The first Maahes to go south. For centuries, the Pride had stopped at the first cataract. It was the edge of the kingdom and, as far as anyone knew, the edge of the world. Iuf-Seneb took the mantle in his late thirties, and he did not agree.
He made the journey at the head of a small company, up the river past the border fortress and on into the country beyond. He found something no Maahes had expected: watchers. The people of the south, the Nubians, had their own old order, their own songs and their own rules about the dark. They did not know about the Pride and they did not need to. They had been doing the same work for as long.
It was the first meeting of two traditions, and the beginning of the oldest alliance in the Roll. Iuf-Seneb did not try to join them to the Pride. He listened, traded oaths and promised to return. He made the trip three times. On the third, in the narrow channels of the cataract, a brood that had followed him south caught the company in the dark. He was killed in the fight, and the Nubian watchers carried his body back to Elephantine.
What he left behind: the southern road, and the first friendship between two orders that would one day become one.
