It was an ancient story of Pharaoh Harmonthep and his vizier Hephnatti. Hephnatti was a most skill administrator of the Empire, originating from the Hanif tribes of the west, but he had one weakness - he fell in love with Harmonthep's only daughter Ashayt, and they were meeting without Pharaoh's consent. When Harmonthep learned of the defiance Ashayt was already pregnant with Hephnatti's child. The Pharaoh called the High Priestess Herit to devise a punishment in a way that would discard neither his daughter nor his vizier. Studying the Book of the Dead, Herit came up with the most terrible solution.

Ashayt was allowed to give birth, but her beautiful son was taken from her and brought to the sacrificial chamber where Hephnatti was held. Ceremony of the Hidden Heart was performed on the vizier, and with it all feelings to Ashayt were expunged, leaving only the loyalty to the Pharaoh. For his immortal life, however, a cruel death of his newborn son was the price, and of the innocent child's essence the sustaining link between the heart put in the iron box and the man's body was weaved as only blood of the vizier's blood could pay it. Harmonthep kept the heart and with his control of Hephnatti he conquered the hill tribes to the west which had long defied his father.

As Ashayt had already been defiled, Harmonthep did not marry her to the Satrap of Qaharaba, a powerful city-state to the southwest, but took her for himself, starting his incestous progeny of which each inherited the part of the scattered and tormented soul of Ashayt's firstborn. One would become Pharaoh Ekhnammon, one would not live to the adult age and one would be the pupil of Hephnatti, by the name Ekhmenes.

In Ekhmenes, the vengeance for Hephnatti's only son would grow and expand. After Harmonthep's death he remained loyal to his brother Ekhnammon, but he killed Herit and spiked her head on his chariot, parading it through the Eye of the Desert. But his resentment grew also against Hephnatti his master, and to replace him he stole his heart from his brother and ordered him to kill himself. Hephnatti left the Eye of the Desert to seek the means of his own death, finding that immortality was a curse more terrible than imagined. None of the ways to commit suicide worked for him, and while his flesh was scratched from his bones, his lich-form remained.

Ekhnammon found out about his younger brother's theft and imprisoned him, torturing him to learn where he had hidden Hephnatti's heart, but he wouldn't tell. Ekhmenes turned blind and leprous in his brother's prison and when his life was nothing but forfeit, Hephnatti rescued him to tell him he had found the way to kill himself at an ancient city of Laramun - his heart had to be destroyed in a Ritual of Devouring. His mortality would return to him only if the essence binding him to the heart was joined again in another body. Ekhemenes' soul had long crumbled and he cared not for his life or mundane glory anymore save for ending the torment. He ordered Hephnatti to kill Ekhnammon and claim his lungs, to defile the grave of his deceased and mummified sister Eutete and bring the chopped vase with her entrails, and to bring to him a maiden from among a Hanif. Hephnatti did his three works. Ekhmenes conducted the dark ritual, joining in himself the remaining parts of the soul of Ashayt's firstborn, culminating in opening the box and eating Hephnatti's heart, unmaking the lich vizier. His wretched body could not sustain the weight of a full soul, however, and would collapse, but not before impregnating the Hanif maiden who then fled from the capital back to her family in the west.

The Day of Wrath would devastate the land, and the new dynasty would emerge in Eye of the Desert once the Senpet remnants would regather in a drastically changed world. The posthumous child of Ekhmenes would be forgotten, but it would be born and receive the name of Ashayt's firstborn, Chephren.