fantasy book series

The Scales Beneath the Sand: Anubis, Tomb Routes, and Egyptian Mythic Fantasy

/ Author Simon Phillips / Leave a comment

The City Beneath the City

A river city carries its dead differently.

Above ground, life presses through the lanes in smoke, heat, fish-blood, old grain, cheap oil, medicine, shouted bargains, and the dull fatigue of people trying to make one more day hold together. Below those same streets, older systems remain. Tomb passages run beneath foundations. Faded shrines keep their painted eyes turned towards forgotten doors. Burial routes pass through stone chambers where the living once prepared the dead for their final journey.

That is where The Forgotten Gods of the Drowned Kingdom begins to deepen.

For readers drawn to Egyptian mythic fantasy, dark fantasy, and stories shaped by ancient gods rather than borrowed decoration, the river quarter matters as much as any temple or necropolis. It is where Neris lives. It is where she steals from tombs because medicine costs money, rent still comes due, and grief does little to feed a household. It is where the distance between sacred history and ordinary survival becomes painfully small.

Neris has already crossed a threshold that should have remained closed. She has returned carrying the uneasy sense that the dead can find her, that their unfinished burdens can gather at the edge of her thoughts, and that something in the dark has changed the shape of her life. She calls herself a bridge because the word gives her burden a use. A bridge joins two places. A bridge carries weight. A bridge does not need to ask who built it or why.

Yet every bridge can become a crossing point for something far more dangerous.

In The Scales Beneath the Sand, the second book in The Forgotten Gods of the Drowned Kingdom, the old routes beneath the river city begin to fail. Souls gather where they should pass cleanly. Sacred passages hold pressure where there should be release. The dead seem to hesitate before a crossing that has served them for generations.

That kind of wrongness belongs to more than haunting.

It belongs to interference.

When the Routes of the Dead Are Wounded

Tombs in Egyptian mythic fantasy should never feel like empty scenery waiting for an adventurer to enter them. They are architecture built around memory, judgement, ritual, identity, grief, and passage. A burial chamber holds the shape of the people who believed in it. A threshold carries the weight of those who crossed it before. A damaged shrine can become more than abandoned stone when its sacred purpose still remains close beneath the surface.

The buried spaces beneath Neris’s city work in that way.

They are not merely ruins. They are old systems of passage. Ferry chambers, weighing rooms, record houses, forgotten shrine courts, and narrow cut-stone ways still preserve the language of burial order. They remember what the dead are meant to do even when the living have stopped listening.

That makes the disturbance at the heart of The Scales Beneath the Sand more unsettling than an ordinary haunting. The dead are not simply restless. Their routes have been handled. Stone has been cut. Ash and blood have been worked into sacred spaces. Something has opened wounds inside the passages where the dead should move towards judgement.

The result is a form of underworld fantasy grounded in pressure rather than spectacle.

The danger begins in small signs. A spill of natron near a jackal-marked recess. Fresh blood in a place that should have been empty. A torn piece of blackened leather. Marks carved into old stone with enough force to make the sacred architecture itself feel violated. Neris follows those signs because she knows the human cost of walking away from something wrong. The dead follow her thoughts. Their fear becomes difficult to leave behind.

The city above continues unaware. People drink beneath reed awnings. Children cry in upper rooms. Fishmongers scrape scales into buckets as night settles over the quay. Yet underneath those ordinary lives, sacred order has begun to fracture.

That is where the hidden god-war first becomes visible.

Not through armies at a city gate. Not through gods tearing open the sky. Through the dead failing to rest.

Anubis at the Broken Threshold

Anubis has always belonged at the edge of fear and judgement.

He is associated with tombs, funerary practice, embalming, the care of the dead, and the passage towards rightful judgement. His presence carries a particular weight because he is not simply a god of death. He stands at the point where death must be ordered, witnessed, and given its proper place.

That makes him a powerful centre for an Anubis fantasy story.

Neris’s connection to him offers no easy blessing. Her jackal talisman becomes a funerary blade only when the dead press too close or when a threshold has been disturbed. The weapon is intimate, cold, and made for narrow places. It belongs in stone corridors, flood-cut passages, old shrines, and the close terror of being unable to step far enough away from another person’s blade.

That distinction matters.

