Princess Maritaten

The linen on Maritaten’s shoulders still smelled of myrrh when the air above the palace threshold began to shimmer-heat without flame, a wavering shimmer that made the gold cords of the doorway look briefly liquid. One moment she was listening to the distant rhythm of drums from the temple quarter; the next, the sound faltered as if someone had laid a palm over the world’s mouth. Her breath went thin. Her desire was simple and sharp: she wanted to reach the anomaly before it swallowed another piece of the sacred rites she was meant to oversee, before it stole the certainty her father demanded from every ceremony.

She stepped forward anyway, careful of the cool stone under her sandals. The courtyard smelled of crushed herbs and damp earth from the last watering, and the night air carried the faint bite of incense smoke. The shimmer thickened, drawing the light inward. A sound like a struck bell rang once-clear, metallic-and then a man tumbled from the brightness as if thrown by invisible hands. He hit the ground hard enough that dust rose around his boots. For a heartbeat, Maritaten only stared at him, her mind refusing to label what her eyes insisted was real.

He groaned, rolled to one knee, and-when he looked up-his gaze locked on her with a startling steadiness. Not the wary scanning of a thief, not the obedient bow of a foreign envoy. Something else lived in his expression: shock held tight behind discipline, as if he’d been trained to survive surprises. His clothes clung to him from the fall, dark fabric with seams that didn’t match any court tailoring she’d seen. The air around him trembled faintly, like the anomaly clung to his skin.

“Are you hurt?” Maritaten asked, and hated how quickly her voice warmed with concern. She should have ordered guards. She should have summoned the priests. Instead she took a half-step closer, drawn by that impossible shift in the air and by the way his eyes didn’t slide away from hers.

He blinked hard. “I-” His accent scraped at the words, unfamiliar and yet somehow intelligible, like a song played on the wrong instrument. “Where am I?”

“In my father’s palace,” she said, sharply enough to make her own fear behave. She gestured toward the doorway where the shimmer still pulsed. “You fell through that.”

He pushed himself upright, slow, as if expecting the stone to vanish beneath him. When he stood, the scent of sweat and cold metal reached her-something like rain on iron. His hand hovered, uncertain, then lowered. “That wasn’t-” He swallowed. “That wasn’t supposed to be here.”

Maritaten’s pulse jumped at the phrasing. Not supposed to-as if he carried a map in his mind and the world had betrayed its own rules. She forced herself to keep her face composed. “What is your name?”

For a moment he looked past her shoulder, toward the corridor where courtiers would soon spill out if the commotion grew. His attention returned to her with effort. “You can call me…” He hesitated, then said something that sounded like a name and yet didn’t fit any Egyptian rhythm. “Evan.”

Maritaten repeated it once, tasting how the syllables sat on her tongue. “Evan.” She lifted her chin. “Then listen. If you are a spy, I’ll have you dragged before the High Priest. If you are a miracle, I’ll have you questioned until your miracle becomes truth.”

His mouth twitched-half amusement, half pain. “Neither of those sounds like a good time.”

“Good time?” she echoed, incredulous, and the anomaly’s shimmer flared behind him like a captured breath. The courtyard lights flickered, and for one dizzy second the night smelled different-dryer, colder, faintly of smoke that didn’t belong to incense.

Evan took a step toward the place where the shimmer had thickened, then stopped as if something invisible had pressed against his chest. He frowned at his own hand, palm out, fingers splayed. “It’s still-” He swallowed again. “It’s still open. I can feel it.”

Maritaten’s desire tightened into something else: she wanted to close it, to seize control of the sacred rites by grasping this impossible seam in time before someone else noticed. The anomaly had been whispering to her since the beginning of the week, bending the air when she recited the royal lines. She’d dismissed it as nerves-princesses were allowed to be nervous, after all, as long as they were never wrong in public.

Now it had produced a foreign man out of light.

“Do not touch it,” she warned, and stepped between him and the shimmer. The stone under her feet felt suddenly untrustworthy, vibrating faintly. “The rites are tonight. This palace cannot afford-”

“Rites,” Evan said, and the word landed differently in his mouth, as if he’d heard it before in another context. He looked at her again, closer now, and the tension in his gaze made her aware of her own body: the weight of jewelry at her throat, the damp chill at her wrists, the way her skirts brushed her ankles when she shifted her stance. “You’re doing something to… keep time in place?”

...