At nearly the same moment Anomus beheld the ghoul, Emperor Irobus rose from his immense bed and stood, arms raised, while slaves dressed him. Behind him, a dozen pleasure slaves, male and female, lay intertwined on the silken sheets, exhausted from pleasing their master, each other, themselves. Irobus would not allow his body servants to wash the night’s juices and exertions from him, not until after he had made his pilgrimage to Hesia’s ironglass sarcophagus.

When he had been properly attired, Irobus walked unhurriedly through the imperial suites. Hundreds of slaves, servants, noblemen and women prostrated themselves at his appearance. He acknowledged none of them.

His acknowledged sons, numbering a dozen, issued from four different mothers, met him at the palace’s entrance, kneeling in two rows of six on the steps. As he passed, they rose and fell into line behind him, and followed him across the vast Courtyard of the Sun, to the Monument.

The Monument was massive, and open to the elements. It consisted of four pillars of stone soaring high into the sky, and at their base, an elevated stone dais, upon which rested a plinth.

On the plinth lay Hesia.

He had ordered her to be placed in her ironglass coffin just as she had been found upon her death. Still, she wore the revealing night dress of rare and costly silk. Still, her face was made up in the way that had best pleased him, her fair cheeks rouged, but her beautiful, nearly doll-like face otherwise untouched by cosmetics. Still, her lustrous, golden hair swirled about her head in a shining nimbus. Only her eyes had been closed, in concession to death.

Emperor Irobus mounted the dais, and his sons took their stations around the Monument, to see that he was in no way disturbed. Their poses may have been ceremonial – none were allowed into the Courtyard when the emperor visited his dead love, after all – but the vigilance of the Eternal Guard and the imperial sorcerers who watched from the walls were, as ever, in deadly earnest.

“Your tomb is finished at last, my love,” Irobus told her, “and it is a marvel. I find myself at a loss for words to describe its beauty.” He put his hand on the ironglass above her heart, above her ample breasts, still as enticing by means of sorcery as the rest of her, as when she still drew breath. “Once the priests have performed all the rights and ceremonies and sacrifices, you will be loaded onto a barge and oared up the Great River to your new and final home, there to await my passing. Certainly, by now you must welcome a change of location, no?” Irobus did not know how much she could hear through the ironglass, but he had been assured by his vizier that Hesia would always be aware of his presence.

“But the tomb, my heart. As soon as I set eyes upon it, I threw off the mask of mourning. That will give you an inkling of its beauty. Truly, never before has such a thing been built, and never will it in the future. It is a fitting monument to the death of my love.” Irobus’s lips twisted slightly as he spoke that last.

“And when I returned to the palace last night,” he continued, “I fucked and fucked and fucked. Does that shock you? I shocked myself somewhat, I must admit. But ten years of celibacy is enough, I think. I do wish you could smell the heavy musk of it that still clings to me.” He ran his fingers along the coffin, down to her generous hips. “You were enough for me, enough and more.” He laid his hand flat against the glass and closed his eyes, remembering better times. Times when he had been happy. More than happy.

“I would have elevated you to empress, in time. I know, we never spoke of it. I had meant it to be a surprise. Imagine; had you not parted your thighs for a slave, you would even now sit beside me on the Throne of the Sun.” His open hand contracted into a fist. “But it does no good to dwell on might-have-beens, I think. Better to think on what will be, no? And what will be is you in a tomb, awaiting me; your master, your emperor and your god.” He bent forward and laid a gentle kiss on the glass above her lips.

“May that wait be long enough to drive you mad, if you are not, yet.”

Irobus left then, trailed by his sons. He had a bath to take, and ceremonies to attend, and an empire to rule. Soon the secret betrayer of his heart would be entombed, secretly still living – for what emperor could countenance the world knowing he had been cuckolded? What man could accept or forgive a betrayal not only of the flesh, but of the heart? Not Irobus, certainly. And an emperor’s wrath could be as cruel as it was implacable.

In the rosy predawn light, none saw the single tear that formed in the corner of the concubine Hesia’s eye.