The divine weapon does not turn Neris into a polished fighter. She remains a survivor first. Her instincts come from tomb shafts, slum alleys, unstable stone, hidden routes, and the practical knowledge that escape can matter more than victory. She fights low, close, and desperately. She uses clutter, broken walls, ash, tight spaces, bad footing, and whatever the room gives her.

The funerary blade gives her a way to answer sacred wrongness. It does not erase fear from her body.

This is where the series separates itself from clean chosen-one adventure. Being marked by a god does not lift Neris above poverty, grief, injury, or uncertainty. It makes her visible to forces that already understand more about her than she understands about herself.

The burden comes first.

The meaning comes later.

The Hands Carrying the Gods’ War

The gods of The Forgotten Gods of the Drowned Kingdom do not begin by fighting openly.

Their conflict moves through human hands.

Chosen people carry relics shaped by divine domains. Their weapons reflect the gods who claim them. Their strengths are tied to endurance, discipline, training, fear, nerve, judgement, and the cost of surviving long enough to learn. That keeps the hidden war close to the body. Feet slip. Hands shake. Wounds open. Pride creates mistakes. A blade can be sacred and still fail in an untrained grip.

In The Scales Beneath the Sand, Neris learns that she is no longer alone inside this pressure.

Khamet enters the story through record houses, burial tallies, ferry counts, ledgers, ink-stained fingers, and maps of disturbed passage. His relationship to the dead comes through pattern and reckoning. Where Neris feels the wrongness in her skin and breath, Khamet sees broken measure. He watches the numbers around burial, crossings, oils, and names begin to separate from one another, then follows the distortion towards something buried beneath the city.

He is useful almost immediately.

He is also irritating almost immediately.

Their early connection is shaped by distrust, exhaustion, sharp replies, wounded pride, and practical necessity. Neither gives the other comfort. Neither enters the other’s life gently. That matters because the war has no interest in providing safe companions at the right moment. It brings people together when pressure leaves them no cleaner choice.

Meretneith arrives from a different part of that same world.

She is a veteran chosen of Neith, shaped by martial discipline, old war knowledge, and the unsentimental truth that survival demands more than instinct. Her presence changes the scale of the story because she reveals what long experience looks like. Every movement has purpose. Every correction lands where it needs to land. Her weapon is an extension of training rather than a spectacle.

For Neris, that becomes its own kind of humiliation.

Surviving is not the same as knowing how to fight.

A hard lesson begins with the feet.

The Scales Beneath the Sand

The title The Scales Beneath the Sand reaches towards the deeper tension of the series. Scales suggest judgement. Sand suggests burial, erosion, time, and the slow concealment of what people once believed was secure. Together they point towards a world where sacred order has been buried so long that even those living above it may no longer know what holds their city together.

Neris enters that buried order carrying the wrong tools for a war she never chose.

She has a funerary blade, a sick mother, a body already marked by grief, and a life rooted in streets where every coin must be counted before it can be spent. The hidden conflict enters through those ordinary pressures. It reaches for her because she has been claimed, though the claim means danger long before it means understanding.

The story remains focused on tombs, thresholds, divine weapons, and the uneasy movement of the dead, yet its centre stays human. The fear is not only that a sacred route may break. The fear is that the break will climb. It will move upward through the stone, into the lanes, into the rooms where people sleep, and eventually towards the few fragile lives Neris still believes she can protect.

That is the real weight of hidden god-war.

It begins in the places no one thinks to watch.

When the War Learns the Road Home

The strongest ancient gods fantasy does not need to announce its scale at once.

It can begin with a single wound in old stone.

It can begin with dead souls gathering at a closed passage.

It can begin with a woman carrying medicine home through a river city, sensing that something beneath the streets has started to call her name.

The first signs are rarely grand enough for anyone above ground to notice. A lamp gutters in a shrine that has stood neglected for years. A burial tally fails to match the names written beside it. An offering bowl lies overturned where no living hand should have passed. In the dark beneath the quarter, old routes begin to tighten around the dead, holding them in places meant only for crossing.

By the time fear has a name, the damage has already travelled.

The Scales Beneath the Sand stands at that moment of widening pressure. Neris has moved beyond the lonely belief that she is only a bridge between the living and the dead. The hidden conflict has found her. Other claimed people have entered her path. A predator has tested her strength and seen where her life is weakest.

