The Heart‑Node beneath Tara thrummed like a sub‑ocean tide, low and certain. Charlie sat cross‑legged on the cavern floor, eyes half‑lidded, letting that basso note curl up his spine and settle behind his eyes. Two days had passed since the battle on the hill; in that short breath of peace the Mutton party had mended gear, buried losses, and argued maps until dusk. Yet every time Charlie touched earth he could still feel the awakened lattice answering—a pulse inside the planet that now kept time with his own.
Angus Mutton's brogue cut through the hush. "Pack only what matters. We leave on the turn of the moon." Singed beard, soot‑dark cloak, unbent shoulders—he looked as if Tara's heartbeat were his own second wind.
Brother Kelan offered Charlie the weighty gold disc he had carried since Skellig. "The Nexus Medallion belongs to the one who lights the nodes. It will harmonize to your signature once you claim it."
Cool metal kissed Charlie's palm; runes around the rim glimmered—Ogham first, then Demotic, Maya, Sanskrit—each flare a gentle vow: guide, not govern. He swallowed and closed his fingers. Responsibility settled, heavy but right.
Sarah watched from the ramp entrance, hugging the quartz arrowhead Aoife had gifted her. Eleven years old yesterday; eleven going on ancient today. She did not ask to come—she simply stood close to Leyla, as rooted as any Highland pine.
Richard's war‑time favors produced a creaking RAF Dakota parked on a forgotten bog strip south of Dublin. The aircraft's skin rattled like a box of tin spoons, but the twin engines finally caught, coughing black peat‑smoke before smoothing into a gruff purr. Aoife nic Ruadán—antler pins gleaming—claimed the copilot seat with the grin of someone who has always dreamed of leaving the island on wings rather than ferries.
Flight plan: hop the Channel under civilian radar, trace Cold‑War corridors across the Med, refuel in Crete, then knife through Sinai airspace before Cairo woke to dawn. Angus pinned the course to an out‑of‑use landing field thirty kilometers west of the Giza plateau—one last scrap of Empire asphalt baking in modern sun.
Cargo: Maeve's courier case wrapped in sun seals (papyrus rites for coaxing hidden doors), three cracked but lethal Sun‑Shard grenades, five Fianna longbows strung with quartz‑flecked sinew, and the hopes of a planet. Above it all, Charlie's Nexus Medallion thrummed a mantra of its own: Tara‑Giza‑Tara‑Giza.
While Europe's lights drifted beneath, Kelan slipped a copper wafer out the tail hatch. It blinked star‑bright before vanishing east. "Message for Delphi and Cappadocia," he said. "Allies will ready soft runways if we fly back wounded."
Charlie leaned against the cold fuselage and practiced Maeve's square breathing: inhale four, hold four, exhale six. Each exhale softened the medallion's tug, turning the distant desert heartbeat into invitation rather than demand.
Aboard the obsidian dreadnought Kezrat‑Vos, Commander Tzeker watched holos of Tara's defeat fade and redraw into a new map—this one tracking a single human aircraft skipping east like a stone across dark seas.
The sensor officer bowed. "Telemetry threads converge on Egypt, Old‑Kingdom latitude."
Tzeker's crest bristled. "Dispatch Scarab‑interceptors and two archive‑diggers. And accelerate the smear campaign."
A hooded aide stepped forward. "Doctor Belgrave's psychiatric brief is ready, Commander. Diagnosis: treatment‑resistant schizophrenia with emerging delusions of grandeur. Several London outlets will print within the week."
"Good," Tzeker hissed. "Fear of madness is the oldest leash." He turned to a separate console and conjured the schematic of a basalt plug, deep inside the Great Pyramid's stone. Behind that plug pulsed a violet node—psion‑well insurance laid five thousand years ago. "Let the child wake Giza," he mused. "We will drink what he spills."
The Dakota kissed cracked tarmac an hour before dawn. A lone jeep idled nearby, lights dark. At the wheel sat Sharifa ibn Mahmoud—Leyla's cousin, archaeologist by day, nocturnal courier for the Sun‑King lineage. She greeted with a tight hug and immediate urgency.
"No officials past the ridge," she promised. "Tour buses follow asphalt east. Our path is older."
Jeep tires hissed over sand. In the west black horizon dissolved; in the east three colossal triangles etched themselves against indigo. Even before full light the Great Pyramid glimmered, as though quartz below its skin had begun to remember.
A derelict survey shack marked their stop. Beneath a rusted grate yawned a Roman‑era water shaft once piped to Nile gardens. Now it would serve as back door. Sharifa crouched and whispered the first papyrus verse—cool mist exploded outward, frosting every traveler's clothes in rime. Thermal cameras inside Giza would see only an eddy of night air.
