I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
- Revelation 22:13
INTERLUDE
Six thousand years ago, long before the Two Lands were united by the king Narmer, a god fell from the sky and came to rest on the desert sands. This descent was witnessed only by a small nomadic tribe, who had no way of knowing that the god was not a god at all, but a time-traveler. When the god decreed himself to be the Great House - to be pharaoh - none of the tribes he conquered offered an objection.
He called himself Rama-Tut, although that was not his name, and he had flung himself into the past for one reason only: to find the child called En Sabah Nur and make him a living weapon. In this, Pharaoh Rama-Tut failed desperately.
En Sabah Nur was no one's slave.
Rama-Tut was sent screaming back to his proper time, and his would-be weapon took the red crown of Upper Egypt in his place. He also took the time-traveler's advanced technology - not the temporal displacement technology, which Rama-Tut had wisely kept on his person, but everything else that he could strip from his predecessor's palace rooms.
The weaponry intrigued him.
The regenerative devices were a revelation from the heavens themselves.
With such tools he need never worry about expending his power to the point of no return - need never worry about aging - need never worry about finding a successor of his own.
En Sabah Nur fashioned some of the technology into his own armor. The bulk of the equipment, however, he placed in his tomb.
His golden room held no gold. It held something infinitely more valuable: a true promise of immortality.
He was the first, and he would be the last. So had fate decreed.
And anyone seeking to disturb his healing rest would pay for it. Dearly.
END INTERLUDE