![]() ![]() "Easy to think about this, easy to imagine them as so simply dispatched.All Axies are beautiful – as stated by Axie Infinity developers themselves. "And he like a stone sentinel in a royal tomb blocked my path. She was still there, the remaining light defining her expressionless face, sparkling on the jewels around her neck and in her large almond-shaped eyes. I saw the smoke rising from them in the dark, gray wisps like snakes coiling towards the ceiling and then gone. "I sat up and moved back the curtains, and the lamps in the room went out. I leapt over the wall and stood alone listening in the empty unpaved street. "My heart was knocking in me uncontrollably. And he was the incarnation of menace in his stillness as he stood staring at me. His skin was bronze all over, as hers had been, enhanced, as the Elder had said. He was ornamented as she had been, and he wore the glorified dress of the pharaoh and his hair too was plaited with gold. He was otherwise lifeless, hands limp at his sides. "When I opened my eyes, I saw a blazing torch on the wall beyond him, and his dark outline looming before me, and his eyes animate, and looking at me without question, the black pupils swimming in a dull gray light. I wondered if the Elder would come to me again, disappointed that I had not returned - and as the thought came clear to me, I realized that someone was standing in the doorway again. In filtered and golden light, I listened to the sounds of sleeping Alexandria, and slipped into thin and glittering waking dreams. "Five nights after I'd left the Elder, when all these thoughts had had time to develop in me, I lay resting in my bedroom, with the lamps shining through the sheer bed curtains as before. And I thought I might expire on the spot from fear. "I could hear no more from either of them than you heard from them when I took you down to the chamber here on the island. I spent the next few nights feasting on blood until my miserable thoughts were drowned in it, and then in the early hours I roamed the great library of Alexandria, reading as I had always done. "But I didn't return to the underground temple. And when my hand found the face, the lips proved just a little softer than all the rest of it, and I drew back. But this was no statue, this thing, this thing was made of something more resilient than stone. Then my hands moved on the thing and felt what seemed the chest of a human statue, its shoulders, its arms. And I rested, catching my breath, trying to command myself. "My hands touched something hard before me. I was still Marius, no matter what had been done to me. I could not realize that I was host to an alien entity. ![]() "I revolted against all of it because if I was anything, I was an individual, a particular being, with a strong sense of my own rights and prerogatives. An immense force emanated from her, an invisible and commanding sense of her presence, her occupation of this small and insignificant room. And not merely a woman, but a magnificent bronze-skinned Egyptian woman as artfully bejeweled and dressed as the old queens, in fine pleated linen, with her black hair down to her shoulders and braided with strands of gold. "And slowly I turned my eyes in the direction of the door, and it was a woman I saw standing there. " Yet there was the sand on her feet and on her linen. But I wasn't above thinking about it and letting him - if he was the one in the doorway - hear these thoughts. I would say, `So you've come out of loneliness and disillusionment and now you want to tell me more, do you? Why don't you go back and sit in silence to wound your wraithlike companions, the brotherhood of the cinders?' Of course I wouldn't say such a thing to him. And then I would have the upper hand with the Elder. To see this person I had but to turn my head. ![]() ![]() It would have taken a band of mortals several hours to discover the trapdoor, but I found it quickly, and I was able to lift it, which mortals couldn't have done. I went out from the city to where the stars provided the only light, and I walked until I came to a ruined temple, and there I began to dig in the sand. "In the hour that followed I was to remember the strength and the speed I'd known in the forests of Gaul, and had not used since. ![]()
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