The Maahes who proved that the mantle belongs to the whole continent. Taharqa-Sen took the mantle at the age of thirty, when the Kushite kings ruled Egypt and Napata and Thebes were part of a single realm. He lived to see that realm destroyed.
When the armies of Assyria swept into Egypt, they took Memphis in 671 BCE and sacked Thebes in 663 BCE. The Pride's old homeland, where it had stood for 2,300 years, was burned. Taharqa-Sen was in the city on the night it fell. He spent it moving through the burning streets, gathering the watchers who survived, and loading them onto boats.
His decision the next morning is the most important in the chapter. Every council of the Pride, from the Fracture to the Imperial Temptation, had argued that the Maahes should stay in the homeland. Taharqa-Sen did not stay. He took every survivor south along the Southern Road to Napata, and founded the Second Seat at Jebel Barkal in the shadow of the sacred mountain. He left the Pride's oldest records sealed in the Theban hills, where they remain.
"The mantle," he told the gathered watchers, "was never a possession of the Nile's north bank. It belongs to everyone who will carry it." He then spent the next fifty years proving it, by opening the Pride's Tests to every watcher in the south, regardless of kingdom or tongue.
What he left behind: the Second Seat, the Pride's survival, and the principle that the mantle belongs to the continent.
