— 🌙 —

[moontwin]

BASICS

Name Cleopatra Selene II Gender Female Age depends on canon point Hair Color Brown

Canon The Shards of Heaven Species Human Height 5'2" Eye Color Brown

▌ THE CANON

The Shards of Heaven is a historical fantasy trilogy by Michael Livingston, set during the rise of the Roman Empire and teeming with magic and mythical lore. Central to the series are the Shards, magical stones with unearthly, destructive powers said to be the broken pieces of the Throne of God: the Trident of Poseidon (Water), the Ark of the Covenant (Earth), the Aegis of Zeus (Life), the Palladium of Troy (Air) and the Lance of Olyndicus (Fire).

▌ THE GIRL

Selene is the only daughter of Cleopatra, former pharaoh and queen of Egypt, and former Roman triumvir and general Mark Antony, and she was raised and highly educated in Alexandria, the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt, in a manner appropriate for a princess. When she was only 10 years old, both her parents committed suicide after they were defeated in the Battle of Actium, while her older half-brother Caesarion was believed to have been killed during the siege of Alexandria. Selene and her remaining brothers were captured by Octavian before Cleopatra could take them with her to death, though Selene did their mother one last favor by smuggling in the asp that would take her life.

She and her twin Alexander Helios were brought to Rome and paraded in thick gold chains and collars made from Egyptian gold; their younger brother Ptolemy Philadelphus had died en route, though Helios also died in prison not long after. Selene was then raised in Octavian's household, and while in Rome she found one of the Shards, the Palladium of Troy, and later stole it from the Temple of the Vestal Virgins with the help of Tiberius, Octavian's stepson.

She was betrothed to Juba, Octavian's adopted brother, likewise a conquered prince of the Berbers, who she'd agreed to wed in exchange for the life of her father's legionnaire, Lucius Vorenus. They were married just weeks after she turned 15, then she'd accompanied him to Cantabria, to the front lines of Octavian's campaign in Hispania.

Comments

— 𝙢𝙤𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙣 𝙖𝙪.

[moontwin]

➝ the Ptolemies are an old money family in Alexandria, Egypt and are strong advocates of history and cultural preservation, and knowledge as a whole
➝ their nationality is Egyptian but they're of Greek descent, with Selene and her brothers half-Italian
➝ Selene is the only daughter of Cleopatra Ptolemy, Director of the Manuscripts Museum (rare books section) of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina
➝ her mother at one point had been named by Forbes as the richest woman in the world, and still is among the world's richest to date; it is also widely known that she did not marry either of her Italian lovers, Julius Caesar (Prime Minister, assassinated) and Marcus Antonius (Army General, Selene's father)
➝ got her bachelor's degree in Anthropology at Alexandria University
➝ currently works as an assistant in the Director's Office of the Manuscripts Museum
➝ has interned and worked all sorts of summer jobs at the Bibliotheca, including being a program director for a LEGO League and assisting Professor Didymus Chalcenterus in the Bibliotheca's hieroglyphics project
➝ aspires to be an archaeologist, with a particular interest in artifacts, historical sites and old books
➝ fluent in Greek, Egyptian Arabic and English, but can also speak, read and write in Italian and Latin
➝ knows a great deal about the Hellenistic period* owing to her family history, and she's also interested in Egyptian and Greek mythology
➝ likes to play chess with her father whenever he visits, even if she always loses
➝ likes ancient literature, historical films, classical music, opera, ballet, etc. because her mother insists on being "cultured" (though mummy flicks are her guilty pleasure, regardless of how bad they are)


*with some vague handwaving about her parents' and her generation for AU reasons, so it was some caesar and some cleopatra and some other romans who were in all that drama, etc.

NOTES ON THE SHARDS, ETC.

