The last Maahes of the Old Kingdom. Merire-Nakht took the mantle in a country that was starving. The river had run low for years. The harvests had failed, the granaries were empty, and the kings who had built the pyramids could no longer feed the people who had built them.
He held Memphis for twelve years. The Pride's convoys had stopped, its resin was gone and its temple allies were scattered, but the city still had a Maahes, and he did what a Maahes does: he stayed. He walked the streets at night, sat at the granary doors and held the gates of the temples against the hungry.
The Children of Apep had been waiting. Famine riots are the best of all days for a brood: the crowds, the dark and the dead are everywhere, and no one counts them. In 2200, as the capital burned, they came for him. He was killed in the riots by the brood he had spent a decade trying to find.
But before he died, Merire-Nakht did one thing that saved the Pride. He gathered five young watchers in a sealed room at the foot of the necropolis, spoke the whole Roll aloud to them, one name at a time, and sent them south before the city fell. Two years later, the mantle chose a ferryman at Thebes. The five carried the song to him.
What he left behind: the five who carried the Roll, and the end of the first age.
