Ezegbe of Amozey tugged the reins of her gallimimus. The shaggy-feathered creature halted with a squawk, with the dust kicked up by its long and slender legs settling over the desert floor behind it. After slipping off its saddle, the Amozean warrior gave her mount’s elongated neck a gentle rub while treating it to a handful of dried dates and beetles, which it pecked up with relish. Once Ezegbe had tethered the gallimimus to a tamarisk sapling, she brushed sand off her green cotton top and skirt and her bun of fluffy black hair. She then surveyed the landscape to her left with a hand over her umber-skinned brow to shade her eyes from the midday sunlight.
The canyon below her cut westward through the desert like a colossal scar. Its sandstone walls burned as brilliant as burnished copper beneath the sun’s unobstructed glow, sinking as far into the earth as many mountains stood high. A narrow forest of palm and acacia trees choked the gorge’s very bottom, their leafy crowns blocking any view of whatever rivulet supplied them with water. On the numerous ledges that jutted from the cliffs’ faces, the weathered edifices of an extinct people stood crammed together as slouching beige stacks of boxy and cylindrical structures.
Ezegbe could not find any steps carved into the canyon walls that would allow passage between these old cliffside settlements. Surely these people, whoever they were, had set up wooden bridges and ladders connecting village to village which had since disintegrated into dust over the eons. Squinting at the face of a cliff beneath one cluster of ruins, the Amozean did notice pairs of little pits gouged into the rock that ran down its height to the ravine floor, which could have served as climbing holds for the ancient denizens while they went to fetch water beneath the trees. It was still hard for her to imagine any human being having the strength or stamina to make regular climbing trips up and down the canyon walls.
Assuming, of course, the beings who built these cliff dwellings were human to begin with. Priests, shamans, and philosophers all over the world spoke of races of other creatures that had evolved sapience and erected shining cities millions of years before humanity’s descent from the trees. All over the world, these earlier civilizations’ ruins lay like innumerable rotting skeletons on a past battlefield. There were even legends of old cities deep within the vast sea, their monuments long since encrusted by coral and seaweed. Even if humans were the race who had built this canyon’s villages, humankind itself had been around for a few hundred millennia, plenty of time for entire nations to rise and fall as nations always had.
Regardless of the cliff dwellings’ origin, what Ezegbe had to do was find a way into one of them. Akhenhotep, the Hekuptan priest who had hired her, claimed that the canyon hid a mask-like idol that might have retained enough magical energy for him to exploit. What he planned to do with it, he had withheld, and Ezegbe could not promise that she could even find such an artifact lying there unmolested over uncounted centuries. Still, the middle-aged Hekuptan had plenty of gold cowries to spare, and he had even paid half the price upfront.
An agitated shriek from her steed shattered Ezegbe’s musing. The gallimimus was hopping on its feet while waving its plumed forelimbs in a panic while a hungry dimetrodon charged at it. The dimetrodon may not have been nearly as large as the giganotosaurus of the southern savanna or the tyrannosaurus from the Amozean jungles even further south, but these lizard-like monsters were nonetheless the desert’s apex predators and were still big enough to prey on humans or gallimimuses. The tall semicircular fin that reared on the dimetrodon’s back did not hinder its darting speed in the least.
Hollering the battle cry of Amozey, Ezegbe tore her steel short-sword out of its scabbard and leaped in to block the dimetrodon’s path. She sliced a dark red gash across the side of the beast’s convex snout. With a yowl half in pain and half in defiance, the creature bared its saber-like fangs and launched itself at her. The Amozean dodged its snapping jaws with a sidestep, but a lash of the dimetrodon’s tail struck her ankle and tripped her. The scorching hot sand of the desert floor assailed Ezegbe’s skin when she fell onto it. She rolled herself to evade the monster’s attempt to pin her down with its foreleg, but the tips of its claws still slashed her shoulder. Only her sheer determination could overcome her pain as she forced herself to jump back onto her feet.