[moontwin]

THE THRONE OF GOD

[moontwin]

"Aristotle reckoned that all events have causes. All things that move do so because something else moved them. In other words, everything has a beginning. So, too, with creation itself. Something outside of it—outside of time, outside of the world—must have caused it. Something must have set the first movement in motion. A prime mover. God." (Shards, ch 18)

"Well, I think that's the reason evil exists in the world," Didymus said. "God is dead." (Shards, ch 18)

"I think Didymus is right: there's only one God. Didymus thinks He's dead. Jacob thinks He's just fallen silent. Either way, He has nothing to do with creation anymore." (Shards, ch 20)

"Imagine trying to describe the Pharos lighthouse. On the ground it has a length and width, but of course it has a height, too. To describe it you'd need at least those three things. But that's not enough... You need to state the time at which you're describing it... Didymus brought all this up when he suggested that we try to imagine one God, the creator of it all. God must, if He exists, live outside time. Above it, if you will, seeing everything that's below just as easily as we can see a rock on the floor." (Shards, ch 20)

"Angels... a term from the Jews. They are beings that are like gods to men, but are nevertheless creations of God, like us. They're even supposed to appear like men, though of great beauty and strength. Like perfect beings... They accompanied God and acted like his agents in the realms below Him... Now imagine if God lives at the highest realm of creation, and from there He can see everything. As Didymus explained it, for Him, past, present and future would all be the same. So from His perspective nothing below Him would have free will. The only way for anyone to have free will, in other words, would be for them to be like God. Yet without free will God's creation wouldn't be truly alive. So He decided to give part of Himself to some of His creatures. This part, we think, is our soul. It is what then exists beyond our deaths, journeying up through the realms to that highest place where God dwells: the gift of true life, imparted through the gift of death, for only in knowing true loss can a being truly know love. At least that's how Jacob explained it. The point is that God gave us the opportunity to become one with His eternity, to have the free will to live and love as we chose." (Shards, ch 20)

"—but there was some kind of dispute among God's angels about God's desire to give us free will. Some of the angels may have refused because they did not want to see man become greater than they were. Some may have objected because they didn't want to lose God. But God's will couldn't be denied. The only way to make us truly free was to unmake Himself. So God sat upon His silver throne, and in a surge of power He destroyed Himself, unleashing what Didymus called the breath of God, which instilled true life in those creatures ready to receive it. The rest of God's great powers—the powers He'd used to create us all—were infused into His throne, which turned to broken stones of impenetrable darkness. And where He had sat upon it, all that remained was a book, the real book behind the legends of the Scrolls of Thoth. God, Jacob says, created of Himself a Book of Life and Death, containing the fullness of His knowledge. It is said tot be the most powerful object in existence, and it remains in the Heaven where God resided, protected by the angels who forever mourn God's sacrifice." (Shards, ch 20)

"Eventually, war broke out among them all. They were divided over what they believed God's plans were for creation. There were some, it seems, who desired to destroy man. In order to defeat these angels who had fallen away from God's will, another group of angels used some of those power-filled fragments of God's throne to create a gate down through the dimensions. In a terrible cataclysm, Jacob said that an angel named Michael, leading the loyal angels, forced the defiant angels into the void. Gehenna, Jacob called it. Hades is another term, I think. Some call it Hell. After the war was over, after the Fallen angels were banished, the loyal angels, who called themselves the Vestals, determined that they'd try to unite all the pieces of God's seat, to bring the powers of God together in order to find the God they'd lost... Whatever they tried failed, though: the throne shattered across creation, and these pieces of God's strength—the Shards of Heaven—have fallen here, where they remain sources of enormous power." (Shards, ch 20)

THE SHARD OF EARTH: THE ARK OF THE COVENANT

[moontwin]

"The first one arrived more than twenty-five centuries ago. That Shard has a special power to control earth and stone. It was used to build many great structures of the ancient world. Didymus thinks maybe this First Shard was taken to Sais during the Hyksos invasions of Egypt." (Shards, ch 20)

"Thirteen centuries ago, Pharaoh Amenhotep's eldest son was named Thutmose. His name means 'Son of Thoth' in the native tongue. He was the crown prince of Egypt, and he led the armies of the kingdom against the people of Kush, the kingdom up the Nile. He defeated them by marrying a Kushite princess named Tharbis. Perhaps through her influence, or through some other, Thutmose revolted against the religion of many gods held sacred in Egypt, and against his father. Somewhere, somehow, the acquired the Second Shard, which has power over water. He built a staff to hold it, to avoid touching it directly. He became, it is said, a Jew, and his name is known to that people as Moses. He returned to Egypt and took the First Shard from Sais, and he built a kind of box to hold it, which is what the Jews call the Ark of the Covenent. Thutmose took the two Shards and used them to cross the Red Sea and journey toward Judea, escaping Egypt and his father. The Jews who followed him established a kingdom there." (Shards, ch 20)

