Lower Egypt, the seventh Cleopatra of the ruling house of Ptolemy, set down the
circumstances pertaining to the discovery of my tomb. This I do at the behest of my soul's
companion in this life, Leda Hubbard, who asks it so that a play may be made of it and the
story told to all the world thereby. For this we are to be endowed with, if not a queen's
ransom, at least the price of a modest palace.
To begin with, I was awakened from the dead.
This was done by means of a magic uncommonly known even in these years of miraculous
happenings. Quite simply, a portion of my body still connected to my ba, or body spirit, was
used to connect my ba to another body, that of Leda Hubbard, a woman of low birth but high
intellect. This magic is called a blending. Leda and I first blended as we dreamed. I learned
that she, like myself, grieved for her father and had suffered betrayal. I knew of her love of
books and words, her search for knowledge. But I also knew, even as she slept, that we were
in immediate mortal danger. We awakened to our peril aboard a ship owned by our enemy.
With the aid of Leda's allies and our combined strengths, we prevailed and vanquished our
enemy.
When we were safely ashore in what had once been my beloved Alexandria, I began to
understand that, although I once more breathed and tasted, saw and smelled, was able to touch
and to feel touch, the life I had ended with the cobra would in no way continue. No longer
would I be concerned with the fate of the Egypt I knew, for it was either gone or buried
beneath many generations of sand and captivity.
Octavian, who continued his dominion of both my lands and his as Augustus Caesar, this
viper who murdered Caesar's own son, my Caesarian, is dead. That Marc Antony is lost I
knew before my own death. His son, my Alexander Helios, was murdered like his half brother
by Octavian. My other children, Selene and Ptolemy Philadelphus, were banished from Egypt
and died in foreign lands without the benefit of an Egyptian burial. Thus I had no hope that
they might enter into this afterlife as I have with the aid of that odd little magician, Chimera.
Alas, Leda's body is not capable of childbearing so there will be no more children for me,
even if there are in this new age men worthy of fathering them. All that I loved, all that I lived
for, is gone. Thus is my life ended, and so it begins again, without husband or children, title or
lands or wealth of any consequence, great beauty or great power.
Still, Leda's loyalties are as strong as my own, and I find some comfort that the people whose
fates concern her do seem to be worthwhile.
However, she has not been a queen and was not reared believing she was born to greatness.
Her goals are as modest as her means, and this I must change.
We made a beginning by changing history as Leda's contemporaries have known it. We had
no tension within us at this time, for our thoughts and longings were in unison. Both of us
wished to revisit my tomb and learn what remained.
I imagined I would be able to go straight to it. During my lifetime, I had visited it
clandestinely for years, secreting the most precious of the scrolls I saved from the burning of
the great library. Later, when Antony gifted me with scrolls looted from the library in