The gallimimus’s frantic squawks and stamping were almost like an audience’s applause as the Amozean and the dimetrodon circled one another near the canyon’s upper lip, her heart pulsing like arena drums. The desert predator’s bright green gaze bored into Ezegbe’s own eyes as it growled with drool dripping from its fangs. The red spots on her adversary’s fin blazed with a furious luminescence that almost blinded her, requiring her to squint as she anticipated her next chance to strike.
The dimetrodon took advantage of her momentary handicap by hurling its bulk at her with open jaws. Ezegbe ducked, letting the beast arc over her. It landed precariously close to the cliff’s edge, its feet kicking away rocks that fell off and clinked all the way to the canyon’s bottom. With a confident smirk, the Amozean waved and jabbed her sword at the dimetrodon. Every time it tried to repel or dodge her strokes, the monster inched closer to the edge behind it.
Ezegbe had driven the dimetrodon right on the lip of the cliff itself when the fin-backed flesh-eater thrust its head into her midriff. She staggered in recoil with her sword thrashing in her grip with clumsy desperation. The dimetrodon made another lunge with its fanged jaws agape. The Amozean swept her blade’s tip across its mouth. With a roaring yowl that spurted blood, the beast reeled off the edge of the cliff and plummeted down its height. Its bestial cry faded into nothing as its body shrank into a dot before disappearing into the treetops at the canyon’s very bottom.
The Amozean panted hard with perspiration giving her skin the sheen of polished obsidian. She scooped up a handful of dust and smeared it over her wounds, hoping it would be enough to block out any malicious spirits that could make them fester. As she drank from her waterskin and poured some of the lukewarm water onto her brow to cool herself, she noticed a beige dome as big as a rural hut that rose from the ground a few paces to her left. Ezegbe would have taken it to be another natural outcropping, but then she noticed that its surface had peeled like plaster in a few spots, revealing layers of sandstone blocks underneath. T-shaped windows in the dome’s sides, and a human-sized doorway with the same T shape, further indicated that it was a manmade structure.
Ezegbe looked back at the distant cliff dwellings, observing that their windows and doorways had the exact same shape as the apertures in the dome. Whatever people, or other beings, had built them must have built this strange dome atop the canyon too. It could have housed the strange idol that Akhenhotep had hired the Amozean to retrieve, or it might have overlooked some access to the city in the cliffs below. Whichever the dome’s original purpose, Ezegbe could use some respite from the blistering desert sun.
She went inside through the open doorway, appreciating the coolness of the shade within. In addition to the windows on the building’s sides, a circular hole in the ceiling’s peak allowed a shaft of golden sunlight to pour straight down into the interior. It revealed a spiral of stone steps boring deep into the earth, with the bottom appearing as a tiny dot of light. More beams of light shot in an uneven stack across the pit around which the stepway went, all of them coming from the direction of the nearest cliff’s side. This had to have been how the ancients traveled between their world along the canyon walls and the world above, with multiple exits along the flight of steps connecting neighborhoods on different ledges up the giant ravine’s height.
Relieved as Ezegbe was that she would not need a torch to see her way down, the sheer drop the stepway twisted around made her heart flutter with dread. Were she to slip off a step, she could fall to her death. Nonetheless, she would take care while descending all the way to the bottom. Her hunch was that, if the ancient cliff-dwellers were to keep their enchanted idol anywhere in this area, it would be far below where most outsiders would be willing to tread down.
As the Amozean descended the spiraling stepway, she kept one hand brushing over the stony wall to keep her balance and not slide off the steps. Her breathing, and the clipping of her sandals over rock, bounced as echoes within the great shaft, making it seem like the ancients’ spirits still haunted the place. The beads of perspiration on Ezegbe’s brow turned colder than the musty air inside. Even with all the sunlight filtering in from various openings, there remained enough shadow in the shaft for her to imagine monsters like the dimetrodon—or worse—lurking within.
And then there was that pulsating hum that reverberated from the bottom. It had been inaudible from the entrance above, but the further down Ezegbe went, the louder it grew.