"... the Ark is no longer with the Jews in Jerusalem. It hasn't been seen for many hundreds of years. Jacob admitted, as Didymus had already discovered, that he's descended from those who removed the Ark from Jerusalem. But he insisted that he didn't know the exact whereabouts of it now." (Shards, ch 20)

"... one of Moses' descendants in Judea was a ruler named Solomon, and that some nine centuries ago he was visited by one of Thutmose's descendants in Sheba, a queen who sought after the fate of the Second Shard. She discovered that Solomon had built a great Temple to house the Ark, and that a cult had been built up around the two Shards. Not satisfied of their security, but reluctant to part with them, the queen of Sheba left behind in Jerusalem a family sworn to protect the Shards whatever the cost. Maintained in secret, this family would pass the knowledge of the truth of the Shards from one generation to another and never cease in its sacred duties to protect them. The queen's visit, and her decision to establish this company, could not have been better timed. Before even two generations had passed, Pharaoh Shoshenq invaded Judah, followed by more attacks against Jerusalem and Solomon's Temple. The family protected the Shards through it all... but during the reign of King Hezekiah, almost seven hundred years ago, we failed. The object Octavian knows as the Trident of Poseidon was called by our people Nehushtan back then; the brazen serpent rod of Moses. People had begun to look to it for healing, as the stories said it had healed their ancestors." (Shards, ch 22)

"Hezekiah was a true believer in the stories of the Ark: that it not only housed the tablets of the Law given to Moses by God, but that God Himself came to earth to sit upon the Ark and pass judgment through His priests, a distant memory of the fact that the Shards were wrought from the throne of God. Hezekiah believed in the Dark, and he saw the honor given to Nehushtan as an abomination. On one of the great feast days he strode into the Temple, as was his custom, and after honoring the Ark he took the Trident and tried to destroy it. He did damage it heavily, but mortal hands cannot unmake the Shard itself, the black stone that actually gives it its power. Too late to preserve the Trident itself, we still had to protect the Shard. The guardians split up, with half the family removing the Second Shard from the Temple and fleeing to Jerusalem with it. It traveled first to Babylon, though what happened to it next we do not know... We are the keepers of the Ark, and from that day to this we have not failed. From Jerusalem to Elephantine in the time of Manasseh, from Elephantine to Kush in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, and from Kush to here in the time of Alexander, we have kept the Ark safe." (Shards, ch 22)

"Together with Alexander and the king and queen of Kush, we came to an agreement. Alexander would turn back and not go beyond the borders of Egypt. In return, we would use the Ark to help him realize his dream of creating this city that would bear his name: Alexandria."
"I don't understand," Caesarion said after a moment. "Why would you help him? Surely with the Ark's power you could have defeated him."
"Defeating him was never our goal, Pharaoh. We only want to protect the Shard, and Alexander gave us the chance—we thought—to protect it permanently, to cease moving it." (Shards, ch 22)

THE SHARD OF WATER: THE TRIDENT OF POSEIDON

[moontwin]

"Poseidon's Trident. Or Neptune's, if you prefer. But it's even more complicated than that. It's also Mercury's and. And Moses' staff. And Nehushtan. And perhaps even more than that." (Shards, ch 3)

"I was searching the old Numidian libraries, and I started to learn about the old religion of the Jews, of which I know far too little. They worship only one father-god now, like our Jupiter, but I don't think it was always so. I think they once worshiped a mother goddess, too, like our Juno. Her name was Asherah. I think she was the same as that which is worshipped in Numidia as Astarte. Anyway, it was among the priests of Asherah that I began to put it all together. And they directed me to an old temple of their faith with many relics. And there I found it." (Shards, ch 3)

THE SHARD OF LIFE: THE AEGIS OF ZEUS

[moontwin]

"When Alexander came up the Nile, the king and queen of Kush (King Nastasen and Queen Sakhmakh) met him with an army. And for reasons no one has ever understood, the invincible Alexander turned away. He instead came here, to Alexandria, and founded the city."
"Nastasen and Sakhmakh must have had the Ark. Alexander knew he couldn't win."
"... But there's more to it. The only reason we allowed Nastasen and Sakhmakh to carry the Ark with them to meet Alexander is that we knew he would recognize it for what it was. He had one. The Aegis of Zeus, Jupiter's armor. A relatively weak artifact, but useful in that it kept him alive despite wounds that would've killed other men—though it did cause changes to his personality." (Shards, ch 22)

