The Kingdom of Khem was a land baked into submission.
Submission to the sun, a relentless, white-hot tyrant that bleached the very color from the sky and cracked the earth like old pottery. Submission to the sand, which swallowed roads, homes, and histories with an indifferent hunger. And above all, submission to their God-King, Malekith the Ageless, the Immortal Emperor who had ruled from his obsidian pyramid for a thousand years.
In Khem, life was not a gift to be cherished, but a resource to be consumed. The official state religion, the Cult of Eternity, taught that Malekith's immortality was the kingdom's salvation. To fuel this eternity, the populace was required to give a "tithe of vitality." Once a year, every citizen over the age of fifteen was required to present themselves at a local Sun-Spire, a smaller replica of the great pyramid, and offer a portion of their life force to the God-King.
It was a slow, creeping death. A young man of twenty had the weary eyes and stooped shoulders of a man of forty. A woman of thirty had the grey hair and brittle bones of a crone. They gave their years so that their king might have millennia. It was the ultimate imbalance: a million lives slowly dimming so that one might burn with stolen light. They did not know a world without this sacrifice. It was as natural and as unavoidable as the rising of the sun.
Into this land of accepted suffering, a new element arrived.
He did not appear in a flash of light or a storm of sand. He simply walked out of the shimmering heat haze of the eastern desert, a lone figure in simple, dark rags that seemed oddly out of place against the sun-bleached landscape. His feet were bare on the scorching sand, yet he left no footprints. The oppressive, hundred-and-twenty-degree heat seemed to curve around him, leaving him in a small pocket of cool, comfortable air.
Ravi had arrived in Khem.
His senses, attuned to the moral fabric of the world, were overwhelmed by the sheer, systemic cruelty of this place. In Eldoria, the injustice had been a rot, a festering wound hidden beneath a veneer of civilization. Here, it was the bedrock of society. It was codified, celebrated, and enforced as divine will. The entire kingdom was a sacrificial altar, and its people were the slow-burning offering.
He walked for a day, unseen by the caravans and patrols that plied the dusty roads. He was a ghost of perception, observing, noting, weighing. He saw a father collapse from exhaustion while plowing a field, his vitality so drained he could barely lift his tools. He saw a mother weeping as her eldest son, having just turned fifteen, was led away by the sun-priests for his first tithe. He saw the priests themselves, their faces impassive masks of religious fervor, their own vitality robust and strong, as they were exempt from the tithe.
He felt the flow of life force, a million tiny, shimmering streams being siphoned from the populace, flowing towards the Sun-Spires, and from there, converging on the great black pyramid in the capital city of Heliopolis. At the pyramid's apex, he felt the single, gluttonous, and ancient soul of Malekith, feasting on the stolen years.
Ravi's expression remained calm, but the air around him grew still, charged with the silent promise of a coming storm. The scales here were not just tipped; they had been nailed to the floor.
His first stop was a small, dusty oasis town named Amarna. A Sun-Spire, a hundred-foot-tall shard of polished obsidian, dominated the town square. Today was a tithing day. A long, silent queue of townspeople snaked its way towards the spire's entrance. Their faces were resigned, their movements sluggish. There was no resistance, no anger. Only a deep, weary acceptance of their fate.
Ravi watched from the shadow of a withered palm tree. He saw a young woman, barely sixteen, helping her frail, white-haired father forward in the line. The girl's name was Zara. Her own life force, which should have been a bright, vibrant flame, was already flickering, dimmed by her first tithe the year before. Her father was little more than a walking ghost, his vitality almost completely drained after decades of sacrifice.
"I can do it, Zara," the old man wheezed, his voice thin as dust. "You should save your strength."
"Hush, father," Zara said, her voice gentle but firm, betraying a strength her weary body did not possess. "We do this together. For the God-King. For Eternity."
Ravi's gaze focused on them, then on the Sun-Spire. Inside, he could feel the arcane machinery, the soul-siphon, designed to drain life and channel it away. He also felt the presence of the town's Head Priest, a man named Kenan, whose own soul was fat and slick with stolen vitality and self-righteous pride.
It was time to make his presence known.
As Zara and her father reached the front of the line, two temple guards, their heads shaven and their bodies muscular, motioned them forward. "The elders go first," one of them grunted, shoving Zara aside and pulling her father towards the spire's dark entrance.
