Heretic of the Nile

017

The wounds that covered her body were slowly draining her of what little energy she had, and she was struggling to stay up on her two feet. It made the arrow she had taken to the shoulder back at Saqqara feel like child's play. She tripped on a protruding rock and stumbled, falling face-first onto the ground.

A glint of light against her right eye struck her like a bolt out of the blue.

Mereneith used her fingers to brush away the sand and gravel surrounding the little spark, until it was enough for her to dig out the mysterious object that had been buried underneath.

She stared at it in disbelief.

An Ak'heka crystal.

Not one that had been carefully grown and tended to within the Great Temple's crystal vault, but a crystal that had sprouted in the wild.

It was not unusual to find crystals in the open—after all, that was how the priests discovered them in the first place. There were dedicated mining areas across the kingdom where labourers were put to work sieving through the dirt to find crystals that would then be sent back to Memphis and used as fodder to grow more of them.

But those were always tiny fragments. Rough and uneven on all edges. Easily mistaken as mere pebbles and stones if one didn't look carefully enough.

This—the crystal she was holding in her hand—was nothing like that.

It was almost as large as a ripe fig, with smooth edges that looked as if they had been meticulously hewn by one of Memphis's best smiths. Holding it up against the moonlight, she could see the clarity of the stone as it refracted the gentle beams from above.

By all counts this would be considered a top grade crystal by the crystal keepers of the temple. Yet it had been nurtured purely by the forces of the earth—something that they had believed was impossible.

The luxuriant glow that the crystal was emitting left Mereneith mesmerised. There was a steady stream of warmth flowing from the crystal's surface to the palm of her hand, granting her comfort in her loneliness and destitution.

Turning her attention back to the unremarkable ground, she continued digging as her instincts told her to. Two, three, four, five—with each crystal she uncovered, a shocking realisation struck.

She had chanced upon an unusually fertile crystal mine, one that could easily outshine all the other existing mines across Upper and Lower Egypt. This arid, desolate site, home to petrified trees for possibly centuries, was also a point of concentration for the earth's energy.

Her thoughts drifted towards her designs and sketches, her plans to create a structure that could harness the full potential of the Ak'heka crystals and usher in a new era of prosperity for the people of the kingdom—not only the rich and powerful.

Ptah's blessings be upon me, for he truly listens to all prayers and is the begetter of all beginnings.

Clutching only the original crystal tightly in her hand, Mereneith quickly shovelled sand back over the others, burying them beneath the surface once more. She scrambled over to the nearest rock and scratched out the symbols of Ptah with the crystal's sharp point, so that she might be able to return one day. She had no means of transporting any more crystals back to Memphis and this was the last thing she wanted Kanefer and his cronies to discover, so this was the best she could do.

With renewed vigour, Mereneith plodded on.

#

The petrified forest that she had been traversing was more extensive than she expected. Mereneith had been lugging her sore frame along for hours, until the first rays of dawn began to crack through the clouds, but she had still not reached the end of the rocky plain.