Farther on, close to the end of the gallery, she stopped beside one of the last columns, one showing Alexander in distant India. Walking around the pillar, the tales of his adventures in that strange, far-off land would out before her sight: the defeat of Porus, the refusal of his army to continue east toward the unknown edge of the world, the terrible battle in which Alexander was struck with a spear arrow in the chest. The wound was so grave, so deep, that his men thought it might kill the man they thought was the son of the father-god: it was said that it gushed red and frothed like water when the iron point was pulled free. Selene remembered how in the stories Alexander had looked down on his surgeon's finger pushing cotton into the hole to staunch the bleeding and smiled at the faces around him. "Behold: it is blood, my men, not the ichor of a god," he'd said.
Somehow, Alexander had recovered. He always did. Despite his many wounds, despite his insistence on being at the front of the line in so many battles, he was invincible. Like a living Achilles, Didymus had once told her and Helios, certainly not unable to be wounded, but just as surely incapable of dying from his wounds. It took poison to kill him in the end. (Shards, ch 13)

Alexander's body rested beneath the glass on luxurious pillows in his royal red cape, and she was surprised to see that the man looked, as the priests had observed hundreds of years before, like he was merely sleeping. At times she'd seen other corpses in this mausoleum—those of her ancestors in the extended hallways, occasionally ritually rewrapped in ceremonial fashion—and always those mummified remains had appeared dried up, shriveled and hollow, with skin like old leather when it appeared from beneath the linens. Not Alexander. His skin looked as she imagined it did on the battlefields of his life: if not soft at least strong and real. He still bore color in his cheeks, lashes on his closed eyes, and his muscles were taut, as if he were ready to rise for battle at a moment's notice. The leather of his sandals and the wrappings winding up to the greaves on his lower legs appeared more aged than the dead man wearing them. And his hands, crossed over his chest, still seemed to grip the sword that lay vertical over his body. Taking it all in, Selene wondered if the priests who oversaw the tombs here opened the coffin to somehow maintain his appearance of preservation, or if his preservation was a sign that he was truly divine, despite the fact of his death. (Shards, ch 13)

Juba felt impatience rise like heat in his chest, thinking what a small sacrifice two-thirds of these strangers would be when weighed against the destruction of Octavian, but he quickly shook such thoughts away. It was Octavian's kind of thinking, the very thing he wanted to destroy. Such impulses had been coming to him more and more since he had donned the armor of Alexander, the Aegis of Zeus. He resisted the urge to pull away the cloak hiding the armor, the urge to reach out with his mind and embrace the warmth of the black stone mounted at the center of his chest. (Shards, ch 27)

He wasn't dead. He should be. Juba knew that. He'd very nearly drowned. He'd been shot through with four iron-pointed shafts—any one of which would have killed a man. But he was alive. Somehow, somehow, he was alive. How? The answer came to him as if from another voice. The breastplate, it said. Alexander's breastplate. (Shards, ch 27)

He reached out to the Shard in his mind, thinking of the silver and bronze ribbing he'd seen embedded on the inside of the armor and that odd symbol in the middle of it all, directly behind the Shard itself: a six-sided shape in a six-pointed star. Imagining himself pushing out through those metal contacts, through that symbol, he gave himself over to the power of the Shard, just as he had so often with the Trident. Like the feel of those twin snakes beneath his palms, the metal of the breastplate around him seemed to move like a thing alive as the Shard drew him ever deeper even as it pushed back and into him.
Power. He felt it coursing into the body that began to awake around him, filling his veins. Power. Life.
And rage. Deep and raw. Rage only barely contained.
The darkness around him lurched hard. Once. Then twice. Then twice more.
In his mind, Juba felt like laughing. His heart was beating again. Beating and calling for blood.
So this was how Alexander had survived so long, through so many battles, through so many wounds that should have ended his life. This was the power of the Aegis. Power that was now his. Power that would help him avenge his father. And himself. Power that would help him kill Octavian. Kill. (Shards, ch 27)

THE SHARD OF AIR: THE PALLADIUM OF TROY

[moontwin]

"The Palladium of Troy. It can control wind. It was carried away from Troy by a Greek named Odysseus, though he could not use it. Where it is now we don't know." (Shards, ch 22)

THE SHARD OF FIRE: THE LANCE OF OLYNDICUS

[moontwin]

THE SCROLLS OF THOTH

[moontwin]