~ ~ ~

When night next descended, Anomus shook himself from his daytime lethargy, eager to tackle the challenge of somehow making contact with the ghoul, or ghouls that apparently roamed within the vicinity of the Tomb.

He was confined to the Tomb’s physical space, that much he knew instinctively. Almost certainly that was where the instinct to expand had its source. All things in nature had, at their beginnings, the inescapable urge toward growth. Why should he be any different? But unlike a bird in its shell, or a worm in its cocoon, Anomus had the intellect and education of a man. He refused to be driven or constrained by his instincts. Reason would supply him the tools to overcome his limitations.

The first task he set himself was to tackle his inability to see more of the outside world than the slice of the night sky visible from the Well.

Try as he might, he could not extend his awareness beyond the lid of the Well’s small opening. He had instinctually known as much, but experimentation confirmed it. So he turned to a resource that he had in abundance – the flies.

He willed one to fly through the opening. It did so without resistance or complaint – but as soon as it exited the Well, he lost his connection to the little thing. He also realized that the loss was, in an infinitesimal way, a loss of his self. The fly belonged to the Tomb, to him – and then as soon as it departed, it didn’t.

Anomus would have frowned, if he still possessed a face. He needed agency beyond the Tomb. His circumstances seemed to be thwarting him, in that quest. But a lifetime of working on physical problems others believed insurmountable had prepared him well for the new challenges he faced.

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He tapped another fly, and attempted to give it two commands at once, to fly up through the hole, and then back down again. But the creature’s tiny intellect wasn’t up to the task. He could manipulate it directly, but it was incapable of understanding orders that carried into the future – indeed, it couldn’t even conceive of anything except an eternal ‘now’. He tried with one of the wasps, with exactly the same result. Though the wasps had slightly more intellect than the flies, it was slaved to carrying out the functions of its instincts, just as the flies’ minds were. Insects, it seemed, were too simple to do as he desired. As they were, they were just incapable of any independent action.

Anomus felt stymied by the limitations he was confronted with. A lifetime of building had taught him that, barring a few tricks, a builder was limited by the quality of the materials he had to hand, both positive and negative. Steel, precious and costly, was in many ways stronger than stone, but eventually would rust. Granite was far more resistant to the elements than sandstone. One could plaster over either, but time would eventually tell the truth of their matter. Anomus, metaphorically speaking, did not even have sandstone to work with – rather he had chalk, if that. It was not suited to the purpose he wished to put it to.

Anomus mulled his problem, much as he had when still a mortal man. Eventually he realized that, while his mortal experience could help him understand the problems he now faced, not every analogy would be applicable. He was not a man any longer; he had new limitations and new abilities. Yes, his previous experience could aid him, but it could also limit his thinking and creativity when it came to approaching the unique challenges his new existence presented.

He forced himself to return to what he knew, not what he assumed, so that he could outline what he did not know. Outline, and then explore.

He knew the physiognomy of the fly, and the wasp. He knew their internal and external functions, and how they operated. He knew their instinctual drives, as dictated to them by that secret language written into the fiber of their beings –

There, he thought to himself. What mortal man would dream of altering what the gods themselves have written? But whatever I am, I am a mortal man no longer. And I will dare.

He captured another fly with his intent, and dove down into the secret code that made up its matter. He had no more than hints of what that code dictated, however. As sharp as his intellect was, he was not omniscient. He began to experiment, to re-write the language that made the fly. It soon died from his attentions, but he had learned more, both of the what of a fly, and also the how of it.

It took dozens of fly deaths before he was satisfied that he was able to read that secret language with sufficient understanding to alter it with more deliberation than blundering. He had also come to discover that if he wished to alter a living, fully-formed fly, it took an amount of mana wholly out of line with the tiny changes he affected. Nearly an hour’s worth of mana collection went into changing a single fly’s body from black to blue, for example. But Anomus was well aware of the principles of animal husbandry, of breeding for desirable traits. That was why the nobles would pay such incredible sums for the majestic horses of the western nomads – not so much for the horses themselves, though they were cherished, but for their promise of breeding more and faster progeny.

