Bayek of Siwa

Bayek was the last of the Medjay, protector of a fading idea of Egypt, when masked men of the Order of the Ancients dragged him and his son Khemu into the vault beneath Siwa — and made him the instrument of his own child's death. The revenge that followed, mask by mask across Ptolemaic Egypt, could have ended as revenge usually does. Instead, with his wife Aya, Bayek turned the grief into architecture: the Hidden Ones, a brotherhood built on working from the dark so others could live in the light, on killing only with reason, on the poor and the powerless mattering more than the throne. Every hooded figure in this Codex descends from his vow.