The Scales Beneath the Sand

The Forgotten Gods of the Drowned Kingdom: Only Half Came Back

/ Author Simon Phillips / Leave a comment

Beneath the black pillars, a young guard counted the men entering the buried doorway, unaware that some would vanish beyond the reach of their companions.

Timeline of Events

The Storm
A violent storm stripped sand from the western dunes, exposing black pillars and a buried doorway beyond the last cultivated fields.

The Report
A field labourer discovered the ancient stonework. His account reached the city, bringing the newly exposed site to the attention of priests and officials.

The Expedition
Stone-cutters and armed guards travelled west under priestly authority. The workers began clearing the entrance while a junior guard remained outside to record their numbers.

The Withdrawal
Only half the men returned from the darkness. Tools lay abandoned, footprints were disturbed and blood marked the sand. The expedition withdrew, leaving the missing workers’ fate unresolved.

Only Half Came Back

The sand slipped over Ipu’s sandals as he carried the tally board along the line of stone-cutters gathered beneath the black pillars. Morning had gone in hauling water and keeping men clear of falling masonry. At the city gate, such a duty would have earned him less grit between his teeth. Still, he had waited half a year for an assignment beyond the walls, and he intended to bring his captain an accurate count.

“Count their feet if their faces trouble you,” said Henu, the older guard beside him, watching two cutters lever a slab aside. “They keep moving. You keep counting. Everyone remains employed.”

“I know how to count,” Ipu replied, scratching another mark into the wax. He glanced towards the labourers dragging stone from the doorway. “I am waiting for them to stand still long enough to prove it.”

The priest’s seal-bearer approached, lifting the hem of his robe from the sand. He inspected the opening the cutters had cleared, where shadow filled the space beyond the pillars. The wind swept along the ridge above them while the hollow itself remained strangely still. Touching the seal at his neck, he ordered the cutters inside and sent selected guards behind them.

Kebi, a broad-handed cutter who had shared dried figs with Ipu at midday, paused to tighten the leather around his mallet. He had spent their meal complaining about the price of flour.

“Put me down as one who came willingly,” Kebi said, a crooked smile showing beneath his dusty beard. “My wife will enjoy hearing it. She says I have to be pushed towards honest work.”

“Then come out willingly as well,” Ipu answered, making the final mark. Kebi laughed and followed the others into the shadows. Ipu watched the last guard disappear, drew his fingertip down the board and checked the total. Twelve had entered.

For a while the sounds of their work carried through the entrance. Stone struck stone, someone called for more light, and a quarrel rose over a tool passed the wrong way. Ipu took comfort in those familiar complaints. As afternoon thinned towards evening, the blows grew farther apart, until he found himself waiting for each one. Henu cleaned sand from his sandal fastening, though his eyes kept returning to the doorway.

The first man stumbled out as the sky reddened above the ridge. He dropped to his knees beside a pillar, clutching his bleeding arm. Others followed in a rush, one supporting a companion whose heels dragged through the sand. Ipu helped lower the man, then searched the dark entrance for the rest. Only six figures had emerged.

“Where is Kebi?” Ipu asked the wounded cutter, crouching beside him. “He was working with you.”

The cutter turned towards the doorway, lips moving before his voice came. “Behind us,” he said, tightening his hand over the torn sleeve. “I heard him call.”

Ipu started forwards, yet Henu reached the entrance first and barred his way with an outstretched arm. For the first time that day, the older guard’s voice had lost its humour.

“Stay here. Count who is standing.”

Ipu looked past him. A stone mallet lay in the sand near the pillar, its leather handle dark from a worker’s grip. Farther back, a bronze chisel caught the last daylight. He thought he heard movement within, faint beneath the wind sliding across the ridge.

“There are men inside,” Ipu said, closing his hand around his spear. “We have guards. We can bring them out.”

The seal-bearer stepped into his path, dust caught in the creases of his face. “The order is to withdraw. Help the wounded to the road.”

“And the others?” Ipu demanded, holding up the board. “What answer shall I carry back?”

The official studied the marks and looked away. “Write what returned.”

Henu helped the injured cutter stand, and Ipu went beside them as the diminished party climbed the ridge. He kept the board close to his chest, shielding the wax from his sleeve. Twelve marks stood in one column, six in the other. The missing men had names, trades and families waiting for them, yet the only certainty he could carry home was the space between those numbers. Behind him, the tools remained scattered below the black pillars, and the last light left the doorway while he was still watching it.

Abandoned mallets and chisels lie in blood-marked sand beneath the black pillars, left behind when Ipu and the surviving expedition withdrew, leaving six men’s fates unknown.

Inspiration Behind the Story

The disappearance of the stone-cutters offers a way to approach the buried doorway through the ordinary people caught in its consequences. Ipu begins with a simple duty: count the workers entering the ancient tomb and account for their return. As the day passes, that responsibility becomes something far more personal. Every missing man has a life beyond the expedition, with family, work and people expecting him home.

The abandoned tools, wounded survivors and disturbed sand connect this Chronicle to the evidence later discovered in Jackal at the Threshold. Yet the greater mystery remains beyond the black pillars. Through Ipu’s experience, the story explores the conflict between obedience and conscience, and how a few marks on a tally board can become the first surviving record of something the city will struggle to understand.

Related Book Series

Related Books of The Forgotten Gods of the Drowned Kingdom

Six men disappeared beyond the black pillars. Their companions returned with abandoned tools, blood in the sand and questions no surviving witness could answer.

In Book One: Jackal at the Threshold, tomb robber Neris follows rumours of the newly uncovered necropolis into the western dunes. What begins as a desperate search for treasure leads her towards ancient judgement, buried gods and a truth that will change her life.

The story continues in Book Two: The Scales Beneath the Sand, as the disturbance spreads beyond the desert into the city’s burial routes, sacred shrines and living streets. With the old powers stirring, Neris finds herself drawn deeper into a conflict whose consequences are only beginning to emerge.

Next Chronicle

News of the failed expedition reaches the river quarter, carrying fear into households whose men travelled west in search of honest wages. At the city work court, a stone-cutter’s wife searches the diminished line of returning workers for her husband. She wants answers from the guards and officials, while the men who survived struggle to explain what happened beyond the black pillars. As rumours spread through the streets, the absence of a body, a familiar voice and even a working tool begins to carry a terrible weight of its own.

Next: No Bodies, No Tools

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.