Dear Readers: Here is the last scene of Episode 2!! :)
Back in Ancient Egypt, where Atria sits as queen...
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Scene 12: The Damned Earth
2020 B.C.
That evening, the pharaoh had certain administrative matters to attend to.
He wanted Atria always by his side, but she insisted that she had no place beside him, for such governmental business. Whined that she would be quite bored. Promised to wait for him in bed.
Then broke that promise viciously, voraciously. Beckoned those pretty-boy litter bearers to a sheltered, shadowed corner, just as she had planned. Ravished and ravaged all four sweaty slaves in one fell swoop. And finally understood firsthand why Zeus was so obsessed with fucking mortals.
She gave them each an extra kiss on any body part they wished, as she departed, in exchange for their sworn silence. And for good measure, she also pledged to chop them into pieces in the afterlife, should they betray this secrecy. She figured that would shut them up; it seemed consistent with the culture and religion of this realm.
The queen then roved the palace for an hour or so, repeating this process with every beddable fellow who crossed her path.
Once she was tired of that, she went to join the pharaoh for his administrative tasks. She knew that the grand gesture—sitting by him despite her boredom, since she simply couldn't stand to be apart from him—would drill the final nail in his sarcophagus. Set his love for her in stone, and seal his doom as her complete and utter slave.
She strode into the audience hall and assumed her throne, to Mentuhotep's palpable delight. The court's reaction to her entrance was a blend of bemusement, surprise, and sheer awe at the sight of the silhouette under her fine-spun diaphanous dress. Atria whispered sugared nothings in the pharaoh's ear before she took her seat.
The matter at hand was a criminal proceeding. On the hard floor knelt a soft-looking boy, bound in heavy chains, his head bowed in heartbroken defeat. Deathly pale—from fear, as well as from his natural skin tone, fairer than any other Atria had seen today. It made the boy look frail, as if born with less blood than all his countrymen.
Mentuhotep informed her as to what she'd missed, so far. The boy was the younger brother of a scoundrel who robbed royal tombs. The thief and his immediate family had been exiled for the felony. This was a customary feature of criminal punishment in this kingdom: a convict's sentence typically extended to his relatives.
"This little bastard was banished to Nubia, for his brother's crime. But he has now returned," the pharaoh apprised his queen. "Set foot on my land, whence he was cast out, never to be welcomed again."
Atria nodded pensively, pretending to understand and agree with this system of justice. "And why has he so brazenly returned?"
The king motioned the high steward—a wiry man in long loose robes, with a shaven head and skin as leathery as his sandals—to continue with his account of the young culprit's offense.
"The boy crossed back into the country for his lover," the steward reproachfully reported. "A beauteous temptress, as the rumors run."
The pharaoh chortled through his nostrils. "Must be beauteous indeed, to have inspired such an insolent return."
"She is famed throughout the city for her beauty—silken hair, gemstone eyes..." the steward stated, darting a glance toward Atria's throne, "...if I may venture the comparison, not unlike you, my lady."
Mentuhotep glowered at his subordinate. Evidently, the venture had been much too bold.
"Far less luminous, of course," the steward nervously amended, bowing deeply to the queen. "A mere moon to your radiant sun."
"Proceed, Meketre," the king impatiently instructed him—no apology could rectify the insult to Atria's unmatched beauty.
Meketre cleared his throat. "The city watchmen found him at his lover's doorstep, in the middle of the night. Weeping and weltering in despair. It seems she had betrayed him—apparently, she'd promised him safe harbor in her home, if he returned. But then deserted him."
Atria's gaze had been fixated on the boy, for all this while in court. He raised his head, a little bit, and met her emerald stare—his own eyes seemed to flare with plaintive passion for a moment. Ashamed and horrified, he immediately lowered them again.
She had noticed a spray of faint spots on his nose. Freckles.
The pharaoh was still laughing through his nose. Imperious snorts. The sound disgusted her.
"And thereby sentenced him to death," the king sneered, rising from his throne and sauntering toward his kneeling subject.
He placed his bent foreknuckle beneath the boy's shivering chin and propped it up, forcing the pale face to behold the mighty pharaoh. "So young... so sad..." he hissed maliciously, "...who is to blame for your untimely end?"
Atria forced herself to forget that she had kissed those slimy fingers just this afternoon.
The king slowly let go of the boy's chin, to run his nails against his throat, a sinister sweep that only barely grazed the skin. "The brother who brought this upon you? Or the bitch who betrayed you?"
The boy grew paler every passing second.
"Perhaps they've both betrayed you; neither has come back to save you from your fate..." the pharaoh ruthlessly reminded him.
He then removed his hand from the boy's neck, nodded coldly toward a court attendant standing by with something sharp in hand.
