Three years ago, archaeologist Nadia Khouri published a paper arguing that Egypt's Dendera Temple concealed a secret older than the pyramids. It cost her everything. Now a dying billionaire wants to fund her vindication and Nadia is desperate enough to ignore what that desperation might cost her. Victor Holt has cheated death for decades through methods that would horrify the public and imprison lesser men. But biology is catching up, and somewhere beneath the sands of Upper Egypt lies the artifact that alchemists, conquerors, and madmen have sought for millennia: the Emerald Tablet, the source text of all Western occult tradition, said to hold the secret of transformation itself. Holt needs Nadia's mind. A Vatican scholar with secrets of his own needs her trust. A shadowy order that has guarded the Tablet since the age of the Ptolemies needs nothing from her at all, they've seen her kind before.

What Nadia discovers in the darkness beneath Dendera will force an impossible choice. how far will she go to stop a man who has consumed others to survive and what will be left of her when it's over?.