by Maggie Shayne (Author)
I am Rhiannon.
This is my origin story.
My original name was Rhianikki, firstborn of Pharaoh. My bare feet sank into the sands of Egypt when the pyramids were new. My mother was a divine queen who died giving birth to me and they say the walls of the palace trembled when they took me, wailing, from her cold arms.
I was special and not just by virtue of my inherent divinity.
But rather than honor my gifts, my father feared them. And when I was five years old, he and his new queen sent me far away from their newborn twin sons, to live at the Temple of Isis, where I learned and grew and became the woman I still am, more than three thousand years later.
That temple is where I was raised, by holy women who taught me the secrets of the gods and of the goddesses and all the ways of magic.
There I met Luca, a father figure like my own had never been, who could only visit me by night and who said we were related in a way I would not understand until I was older.
During those years, I rescued stolen children; I answered women's prayers; I helped artists find their calling; I caused a poor, small village to thrive, and I saw the face of my beloved in the glass-like crystal ball of a prophet.
I communed with Isis nightly and became convinced she lived within me, that my soul was divine.
That assumption has never left me.