Summary
Moonlit reeds whisper a lullaby to the river that once swallowed a dynasty; on its banks, a nameless foundling—wrapped in lotus silk—grows into Lya Mara’s phosphorescent Princess, her cheekbones carved by the ghost of Nefertiti. She is raised by Lotte Stein’s gaunt governess, a woman who speaks only in imperatives and smells of embalming salt. Eugen Rex’s archaeologist, half-sand, half-silk, unearths a cartouche bearing the girl’s likeness and drags her from reed-hut obscurity into the carnival of Weimar Cairo—balloons, gramophones, and gin-soaked cabarets where Siegwart Gruder’s oil-slick prince gambles away his last fertile acre. The Nile, now a ribbon of mercury, reflects her two destinies: one of gilded chambers where Karl Platen’s eunuch-vizier teaches her to breathe through her eyelids, another of torch-lit tunnels where Paul Graetz’s one-eyed tomb-robber promises freedom in exchange for a scarab that beats like a second heart. Betrothal, exile, a chase across sand-seas that behave like oceans, and a final moonlit confrontation on a felucca whose sail is stitched from the linen shroud of a long-dead queen—her pulse syncs with the river’s, and she must choose whether to dam the future or drown the past.
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