The king had a few final words for the boy, uttered without looking back over his shoulder, as he turned to remount his throne. "Not that they could."
The attendant waited till the king was seated—and the king was very deliberate, even theatrical, about taking his seat. As if the chief purpose of this entire proceeding was to offer up a spectacle for him.
Atria realized, in this instant, that it probably was.
And then the instant ended. The instant that had been this poor boy's life. The executioner had not waited a moment, once the king resumed his throne. He took position, pressed the blade against the pallid throat and sliced across, as fast as if through empty air.
And she saw, for the first time, just what it meant when a thread withered by her shears. This one had not put up a fight.
There wasn't so much as a gasp, throughout the court. The only sound was laughter through their noses, snide and satisfied—as if there were anything amusing or rewarding in this sea of red.
The red to which she had been blind, back in the shadows of the Cave. Blind no longer, and never again. This blood was on her hands. It struck her in her newly human core, all the more painfully because she had never dared to imagine what the feeling would be like.
She felt the pharaoh's hand upon her arm. Woke from the blood red blur, because she needed to, in order to survive.
The king gazed into her green eyes, did not see the sea of red that raged beneath. "Does this trouble you, my lady?"
Time to pretend again. She steeled herself and let a sultry smile creep onto her lips. "No—it excites me," she breathed.
This answer set the pharaoh's loins on fire, and it showed. He even had to place his forearm on his lap to hide the swelling surge.
And she had to hide her disgust, at the sight. "O Mighty Pharaoh, I am no stranger to death," she purred—that, at least, hadn't been a lie. "Bring on the blood."
The next convict was brought into the audience hall.
It was the tomb robber. Dragged in just as his brother's bloodied body was dragged out.
The pharaoh's face sagged into a sardonic frown. "Oh, how touching; how tragic... The hero came back for this brother after all..."
The felon screamed his brother's name, tearless sobs wracking his frame—shoulders far broader than his brother's, darker hair and skin, rugged features free from so much as a freckle.
He was gorgeous. As a god, almost. But Atria could not reflect on that right now, how she would die to share his bed. This was a court of blood, where flesh turned cold, not hot. The utter opposite of a bed.
He snarled and smoldered at the court, struggling against his chains. Prouder, fiercer than the lion in whose likeness the pharaoh's bed was carved. And then he saw her, and the lion in him lunged.
"You!" he roared at Atria, nearly exploding from his bonds.
The king rose to his feet. "You dare bark at a queen!" he bellowed.
The man seethed, storms thundering through the sea of his blood, set to burst from his veins. His captors panicked to restrain him. Beat him with their flails, but each blow was to no avail, against the numb skin on his bruised and battered back.
"She's not the bitch that you should blame," the high steward scornfully advised him.
"You may as well be," the man snapped at the motionless queen. "I warned him against your kind."
The slaves hauling his brother's body had just exited the room.
"And I'd warn you as well, O Mighty Pharaoh," he rasped. "Such beauteous beasts thrive on the blood of broken men."
His fury had cast a momentary hush over the hall. Even the king was briefly silent, as the thief spoke his last words.
"She is a shadow," he growled, his darkling glare tearing the skin off of Atria's bones, "the breath of death walking this damned earth."
That was the final straw, for Mentuhotep. He promptly reclaimed his royal command over the court. "Slice out the tongue," he ordered. "Disfigure this dog's entire face, then bury it alive."
He felt the queen's cold hand upon his arm—the one thing on earth that could ever give him pause. He blinked. "Would you object?"
She would; she did. "Do him the honor of a noble death."
A collective gasp, throughout the court, and then a deferent hush. The queen, this consort risen to the throne only today, had spoken out against the order of the king. A thing no queen, no one, had ever done.
And yet the king was listening, and so the whole world listened.
"He must die; we all must die. But love and loyalty deserve honor in death," the queen pronounced. "He came back for his brother. He does not desert his loved ones, even when it means his doom."
Atria rose to her feet and looked out on the crowd. On all these threads, each simply waiting for its turn to wither by her shears. The mortal blood, the sea of red that would be spilled, slowly but surely, one by one, until the human race was done.
She could not wait until that day. This was a sad and sorry race, one that should never have been born.
"The same cannot be said for all the men, or all the women, on this damned earth," she concluded as she turned and left the hall.
Retired to her bed, to bitter sleep. Not wanting to know whether her order was obeyed. Hoping, as a mortal, to never wake up.
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THE END of Episode 2!!! Hope you liked it! (And I hope these two brothers brought to mind certain characters from the modern-day storyline...? Going for a bit of parallelism here, hehe)
Anyway, thank you sooo much for following me on this journey!! I really hope you will continue to enjoy it ^_^
And if you liked this episode, or even just this scene, please don't forget to vote! :)