So I finally got the first chapter out! ^^ Go me.
Much thanks to Mai Valentine, Lady Phedre, Meriah, and The Inquisitor for reviewing! ^^
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CHAPTER ONE
The Story of the Thief Town
Kuru Eruna. That was the name it knew itself by, long before any other. Nestled in the shadows of the great cliffs, brought life by the river that ran it through. Kuru Eruna, the village at the edge of desolation.
None of the ones who came after knew from whence it had come, or its people. They were simply there, had always been there.
No true Children of the Nile, these, but the remnants of a vastly older nation. A simple people, yes, but ancient…and powerful beyond imagining.
At the deepest level of the human mind and body and soul, there is the ability to make all things reality, to see the unseen, to alter the very laws of the universe itself.
Most have lost this ability, or forgotten it ever existed.
But always there are those who remember. Always there are those who dip into this deepest well of the soul, and draw from its darkness terrible and wondrous things.
Of such were the descendants of Kuru Eruna.
And in such a way did they live, peacefully, simply, same as they had for centuries, not wholly in this world, or those beyond.
Until the others came.
The Pharaoh's race, a people of sword and spear, come from the cities to the north and the east, spreading out over the Valley of the Nile. They came to the land where Kuru Eruna was, and found it good. And, drunk with power and blind with their own greed, desired it for themselves. They bribed, then conquered, the people of Kuru Eruna.
No warriors, these village folk. But the free do not surrender their freedom easily, and they fought, the only way they knew - with the unseen, and the unimaginable.
Powerful though they may be, in their own right, mists and magics cannot stand against swords and spears. Not fully of this physical world, they cannot defeat the things that are.
Kuru Eruna fell.
And so the people were made slaves in the land they had held for centuries, conquered by a people their own had ruled, once, in an age forgotten.
Even so, their captors did not dare take them from this place, or build a city upon the ruins of Kuru Eruna. The people were bound to this land, and it bound to them.
The land was the body, the people the soul. The Pharaoh's race knew this.
Even the most reckless have their limit. Even the profane knew that they walked on hallowed ground.
But cruelty thwarted will only be cast anew in another bitter guise. If they could not break the souls of the people through separation, they would break them under the yoke of slavery. If they could not turn Kuru Eruna into a city of the living, they could turn it into a city of the dead.
They could force the people, by their own hand, to turn their ancient home and the cliffs that sheltered them into a necropolis and sacred burying ground for the ones who had destroyed them. And they did.
And so Kuru Eruna sank into darkness for many thousand years.
But slaves never forget freedom, even if freedom is only an old story told by the tiny hearth in the darkness of a slave shack. And they are forever seeking that freedom, forever reaching for it as a child reaches for the sun in the sky, bound and shackled by their fate though they are.
Because always there are those who will fight their fate to the point of damnation and beyond.
And so it was, that after countless centuries of imprisonment, a phoenix emerged from the ashes of Kuru Eruna.
She was the daughter of the slave chieftain (her father dead of work long before his time), beautiful and brilliant, true child of a race of dreamwalkers. But there was steel in her, too, forged in slavery upon the anvil of suffering, and a strength and reckless will that would be not only her salvation, but the salvation of an entire people.
A chieftain's daughter, she was a queen among the people of Kuru Eruna, and kings and queens are but servants of their people. In life and in death, they are given to the good of their nation.
And so when the overseer of the garrison at Kuru Eruna rode out to choose his tribute, and chose her, she knew what must be done.
When he went to plant himself between her legs, she took her dagger from its hidden sheath, and planted it in his temple to the hilt.
In the ensuing chaos, she was able to escape. She fled the crime, but not the consequences - and indeed, she never would. She disappeared into hiding, but her actions lived on the lips of every slave in Kuru Eruna.
She was the spark that kindled rebellion in the eyes of her people once more.
Even in hiding, she became the focus of that rebellion. Every exile, dissenter, and malcontent of Kuru Eruna gathered to her cause.
An army of the outcast; uprising of slaves.
All over Kuru Eruna, the slaves began to revolt.
She was the catalyst that finally drove them into action. She was the current that carried them along to that final goal.
And she returned to them, at the turn of the tide, in the final battle between the soldiers and the slaves, at the head of the cresting wave that broke over the garrison at Kuru Eruna and swept it away.
Many died in that terrible battle, and Kuru Eruna never fully recovered their loss. But many lived, also, and lived to see freedom.
And yet, freedom is its own terrible burden.
The garrison at Kuru Eruna had overseen and enforced their slavery, but at the same time it had provided for the people, given them their rations and all their material possessions, nurtured them even as it destroyed them. A master will care after his hounds even as he abuses them.
And now it was gone, now they were free. They had nothing but the weight of their own freedom.
You can't feed your children with freedom, can't provide for your family with liberation. There ambiguous ideals are all well and good, but survival rules.
