A little over one week prior to Vaile meeting Ratams and Zahra, the Pharaoh herself was enjoying herself in one of the few moments of alone time she had. Although, truth be told, she wasn’t exactly alone in the fullest sense of the word. There was another sapient being in the room with her, and she was deriving no small amount of pleasure from the suffering of the being’s mind and soul.

During the totality of the Desert Elf Invasion that had been going on for who knows how long, Zahra had been unable to go directly to the front and fight off the Sand Elves herself. Those damnable bastards had some kind of ward that they kept putting up wherever they went, slowly isolating her and her influence from more and more of her lands. This had made her very unhappy, and this time alone to herself and her victim was one of the few ways she could vent her frustrations.

She enjoyed the suffering of the creature that was before her. A long, long time ago in a place far, far away from her current domain, this mongrel had done something to herself and her nation that had left a lasting and festering wound on her mind and soul, to say nothing of what the creature had done to her body. She hated every minute that she was under that foul bastard’s control, and she had felt the darkness that he had used to manipulate her slowly tainting her bit by bit. Now, the puppet-master had become the puppet, and the slave had become the master. The foul mage that had deceived her so was now trapped inside the body of an Emperor Cobra, Neon Genesis Fantasia’s monster equivalent of the SciFi Channel movie version of an upsized King Cobra.

Oh, how she had enjoyed stuffing that mad mage’s mind and soul into his current prison! The agony that wafted off of his form was music to her ears. She would never, ever let him go, not now and not ever. He would serve her as a mobile seat until his current body gave out and she had to stuff his mind and soul in another one. She had been doing this for centuries up till this point, so she had the process down to pat. Now that the current Emperor Cobra’s life was at its natural end, she began to initiate the ritual of transference to force the already heavily addled mind and soul of her former master into a new body. This would further increase the burden placed upon the sorcerer’s existence, and Zahra estimated that she either had another two times to do this whole song and dance or that she had to find something else to stick the bastard into.

It was then when the realization hit her. Of course! It was so simple that she couldn’t figure out why she had not thought of it earlier!

She switched the wording of her ritual ever so slightly, and the older, previous shell that the dark wizard had been stuffed into fell to the ground, its life having left it at last. The crystal that acted as the link between the two ritual circles began to glow an even brighter shade of red than it had all the times that she had used the original ritual, and by the end of her experiment the other Emperor Cobra had also collapsed to the floor.

However, her experiment had succeeded. The crystal now contained the mad mage’s soul, and she knew just where to put it.

…

“No more. I’m sorry. No more. I’m sorry. No more. I’m sorry. No more. I’m sorry. No more. I’m sorry. No more. I’m sorry…”

The will trapped within its crystal prison would have taken a fetal position while crying and rocking back and forth if it could. It had endured suffering beyond the scope of what a human mind could deal with and was, by this point, effectively broken. It sobbed its apologies over and over, but the person it had wronged in its original life had no mercy for it. All that was left when the Pharaoh looked at it was contempt, hatred, and rage. At the very least, in public it had been treated like a disobedient pet owned by a rather harsh master, but in private it was a whole different story. Now it was held within a red crystal, and its odds of survival were diminishing by the second.

“Please, just end it! I’m sorry! No more! Make the pain go away, I beg you!”

The Femme Fatale Pharaoh seemed to have heard the mournful cries of it, but when she looked down towards it the risen dead ruler merely whispered “No.” and moved on.

…

She had never intended to open this pandora’s box, but if her estimates were correct, then she had the perfect opportunity to deal with two birds using just one stone. Locked away, deep beneath her palace, was a beast powerful enough to even give herself pause. During its heyday, the monster called Eclipse Apophis had effectively forced Zahra to split her domain in two. One half was hers, and the other was owned and terrorized by the massive purple and black cobra that was now imprisoned behind this last door.

More than a century had passed since she had cemented her status as a God in the eyes of the people that she ruled over by forcing the Eclipse Apophis to yield, and now the beast was starved and weak. She initially intended to kill it, but now she had a way to make the mad mage suffer eternally all while she could make the nightmare that was her old foe stay beneath her forever after.

“Wake up, you dumbass overgrown legless reptilian bastard!” she yelled, rousing the withered monster from its starvation-induced slumber. She did not wait around for the beast to do much else and began her new ritual.

…

“Should we be concerned, Ramses?”

“No. She went in there for a reason and she will leave when she is ready.”

“But that is the room that holds the-.”

“Yes, but she was the one to best it in the first place. She likely entered to put the creature out of its misery, or perhaps to force it to serve her.”

“OK, but-.”

“Hush! She is emerging!”

The two guards stood at attention as the massive doors opened again and an Emperor Cobra whose scales were a mixture of black and purple slithered out from the prison, the Pharaoh reclining upon its head. The serpent’s body had numerous talismans fused into its flesh while gold bands gripped the frame of the creature tightly and hieroglyphs burned into its scaled form dotted the monstrous serpent’s being. Beyond all of it, there looked to be a place where the flesh on the snake’s head had been peeled away and there seemed to be evidence that something had been placed inside its skull in lieu of its brain.

Zahra smiled with non-malicious joy for the first time in quite a while as she rode her newest ‘pet’ down the halls to reach her throne room. Things were looking up, and now she had more time to spend trying to direct her forces to drive back the invaders. She had done what she wanted to and had neutered two snakes with one move.