Roman brick gave way to Old‑Kingdom limestone, then to bedrock honed smooth. The deeper they crept the stronger Charlie felt the tug—static in teeth, flicker behind eyelids. The Nexus disk under his shirt buzzed faintly.
At a blank wall Sharifa declaimed the second verse. Hieroglyphs glowed, shuffled aside like gold scarabs, revealing a fissure scarcely shoulder‑wide. One squeeze, one breath, and they spilled into the Queen's Chamber—coffin‑quiet, dust fifty centuries thick.
But littered across that dust: slivers of black alloy, too new, too cruelly sharp. Maeve knelt, grimaced. "Reptilian conduit shards."
Leyla unrolled the third papyrus. "We clear vertical shafts, vent star‑current, then seat the Heart‑Key. If we mis‑sequence, their psion‑well leeches power."
Angus jabbed his staff toward twin apertures slanting upward. "North for me. South for Richard. Aoife, belay. When we breach the capstone plugs, drop your Sun‑Shards and let the sky rush in."
Ropes whispered, stone showered grit. Charlie, Kelan, Sharifa, and Leyla remained to draw a circle around the chamber's center: eight‑pointed star, twin serpents split, sunrise glyph at core. Dust glimmered; the hum rose—urgent, insistent.
Above, a boom like thunder caged in stone. Angus's Shard. Seconds later, Richard's. Cold night air spiraled down both shafts, carrying a slice of constellations. The hum leapt from urgent to ecstatic. Limestone seams flared lines of light converging on an unadorned granite coffer.
Charlie stepped forward. Lid soft‑melted under his touch, folding open like papyrus in warm rain. Inside hovered a palm‑sized tetrahedron of clear quartz pulsing dawn gold. The Heart‑Key.
"Center of the star," Kelan breathed.
Charlie set the Key on the exact crossing. Leyla spoke the final name of the sun: "Neb‑Ra, awaken."
Light speared upward through both shafts, outward through buried corridors, downward into earth. The chamber shook—not fear, but exaltation.
Stone at the southern tunnel burst inward, disgorging a squad of armored reptiles. Violet barrels pre‑charged. Behind them strode Tzeker, armor still scarred from Tara but amulet reforged.
"Predictable," he rasped, smile like wet knives. "Where the door opens, the child obliges." He gestured; embedded psion conduits flared violet, latching onto the pyramid's newborn current.
Quartz arrowheads from Aoife's bow howled; two conduits shattered. Maeve summoned a prism wall, dust transmuted into glass slabs. Richard swung Angus's spare staff, intercepting the first plasma streak. Angus—charred cloak flaring—dropped through the ceiling and flung a Sun‑Shard straight at the commander's chest. Liquid opal splashed; Tzeker roared, scales sizzling.
"The node, lad!" Angus barked. "Seal the surge!"
Charlie closed his eyes. Inside, two heartbeats now: Tara's bass drum, Giza's brighter snare. He pictured them syncing, then pictured black lattice threads snapping like rotten net. Power arced off his skin, raced along limestone seams, hammered every conduit still clinging to violet life.
Topside, the Great Pyramid bloomed in a halo as bright as second sunrise. Cairo's predawn dimmed in comparison. Reptilian electronics shrieked, overloaded. Tzeker staggered, amulet cracking anew. He snarled something in his native tongue, slapped a recall stud; distortion grenades detonated, covering escape through crumbling corridors.
Silence dropped, thick and hot. The Heart‑Key dimmed, task complete.
Sharifa ushered them out a maintenance ramp moments before tourist patrols began their dawn rounds. From a sandy knoll they watched sunlight crown the limestone giants. For one impossible minute the Great Pyramid glowed as legend claimed it once had—white fire, edged in rose, singing to every angle of the sky.
Charlie clutched the Nexus Medallion. Two runes blazed solid gold. The lattice inside him felt wider, steadier, like a river discovering a forgotten tributary.
"Next drum waits in the Valley of the Moon," Maeve said—her name for Teotihuacan. "We'll need new papers, a quiet cargo vessel, allies among the Eagle‑Knight families."
Aoife flexed shoulders eager for mischief. "And I know smugglers who'd barter an ocean passage for one Fianna arrow."
Angus planted his staff. "Let Commander Lizard lick his wounds. Each node we wake cuts one more line on his leash."
Leyla looked east where the day burned pure and relentless. "Then we move quickly and we vanish quicker. Myth travels best in rumor."
Charlie let the desert heat soak through his boots, through skin, through bone. Two heartbeats down, three to go. Far across the world he felt Teotihuacan stir, a slow thunder in obsidian corridors.
"Let's give the next pyramid something to remember," he said, voice steady.
Behind him, the Great Pyramid answered with a low, golden sigh—as if the desert itself were nodding them onward.