Abydos Excavation House — December 12th

He didn’t say “I told you so.” Julian never does. But he had every right to. Irritating as that can be coming from him.

Eight months since Saqqara. Eight months since I watched a four-thousand-year-old man crumble to dust while Emile bled out at the excavation house. And still, every time I close my eyes, I hear the sound of club meeting bone.

Tonight, Julian finally said it out loud. What we’re both afraid of. That Merneith wasn’t just a regent. That she was king. In every way that mattered. And that someone—not one person, but a system, a century of scribes and priests and grateful sons—decided she would be more convenient as a footnote.

“You’re reading feminism into archaeology,” he said.

“I’m reading evidence,” I said back.

But that’s not quite true, is it? I am reading something into the evidence. I’m reading the same thing I saw in Djoser’s tomb. The same thing I saw in Emile’s eyes while he died. The same thing I see every morning in the mirror.

Rage.

Not the hot kind. The cold kind. The kind that sits in your bones and calcifies. The kind that makes you get up at 4 AM to examine pottery shards because sleep is just a waiting room for nightmares.

Julian found something. A notation on the back of the ivory label, hidden for three thousand years. “The queen ruled for twenty years. The king ruled for forty. The truth ruled for neither.”

He showed it to me like it was a confession. Maybe it is. Not Merneith’s confession. Ours. History’s. Every time we look at a woman’s grave goods and say “consort” when the evidence screams “king,” we are complicit in the erasure.

I wrote it in my notebook. The one with Emile’s loupe still attached to the binding. I wrote: Suspect: History itself. Motive: Patriarchy. Conviction: Impossible. Truth: Unavoidable.

Julian asked what Emile said in my dream.

“He asked if I was eating. He asked if I was sleeping. He asked if I was still fighting.”

I told him I was trying.

Trying isn’t enough. Emile knew that. Julian knows that. Merneith knew it too, I think. She was beaten—I saw the fractures in her skull, long healed, over and over again—and she kept ruling. She kept ruling until she died. And then they buried her as a king. And then they rewrote her.

The knife is not always metal.

Sometimes it’s a son who says “I love you, Mother” and then lets the priests scratch out your name.

Tomorrow we enter the tomb. The real tomb. The one the Order lied about for a century. Julian has his pistol. I have my notebook. We both have our ghosts.

I don’t know what we’ll find.

But I know what we’re looking for.

A woman who refused to kneel. And the men who couldn’t forgive her for it.

— M.K.

P.S. — Julian held my hand tonight. Not romantically. Just… humanly. It was the first time I’ve felt warm since Saqqara. I don’t know what to do with that.

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