Every so often, she would pass a doorway in the stepway’s wall that led out to a canyon ledge, giving her a closer look at the ruined dwellings perched on it. Much like the dome that capped the stepway, the cliff dwellings had their walls’ plaster peeling off in spots to expose the stone blocks within. Every time Ezegbe pondered going through one of the exits to explore the ruins on each ledge, walking up and down the same narrow streets that dozens if not hundreds of citizens must have traversed every day in the distant past, the unearthly hum from the bottom pulled her attention back down.
After a long descent down the steps, the Amozean reached the very bottom of the shaft. There was on one side another exit that led to the canyon’s forested floor, but it was the alcove depressed into the rock on the opposite side that caught Ezegbe’s attention. Mounted on its surface was a row of five wooden masks that were each bigger than a man’s face. The leftmost and rightmost ones had human-like features with the exaggerated proportions typical of ritual masks, the second mask on the left sported the long and pointed beak of a pterosaur, and the second one on the right had the snarling narrow-snouted visage of a velociraptor. The mask in the center, the very largest of the five, had the face of a dimetrodon with gaping sharp-toothed jaws, with a ridge on its scalp representing the creature’s fin.
It was to the dimetrodon mask that Ezegbe traced the bizarre humming, the one that gave off warmth when she held her palm over it. She touched the mask, and the heat burned her fingertips like heated metal.
“Feed me,” a resonant voice said. “My power feeds on blood.”
There were stains of dried blood on the dimetrodon mask’s teeth, which appeared to have been the teeth of a real dimetrodon once. Ezegbe could only guess whether that had been human blood, animal blood, or a mixture of the two. Her own people back in Amozey would offer both to their gods. It may have been a gruesome cost of life, but gods everywhere always needed sacrifice the way humans needed food.
Turning to the exit behind her, the Amozean knew where she would find the blood the mask demanded. Already, she could pick up the coppery scent of blood and the more putrid odor of spilled entrails mingling with the fresher fragrances of the trees outside of the shaft. She followed the gory smells out of the stepway shaft and back into daylight, although the trees on the canyon floor cast enough shade to keep her cool. Beneath the canopy of trees, beside a gurgling stream, lay the dimetrodon’s limp carcass. Already, small carrion pterosaurs had torn into its viscera, squabbling at each other with snapping beaks while a young crocodile snipped off a sliver of flesh from the corpse’s opposite flank.
Ezegbe brandished her sword with a threatening yell, spooking the pterosaurs into fluttering off. She sawed through the leathery hide and flesh of the dimetrodon’s breast until she reached its heart and hacked it out. The blood that leaked out of the heart to drench her hand as she held it was still warm.
The Amozean returned to the alcove where the masks awaited. She inserted her hand through the dimetrodon mask’s open mouth and squeezed on the heart, with its blood gushing onto the mask’s fangs. Twin sparks of green light burned within the mask’s eye holes as it exuded more intense warmth than before.
“You have fed me well, Ezegbe of Amozey. Wear me, and you can claim my power as your own.”
“I do have one question, O Mask of the Cliff-Dwellers,” Ezegbe asked. “What happened to your people here?”
“First, you must know that the desert around this canyon was not always desert. As the Hekuptan annals have recorded, it was once shrubland that teemed with game and enjoyed yearly rains. My people, whom you may call the Temmem, were able to grow their crops atop the canyon while building their homes on the ledges along its twin faces. Over time, their chiefdom grew in power and wealth even as the rains faltered, and their avarice and arrogance exhausted what little left the land could provide. As punishment for their hubris and the devastation they had wrought on their own land, we let those Temmem who would not leave the canyon die out on their own.”
It was a brutal story, which the mask had related with cold neutrality, but Ezegbe knew that the will of the gods could be like that. Whether they were Amozean, Hekuptan, or Temmem, any mortal had to be careful around their gods. Disobedience or hubris could cost not only any single person but also entire civilizations.
Nonetheless, the important thing was that Ezegbe had obtained the mask for the priest Akhenhotep. All she had to do was bring it back to him in Hekuptah. Now if only she could go back up all those steps without collapsing under fatigue!
