Disclaimer: All the characters in this story exist only in my imagination. Similarity of name to a real person is not intended. All events indicated in this story are of my invention. Please don't sue me if anything here is similar to actual persons or events, or is the same with works of other authors. Believe me when I say any similarity to real events/persons and/or works of other authors is purely coincidental!

Eternity

Prologue: Shadow of a Broken Heart

Thebes, Egypt

Temple of Sekhmet

It was the darkest day of his life.

Holding her close, Nefer, blood of Pharaohs and Prince of Egypt, knew that the death of Lady Tetishere, a noble born of the Pharaoh's court who is his beloved and the woman in his arms, is near.

"No, don't leave me…" He pleaded to Tetishere, whom he considered to be his life.

Tetishere gave a weak smile and lifted her hand onto Nefer's face. "I love you." A tear escaped her face while Nefer held her hand. Closing her eyes, she took her last breath.

It was at that moment that the young Prince felt his heart shatter into a million pieces.

Taking his eyes burning with loss, sadness, anger and rage off her beautiful sleeping face, Nefer looked with those eyes at the person who drove his sword into his beloved's heart, his older brother, Prince Khuei.

Khuei, older son of the Pharaoh Mentuhotep, smirked as if he has done something honourable instead of murder.

Wanting to kill his brother but couldn't, since Khuei's men surrounded him, Nefer placed Tetishere's limp body on the cold, hard floor and stood up.

"Had she chosen me she would have been Queen, yet she just had to choose second-best." Khuei said smugly as he walked towards Nefer and Tetishere's dead body.

"Then why don't you finish it, brother." Nefer voiced with a sharp edge and eyes that now only had rage in them, the other emotions having been melted by the death of the woman he so loved.

Swinging his sword upward, the older Prince chuckled. "With pleasure..."

Without closing his eyes, Nefer took the strike that Khuei's sword gave him, making a huge, bloody gash across his chest to where his heart is located, with an after math, he didn't quite expect.

Instead of feeling pain from the wound that exposed his broken heart, he felt no pain of any kind, but he did feel like he was falling into the darkness of a deep abyss, a deep abyss from which he cannot get out from.

The thud that came soon after told the young Prince that he was now lying on the floor of Sekhmet's temple beside the body of Tetishere... His beloved Tetishere.

Taking her unmoving hand in his still-warm one, Nefer looked at the lion-headed statue of the Goddess Sekhmet beyond Tetishere's form, pleading for what exactly? He didn't know.

With his vision blurring, Nefer readied himself to join the woman he loved in the afterlife but suddenly, something held him back.

"Such a handsome young man..." Out of nowhere, a cold hand caresses the Prince's cheek.

The hand belonged to a woman with very pale skin, eyes with white irises and dark pupils and a grin that showed her sharp and pointy canines who suddenly appeared. She was wearing a royal dress that reached her ankles, golden bracelets and earrings, a golden royal necklace and a golden royal headdress.

"Who... Who are you?" Nefer managed with great difficulty.

"I am Sekhmet, your guardian, and I am here to give you what you want, though you may never admit it." Her smile was frightening, as if she was surveying something to eat rather than a gravely wounded young man, a Prince of Egypt nonetheless, on the brink of death.

"What do I want?" the Prince asked more to himself rather than the Goddess.

"Power... I offer ultimate power that can vanquish your enemies and quench your thirst for vengeance..." Sekhmet stated waving a hand to Tetishere's body.

Because of the fatal wound he received, Nefer couldn't think.

"You need not speak. The power I talk of, it is yours. How you use it no longer concerns me." Sekhmet informed her 'charge' rather disinterestedly and with a snarl, disappeared in a stream of white light.

That was when he felt it. His rage towards his brother, Khuei, becoming pain, the pain of losing his love, and then he felt the pain become something different... Hunger.

Finally feeling his legs, Nefer slowly stood up and looks around at the astonished faces of Khuei and his men. In their necks, he saw the veins that pumped blood throughout their bodies. Hearing the beating of their hearts, he started to salivate.

"How-" Khuei's heart beats the loudest.

Entranced by heart beating all around him, Nefer couldn't control himself anymore.

He attacked each and every man that followed Khuei into that temple, biting their necks and sucking their sweet tasting blood while enjoying their screams of horrification, until his brother was the only one left standing.

Khuei was rooted to where he stood. "Monster..." It was all he could utter.

"I am going to enjoy this..." In the blink of an eye, Nefer was beside his brother. Grabbing Khuei in a way that exposed his neck, he bit into it and proceeded to drain the older Prince of his blood.

It was only when Nefer's hunger was satiated that sanity finally had a hold on him.

Dropping Khuei's body and looking around at the dead scattered on the temple's cold floor, Nefer was horrified.

"What have I done?!"