She still carries the same burdens she carried before the dead began to answer her. Her mother still waits in a narrow room. Medicine still costs more than she can spare. The river quarter remains full of damp walls, thin lamps, crowded lanes, and people trying to protect what little has survived another difficult day. The divine has entered her life, yet it has offered no escape from any of that.

Instead, it has placed those fragile things in danger.

The city remains standing. The temples have not fallen. The gods have not yet stepped openly into the streets. Their names still belong to shrine walls, old stories, ritual words, and the fears people carry quietly through the night.

Even so, the balance has shifted.

Something beneath the city has learned that sacred order can be wounded. Something has begun to test the routes of the dead, the people marked by old gods, and the living ties that make those people vulnerable. Neris has survived the first movement of that pressure, though survival has only brought her closer to the truth waiting beneath it.

The war begins before anyone understands its full shape.

It begins in tomb dust, river stink, jackal shadows, broken thresholds, and the silence left behind when the dead fail to rest.

It begins beneath the sand, where old scales still wait for something to be weighed.

Egyptian Mythic Fantasy, Anubis, and the Burden of the Dead

/ Author Simon Phillips / Leave a comment

Where the River Meets the Dead

The dead were never far from the living in The Forgotten Gods of the Drowned Kingdom. They pressed close through river stink, damp stone, old prayers, sealed doors, and the narrow spaces where poverty forced the living to touch what should have remained undisturbed. In this Egyptian mythic fantasy world, tombs were never simple ruins. They were sacred architecture, built around memory, judgement, passage, and the uneasy belief that the dead still had claims upon the world they had left behind.

That closeness shaped Jackal at the Threshold, the first book in the series, before Anubis ever stepped fully into view. The story began in the river quarter, where Neris lived between hunger and guilt, between the need to keep her mother alive and the knowledge that her work among the dead had already cost too much. The noble terraces rose upriver in white stone, catching the last light of the day, while the slums below sank into shadow, smoke, mudbrick, and the rot lifted from the water by evening heat.

This is the root of the series. Egyptian mythology is not laid over the world as decoration. It is felt through burial practice, thresholds, funerary silence, jackal imagery, and the dreadful possibility that judgement may be waiting in places ordinary people have learned to rob, fear, or ignore. The gods do not begin as distant names from old stories. They begin as pressure in the stone, as warnings cut into doorways, as whispered talk of Anubis stirring when a boundary has been broken too often.

Anubis at the Edge of Judgement

Anubis belongs to thresholds. He stands at the edge between the living and the dead, between burial and desecration, between memory and judgement. In this dark mythological fantasy series, that role matters more than spectacle. He is not a generic shadow god, nor a simple patron offering power to a chosen hero. His presence is severe, patient, and bound to what has been done.

That is why Jackal at the Threshold begins with theft rather than battle. Neris is a tomb robber from the river slums, and her skill lies in stone, rope, darkness, narrow ledges, old mechanisms, and the ability to keep moving when fear should have stopped her. She steals from the dead because rent, food, medicine, and hunger have left little room for clean choices. Yet the story refuses to make survival into absolution. Poverty explains much. It does not erase everything.

Anubis enters through that tension. The western dunes uncover black stone after a storm. Workers enter and fail to return. Rumours move through the slums faster than certainty. A buried place, older than the known order of the city, waits beneath the sand. Neris goes because the world has trained her to see danger and value together. She knows the signs. She reads blood, abandoned tools, carvings, warnings, and silence. Still, need pulls harder.

When she crosses into the Drowned Kingdom, the tomb itself becomes an instrument of judgement. Jackals walk the walls. Scales wait in carved stillness. Hearts are shown in stone as if every secret has already been measured. The deeper Neris goes, the less the place feels like a tomb built for the dead alone. It becomes a boundary that remembers who has entered it, what they carried, and what they tried to leave unnamed.

Neris and the Cost of Survival

Neris is central because she is human before she is anything else. She is not a polished champion waiting for a divine weapon. She is a daughter, a thief, a survivor, and a woman shaped by a death she has never truly faced. Her brother’s collapse in a tomb shaft lies beneath every choice she makes. She saw the crack. She dismissed it. She sent him ahead. That single remembered moment gives the first book its deepest weight.

The power of this Egyptian mythology fantasy series comes from that kind of pressure. Divine judgement does not arrive in an empty life. It arrives where guilt has already made a home.

