Anupher Setepenra | Divine blooded Heir

The first light of Ra’s dawn spilled across the sandstone walls, painting them in muted gold — a cruel contrast to the haze of exhaustion clinging to Anupher’s mind. He had not closed his eyes once through the night. Sleep was a battlefield he dared not enter.

A shallow hiss left his lips as the servant bound fresh linen around his forearm, concealing the reddened burn that still steamed faintly from the oil lamp’s flame hours before. A foolish wound — and a deliberate one. The bite of fire had been the only thing fierce enough to drag him back from the edges of unconsciousness.

The jackal-headed headdress lay discarded beside him, its black ears tilted toward the floor like they, too, shared his fatigue. Anupher sat with his gaze fixed out the tall, narrow window. Beyond the palace’s high walls, Sekhemara was stirring — the cries of merchants beginning their trade, the bleat of goats being herded toward market, the faint chanting from the temple priests calling on Ra’s blessing for the day’s labors. The air smelled of warm dust and incense.

He adjusted the gold bracelet on his wrist, thumb grazing its familiar etchings until his chest tightened. His mother’s bracelet. Always there. Always heavy.

The servant tied the final knot in the bandage and stepped back. “Will that be all, my prince?”

“Yes,” Anupher murmured, voice low and even despite the rasp in it. “Leave the lamp burning.”

Alone once more, he crossed to the table where his morning draught waited — a small clay cup filled with a bitter concoction of herbs and desert root, its steam carrying the sharp tang of mint and iron. It was not pleasant, but then again, nothing worth enduring ever was. The first swallow sent a shiver down his spine; the second cleared a fraction of the fog in his head. Not enough. Never enough.

Scrolls and tablets lay scattered in ordered chaos across his study table — military formations, crop yield records, a half-finished treatise on border defense written in his own precise script. He lowered himself into the seat, jackal tail twitching once against the floor as he pulled one closer. His eyes followed the ink, but every so often they drifted to the window, to the line where the sun had climbed above the horizon.

It was near midday when the knock came.

The palace guards announced the visitor — a courier bearing word from the Pharaoh himself. Anupher’s amber gaze narrowed when the messenger entered. Dust from the road clung to the man’s robe, his posture not quite the respectful bow expected before a son of Malik Azim. And his voice — low, almost mocking — carried a strange heat beneath the formalities.

“A message, my prince,” the man said, offering a scroll sealed with the royal mark.

Anupher accepted it, noting — with the kind of sharpness born from years of suspicion — the faint smear of dried blood near the ribbon. His fingers paused. His eyes, however, betrayed nothing as he broke the seal.

The words spoke of an urgent matter in Khemset: the yearly harvest’s yield in peril from dwindling Nile floods, in need of oversight and, if necessary, the prince’s personal intervention to call for further resources.

It was a request he would not refuse. And yet… as he read, something in the back of his mind — He shook the doubt off, this message was directly from his father afterall.

The desert was a jealous beast. It clung to Anupher with teeth of heat and claws of thirst, gnawing at his resolve hour after hour until each step felt like an insult to the gods themselves. Seven days — or perhaps more — had passed since he’d left the city walls, following a trail marked on a parchment that, unbeknownst to him, was poisoned with lies. The messenger who had delivered it had spoken with the soft courtesy of a loyal subject yet the malice of an outlaw, that should've been the first hint.

Perhaps it had been foolish to travel alone.

Now, the sun blazed high in a pitiless sky, gold and white so bright it washed the edges of the dunes into blurs. His breath came dry, the taste of sand coating his tongue. The camel he had begun the journey with was long gone — lamed after two days on a treacherous dune slope, left behind with murmured rites to Anubis for a painless passing. Since then, his legs had carried him through the endless shifting gold.

Anupher’s mind was a fractured mirror of thoughts. He had trained for years under both priest and warrior, son of Malik Azim — Pharaoh, Judge of the Living — born beneath the conjoined blessing of Ra’s light and Anubis’s shadow. That birth had cost the life of his mother, her final breath whispered as an offering to the gods for the lives of the twins. The story had been retold since his childhood like a hymn — that their arrival was the answer to a celestial bargain, and her sacrifice the coin that paid for their divine blood.

He had always tried to force himself to Believe it. Even now, with grit biting his eyes and the sun weighing like a millstone on his back, he clung to the thought that he could not fail.

A mirage shimmered on the horizon for what felt like the hundredth time. His eyes burned, the muscles in his calves threatening mutiny, yet something in the wavering image caught him differently this time. The shapes did not dance away when he blinked; the glint of water persisted.

An oasis.

The thought sparked a faltering second wind. He trudged forward, the dunes rising and falling like the breath of a sleeping giant. The green broke into focus — palms swaying, low mudbrick dwellings clustered near a pool where light scattered like coins on its surface.

Relief never reached his tongue.

The first arrow hissed past his ear before he even registered movement. The second struck the sand at his feet. His body reacted faster than thought — shield angled, scimitar half-drawn — but the ambushers were already closing in, black-scarved figures erupting from behind the palm line, steel flashing.

He fought in a haze, movements mechanical from years of sparring under Sekhemara’s harsh tutors. The Black Fang — but not their disciplined core. These fighters bore mismatched gear, snarls under their veils, and moved with the reckless hunger of jackals. A rogue clique.

Anupher’s strength held, but his stamina bled away. Sand stuck to the cuts blooming along his forearms, each breath clawing his ribs. Then, amid the clash, a figure darted into the chaos — not armed like the rest, moving more like someone trying to get away than to strike.

The battle’s fever broke in a sudden lull. A few of the rogues lay in the sand, the rest scattering into the heat shimmer beyond the palms. Anupher staggered, leaning on his blade.

Dust swirled lazily in the aftermath, and there — half-shielded by a toppled market stall — stood A figure. Their stance was defensive but not hostile, eyes locked on him.

Anupher blinked sweat from his lashes, his vision narrowing. His scimitar rose, point aimed at their chest despite the tremor in his arm.

“Who are you?” His voice rasped like gravel. “And what in Sekhemara’s sands just happened here?”

The sun glinted on the edge of his blade as he took a limping step closer, the air between them still hot with the scent of blood and dust.