- o -

Somewhere On the Path to the Valley of the Kings

After Sixty Years

With shackled hands and feet, the still young-looking Prince Nefer watched as the lavish tomb his younger brother Sankh, now known as the Pharaoh Mentuhotep II, had his architects built was being made. It didn't elude the Prince that the tomb was being built for him.

It was his punishment for what he did sixty years ago, and he accepts it freely. Well, it was the only punishment that can stop him, or at least contain him.

The Pharaoh's court and the Priests, which include those who have died and their successors, have tried everything to punish him for the deaths at the temple of the Goddess Sekhmet, from drowning Nefer at the river Nile to stabbing him through the heart with a sword but nothing worked. So they have decided to simply seal him in a tomb.

All of a sudden, the two guards that accompanied him in watching the building of the tomb stepped aside and dropped their heads signalling the arrival of the Pharaoh.

"I am sorry it had to be this way, brother, but I am Pharaoh and I have a duty to our people." The Pharaoh placed a sympathizing hand on his brother's shoulder.

"I understand, brother." He really did. To the Prince, who hasn't aged a day since that event at Sekhmet's temple, what he did was murder, no amount of sugar-coating can change that and he should be punished for it.

"It is ready, my lord." One of the architects informed the Pharaoh.

Looking at Nefer, the Pharaoh gave the architect and the guards that accompanied the Prince the signal for his brother's demise. "Seal him in."

The guards walked Nefer to the entrance to the tomb and guided him just inside of its door but before it was to be sealed, the Pharaoh faced him.

"There are vessels of blood inside if you need to feed but I do not know how long the supply will last." Pharaoh Mentuhotep informed his older brother.

The Prince only nodded.

Nefer's final thought as the doors, which had warnings engraved on them, were closed was that of regret for causing his father and brother, who loved him dearly, so much pain.

- o -

Egypt, One Thousand Years Later

Chuma, the leader of a group of tomb robbers wanted throughout Egypt, watches with interest as his associates dig up a tomb that they have discovered while travelling to the Valley of the Kings.

"Chuma, we're almost at the door." Haji, Chuma's friend and second-in-command, informed him when he approached, his smile from ear to ear.

"Good."

"Strange though..." Haji added with a wrinkled brow.

"What?" The leader of the tomb robbers asked, clearly seeing that something was bothering his friend.

"This tomb. It's quite far from the valley. Don't you think?" The valley being the Valley of the Kings.

"Chuma, Haji, we've reached the door!" Khai, a burly man and one of Chuma's group, shouted rather excitedly from the dig.

Reaching the dig, the first thing Chuma did was to look at the engraved markings on the tomb's door, being the only one of their group able to read ancient text.

"What does it say?" Atsu, another of Chuma's companions, voiced his curiosity.

"The usual. Nothing that we haven't seen on other tombs but what I don't understand is this..." Chuma replied, pointing to the engraved picture of Sekhmet baring her fangs in a snarl and the hieroglyphs that translated to words 'broken heart' beside it.

"Perhaps it would be best if we don't open this tomb at all..." Haji suggested to his companions even though he knew it was not what they wanted to hear.

Chuma looked at his friend with eyes that says his faint-heartedness is unacceptable. "If you do not wish to go inside with us, just say so. You do not need such cowardice for us not to take you."

Releasing a ragged breath in defeat, Haji volunteered to help Khai opened the tomb's door.

When they did the said task, a cold, gust of air blew out of the tomb and along with it, a ferocious snarl.

"What was that?" Khai asked, his voice almost a whisper.

Suddenly, something came out of the tomb and instantly killed Haji and Khai, then disappeared as fast as it appeared.

"Did you see what that was?" The question was directed to Atsu who was the only companion Chuma had left.

"No..." But then Atsu's answer was followed by a pained muffle.

Turning his head towards Atsu's direction, Chuma saw his companion being held in a way that exposed his neck by a man with skin, a pale shade of bronze, eyes, white except the pupils and fangs that gleamed in the sun as he smiled frighteningly so.

With a shriek, the man chomped into Atsu's neck. Atsu was struggling but the man was simply too powerful. A minute later, the man dropped Atsu's body into the ground like a doll that was discarded.

"What are you?!" Chuma was rooted to where he stood.

The man that killed Chuma's companions who now looked at him as if surveying his next meal was a like the pharaohs of old come alive in white, golden-trimmed kilt, heavy golden bracelets, a royal necklace and a royal headdress.

Feeling his legs again, Chuma started to run without thinking of the direction he took. It didn't matter as long as he can get away as soon as he can but that wasn't to be so.

Chuma didn't know how but the man - the monster blocked each and every direction he took to get away in the blink of an eye.

Then just as fast as he chased Chuma to which direction he planned to escape, the man-monster grabbed Chuma's neck with one strong hand and to the neck owner's horror, bit cold and icy fangs into it, afterwards proceeded to slowly drain Chuma of his blood.

The sun and the sands the last thing the tomb robber sees before he slips to darkness.