It was to her surprise that, as she held onto the mask while ascending the spiraling stepway, it infused enough of its warm energy into her that it drowned out any aches she might have felt in her legs. By the time the Amozean had come all the way up to the dome’s doorway atop the canyon, she had not even broken another sweat, and her heart rate was no faster than if she had gone on a leisurely stroll across level land.
“Let us see what that Akhenhotep plans to do with you, O Mask of the Temmem,” Ezegbe said as she walked back to her gallimimus, cradling the enchanted mask in her arms.
Over the course of centuries, the proud people of Hekuptah had built many grand cities along the fertile floodplains of the Iteru River, but the city of Niwt-Akhen had not been one of these. Instead, it lay out on a shallow mesa in the desert southwest of the Iteru’s upper course, although a manmade channel now since filled in had once connected it to the river. Niwt-Akhen was the project of one Hekupthan Per’Aa who called himself Akhenmose and had reigned a century and a half ago. He had sought to abolish the traditional Hekaptan pantheon in favor of a cult venerating a singular sun god he called the Akhen, with himself as the god’s living avatar, and Niwt-Akhen was to be his grand new capital.
According to what the priest Akhenhotep had told Ezegbe the day they first met, Akhenmose had governed the kingdom with benevolent wisdom and oversaw a period of prosperity. However, what Ezegbe had overhead everyone else in Hekaptah say was quite different. Akhenmose had instead overworked and overtaxed his subjects, persecuting their traditional faith, while idling away with his family in the luxurious confines of his new palace. It was enough cause for the Hekaptan people to overthrow him, striking his name off the official chronicles while restoring their old gods, and letting the desert reclaim the heretical tyrant’s dream city.
Nonetheless, Akhenmose had no shortage of descendants lingering within Hekaptah, among them Akhenhotep himself.
Ezegbe had little way of confirming whether Akhenhotep’s account of history was truer than that of the rest of his people. Nonetheless, as she observed the wind- and sand-beaten remains of Niwt-Akhen from atop her gallimimus, she found herself inclined more toward the Hekaptan commoners’ account.
Even after a hundred and fifty years of abandonment, the city stood as a towering crown atop its mesa foundation, with mudbrick ramparts rearing even higher than a savanna brachiosaurus could crane its long neck. The pair of off-white limestone colossi depicting Akhenmose in full regalia reached even higher as they sat on guard of the city wall’s gatehouse, with faded traces of paint clinging to their surfaces. From behind the wall’s eroded parapet rose the rooftops of the palatial and temple complexes as well as the pointed tips of obelisks. In the hazy distance northwest of the city, Ezegbe could make out the huge half-built pyramid that was to be Akhenmose’s tomb, its flat summit poking up from the desert sand like a second mesa. It all conveyed the extravagant grandeur that only a megalomaniac even greater than the typical Hekaptan Per’Aa could commission.
It was the same sort of hubris that the gods had punished the Temmem for even deeper into the past.
The wide rectangular doorway in the city rampart’s gatehouse stood open, with the immense baobab-wood doors tilting outward as if overdue to fall off their hinges. At least Ezegbe would not have to find another way into the city. She wondered why the priest had requested that she bring the mask to him within those ruins, even if they had been his ancestor’s capital. What did he want to do within the walls of fallen Niwt-Akhen, and why did he need the mask’s power to do so?
The Amozean rode through the open gate and went down the dust-swathed avenue that bisected the city. The lifeless trunks of desiccated date palm trees still swayed in the balmy evening breeze, which whispered as it swirled around the empty streets and alleyways. Much like the city of cliff-dwellings back in the canyon, this had once been the home of hundreds if not thousands of people, even if they had been there for the duration of only one heretical despot’s reign. It boggled Ezegbe’s mind to imagine chattering throngs of citizenry covering what were now only unfilled spaces between stone and mudbrick buildings.
Her gallimimus halted, twitching its head around with a nervous chirp. Beneath the murmur of the wind, the Amozean could hear scraping over sand like footsteps. The back of her neck prickled with fear as she scanned the streets for movement with her hand on her sword’s hilt. It could have been a scavenging velociraptor out there, or a prowling dimetrodon. Or something even worse.