As slaves, they knew no other trade but slavery. As freedmen, they would never return to it.
She, the deliverer-queen of Kuru Eruna, knew this. They must survive. And those who cannot make a living for themselves must steal it, so she led them where they feared to tread: along the path of thieves.
Thus they became the destroyers of what they had created, robbers of the tombs they themselves had built, in slavery a lifetime ago. Stealing riches from those beyond any need of riches, that the living might live off the dead.
Jackals of the tombs, eaters of darkness.
They took, or bartered for what they desired with the other scattered, distant villages, who endured them because they were the bearers of wealth as well as death, these people cloaked in the shadows from whence they came, these people of the fabled Kuru Eruna.
But the things of the Pharaoh and the Pharaoh's people they laid waste, destroying as they themselves had been destroyed, taking what had been taken from them, the debt they were owed - a debt of blood.
And so Kuru Eruna became known as the Thief Town, a legend to haunt the sleep of the Pharaoh's people.
A full legion, the Pharaoh raised against Kuru Eruna, sent across the wastes to decimate that isolated village. Some five hundred men, warriors born and bred.
Two came back alive. Battered and bloody and half mad with terror, they told their story.
The first night in the wilderness, they camped in a nameless desert valley. And in the deepest darkness, the warrior-queen and the entire force of Kuru Eruna appeared on the rise of the hill, bearing down on the hapless, sleeping army.
Half-conscious, disoriented, terrified, all their training lost in confusion, the legion crumbled in the onslaught, falling to the inexorable tide of the people of the Thief Town, until the desert itself ran with rivers of blood.
And when the dawn came, when the disk of Aten rose above the desert and Ra looked down at the valley - no Kuru Erunans. For there had never been any. Only the dead and dying of the Pharaoh's legion, torn to pieces by itself, brother against brother in the darkness.
Even the mighty Pharaoh of Khemet did not dare send another. Even the Pharaoh feared to stand against the queen of Kuru Eruna.
For queen was what she had become to them, truly; lady and war-leader, and patroness and protector alike.
Unto her and unto her world, in the sixth year of their liberation, there was born a son. And this son she named Bakura.
No one knew who his father was, and perhaps it was better not to. But it didn't matter, really, for he was truly his mother's son. Strong, intelligent, fierce as a wild wolf-cub, ringleader of the children of Kuru Eruna, this little Prince of Thieves.
His mother was dark, as Egyptians are (the blood of the conquerors long since assimilated into the blood of their victims), of dusky skin and midnight hair, though her eyes were the color of the sky in water. His skin was as dark as his mother's, and his eyes the color of greying darkness, settling to brown as he grew. But his hair was a pristine, perfect white, paler than alabaster.
White. The color of death.
Even as a child, the hand of the divine was heavy upon him.
A halo of darkness surrounded him, the aura of another world. And the little spirits were drawn to him, danced in his footsteps; the little spirits of the earth that we can see only with our mind's eye, feel only with the senses of the soul.
But he saw them, he felt them. He spoke to them, and they answered.
By his fifth year, his mother began his training in arms; by his seventh, training in the shadow-arts through which her people lived. Because as she told him, and it seemed he knew even before he was told, he was born for the darkness.
Under the thief-queen's rule, Kuru Eruna thrived. A generation was growing up in the shadow of the cliffs, free of the Pharaoh's control.
But the walls that guard our world begin to slip, and we grow lax in our defense; victory passes in the minds of the victorious, but the defeated never forget.
And when another darkness threatened the borders of Khemet, when a foreign army sought to crush the Pharaoh's people even as they had crushed others, Pharaoh remembered the Thief Town. And saw in destruction the gateway to power.
The gods of battle demand their tribute, and this tribute can only be paid in blood. Victory comes at a price; for victory, a sacrifice is needed.
This sacrifice would be the life of an entire village.
And so the Pharaoh was decided; he would kill two birds with one stone, destroy one enemy by destroying another - he would slaughter all Kuru Eruna, and through their deaths open the world to a power so mighty that even the gods trembled before it.
Kuru Eruna slept on in the darkness, unknowing, waiting for a dawn that would never come.
To be continued…
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- Khemet, if you don't already know, was the ancient Egyptian name for Egypt. I use the word 'Egyptian' sometimes because I don't think 'Khemetians' is a word. But if you know more about this than I do, email me and enlighten me.
- The line "to the point of damnation and beyond" is shamelessly stolen from Kushiel's Dart by Jaqueline Carey, an excellent novel.
- I know Bakura's mother is a Mary Sue. I really don't care. I didn't even bother naming her, and she dies in the next chapter anyway XD
- I call them 'Bakura' and 'Ryou' in the fic for simplicity's sake. The names are explained later in the fic.
And REVIEW! Please! I only got four in the prologue ;; It was depressing.