In the coming months after my father's death, I read all of his private scrolls and tomes and tablets. In doing so, I found the spell with which he had saved my life. Finding out what he had done and what he had made me into, I hated him more than I ever had. I would never die, all of my senses were enhanced, magic ability was enhanced and expanded. I no longer needed to pray to perform rituals.

After reading the spell and the accompanying writings, I set out to learn what I could do. I found that I was physically stronger than twenty of the palace's finest guards. I was faster than I could imagine, a mile wasn't even a minute anymore, where before I could not even run a mile at all. I pushed my limits and boundaries, physically, magically, mentally.

I was now the head of my family as well. Being my father's heir made that my right. I now controlled everything; money, guards, I even found out that there was a house up river that was mine that I had never known existed. I also controlled the life of my unmarried twin sister, and still had a hand in my married brothers lives. I knew they resented me, hated me, and my sister feared me. But by now I no longer cared. I felt cold inside, I felt like emotion had died with my human life. I went through my days without the kind of loneliness or sadness I had before. I suppose I thought it as some kind of blessing.

I no longer longed for the things I could not have, and now I believed my father right that no man would want a female of my temperament or ability. Now I no longer cared. I sat in on meetings, gave the same sound advice that I always had. Only now I added myself into plans because of what I could do. It wasn't long before I was doing things no female human would ever be allowed to do. Battle became something I did when it was necessary, my cousin knowing the extent of what I could do as I had found out.

Winning over the armies as a female I think was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to try doing. It took years of toiling against the kind of hate and abuse men were free to deal in those days. I dealt with it the only way I knew how; cold grace and stoicism. Angry voices were met with soft spoken words that chilled the bones and instilled fear and respect into anyone under my command.

I essentially threw myself into the only thing that I did understand, that being magic and the betterment or my country. Of course there were those who didn't listen to me, and I would spend years of a Pharaoh's reign with being denied and my advice discarded simply because I was female.

But I am getting ahead of myself a little. In the first year after my father had died and I had been made into what I took to calling an Ancient, and once I had learned some of the extent of what I could do, I went down a dark road.

I wished for punishment of the group of men who had ruined my entire life and taken from me something that I now would never have. I had seen the faces of the men who had attacked me in the darkened street that night, before they had attacked me. I could hear more sharply than a human could. And in the nights when I was wakened screaming, because the old terrors of my mother had returned, only now I had the same face as my mother once did, and the dreams took on a whole new terror.

I eventually was able to find, one at a time, each of the guards who had brought this misery on me. And when I appeared to them, they saw my face before I took them even from their beds and wives in the night. I brought them into the dark of the ritual room where I had been changed. They were shackled to the stone table to which my life had been changed and taken from me by the guards that I now had under my command, including the Indigo Guard, who seemed particularly rough and silent in these instances. The guards were stripped of their armor and clothes forcibly while I stood and watched. I ordered on each occasion that the guard be dressed in the simplest of white.

I could have done all of these things myself, having the strength that I did, but I thought to bring them the same kind of terror that they had brought me. Once prepared, and the candles and oils and incense lit, I performed a ritual sacrifice of each of them to Anubis, that they be judged on what they had done and be accorded appropriate action.

When finally the last of the four had been given to the Gods for their crimes, and I washed the blood from my hands, feeling that same numb feeling that had plagued me in the year that had now passed. I was glad that my revenge was over and justice served so that I could move on and finally accept what had happened, but it didn't feel that way. I still could not have the life that my sister was accorded. I essentially had no family, and I had never in my life had a friend. In twenty-one years. What was worse, I no longer wanted such either. I might mourn for what I could not have, but I also no longer wanted it, and that hurt as well .

* * *

A few months after I had turned twenty-one, after sunset, when I had retired now to my rooms to watch the moon, there came an urgent sounding knock on my door. When I opened it, the Indigo Guard stood with my sister in his arms. She was unconscious, and both of her legs were at odd angles, telling me they were both broken. He told me that he had found her at the bottom of the city wall. It was like to the night he had brought me to my father.

