The Passion of Cleopatra (Ramses the Damned 2)

"How did your fracti become children in your heart and on your lips? From where did this love for them come?"

"You seek to know my heart?"

"I seek to know your motives. Your heart in its entirety I would do best not to explore. I imagine the endeavor would be akin to chasing a moonbeam off a cliff."

"You seek to delay your murder of me with chatter. My motives have always been clear to you. I seek the pure elixir."

"So that your children may never die?" she asked.

"How many immortals have you made? You have the pure elixir. You can't understand my anguish. Two centuries, Bektaten. That was all I could give them. Two centuries of life. But a heartbeat amidst immortality. And yet, those were the only choices I was left with after our kingdom fell. The incessant, crushing grief of another generation lost to withering and dust after two hundred years. The absolute isolation as I walked the earth alone. Or the absolute darkness beneath it. And so I chose the first until only the third was bearable. And those children, the ones you slaughtered, had little time left. So I placed myself in a tomb, knowing that once they had crumbled, no one would know of my location, and my sleep would be as permanent as death."

"And yet, they woke you."

"Yes. They heard tell of this Ramses the Damned and in him they saw the hope of the pure elixir."

"You could have easily dismissed them and returned to sleep," she said.

"I've explained my motives. What else do you want of me?"

"You've lied about them. I watched you among your children, Saqnos. No great love drove you. You treated them as incompetents and slaves. You sought the pure elixir for your own benefit, not theirs."

"You ask me questions to which you believe you have the answers. Why? Why delay for another moment what you have always longed to do? Turn me to dust! Punish me once and for all for this thing you call a betrayal. So that we may put our history to sleep forever."

"What I have always longed to do? Nonsense. You were the one entirely possessed by a singular goal. You squandered the millennia you were given on bitterness and appetite, the pursuit of that which you were not meant to have. You don't command me here or anywhere."

"No. I give you explanations which you then twist to justify whatever you wish to do."

"How dare you?" she said. "How dare you treat me as one governed only by emotion? You staged a rebellion without a plan. Without the barest knowledge of what you stole. In your jealousy and your rage, you allowed reason to abandon you. You didn't once stop to question what an army needs to remain intact. You didn't once stop to ask what would render a soldier loyal to you if they had no need of food, arms, or shelter. You assumed they would hail you for all time as the deliverer of a great gift, and this alone would render you a god in their eyes, and not just a calculating thief.

"And yet, the Saqnos I knew, the Saqnos who served me, would have asked these questions. He would have encouraged me to ask such questions myself had I told him of such a plan. But the man who burst into my chambers, with the arms of my own soldiers raised against me, he was not that man. And so I will not allow you to stand before me and claim that grief for your fracti has made you what you are now. You were changed thousands of years before then, before a drop of elixir ever touched your lips, when just the idea of it drove you insane."

"I don't stand before you. I sit and I do so in fear of your daggers and your poisons."

"And I stand before you, in fear that you cannot tell the truth of yourself because you do not know the truth of yourself."

"Then give it to me, my queen. Give me my truth, even as you refuse to reveal your own."

"You have always known my truth."

"That is a lie!" he cried out. "Eight thousand years later it is still the greatest discovery of humankind and still you keep it secret. Still you guard it as if it were just an ancient scroll."

"And what would you do with it if I gave it to you?" she asked. "What would you have done then if your plan had not ended in ruin?"

"I would have made gods on earth."

"Yes," she whispered. "Yes, you would have. And to do this you would have extinguished anyone who was not godlike in your eyes. You would have used it to fortify our palace against all others. You would have fractured our kingdom into a million pieces small enough to lie at our feet like blossoms. You would have taken the glorious miracle I had discovered and used it to shatter Shaktanu, and to make a kingdom only out of what was within your reach. And you knew I would permit none of these things so long as I ruled. And that is why you raised arms against me the moment you heard of the elixir's existence."

"And yet you've allowed me to live all of this time," he said.

"I have nourished hope. I have wished that a man given all the time in the world might someday come to know his true self and wish to improve upon it. But with each passing century, you have proved these hopes were in vain."

"Grieving for my soul," he sneered. "It holds you in thrall the way some are held by strong drink."

"It has, Saqnos. But I'm relieved of this obsession now. I set you free."

Ramses worked to keep silent. Next to him, Julie stiffened, tensing her hand around the dagger's handle.

"Free?" Saqnos asked, giving voice, it seemed, to Ramses' own thoughts.