Prologue I

“What have we done?”

Astrapes Iumatar eased Khepr away from where he stood facing their machine’s imposing, columnar central pillar of glass, and reached down to take his hand. She couldn’t help but feel the same horror, as she stared back at what they had created.

Plastered over the ceiling of that cavernous underground chamber were the winding tendrils of outbound connections and structural supports, spread out like the branches of a great oak that had grown into its ancient adulthood compacted, hemmed in by the flat surface of the stone above. And just like such a titanic tree, those branches spiraled inward, coming together around the central glass trunk that extended down from the top to the very bottom of the chamber. There a sea of thick roots as dense as the branches above formed by the cables and tubing of the inbound telegraph connections flowed over the prodigious vacuum tube’s mounting pedestal, and so binding the central glass fixture in place, both to the chamber’s ceiling and floor.

And the muted hum of electric charge newly coursed through its heart of steel, copper, lead and glass. It was an unassuming noise, one that belied the dread of the machine’s purpose, or the reach of its power. 

And so it was that small noise that had prompted the wave of despair then washing over Astrapes and her co-conspirators. The noise, however quiet, that they all knew meant the worst was upon them and still yet to come.

The device was armed, and it could no longer be disarmed.

Their impossible choice, made.

Pairos was transfixed, beside them, just the same, before managing to peel his eyes away.

“We will all stay. What we promised… we must stay,” he repeated to them. As if to remind himself of the importance of doing so, more than anything else.

“Yes. Until the end,” Astrapes replied. “…If it is to the end that we must.”

She took a step from Khepr to take the other man’s hand in her own, squeezing it.

“…And I will keep attending the sybilline divinations, ” she reassured him, though tears welled in her eyes at the thought. “The divinations, and the councils. I will keep… fighting against the current that it seems has built up against us. Against… reason, in the court.”

“Anything less would be irresponsible,” said Khepr. 

Astrapes felt him still shaking, and forgave him his bluntness. He was in no condition to censor his thoughts. None of them were.

“We are not without allies, yet. The heir and her husband take us seriously, even if they do not have the emperor’s ear. Captain Tanhkmet is very energized by our warnings, too, even if he is misguided in his sense of the proper countermeasures.”

“But the emperor is still… the emperor,” said Pairos.

“...Yes. He is,” she said.

Silence returned between them. 

The great cylindrical chamber of glass, affixed above and below with capitals of rubber and copper and steel, stood as if a single pillar supporting the whole ceiling of that vast chamber of the Atum-Ra catacombs.

Cowing those three to whom it owed its existence, as it loomed over them. But only motionless, then.