In our world, they can’t. But in the worlds I create, there’s always a way that leads them to each other, a nebulous boundary only they can cross.

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When “Hades” is executed, “Persephone”, the daughter of the tyrant, is not. Before he is killed, he vows to find her again.

To this day she still exists, locked in …

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As one of their newly minted Certified Fictionary Story Coaches, (I spent nine months on the certification - which was challenging but so worth it!) I’ll be hosting a weekly write-in for the members there each Saturday.

I’m excited to get back to this book and hope to get it finished during what we in Fictionary are calling November Novelist - what used to be (the now defunct) NaNoWriMo.

For now, I’m planning on sharing this WIP with you as I go, and would be happy to get your feedback and comments. I would especially love to hear from veteran romance readers with your thoughts!

What I really want to know is - is it possible to combine my love of fantasy and ancient Egypt and wrangle a romance genre book out of it?!

Roll on November, we’re going to find out!

P.S. I made the cover myself on Canva, I know it’s terrible, but I did my best to get across the themes of time travel, romance and a hot pharaoh-to-be.

P.S.S. My partner (who is an actual well-known artist) took one look at it and said - oh my god, look how beautiful they both are - meaning they are too beautiful - to which I said, of course they are! It’s a romance novel! He laughed and left, although I did hear him mutter as he walked away, did she have to make the prince guy so hot? (Yes. I did. Sorry not sorry!)

*meaning two independent love stories happening side by side due to ahem time-travel circumstances

And now for the blurb!

Nerys Whitaker has it all - a cushy column at History Lives!, a gorgeous flat in a Grade II listed building in a leafy part of London, and a relationship that’s lasted more than a year.

But in just one day, she loses her job to AI, finds an eviction notice stuck to her apartment door, and gets dumped by her partner who’s fallen in love with someone else.

Hungover and depressed, she ends up in the British Museum archives with her best friend who shows her a mirror that suddenly appeared in a locked box dated to the time of Thutmose III.

Despite being thousands of years old, it looks brand new. Nerys says it’s a fake until she looks into it and finds herself transported into the apartment of Pharaoh Hatshepsut’s daughter.

Now all she wants to do is get back home to McDonald’s, hot showers, and electricity, but when she learns the goddess Hathor sent her to ancient Egypt to stop the Egyptian empire from going down the wrong track, changing history, and erasing her existence, she finds herself embarking on the adventure of her life.

Content warnings: language

Spice Level: 3/5 At least one intimate scene with the reader present, euphemistic language for act and body parts. Non-pornographic descriptions. No smutty language.

© E A Carter 2025 All Rights Reserved

First Draft Version.

If you know anything about me as a writer you’ll know that gods or cats will figure in my books. There is usually also an element of time travel or at least a decent look at the question of immortality. In Hathor’s Mirror, you get gods and a time-travelling cat!

However! I have decided to break away from my usual style of storytelling with my first attempt at writing a classic romance novel. There is a kind of story formula that all romance novels follow and so I decided that I wanted to edge out of my comfort zone of fantasy first and romance second to romance first and fantasy second.

Might sound easy, but for me, it’s a little bit of a challenge. I like to get caught up in the mystery of things - like the Osirion - and then weave a story around that. But this time I’m going to avoid that and push myself to focus on the romance beats instead.

Can I do it? I don’t know yet but if you’re a paid subscriber you can read along with my chapters as I create them and tell me. Don’t worry I’ll ask leading questions at the end of each chapter to get you going.

If you are an expert romance novel reader, I would especially love your feedback!

In the meantime anything that doesn’t fit in the story, but I want to share will end up here in the Books In Progress section.

And now…let’s talk about one of the weirdest things that exists in the world…

The Osirion is a true ancient mystery. It was rediscovered by Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray while excavating the Temple of Seti I in 1902. In fact, they dumped all the sand and debris they cleared from the temple onto the buried Osirion, so they had to do double the work to start to excavate it when they realised there was something there!

The site was excavated in stages with progress halted during the First World War. The photograph taken below is how The Osirion looked when it was fully excavated in 1925 by the German archaeologist Henry Frankfort.

Before it was rediscovered by Petrie and Murray, the last known reference of its existence was made by Strabo in the first century BCE:

Above this city [Ptolemaïs] lies Abydus, where is the Memnonium [Osirion], a royal building, which is a remarkable structure built of solid stone, and of the same workmanship as that which I ascribed to the Labyrinth, though not multiplex; and also a fountain which lies at a great depth, so that one descends to it down vaulted galleries made of monoliths of surprising size and workmanship.

The subterranean water basin at the Osirion was consequently named “Strabo’s Well” by modern excavators. Strabo then theorises that the Osirion might have been constructed by Ismandes, or Mandes, the same purported builder as with the Labyrinth at Hawara:

But if, as they say, Memnon is called Ismandes by the Egyptians, the Labyrinth might be a Memnonium, and the work of the same person who constructed those at Abydos and at Thebes; for in those places, it is said, are some Memnonia.

Strabo mentions a place called a Labyrinth and this is where things get super delicious! During the fifth century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus also visited this so-called Labyrinth (located near modern day Faiyum about 100 km south of Cairo).

