The Maahes who went back north. Irike-Maa took the mantle in the year before Alexander's armies swept into Egypt, and he watched a new world arrive: a foreign king, a new city on the coast, and a hunger for knowledge that the old kingdoms had never shown.
He saw that the Pride had been absent from Egypt for 300 years, ever since Taharqa-Sen led it south, and he decided it was time to return. He kept Meroë as his home, but he opened a second house in Alexandria, hidden among the quarters of the copyists and scribes, and for the first time since the sack of Thebes, the Maahes held a seat in the north.
He was the first Maahes to hold seats in two different countries at once, and he learned the price of it: a Pride that lives among scholars is a Pride that will be asked to explain itself. Around 300 BCE, a Greek scholar of the great library offered to copy the Roll in full, to preserve it for the ages. Irike-Maa declined. The Roll, he said, was never written because a written thing can be burned, stolen or changed, and a spoken thing lives only as long as someone is willing to say it. The scholar left disappointed, and the Pride kept its oldest rule.
What he left behind: the Alexandria house, and a clear answer to the question of why the Roll is not written.
