Shabaka

Shabaka was the lover and advisor of Pharaoh Merneith, but ultimately betrayed her as he was consumed by a lust for power. He chose not to kill her, instead imprisoning her in an undying form for reasons unknown. Afterwards, he oversaw his son's ascension to the throne, and orchestrated over centuries a dynasty of Kushite kings over Egypt. He unnaturally extended his life through vile rituals and blasphemous reinterpretations of the sacred Book of the Dead, and this same prowess imprisoned Merneith in an undying state for centuries.

However, he was eventually defeated himself by the sorcerer-king Sargon of Assyria, one of the Penultimate Sorcerers of the Mythic Age, and was banished to the land of the dead. There, the god Anubis separated his soul into its composite parts and scattered them at the behest of his father Osiris. For millenia, Shabaka searched in vain, as he was cursed to never be able to bring himself together.

It was not until the intervention of the malevolent Prince Sin that he was able to regain his old form. The corrupted Atlantean sorcerer sought to harry Merneith, who had joined forces with his sister and enemy Queen Atlanta, with the return of her greatest enemy. However, Sin was weak in power, having lost much of his sanity and mind in the eternity he spent with the people of Mu. He sought to use Shabaka as proxy.

Instead, Shabaka betrayed Sin, and bound the Atlantean using a similar ritual he used to bind Merneith. Using this phylactery as a focus for his own power, he clashed with the Marvels when he ressurected the dead of Egypt as an army. He was eventually defeated, and Queen Atlanta destroyed the phylactery, denying Shabaka the Atlantean's power but also freeing Prince Sin to plot elsewhere.

Over the years that followed, Shabaka was a dire foe, who refused to every truly give up despite numerous defeats and deaths. Constantly harried in his sojourns to Duat by the forces of Osiris, and even the statue-like ghost of Anubis, he only grew stronger over time. He made occasional alliances with the enemies of the Marvels, including the vile Cabal that opposed the Penultimate Sorcerer J. Q. Boehm. However, his compulsive tendency to betray always overtook him, and he rarely worked with anyone for long.

Mysteriously absent from the world during the turn of the millenium, Shabaka was last known to be in Duat after being destroyed by his former ally, Beatrix Faust. His current activities or whereabouts are unknown, but it is unlikely to remain that way for long.