Amenmose-Khay took the mantle two years after the last Maahes of the Fracture died, as the southern armies began the war of liberation. He was a Theban boatman's son, trained by the cells that Neferu-Kemau had built, and the first Maahes in over a century to see the Pride's work done in daylight.
He rode with the armies, not as a soldier but as a shadow beside them, watching for the broods that followed every campaign. When the war carried the empire south into Nubia, he faced the hardest decision of his life: the Pride's old pact with the watchers of Kerma, made by Neferu-Kemau, was now with a kingdom the empire was about to conquer.
His answer became the Compact of the River. Amenmose-Khay went to the Nubian watchers himself, unarmed, and promised them that whatever happened to their kingdom, the Pride's watchers would not become the empire's. The Nubian posts kept their own leaders, their own oaths and their own Maahes candidates. It was the first and most important act of independence in the age, and it held for a thousand years.
His southern roads reopened the groves, and the first full convoy in over a century reached Thebes in the thirtieth year of his tenure. He died in 1502 BCE, killed in a northern campaign against a brood that had followed an army across the sea.
What he left behind: the Compact of the River, the reopened roads, and the first daylight Pride.
