Note: The ancient Egyptians' Book of Going Forth by Day is what we call the Book of the Dead. We're morbid.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
- Revelation 22:13
INTERLUDE
To erase a name was to erase the person who bore it, and the ancient Egyptians had been thorough. They wiped the name of En Sabah Nur from their history: chiseled it from monuments, scoured it from painted walls, struck it from papyrus scrolls... anything to rid the Two Lands of the slightest memory of their former god-king.
But even the Egyptians were afraid to touch his tomb.
He had ordered its construction scarcely two weeks into his reign - not remarkable in a culture preoccupied with the afterlife. What made the craftsmen and laborers curious, though, was the lack of necessities. There were to be no carvings, no paintings, no ceremonial offerings in the burial chambers, no copy of the sacred Book of Going Forth by Day. En Sabah Nur had even, bafflingly, decreed that he was not to be mummified.
Fine, the priests had declared - not in his hearing, of course. Let the heretic rot in his blank tomb. His soul would have been devoured anyway, once judged against the purity of the feather of Ma'at.
The complex itself was simple, built of stone like any other temple, and set into the shelter of a cliff. No one had dared to cross its threshold since the last workers had gladly left its shadows; once its builder had been deposed, the priests had conducted the ritual curses safely outside the tomb. Their job finished, they left, and no one spoke the name of The First One any more.
As the years passed, and En Sabah Nur did not return, the terror he had inspired faded to a few whispered legends. One of these was collected by the Greek historian Herodotus, who labeled it as a story of Apophis, the serpentine enemy of Amun-Re, or perhaps Seth, the powerful desert- god. The sole copy of that particular story, which hinted at a tomb in the high desert, was stored in the magnificent Library of Alexandria. It did not survive the library's burning in the first century BC.
And so the tomb remained undisturbed in its remote corner of Upper Egypt for thousands of years. Even after the ancients had been sealed in tombs of their own and the fear had likewise died, even after the old religion had been supplanted with new beliefs, En Sabah Nur's last monument received no visitors. Grave robbers did not go there, for there was nothing to steal. Archaeologists did not excavate it, because no one remembered that it existed; after all, there was no record, anywhere, of the pharaoh who had ordered it built.
Deep within the womb of desert rock, his sarcophagus lay empty, his tomb's twisting passages unused and full of dust.
That solitude, however, was about to end.
END INTERLUDE