Neris’s mother keeps the story grounded in the mortal world. Her illness, the cost of healers, the bare room by the river, the careful division of four silvers between medicine, rent, and food all matter. These details prevent the mythic world from floating away into abstract gods and relics. Before Neris stands before Anubis, she stands before hunger. Before she touches the Threshold, she has already crossed moral boundaries in order to survive.

That makes her judgement more painful. Anubis does not condemn her simply because she is poor. He does not ignore the cruelty of a world where the dead are buried with gold while the living starve beside the river. Yet he draws her back to the moment where choice remained. The crack in the stone. The hurry. The brother who trusted her. The weight she carried and refused to name.

This is where the story changes. Neris returns the relic she came to steal. She confesses what she has hidden even from herself. Anubis marks her, and the burden he gives is no easy blessing. She will see when souls stray. She will hear unrest where others hear only night wind and water. What she disturbed will no longer pass unnoticed.

The Door Opened by Jackal at the Threshold

Jackal at the Threshold is the first entry in The Forgotten Gods of the Drowned Kingdom, and it works as a doorway rather than an explanation of the entire war. It brings the reader into a world of tombs, river-prayers, restless spirits, funerary dread, and divine attention without emptying the larger series of mystery.

The book belongs to Egyptian mythic fantasy because its supernatural force rises from recognisable sacred ground. The Drowned Kingdom is not simply an ancient ruin with treasure inside. It is a necropolis of judgement, silence, and unfinished passage. Its walls are carved with jackals, scales, hearts, stars, drowned kings, and warnings left by those who understood too late that the dead are not abandoned things.

The experience of entering the book is intimate rather than grand. The reader follows Neris through the alleys, the heat, the old smoke of her home, the desert road, and finally into cold black stone. Every movement carries the body with it: sand under sandals, torchlight bending across carved walls, breath misting in impossible cold, fingers testing ledges, muscles straining against fear. This is not a clean chosen-one adventure. It is a story about what happens when someone desperate crosses into death’s territory and is allowed to return.

By the end, Neris has stopped being merely a thief of the dead, yet she has not become safe, powerful, or fully informed. She believes she has become a bridge between the living and the dead. She has no understanding yet of the full hidden god-war moving beneath the surface of the world. That ignorance is essential. The first book closes with a woman changed by judgement, walking back into the same poor streets, with the same hunger still waiting, and a new awareness of the dead moving around her.

The Gods Beneath the Sand

The wider series will open slowly from that first burden. The Egyptian gods do not begin by shattering the sky. Their war begins through sacred wrongness. Burial routes falter. Souls fail to pass cleanly. Tombs open when they should remain sealed. Relics wake. Human beings are chosen, armed, watched, and used.

This is the hidden engine of The Forgotten Gods of the Drowned Kingdom. The gods avoid open war because such conflict would devastate the mortal world. Instead, they act through chosen humans bound to divine weapons. The weapon carries the force first. The human bearer becomes dangerous only through endurance, discipline, survival, and cost.

That rule keeps the series grounded. Neris does not rise because she has been handed effortless power. Her first Anubis-linked weapon is intimate, funerary, close-range, and judgement-bound. It belongs to tombs and thresholds, not battlefield spectacle. Its danger comes from what it is tied to: burial order, false return, broken passage, and the dead who have failed to rest.

Other gods wait beyond the first threshold. Set moves through disorder, desert violence, destabilisation, and predatory pressure. Thoth brings record, reckoning, hidden knowledge, and an intelligence that can be as dangerous as any blade. Neith carries ancient discipline, strategy, and martial severity. Horus represents visible legitimacy, kingship, and ordered force. Ra remains the remote solar authority whose weight shapes the divine hierarchy even before he steps forward.

Yet the series must always return to Neris. Gods may shift the board, but human lives carry the cost. The river slums, Hamat’s warnings, her mother’s illness, the memory of her brother, and the quiet work of guiding unsettled souls remain as important as any relic duel or divine decree. Without those things, the war would become spectacle. With them, it remains sacred, dangerous, and painfully human.

What Waits Beyond the Threshold

The first book leaves its deepest questions unanswered because the world has only begun to move. Neris has crossed the Threshold. Anubis has marked her. The dead now call to her when their passage fails. Somewhere beyond the city, old stone shifts beneath the sand, and attention stirs in places she cannot yet name.