The Labyrinth is situated beside the Pyramid of Amenemhat III, who was a pharaoh from the 19th century BCE. Typical of modern Egyptologists who refuse to accept that perhaps there was an older civilsation that existed in what later became Egypt and before the end of the Younger Dryas period, they have attributed the construction of this wonder to Amenemhat III simply due to its proximity to his crudely-built pyramid that sits adjacent to it.

It has never been properly excavated and is currently under ground and submerged in groundwater. The floorplan of it has been estimated to be 28,000 sq meters or 300,000 sq ft. For comparison, an American football field is 57,600 sq ft, which means this megalithic structure was the size of 5.2 football fields.

To help you get a sense of just how enormous this structure is, below is a representation of the Labyrinth by the 17th century German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher based on Herodotus’s description and other ancient writings.

Here’s what Herodotus has to say about it:

“The labyrinth is situated a little above the lake of Moiris and nearly opposite to that which is called the City of Crocodiles.

This I have actually seen, a work beyond words. For if anyone put together the buildings of the Greeks and display of their labours, they would seem lesser in both effort and expense to this labyrinth... Even the pyramids are beyond words, and each was equal to many and mighty works of the Greeks. Yet the labyrinth surpasses even the pyramids.

When one had entered the sacred enclosure, one found a temple surrounded by columns, 40 to each side, and this building had a roof made of a single stone, carved with panels and richly adorned with excellent paintings. It contained memorials of the homeland of each of the kings as well as of the temples and sacrifices carried out in it, all skillfully worked in paintings of the greatest beauty.

It has twelve courts covered in, with gates facing one another, six upon the North side and six upon the South, joining on one to another, and the same wall surrounds them all outside; and there are in it two kinds of chambers, the one kind below the ground and the other above upon these, three thousand in number, of each kind fifteen hundred.

[...]The upper set of chambers we ourselves saw, but the chambers underground we only heard about.

For the passages through the chambers, and the goings this way and that way through the courts, which were admirably adorned, afforded endless matter for marvel, as we went through from a court to the chambers to colonnades, and from the colonnades to other rooms, and then from the chambers again to other courts.

[...]Over the whole of these is a roof made of stone like the walls; and the walls are covered with figures carved upon them, each court being surrounded with pillars of white stone fitted together most perfectly; and at the end of the labyrinth, by the corner of it, there is a pyramid of fourty fathoms, upon which large figures are carved, and to this there is a way made under ground. Such is this labyrinth.” (Herodotus, Histories, Book II, 148).

If you want to learn more about the Labyrinth this is a good place to start:

Ok let’s get back to The Osirion and how old it could be and what its connection to the megalithic Labyrinth could be.

Below are accurate renderings of how The Osirion would have looked when it was being used (3-D renderings by Konstantin Evchenko). Far from being a tomb, or temple, The Osirion seems to serve some kind of purpose as a massive water pump that through various dating techniques has now placed this structure far back into the distant time.

One conservative estimates suggests it could have been constructed BEFORE the ancient Egyptians emerged, when the Nile was 15 meters lower than it is today. Why? Because the structure you are looking at above and below is in fact, an ISLAND that stands on at least 15 meters (and more likely 21 meters) of granite blocks that have been built into an enormous underground “tower” surrounded by a canal that is (to our modern eyes) dug into the ground, capped by megalithic stone pillars and roofed over by blocks weighing over 100 tons.

Mind blowing right?

Also, even more amazing is the recent discovery that the water that is in The Osirion is coming from a primal fossil aquifer not connected to any known water source or aquifer. What we know is really don’t know how deep this “tower” goes into the ground or how the builders knew about this source of water that has a different mineral component to any of the known water sources in the ground.

Right, now at some point in very ancient history, the structure suffered immense damage of a cataclysmic nature. Based on the design, the lack of engravings (although Seti I did have some added, but they are crude compared to the workmanship of the structure and only in a few places). It has been suggested that The Osirion could have been built by a previous lost civilisation contemporary with the builders of the Sphinx, the so-called Giza temple, Gobeki Tepli, and other extremely ancient neolithic structures including (in my opinion) the Labyrinth.

These structures have generally been placed much further back in time to around nine to eleven thousand years ago and the damage they suffered is attributed to the end of the Younger Dryas period when a major world-wide cataclysm occured that effectively caused the sudden extinction of mammoths and devastating flooding of up to 121 meters (400 feet) and ultimately transformed the temperate wetlands of Northern Africa into the Sahara Desert.

So what does this mean? And why am I adding this long, detailed author’s note to what is supposed to be a light-hearted time-travel romance? Because I really like to give my readers insight into what is behind my stories, and of the magic I see in the world I can bring back to life through fiction.

I do believe that there was a civilisation that existed prior to recorded history that began with Sumer in Mesopotamia around six thousand years ago. I also believe that the peoples of ancient world were very aware of these sites and venerated them as being built by the gods. Hence the Osirion is considered the grave of the god Osiris, which would have been constructed by the gods during the time the ancient Egyptians called zeptepi or the time when the gods co-ruled with mythical pharaohs for thousands of years.

So here we are, back to Hathor’s Mirror, where we are going to have some fun overlapping fiction, ancient history, and the latent power of the gods. Now all that’s left is for you to enjoy the story.

If you want to learn more about the Osirion, this is a great in-depth review. Definitely worth the watch.

He shares fascinating explanations about the multiverse, wormholes, and fine-tu…

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