"Wait!" Zara cried, stumbling. "He is weak! Let me go with him!"
"The God-King's will is absolute," the guard sneered, unmoved by her plea. "The weak have the most to give."
They dragged the old man into the spire. Zara watched, her face a mask of anguish, tears welling in her eyes. She knew her father would not survive this tithe. He would walk in as a man and be carried out as a husk.
It was this single, perfect moment of casual, systemic cruelty that triggered the first correction.
Ravi stepped out of the shadows.
He did not walk towards the guards. He walked towards the Sun-Spire itself.
The air in the entire town square dropped twenty degrees in a single second. The relentless sun seemed to dim, its light turning thin and watery. The silent, shuffling queue of townspeople froze, a sudden, inexplicable dread seizing their hearts. They looked up from their feet, their resigned expressions turning to confusion and fear.
Head Priest Kenan, who was overseeing the tithing from the top step of the spire, felt the shift. "What is this? A sandstorm?" he barked, annoyed by the interruption.
Then he saw Ravi. A boy in dark rags, walking calmly towards his holy spire, the very ground seeming to cool beneath his feet.
"You there!" Kenan shouted, his voice filled with arrogance. "Halt! This is sacred ground! No one approaches the Sun-Spire without an offering!"
Ravi did not stop. He continued his unhurried pace, his eyes fixed on the obsidian structure.
"Guards! Seize him!" Kenan commanded.
The two guards at the entrance turned, drawing their cruel, sickle-shaped swords. They charged at Ravi, their faces set in grim lines.
They never reached him.
Ravi simply glanced at them. It wasn't a glare, not a look of anger. It was a simple, factual observation.
The two guards stopped dead, their swords falling from nerveless fingers. They looked down at their own hands. The skin was wrinkling, aging at a supernaturally fast rate. Age spots bloomed on their arms. Their dark hair turned grey, then white, in the space of a few seconds. Their strong, muscular bodies stooped and withered, their vitality draining away not into the spire, but into the dry desert air.
In less than five seconds, the two robust young guards aged eighty years. They collapsed to the ground, not dead, but ancient, frail husks, their eyes wide with the horror of having their own life force stolen from them. They had become the very thing they helped create.
The crowd gasped, a collective sound of terror. Head Priest Kenan stared, his jaw hanging open. "What sorcery is this!?"
Ravi reached the base of the Sun-Spire. He placed a single, unassuming hand on the sun-warmed obsidian.
He was not just touching the stone. He was touching the entire network. He felt the intricate web of magic that connected every Sun-Spire to the great pyramid in Heliopolis. He felt the river of stolen life flowing through it.
And with a single thought, he reversed the flow.
A deep, resonant hum filled the air. The obsidian Sun-Spire, which had always been a thing of darkness and dread, began to glow from within with a soft, brilliant white light. The arcane symbols carved into its surface, once used for draining life, now blazed with a new purpose.
Inside the spire, Zara's father, who had been strapped to the tithing altar, felt not a draining, but a flood of warmth and energy. The life force that had been stolen from him over fifty years was now rushing back into his body from the spire itself. His white hair began to darken, the wrinkles on his face smoothed, and the strength returned to his limbs.
Outside, every person in the queue felt it. A gentle, invigorating warmth spreading through them. The weariness in their bones lessened. The fog in their minds cleared. They were not being drained; they were being… restored. Decades of stolen vitality were being returned to them from the god-king's own vast, hoarded reservoir.
Head Priest Kenan shrieked as he felt the backlash. The stolen vitality that kept him young and strong was being violently ripped from him, flowing back into the spire. He aged a decade in a second, his skin sagging, his face becoming a mask of withered terror.
"No! My life! The God-King's gift!" he screamed, clawing at his own face.
Ravi removed his hand from the glowing spire. He looked at the priest, his eyes calm and cold.
"The debt has come due," Ravi's voice echoed in Kenan's mind. "The scales are being balanced."
The Sun-Spire of Amarna was no longer a tool of sacrifice. It had become a beacon of restoration, a fountain of life, undoing the damage of a generation with every pulse of its brilliant, white light.
The Slum God had made his first move in the kingdom of the sun. And in his palace in Heliopolis, a thousand-year-old emperor suddenly felt a chill, as the first drop of his stolen immortality began to drain away.