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From: Amemshehu
Date: 16 May 2000
Time: 07:49:06
Look, who comes here! A grave unto a soul.
- William Shakespeare, King John II
The season of Death had begun again for the ancient Vizier, she pondered, as she moved yet another gamepiece. Her opponent, an ancient Wraith of indeterminable years, was providing quite the active resistance in their game of strategy. A lazy contest for a lazy day in the land of black sands...
The lands of Amenti, her second home.
Indeed, she was a strange soul, for her departure from the lands of the living was temporary. Through the nature of spiritual development, she would rise again, in the same body, at the same age, only to expire yet again and begin the cycle anew. There was a sense of rest this time, however...a sense of needing to recuperate her weary inner being. For over four millenia, she had concentrated her efforts on one project or another, allowing them to take her over and give her existence meaning... Empires had risen and fallen at her ire, the world had been explored, and a dangerous rival had engaged her in a deadly game of centuries old "tag"...yet these were corporeal exploits. The shift in balance required that, after all these eons, she experience the more ghostly reflection of the world, the Underworld. It could take millenia, a currency she possessed in abundance.
Perhaps it was the means by which she departed the last time that required her troubled soul to rest for a short span. Her rival, a vampire (yes, they exist, my friends) named Zanzibar had finally increased the danger of their confrontations with his heightening power and encroaching schemes... she had loved this vampire as much as one enemy could to another, enjoying their deadly dance and simplistic exchanges. He had been her psychological match at every turn, a manipulative planner, and a cunning demigod...her only regret was his lack of morals, which mandated the sentence of death in the end. He was not, however, without subordinates to continue his war...
Anticipating her ebbing lifecycle, a secret tomb had been constructed, glyphs and statues paying homage to the Celestials of Egyptian lore while a massive statue in the center of the temple depicted her beloved goddess Isis, a figure she served as priestess and Chief Vizier to the mortal pharaoh in her mortal times. Zanzibar had fallen, the Wizard Incarnate was triumphant...and his ghoul leapt out and attacked with a strength and tenacity saturated by the supernatural. The surprise was his, and therefore the advantage, and soon the broken, battered Amemshehu stumbled away quickly toward her secret home, the ghoul known as Victor in close pursuit. What the servitor did not realize was that this cat and mouse game was one that Mem had played before, even with a failing body. The stone wall opened as Amemshehu entered and collapsed, the stone servitors animating and lifting her still body into the sarcophagus and sealing it within the statue of Isis as the hapless Victor pursued and discovered, far too late, that the tomb was also his own as it closed with a grinding stone pitch.
The soul, naturally, rests for a short time, but it was long enough to awaken to the sound of shrieks and froths. Her Ka had retaken shape in the Necropolis of this New World city she had pursued Zan to, this Dal-las, and her Ba had returned to the ancient Egyptian lands of Amenti, the Necroloptic reflection of ancient Egypt. The servitors droned about, cleaning the scratches and blood spatters of the pleading, froth-mouthed lunatic that had been in the tomb long enough to experience the profound lack of water and food...they ignored him, these stone beings, and yet he flailed about in the darkness with a desperation that one of them would possess enough sentience to grant his escape.
Pity welled up in this tragic figure and she began to sit and meditate, summoning the will to affect the objects of the physical world for him. Time and again, her meditation was cut short by the mad howls of Victor as he mourned his rapidly approaching fate, the froth becoming more and more bloody. Each time a plea was attempted, each feeble gesture to the ghoul that someone was here to help him if he could just be quiet, his croaking shrieks increased and the bloodied stumps where his fingers were would streak fresh crimson on the walls for the apathetic servitors to clean. At long last, the man fell to the ground silently, the Vizier meditating and concentrating to gather the power to open the door...it opened, and she turned to rouse the cryptically still mortal as he slowly died, staring into the darkness...
Slowly a shadowy creature rose from the body and looked about him in a panic, his bloodied stumps for fingers oozing a black ichor that wiould evaporate before it could hit the floor. "Victor...I'm so, so sorry...this was not the fate I had wanted. You weren't supposed to reach the door so quickly before it could clo--" the mummy tried to explain, cut off by the soft, foreboding cackle of the recently wraithed ghoul.
"I'm...I-I-I'm....trapped! Everywhere, I'm trapped?!?" laughed the wraith as blackened bloody tears streaked down his face from wide eyes and tangling hair. Amemshehu slowly backed away from the hysterical madman as he turned and ran away, howling at the top of his lungs and shrieking his personal blasphemies into the night.
She hadn't seen Victor since then, the couple years she had been in the Underworld...the Hierarchy had likely volunteered him for existence as some unwanted object or building cornerstone, who knows? Peace, if it existed, was deserved for whatever creature he was now.
The memories of the Ba shifted abruptly...from time to time, she concentrated on what her Ka was doing in Dallas, and the memories that flooded in were the most interesting she had gathered in some time. A mortal medium...a gathering of Wraiths...a battle with a monstrosity to protect the mortal... and a plunge by the defender into the Tempest. This was unacceptable, naturally...defenders of the human cause were to be preserved if possible. The Ka certainly concurred, her desire for her Ba half to pursue was adamant. Slowly rising, the Wizard gathered her nearly sheer black robes about her and nodded to the Wraith companion, setting off for the city proper to seek the proper services to acquire in the rescue of the Wraith ironically known as Nothing.
The Beginning