After failing to detect anything more, Ezegbe continued down the avenue until she was a few paces before the Temple of Akhen, by far the city’s most enormous building. Twelve pairs of dimetrodon sculptures with Akhenmose’s countenance for heads sat on pedestals on opposite sides of the avenue leading to the temple’s front pylon, a broad towering edifice with columns of Hekaptan hieroglyphs inscribed into its sloping face. Above the tall doorway going through the pylon was the image of the discarded god Akhen itself, portrayed as a solar circle with long and straight arms shooting out of it and Akhenmose’s smiling face inside. The image still had on it a few flecks of gold paint catching the yellow light of the sunset.
Ezegbe chuckled as her eyes met those of the Per’Aa in the solar circle. “And I thought our Ahosu back in Amozey was proud of himself. I would have hated to have served as this Akhenmose’s guardswoman.”
The Amozean tethered her gallimimus to the neck of one of the dimetrodon sphinxes in front of the temple. She hugged the old Temmem mask tight with her arms, feeling its warm energy on her bosom, while entering the temple. The mask’s eye holes still glowed bright enough to pierce through the darkness inside.
Behind the frontal pylon, there extended a hallway lined with rows of columns as tall and stout as the mightiest jungle trees, with smatterings of paint still clinging to the inscriptions chiseled on their surface. Every clip of Ezegbe’s sandals on the tiled floor echoed within the hallway, making the little hairs on her neck stand on end. Her eyes darted sideways to see if there were any desert predators hidden in the darkness beneath the columns. She had not forgotten that scuffing she and her steed had heard outside earlier.
“Welcome back to Hekaptah, Ezegbe the Amozean,” she heard the priest Akhenhotep announce.
He sat like a Per’Aa in his own right on an alabaster throne at the hallway’s far end. On the wall behind him was emblazoned an even larger image of the Akhen’s solar disk, positioned just above his shaved scalp like it was a regal crown. His sienna skin was a shade lighter than Ezegbe’s own, and he had the narrower nose typical of the Hekaptans and other desert peoples. The black-spotted crocodilian hide of a kaprosuchus he had slung over his chest marked Akhenhotep’s station within the Hekaptan priesthood, as did the unblemished white of his linen loincloth, even if he secretly followed a different god from the official pantheon.
The priest rose from his seat with open arms with an eager smile. “I trust you haven’t had much difficulty recovering the mask of the Temmem, have you?”
“Only a little,” Ezegbe said. “I had some trouble with a dimetrodon once I reached the canyon. Thankfully, the blood from its heart allowed me to replenish the mask’s energy. Now, before I hand the mask to you, a couple of things. First, the second half of your payment.”
Akhenhotep wasted no time in showering a fistful of gold cowrie shells into the Amozean’s hand, and she wasted no time in trickling them into her little leather purse. It would be enough to cover her expenses on the road for the better part of a year.
“Second, if you don’t mind me asking, what do you plan to do with the mask, O Priest of Akhen?” Ezegbe asked.
Akhenhotep’s eyes glinted green from the light in the dimetrodon mask’s eyeholes, as did the teeth in his smile. “Since you are already paid and have no serious investment either way in Hekaptan affairs, I shall tell you. As a descendant of the great Akhenmose, and a loyal disciple of the Akhen, my plan is to restore my illustrious ancestor’s dynasty. All Hekaptah shall bow to the Akhen and no other gods once more, and the ruins you see around you will become our capital once more. And I, Akhenhotep, shall crown myself Per’Aa, and I shall lead our empire to a glorious future unlike any my forefathers could have imagined. Under my reign, the entirety of the known world shall belong to Hekuptah—and therefore it shall belong to me. Now, hand me the mask.”
Ezegbe’s heart shuddered, and she tightened her hold on the old mask. The green reflection in the priest’s eyes radiated more malevolence than a hungry dimetrodon’s.
“I said, hand it to me!” The loud snap of Akhenhotep’s voice pierced through the temple’s former silence. “I’ve already paid you. Now hold up your end of the bargain!”
“I would sooner give up all my gold than aid your ambitions,” Ezegbe said. “This is madness!”