It was surreal, and I remember thinking that I must have fallen asleep. There were only three reasons my sister could have been found broken and unconscious at the bottom of the walls around the city; that she had either been pushed, she had fallen, or she had jumped. I lead the way, as my father had, to the ritual room, and had the Indigo Guard lay my sister on the table while I got what I needed. My sister was my Twin, and the only difference was that she had our father's eyes like my brothers did, and so it was as if I were looking at my own face. I kept wishing that I would wake to find that it had in fact been just another terror, but no such thing happened. Same as my father had over a year before, I performed the same ritual he had on me in order to save my Twin's life before the heartbeat I could hear stopped.

I saw her body rise as mine had done, and heard the horrible cracking as her broken bones snapped themselves seamlessly back together and healed and any internal damage became nonexistent, her heartbeat becoming stronger until it sounded with mine. I thought that the same thing would happen to me that had happened to my father, and I was prepared for it. I saw it as a release from my own mind and misery. I almost welcomed it. And when my sister's body returned back down to the table, healed and new and she woke. I saw her look at me, and for a moment before she had realized that she hadn't died, she smiled at me. Then, when she realized what I had done, her expression turned and before everything went black for me, I knew she hated me as much as I had hated our father.

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* * *

When next I woke, I was surprised to actually be alive. Why had I not turned to ash as my father had? Was my sister alright? I realize I had wanted to die. My sister could live a normal life out from my shadow of the fear I knew she had of me, and my brother's would no longer have to suffer the shame of the 'greatness' they had been robbed of their birthright in being our father's heir. And when I woke to the sun after saving my sister's life, I wept on realizing this. I had not wanted any of this, and now my sister's fear had turned to hate as well.

I knew that I could not help my sister, that she wouldn't accept it. Why should I bother when I was hated as I was? And I had a meeting with my cousin that day. So I went to that, and offered my service in helping to quell skirmishes on the borders of the kingdom, since my cousin knew what I could do. And so I was sent, with ten other soldiers and the Indigo Guard as well, whom I had actually forgotten was assigned strictly to me.

We traveled by horse, and camped each night. The soldiers didn't think I should be there. Battle was no business for women they said. They were for the hearth, home and bed they said. They were to be protected. And from my spot lying by the horses by a tree rather than with the group around the fire, I snorted to myself. These soldiers had not heard my name or known who I was. I found it amusing that they thought I was asleep or couldn't hear them when I could hear them as if they were sitting right beside me or closer. I found the Indigo Guard not agreeing, or even really saying much, which I found curious, but I heard something off in the distance and got up and went around the horses to look in that direction.

The sound had come from miles off, but it was steadily getting louder, but I wasn't the only person who heard it. The Indigo Guard saw my movement and had come up beside me. Now, it was not uncommon for people to not age very much before they died in this time period. However, the Indigo Guard had not aged in nineteen years. And from my understanding, he had been in service to my father before even then. Not being stupid like the rest of my company were, I asked if he could see them as well, if he could hear them. He merely nodded.

'There are two options.' He replied, low enough that the other ten could not hear, but that I could hear clear as crystal. 'We could warn them, or we could wait until they are scrambling and then act.'

'Wouldn't it be a better idea to warn them so that we are not caught unprepared?' They might have made remarks about me, but I preferred to not have the men unjustly caught unawares. The only response the Indigo Guard made was to gesture towards the fire where the men sat for me to go on ahead and warn them while he leaned against a tree, a look on his face that was almost infuriating. So I glared at him and went to the fire.

When I did I knew why the Indigo Guard had had the expression he did. When I told the men what I had seen and heard, one or two of them looked in the direction I said, but neither of them could see or hear the group coming towards us. Because of that the rest of them discounted me, said I was seeing things, hearing things. They reiterated the earlier thought that I shouldn't be there, that women were only good for the home, and this wasn't a home. They said that they should have been lead by another male, not some female who was out of her mind and probably not what she said she was, head mage or not, and they would never live down the shame among the other soldiers.

I turned and stomped back over to the horses and picked up my khopesh, and stood once more beside the Indigo Guard, who I could have hit for the expression on his face. He looked like he was laughing at me with those eyes, and I glared at him, though I was shorter and smaller than he was.

'They didn't listen.'

'Did you think they would?' His words laughed at me.

'I'm used to people listening in the councils. Those men are idiots.'

'This isn't the council. For now just be ready yourself, there's twice as many of them as there are of us.'

I turned back to look to where I could see the small cloud of dust and figures of the incoming enemies. I saw that he was right, and I gripped my khopesh while the rest of the company laughed and drank by the fire. Twenty minutes later they finally heard the sound of approaching horses, but it was too late. In their panick and rush to run and grab their weapons, the group came upon us all, though I had jump up into the tree by the horses and was not seen as they ambushed our camp.

