weight of his presence pressed down on her small body like a mountain.

’What did my other half do to him to make him this furious...?!’

She had only wanted to see him with her own eyes... She’d wanted to see how great this Silas Graves really was, after weeks of listening to Harper adore him like the sun itself.

She hadn’t known the sun could look at her like this.

She had no sand... She had no armies and no Khopesh... She was a dusty little cat on a sidewalk, and one flick of his finger would end her second life before she could even blink.

Nitocris flattened her ears against her head.

She tucked her paws beneath her chest and lowered her small head until her chin touched the pavement, and she resigned herself to her fate.

"Ititius and I are one... Nyaa~" she whispered.

She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the end as one second passed, then two.

The whine of the spinning water spears faded away.

The crushing weight lifted off her back like morning fog burning away in the sun, and the warmth crept back into the air.

Nitocris cracked one golden eye open.

The sunlight had returned, the leaves were rustling again and Silas Graves was squatting right in front of her with his forearms resting on his knees, stroking the stubble on his chin, looking down at her thoughtfully.

"I see," he said and Nitocris stared at him.

’What...?’

A heartbeat ago, he had been ready to wipe her off the face of the earth... Now he looked like a man trying to remember whether he’d left the stove on.

Her heart was still hammering against her tiny ribs.

Her tail was still puffed up like a bottle brush, and she was fairly sure that if she tried to stand, her legs would give out beneath her.

This boy was either the most dangerous creature she had ever met, or the strangest... Possibly both...

"Can Ititius come out?" Silas asked, as casually as if he were asking for directions.

Nitocris shook her head quickly, her whiskers flapping.

"No, Nyaa~" she said. "Ititius was destroyed by your final attack, Nyaa~... When he fell, my soul was torn free, and it became this, Nyaa~... my favorite creature in all the world, Nyaa~."

Silas nodded slowly.

She didn’t tell him the rest since a queen did not air her humiliations to commoners.

Nitocris didn’t tell him that she’d opened her eyes in the abandoned capital of the desert after it had been evacuated, alone and tiny in a city of empty streets and howling sand.

She didn’t tell him how she’d run across the scorching dunes on four little paws, dodging hawks and scorpions as well as monsters, or how she’d tumbled through teleportation by hanging around some human soldiers by sheer luck and landed in the middle of Valoria City.

She didn’t even tell him about the night she’d spent stuck at the top of a palm tree because a desert fox had chased her up it and she had been too proud to climb back down while it was watching.

...She certainly didn’t tell him about the weeks she’d spent sleeping in cardboard boxes and stealing scraps from restaurant bins while she searched for any way to reach Harper and the people here were insane too.

In her day, cats had been creatures of witches and dark omens... People had left offerings and kept their distance.

Here, grown men in business suits made high-pitched cooing noises at her from across the street.

Schoolgirls chased her down alleys with shiny little packets of fish paste, squealing about her tiny toe beans, while she scrambled up drainpipes to protect what was left of her dignity.

One old woman had even tried to put a tiny pink sweater on her.

Nitocris had bitten her, of course then she’d eaten the fish the woman offered her afterward, because she was a queen, and queens did not refuse tribute.

’The people of this era have an obsession with cats, Nyaa~’

"So Ititius is dead, right...?" Silas asked.

Nitocris nodded firmly.

"He’s gone, Nyaa... Not a single spark of him remains, Nyaa~"

"And you’re another part of Ititius," Silas went on, "but you’re the one in control... and you’ve been searching for me?"

Nitocris blinked.

Well, that was technically true... She’d been looking for him because finding him was the fastest way to find Harper but looking at him now, squatting on a sidewalk in a rumpled shirt with stubble on his chin, she couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed.

For someone Harper had praised endlessly as a peerless king, he looked an awful lot like a sleepy boy who needed a nap.

She nodded anyway.

"I have, Nyaa~"

Silas reached down and scooped her right off the ground.

"NYAAA~!"

Her paws flailed wildly in the air as the world tipped sideways, and Silas lifted her up to eye level and studied her.

"What was your name again?"

"Nitocris, Nyaa~!" she hissed, wriggling furiously. "Put me down this instant, you great ape, Nyaa~!"

"Nitocris, hm...?" Silas tilted his head. "Nito...?"

A wide easy grin spread across his face, and her whiskers twitched with sudden dread.

"Alright, Nito... You’re coming with me. I’ve got a lot more questions for you, and Harper’s on her way over right now, so you’ll get to see her too."

Nitocris stopped wriggling.

...Harper was coming.

Her student... Her successor... The stubborn, lovesick, ridiculous girl whose soul she’d lived in for weeks, the only person in this strange new century who carried the desert in her blood.

After everything, after the sand and the hawks and the cardboard boxes, she was finally going to see her again.

A small soft smile spread across her little face before she could stop it, and her tail gave one tiny happy flick.

’Even if I did take her body... I apologized though?’

Silas adjusted his grip and pulled her closer to his chest, and his nose brushed the fur behind her ears.

He froze as his face twisted in horror, and he held her out at arm’s length.

"Ugh... You smell terrible," he said. "Seriously, you smell disgusting... Have you been sleeping in a fish market?"

Nitocris’s eyes went wide with earth-shattering fury.

"HOW DARE YOU, NYAA~!" she shrieked, swiping at his knuckles. "I am the First Per-aa of Khemet, Nyaa~! I smell of the eternal sands, Nyaa~! Release me, you wretched dog, Nyaa~!"

Silas tucked her firmly under his arm like a furry black football, ignoring her kicking legs, her hissing and her endless stream of ancient royal curses.

"All you need is a bath..." he chuckled.

"I do not need a bath, Nyaa~!" Nitocris wailed. "Cats clean themselves, Nyaa~! It is beneath my dignity, Nyaa~! I will have you know that in my palace, I bathed in milk and rose petals, Nyaa~!"

"Great," Silas said. "I think we’ve got some milk in the fridge..."

"THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEANT, NYAA~!"

He forgot about the shaving stick.

Silas turned around and walked back toward his apartment, carrying the squirming former empress of the desert under his arm toward a tub full of soap and warm water.

Nitocris hung there limply, watching the sidewalk bounce by beneath her, and closed her eyes in total despair.

’This Silas Graves... He’s an idiot!’