Mistress of Pharaohs. Daughter of Dawn. Natalie Yacobson

herself. It was an honor for him. But he was waiting for something else. One last loving embrace before he died? Her love died with the first burns of heavenly fire. All that was left was vengeance.

      The living desert

      The battle sword remained. Alais drew symbols in the sand with its tip. But the bracelet of omnipotence had disappeared somewhere. Without it, she felt powerless. After all, all the power of the sunlight was contained within it.

      Alais grabbed the snake that was slithering across the sand. It hissed, exuding venom. The tiny mouth opened dangerously. The snake wanted to bite, even if it was an angel, whose blood would immediately burn. It was an ugly creature, but brave! It was a matter of one minute to crush the snake. Alais didn’t even feel sorry for it. The desert, greedily accepting the shards of sunlight that fell to the ground at the same time it did, and became gold, knew what the angel expected of it. The snake’s body began to slowly turn gold. It was from tail to head. And now it was a new bracelet that came to life and wrapped in rings around Alais’s forearm. The dead snake became flexible and docile. She had made an excellent copy of the bracelet. It was just a copy. Alais frowned. That would do for now, but how and where would she find the real bracelet? She was wearing it when she fell. So where had it gone now?

      The desert had lived and breathed since the angels had fallen into it. Out of the light that fell with them something was born… Touching the sand, it suddenly turned to gold. And the sands in front of her, which a day ago had been black, now glowed like a bottomless and boundless treasury reaching far beyond the horizon. Even in the heavens it was not so rich. Gold meant nothing there. But here on earth, it took on a special meaning.

      People fought over it if they found it somewhere. To them it was most often the object of strife and murder. To them it was rare, to her it was commonplace. Alais often amused herself by passing the sand between her fingers, and her touch would turn it golden. How can you fight over gold when you can turn everything around you into it? Fighting over freedom is another thing. Alais cast a grim glance at the heavens. They seemed to have turned purple, and the sand in the desert had all turned to gold for miles around. She had walked on it for too long. Her feet always left a trail of gold. And there was no longer a trace of the ash that had strewn the desert after the angels had fallen.

      A golden swirl of grains of sand swirled around Alais. A whole desert of gold would have been a fairy tale for mortals, but not for her. But she had already noticed that once a man found a single bar of gold, he was willing to kill for it. The glitter of heavenly metal makes people lose their minds.

      “Gold is like you,” Remy once remarked. “It brings them as much evil as you have brought us. But we don’t blame you, and they don’t blame it.”

      Nor did Alais tear out his burnt tongue for being blunt, though the sword itself vibrated in her hands. It’s a good thing Remy stayed sensible. But it was better that he had remained handsome. Now he was a mountain of black muscle and leathery wings. All her supporters looked no better than him now. Some angels slept in the barchans, and when they emerged from them by nightfall, they looked like stuffed animals made of sand. As they shook themselves off, the sand stirred with ash.

      How much ash could be left by burnt wings! The ashes seemed to begin to replace her army blood. In heaven they had been exposed to a wound that would not stop bleeding.

      “It makes me want to stab one man, and see his blood gush out of the wound to no end, until it floods the whole desert.”

      “There isn’t that much blood in those things, I’m afraid,” Remy said, still judiciously, showing his forked black tongue.

      “I know! But they did it to us. And we have to do it to someone else to be comforted. It’s as if the heavens are still drinking our blood, though they seem to have drunk it all. But they will never stop drinking.

      “Let us go at them with another war!”

      “Not yet!” Alais looked around at the monsters in the sands. They had already gained their strength from the blood of men. Their angry hum alone would make the heavens tremble. The beautiful creatures had gone through torture, turned into monsters, and the monsters had hardened. Now they are capable of anything. So what is she waiting for? Why not give them the order to advance? Or does she fear another defeat? Alais threw back the golden strands from her forehead. The rumble of the first angelic battle was in her ears. It was too soon to repeat all that. She needed to recover from her first defeat. The moral wound was stronger than the physical.

      The tip of her sword resisted as she began involuntarily drawing a familiar name in the sand: Mikhail.

      Michael betrayed her. He sided with the enemy, even led his armies. How quickly those who loved can betray!

      You cannot draw his name to the end, or he will show up here and call her back. One must not trust him! He must not even be remembered!

      Alais stirred the sand. The writing disappeared beneath the grains of sand in an instant.

      Michael certainly remained handsome, unlike Remy. She imagined his radiant face would one day blaze with fire, blacken and shrink like burnt parchment.

      “Look what we have got! Do you like these deserts?”

      “I don’t see the difference between the deserts and the clouds,” Remy was an optimist. Or was he only pretending not to care?

      “The deserts are better, because they are ours. There’s no one here but us.”

      “There are people and lizards.”

      “Let them be food.”

      The blood of the humans tasted good. Alais often drank it with pleasure. She only disliked that humans were beginning to show an intelligence that wasn’t there before. Existing on the same earth as the angels, it was as if they had begun to adopt a piece of their intelligence. It would be better to destroy people, but then there would be no more of their blood, which is so pleasant to drink. Somehow it tastes better than lizard blood.

      But why is it? All living creatures on earth are the same. They came here a long time after her angels had fallen in the wilderness. Why should there be any difference between all these creatures? Why does the blood of any of them taste sweeter?

      Sickle of Blood

      Alais found a sickle in the sand. Apparently it was formed from a shard of sunbeam, curved in a strange shape. The sickle was still hot. And yet it was nighttime. The sand is not red-hot.

      Black letters stretched across the golden blade, as if drawn in darkness.

      “I’m still with you.”

      What could that mean? Who was still with her? All around are her fallen legions, mutilated and burned. There is no one extra in them. Perhaps the inscription is a message from someone she counted among the dead? Hardly a message from God, but there is power in the words, as if someone stronger than the Almighty were present.

      An aura of darkness enveloped the golden sickle, and suddenly the black letters on the blade were golden, too. You couldn’t read them now. The reliefs were barely visible.

      Alais weighed the sickle in her hands. As long as it touched her skin, she had the magical feeling that there was someone she couldn’t do without.

      “You’re just like a friend to me,” Alais whispered to the sickle, and the sickle glowed brighter. It resembled a month in the sky. And that was the month she held in her hands.

      “We are like night and day. We are one! As day does not exist without night, so you do not exist without me.”

      The mysterious voice sounded only in her head. It enveloped her consciousness in a black mist. Alais grew wary. There was definitely someone nearby, but she didn’t see him, and her armies didn’t see him either. Otherwise they would have panicked. There was as much danger from the invisible creature as there was magnetism. she wanted to see it.

      Perhaps