I surprised the enemy warriors when I came down behind them from the tree while my company was scrambling, cut off from the horses where their weapons were. I didn't hesitate to slash the two intruders nearest me with one fast, fluid motion of my arm that sent the two screaming to the ground, somewhere to my right I saw the Indigo Guard snap the neck of another and his body dropped like a rock. My men had not listened to me, and now were at a loss, pinioned without a way to get to their weapons. They had to resort to hand to hand combat against the weapons of their enemies while I cut a path through the group.

Someone caught me off guard because one of my own had let out a yell and my khopesh was knocked from my hand and away. The enemy only saw an unarmed woman now, but the first person who tried to take a swing at me I ducked the swing and in the same motion struck under with my hands hard enough to break ribs and knock the male feet away from me. I saw one of my own struggling against another and before the enemy knew what was going on I had come up behind him, and using a little more force than necessary while snapping the male's neck, nearly took his head clean off as his flesh ripped and I got splattered in the face with the male's blood. I took one moment to look at the warrior I had saved before moving on.

Within minutes and in no small part because of myself and the Indigo Guard, the entire group of nineteen were dead in our campsite. I was surprised, I hadn't even thought twice about what needed to be done. There were nearly twenty bodies littering our campsite now, and nearly half of them had been left by me, and there in the quiet with just the fire crackling I saw the bodies lying there, some in pools of their own blood, others who hadn't bled. One of the rest of my company was wounded, and I went to him with my blood spattered hands and set them to the wound. I had learned that I could heal others, and so now I healed this male within moments without a word.

The rest of my company were now staring at me as if I had suddenly sprouted two more heads. It's obvious that they hadn't believed me and that they were astonished that I had been capable of what I had done minutes before. I stood straighter than I had even when my father had died in making me the abomination that I now was, facing these men's gazes without faltering before I bent and picked up a bleeding corpse in each hand and began dragging them away to burn a good distance away from the camp so that the smell wouldn't wrinkle their delicate little noses.

I wasn't sure why I felt so angry, I felt like skinning all of them alive, those men. Had they listened to me, I would not be covered in blood and grime and sweat and dragging body parts into a pile a mile off in order to save their sorry hides. And men like that would be the very last to ever admit that they should have followed a woman's direction.

I was throwing a body on the fire I had built, followed by the body's dismembered arm, when another body hits the pile. It was the Indigo Guard. I don't know why he was helping, the other ten men in the company weren't helping. I had nothing to say, and simply turned to head back to the camp to grab my completely bloody hands onto a couple of the last corpses. The sun was not yet rising, but the beginnings of dawn weren't far off. The Indigo Guard said nothing either, but helped without a word. It was oddly refreshing to not be doubted, scorned, or entirely dismissed.

When all of the bodies were piled and blazing finally, the sky was beginning to get a little lighter. For some reason, that I simply assumed was because of the personal assignment to me, the Indigo Guard was still there, an arm's length away. He hadn't said a word the entire time, and neither had I. In the distance, less than a mile away, I could hear the beginnings of breakfast in the camp. Those men had even gone to sleep while I stayed up dragging bodies. At one point I had been tempted to beat them with a dismembered arm or leg. It was the beginning of my hate for people, men in particular. The only one I didn't resent or hate was the Indigo Guard, though that I thought bordered on indifference. My silent shadow. At least one person didn't hate or underestimate me.

I looked at my hands, almost black from being completely covered in blood and dirt, and sighed almost silently and let my hands fall to my sides as I gave a last look at the pyre that was built of the bodies of my enemies. I turned away from the fire, back toward camp, and my shadow came with me without a word.

When I got to camp, breakfast was mostly finished, and surprise surprise, they had saved food for the Indigo Guard, but none for myself. At that point I didn't care. I tended to picking up my untouched space for sleeping and saddling my horse. I was angry once more, and this time I wrapped myself in it like a blanket, bury the hollow feeling. Why not bury the anger and everything else while I'm at it? If I'm cold, nothing matters and nothing hurts. Better for logic and an ability to do my job in my place than to be angry or unhappy and let that cloud my judgment and make the mistake that I just knew everyone was waiting for me to make.