The darkness was absolute until it wasn't. One moment, I was Julian Vance, a man whose life was measured in footnotes and library hours; the next, I was standing in a cathedral of light that had no ceiling and no floor.
"Julian," the voice whispered. It was the sound of a desert wind. "You died with your eyes on the past. Now, I give you the future—or rather, a new past to mold."
I looked at my hands. They were solid, but my heart felt like it was beating in a different frequency. "Libya," I said, the word a dry rasp. "You're sending me to the collapse."
"I am. But hear the tether," the Being said. "Every time you die in that world, you will not find peace. You will be reborn into the very civilization you created. You will be its ghost and its guardian, century after century, until the 21st century arrives. Only then, if your kingdom still stands, will I return you to the moment of your car accident. You will live again in your own time."
"And if the kingdom falls?" I asked.
"Then you fall with it into the eternal silence," the Being replied. "Go now. The sand is waiting."
The transition was a violent surge of heat. I gasped, sucking in air that felt like liquid fire. My eyes snapped open, and instead of a hospital or a void, I saw a sky bleached white by a merciless sun.
I was lying in the dirt. My body was younger, harder, and covered in a layer of grime that felt like it had been there for years. I sat up, my head spinning, and looked at my surroundings.
This wasn't a city. It was a wound. I was in a settlement of mud-brick and broken stone. The walls were jagged stumps, blackened by fire and chiseled away by Egyptian raiding parties.
"Zul-An?" A man knelt beside me. He looked like a walking skeleton wrapped in leather. This was Kaelen. His eyes were bloodshot, sunken deep into a face mapped by hunger.
"I'm here," I croaked. I tried to stand, my legs shaking. "How long have I been out?"
"Two days," Kaelen said, his voice cracking. "The children are stopped crying, Zul-An. That's the worst part. They don't even have the moisture left to weep."
I looked around the ruins. These were the Mazax. There weren't a hundred thousand people here—not yet. There were barely three hundred survivors huddling in the shadows of the broken walls.
"The Egyptians... Merneptah's men... they took everything," Kaelen whispered, staring at the horizon where the Nile lay, far to the east. "They smashed the wells. They said the Libu must learn to thirst."
I felt a surge of Julian's historical knowledge. Pharaoh Merneptah. The son of Ramesses the Great. He was a hard man, and his grip on the borders was iron. He had left these people here to die as a warning.
"We can't stay here," I said, looking at the scorched earth. "The walls are broken, the soil is salted, and the Pharaoh's tax collectors will return to see if anyone is left to bleed."
"Where would we go?" Kaelen asked with a hollow laugh. "The desert is a wall. The sea is a graveyard. We are trapped in the middle."
I knelt and pressed my hand to the ground. I closed my eyes, visualizing the geological strata I had studied in the 21st century. I knew this region. We were sitting on a thin crust of despair, but miles beneath us was the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer.
"South," I said. "We go directly south. Two days' march into the deep Sarir."
"South is death, Zul-An!" Kaelen stood up, his voice rising in panic. "There are no oases there. No springs. Only the dunes that swallow armies."
"There is an ocean there," I said, standing up and meeting his gaze. "The gods showed me. A pool of water so vast it could drown all of Egypt. It is waiting for us to wake it."
The people began to gather around us. They looked at me with a mixture of fear and the last, flickering embers of hope. They had nothing else to believe in.
"We take the camels," I commanded. "We pack what little grain is left. We leave the ruins of this city to the vultures. We are going to find the Deep Sea."
The march was a slow-motion nightmare. We had twenty camels, most of them rib-thin and surly. I walked at the front, using a crude wooden staff to keep my rhythm.
The heat was an enemy I hadn't prepared for. Every step felt like pushing through waist-high water. I watched the elderly fall and be hoisted onto the few healthy camels we had left.
"Are we there yet, King of Dust?" a young man mocked on the second day. He was dragging his feet, his tongue swollen in his mouth.
"Almost," I said, though my own doubt was clawing at my throat. If my memory of the aquifer's depth was wrong, I was leading these people to a mass grave.
By the afternoon of the second day, we reached a wide, low-lying depression. The sand here was finer, almost white. I stopped and drove my staff into the ground.
"Here," I said. My heart was hammering. "We dig here."
"There is no green here," Kaelen said, looking around the desolate basin. "No birds. No life. Just salt."
"Life is beneath us," I replied. "Kaelen, get the men. We don't dig with shovels alone. We use the percussion method. We need the heavy stone weights and the copper-tipped rods we took from the Phoenician wreckage."
I spent the next hour explaining the mechanics. I couldn't build a modern pump, but I knew the physics of the Bronze Age. We built a tripod out of sturdy acacia wood, lashed together with camel-hide ropes.
We hung a heavy stone from the center, tipped with a sharpened copper bit. The idea was simple: lift, drop, repeat. Over and over, shattering the rock crust until we breached the pressurized water.
The first ten feet were easy—just soft sand and clay. The people worked in shifts, their desperate hope turning into a rhythmic, mechanical fury.
Then we hit the sandstone. Clang. Clang. Clang. The sound of the stone weight hitting the bit echoed across the silent desert like a funeral bell.
"It's dry," Kaelen whispered on the third day of digging. The hole was thirty feet deep. "The bit comes up hot and dusty. There is no water, Zul-An."
"Keep going," I said, my voice cracking. "The earth is a shell. We just have to crack it."
The sun began to set, casting long, bloody shadows across the basin. The men were ready to drop. I took the rope myself, my hands raw and blistered. Lift. Drop. Lift. Drop.
Suddenly, the bit didn't hit stone. It hit... nothing. The rope went slack. For a heartbeat, there was a terrifying silence.
Then, a sound came from the bottom of the dark shaft. A low, guttural hiss, like a giant taking a breath.
"Back!" I screamed, lunging for Kaelen's tunic and throwing him backward. "Everyone away from the hole!"
BOOM. The ground buckled. A geyser of icy, crystal-clear water erupted from the earth, shrieking as it breached the surface. It shot forty feet into the air, a shimmering pillar of life in the middle of a dead world.
The water didn't stop. It wasn't a trickle; it was a pressurized flood from the ancient world. It hit the dry sand and began to form a pool, steam rising as the cold water met the hot earth.
The Mazax didn't scream. They didn't cheer. They walked toward the water in a daze, falling to their knees as the spray hit their faces. They drank until they vomited, then drank again.
"It's real," Kaelen sobbed, his face buried in the wet mud. "You actually found it. The Deep Sea."
I stood back, watching my people come back to life. But I knew the water wouldn't last if we didn't manage it. "Don't just drink!" I shouted. "We need to channel it! If it sits in the sun, it will vanish!"
I began to draw in the mud with my staff. "We build the water-ways first. We dig deep trenches and cover them with flat stones to keep the sun away. This is the heart of Afer-An. The water comes first; the walls come later."
As the moon rose over the new oasis, I looked at my blistered hands. We had the water. Now, I had to figure out how to keep Pharaoh Merneptah from coming to take it.