Ineb Djer — the world wall

The World: Two Civilizations, One Question

Every place in this book sits inside a ring of ice mountains called the Ineb Djer, the World Wall. One gate breaks that ring, at Bakhu in the east, and it has been sealed since before living memory. Within the wall, two civilizations grew up answering the same question in opposite directions.

North

Kemet

The black land — permanence against the thaw

[ blue glass · city of ice on the black Iteru ]

Built on the bones of Egyptian funerary tradition, carried to a conclusion Egypt itself never reached. The Hem Ka priests believe the spirit — the Ka — cannot survive the loss of its body, so they bind the dead against the thaw the way the old embalmers once bound them against rot.

By every account its people give, it is an act of love. It is also a city where the dead press their hands against the inside of the glass, because some part of them is still trying to leave.

Burning natron oil The Iteru The aurora as approval

South

Letheion

The white sea — forgetting as mercy

[ marble courts · olive groves above the still Lethe ]

Letheion took the opposite road. White stone weathers in a warm sea wind, and the hierophants administer a drug called Nepenthe, along with the pale fruit of the Lotos, to spare the living from grief heavy enough to break them.

A people who believe forgetting is mercy. They are not wrong that grief can be unbearable. They have simply chosen not to bear it.

The Lethe spring The Lotos Olive groves

The Relic

Somewhere between the two stands a ruin at the center of it all — and a fragment of the pillar that once sealed the gate at Bakhu now lives in the palm of a young man who never asked for it. Where it came from, and what it wants, is most of this book.

Neither Kemet nor Letheion has room for a third answer. Menkhef crosses both anyway. Meet the people making him regret it, and the ones making it worth it.

Meet the characters →