Be it faster horses, fatter pigs, stronger hawks, or grain that bore more fruit, mankind had been striving to interfere with nature for thousands of years. Anomus, with his bizarre abilities, could do so directly and precisely. If he had but a little patience, he could breed larger and more intelligent flies and wasps, and once he had effected the changes he desired, the improved creatures would continue to breed true at no further cost of mana. He could even speed up the cycle of life – indeed, he had to, if he wished to accomplish much before the Emperor returned to the Tomb with his concubine’s remains.

First, however, he wanted to alter a single, winged minion, to make it capable of accepting orders that it could then perform autonomously, without his direct control. Until he could do that, he would be virtually blind to events outside the tomb. It was a difficult task, with many intermediate steps.

The fly’s speck of a mind was not physically capable of doing what he wished. He realized that he would have to both enlarge and remake it in order for it to be useful to him. But doing so also entailed altering and enlarging other portions of its body, not the least of which were its wings and all the connective tissue, so that it could still fly with something approaching purpose.

His alterings were costly, in terms of mana, and the work was not quick. He toiled and refined his new fly for the remainder of that night, and when dawn came, he was not yet done. Rather than continue on into the day, pulling from his reserves of strength, Anomus paused in his work and let his daytime somnolence steal over him without resisting it.

Throughout the day, he ‘dreamed’ of his fly’s brain, the architecture of its redesign that would be necessary to remake it into a useful spy. When he woke, he realized that he had several thousand examples of the construction of much more complex minds that might assist him – though the examples were fast decomposing.

With only a slight reservation, Anomus turned his concentration towards the corpse nearest, one sprawled partway down the stairs, holding open the secret door.

Inside the secret chamber of the man’s mind, Anomus found much wonder, and even more sorrow.

Life had fled, and with it, thought. This itself limited what Anomus could learn about the workings of the human brain. He moved through a space so much vaster and more complex than he ever might have imagined, but it was a construction falling to ruin around him as the forces of mortality dug ever deeper into it. He learned little beyond the fact that the human mind was orders of magnitude more complex than the mind of a fly, which he had already suspected. But he had never suspected just how intricate was the mind of a person. It saddened him that men and women were born with such potential, and yet sentenced to inevitable death. How much potential in even the simplest of humans, and in each and every one, the doom of mortality. With a mental sigh and a strange sense of loss, he turned his attention once more to his experimental fly of the previous evening.

After more hours of careful tinkering, he experienced his first breakthrough. By altering the portion of the fly’s brain that dealt with smell – quite a large portion of the overall mass – he was able to instruct it to perform two consecutive actions.

He commanded it to fly to the far wall of the chamber, and then from there, to continue on to the black mana stone. Bumblingly, it did so. Anomus felt as though he had accomplished the moving of a mountain, but he knew that this was only the first step in remaking the creatures so that they could truly serve him in a useful capacity.

Two nights he had toiled on the fly to the exclusion of all else. In that time, the ghoul had not returned to the Well’s lid. Not that he could blame the creature after it’s harsh rebuff by the spelled ironglass. But Anomus felt that he needed to move more quickly in altering his fly-spies, lest the ghoul or ghouls leave the area before he figured out how to make contact with them.

Anomus also had another pressure that increasingly weighed down on him, one that he had put off for two nights, but that he sensed he could not do for much longer – the drive to expand, and to build. It seemed that for the length of his existence he would be, if not ruled, then at least influenced by that instinct. He supposed it was like a thirst – once could ignore a parched throat only for so long before being incapable of not reaching for a cup of water that was easily within one’s grasp. And so he expanded his will through the bedrock on the final hour before dawn, but this time instead of doing so outward in all directions, he focused on expanding towards the Great River – towards, and ultimately beneath it. He wanted to claim the area beneath the worker’s camp. He had notions, both about the possible ghouls attracted to it, and for the space itself. But first he had to reach it.

He did not get far before dawn arrived, but even a few feet’s progress was enough to ameliorate the worst cravings toward expansion. He went to his day -rest satisfied with all that he had accomplished, but well aware that he had much further to go.