That is the shape of the series promise. A grave thief has been pulled into the service of judgement, yet the judgement of gods may prove no cleaner than the lives they weigh. Divine weapons will appear as burdens rather than gifts. Chosen humans will discover that being claimed by a god can mean being protected, used, lied to, or sacrificed. The dead will not always pass cleanly, and the living will not always understand who has broken the route.

In this world, tombs are not background scenery. They are pressure points between the living and the dead. The river is not merely water. It is memory, passage, rot, need, and prayer. Anubis is not a symbol printed on the surface of a fantasy setting. He is first felt through the silence before judgement, the dark edge of a doorway, the unseen weight of a heart, and the terrible mercy of being sent back changed.

The war has already begun, though Neris does not yet understand its shape.

She has only heard the dead.

The gods will come later.

How I Plan Epic Conflicts Without Losing the Characters

/ Author Simon Phillips / Leave a comment

If there’s one question I return to again and again while writing The Veil of Kings and Gods, it’s this: how do you make war feel personal? Not just dramatic, not just explosive or large in scale, but real, rooted in the hearts of the people forced to live through it.

High fantasy is often filled with titanic clashes: gods levelling mountains, kings raising armies, ancient orders clashing across the centuries. But if I’m being honest, those scenes only truly work when they grow from something human. When a character you care about walks into the storm and you understand why.

I’ve spent the past year trying to balance these two worlds: the grand and the intimate. The arcane and the emotional. And nowhere has that balance been more important than in planning the major conflicts of this story, political, magical, divine. Today, I want to share how I approach that.

The Characters Always Come First

It sounds simple. Obvious, even. But when you’re building a vast world with kingdoms at the brink and gods whispering from beyond the veil, it’s shockingly easy to forget that someone still has to live through it.

For me, that’s Simion, Patrick, Týrnan. Each of them sees the oncoming storm from a different vantage point and each is wounded by it in ways that are quiet, personal, and rooted in character. Simion is a man caught between divine expectation and the fragile world of expectation. Patrick bears the weight of kingship while hiding parts of himself that would shatter his position. Týrnan fights not for conquest, but to keep his people from losing their soul.

The conflicts around them may escalate. But unless those conflicts are built on the foundation of who they are, their doubts, fears, loyalties, and flaws, the story would ring hollow.

Conflict as Mirror, Not Just Plot Device

One of my guiding principles is that every external conflict must reflect an internal one. If a battle breaks out between kingdoms, it needs to echo the unrest already stirring within the characters.

Take Patrick. His kingdom teeters on the edge of diplomatic collapse, but what drives that tension is not just geopolitics, it’s his own repression. His court senses weakness. His enemies sense distance. And Patrick, for all his strength, has no safe space to be fully himself. The war outside is the war inside.

Likewise with Simion, who is being slowly crushed by the power he once sought. The threats he faces aren’t always from enemies; sometimes they come from within, from his refusal to be the weapon the gods demands, from his fear of harming those he loves, from the ancient force he’s inherited that now forgets its own wisdom. These are personal wars. The divine and the magical are just the landscape they bleed into.

Intimacy in the Midst of Chaos

One of the joys and challenges of writing a large-scale fantasy series is finding the quiet in the chaos. There are scenes in Book 1 where cities are burning or armies are gathering, and yet the most important moment is a hand held too tightly, or a look that lingers a second too long. That’s what I strive for.

When Simion walks into battle, I don’t want the reader to think of fire and ruin. I want them to think of his challenges. Of the weight of the cloak he wears. These are the things that make his power mean something. Without them, he’s just another mage with too much fire in his hands.

And when Patrick makes a decision that could cost him the alliance of a kingdom, it’s not the politics that matter. It’s what he sacrifices to stand firm, the love he denies, the truth he cannot speak, the safety he’ll never truly have. These are the human costs, and they’re what I try never to lose sight of.

Final Thoughts

I love grand fantasy. I always will. But I believe its heart lies not in its spectacle, but in its people. In the ones who stumble through magic and war with bruised hearts and broken promises, doing their best to hold on.

So when I plan my conflicts, magical or mortal, I don’t begin with maps or power levels or ancient histories. I begin with the characters. With their wounds and their wants. And I try, as best I can, not to lose them in the storm.

Because the war may shape the world.
But it’s the people who shape the war.