The priest shot his hands onto the mask, plucked it out of Ezegbe’s grip, and slammed it onto his own face. “This is the rebirth of a dynasty, and the dawn of a new era! Now…how shall I try out this mask? You said it drew its power from blood?”
The blood drained from the Amozean’s cheeks. She reached for her sword to prepare for the worst.
Akhenhotep cackled, his eyes flaming green through the mask he had appropriated. “Then allow me to replenish it once more with yours!”
He looked down at his hands as his fingernails grew into talons as long and sharp as those on a velociraptor’s forelimbs. Ezegbe had not even been able to unsheathe her sword when the Hekaptan priest slashed across her bosom, his newly grown claws cutting through cloth and flesh. Extreme agony scalded her wounded breasts as she teetered away from her attacker, bending at the waist under the burden of her pain. Dashing toward her with supernatural speed, Akhenhotep raked the Amozean’s shoulder with another swing of his taloned hands, laughing with cruel glee. His eyes’ fiery luminance stung Ezegbe’s own to the point of tears.
She could not let this human monster reduce her to bloodied scraps. Not even if he had the blood-fed power of a forgotten god’s mask at his disposal. The third time Akhenhotep slashed at her, Ezegbe parried his arms with a chop of her sword. Both of his forearms fell to the floor, evaporating into green smoke, while he shrieked as loud as a tyrannosaurus could roar.
It was to the Amozean’s horror, and the Hekaptan priest’s fiendish delight, when his arms grew back from their stumps with a sizzle, his fingers sporting those horrible claws once more. Ducking his fourth attack at a hair’s breadth, she rushed into the black shadow among the columns, maneuvering around them with the hope of throwing Akhenhotep off. Instead, he raced after her with that same inhuman speed and persistence, disappearing into a blur with each stride, the glow in his eyes illuminating his pursuit. The only way Ezegbe had any hope of defeating the priest was to get that mask off him. Or cut off his head.
She twirled around and hacked at Akhenhotep’s neck, hoping to cleave his head off. He dodged faster than an eye’s blink and smacked the flat of his hand into the Amozean’s cheek. As she fell against a column, the sword slipped from her grip, and he pinned his sandaled foot on it.
“How good are you without your trusty blade, Amozean?” Akhenhotep taunted. “Thankfully for you, I’ve drawn enough blood for my purpose tonight. How about I spare your life, young lady? Of course, I have a certain price of my own in mind…”
The predatory leer in the priest’s gaze gave away everything for Ezegbe. Rage and disgust drowned out any pain or fear she might have as she flung a fist at his mask. It flew off his face to bang onto the temple floor, splintering in half. All its enchanted power hissed out as streams of green steam into the air before dissipating.
“No, no!” Akhenhotep cried, falling to his knees while holding up hands that had gone back to human form. “My power, my opportunity…it’s all gone! How could you, you southern bitch? How could you—”
There was still one source of green light within the temple. It was a pair of green pinpricks glaring from the darkness across the hallway behind the Hekaptan priest, drawing nearer with the scraping of clawed feet over the floor.
Ezegbe smirked with crossed arms. “Lucky for you, I won’t have to be the one to kill you. It seems like we have a guest who will take care of that for me.”
She pointed to the dimetrodon that crouched behind Akhenhotep, its tail swishing behind it while carnivorous hunger gleamed in its eyes. He sat there petrified like one of his people’s mummified dead until the fin-backed beast pounced on him, sending his soul to the underworld where it would receive divine judgment. The vile priest’s screams’ intermixing with the ripping of his flesh and the cracking of his bones was as music to the Amozean’s ears.
Ezegbe plucked her sword from the floor, sheathed it, and skirted the feasting dimetrodon to examine the splintered mask. Even if it had lost its power, she could turn it in at one of the Hekaptan libraries for their scholar-priest’s study. It would help preserve what remained of the ancient cliff-dwelling culture of the Temmem, and they might reward her with even more gold cowries.
Leaving the Temple of Akhen behind her, Ezegbe the Amozean fed and untethered her gallimimus, remounted it, and rode out of the empty ruins of Niwt-Akhen with the sunset behind her.