They wasted no time once that baleful warning was delivered. Whatever else one could say about the demon that lurked below Sebek’s temple; it seemed to want Heshtat and his companions alive. The evidence of their eyes also couldn’t be ignored, and it was clear to all that calamity was soon to arrive.

  “How long do we have?” Heshtat asked.

  Harsiese frowned and squinted towards the great river and its smaller tributary that was even now rushing their way. “Minutes, by my best guess.”

  “Can we outrun them?” Neferu asked.

  “No,” Harsiese rumbled.

  “Even if we could, more will be drawn,” Maatkare agreed. “We must make for the Waking, and soon.”

  Heshtat nodded. “This will be the last chance until we reach Idib to stand in the Other. We will be swarmed for the rest of our journey and the veil is all that will shield us. I would not be surprised if our journey through the Waking is made harder by this, too.”

  “Perhaps Ahhotep will wake soon now that we’ve rid him of the demon that was draining him?” Neferu suggested. “He could then shield the Eye.”

  “Perhaps,” Heshtat allowed, though privately he suspected the Other would be too churning with fiends of all stripes for them to enter again until they reached the spiritual fortifications of Idib’s central pyramid, whether or not the priest worked his magics in their favour.

  He looked to the approaching smudge on the horizon, growing larger with every moment, and then behind to the bare white bones of the mountain range rising into the twilight sky. No movement from there, at least. He had minutes. But could that be enough?

  It would help with the journey, and Harsiese could pull him from his trance if they were cutting it too closely…

  “Shadow me,” Heshtat said, sitting down in a cross-legged meditative pose. “If I have not returned by the time the swarm is upon us, pull me back.”

  Harsiese and Neferu frowned in confusion, but Maatkare moved to stand behind Heshtat, wrapping one of the ropes from Ahhotep’s sled around Heshtat’s torso and holding the end tight. Both of them shared a look, then the rope began to shine with the soft glow of essence as they poured their intent down it. It was crude as far as spiritual anchors went, but given that Heshtat was very much a willing participant, the Other should bend to their will and allow the rope to bridge the gap to whatever strange corner of this realm Heshtat’s chosen deity dragged him to.

  “What’s happening?” Neferu demanded.

  “No time. Maatkare can explain,” he said, and then Heshtat closed his eyes and opened his heart to the Other, attempting to awaken another aspect.

  ***

  When one opened a channel to a god, it was always in the Otherworld.

  That was partly why the priesthood were so important for most regular mortals to open their first or even second channels—because only the priesthood had the means to protect a mortal from the dangerous denizens of that nightmare realm. Or rather, the various cults of Amansi were the only ones that had both the means and the disposition to share it with regular people that lacked massive wealth and power.

  Other than taking place in the dreamscape, there were few similarities between each opening of a channel. Each god was different, and each would-be cultivator was as well. Nemty might have appeared as nothing more than footsteps to Heshtat but could just as well appear as an empty sky to others, or perhaps the silhouette of a kindly old ferryman plying lonely waters in the distance. It was impossible to know for sure.

  Some gods had their preferences. Bestat, for example, usually worked through avatars—fragments of her will that roamed the Other in their own way and by their own rules, visiting those who called out to them with the right mix of intent and familiarity. Still others had to be sought out more directly. In places of power, through occult rituals, or in the presence of certain natural wonders. Heshtat knew of one war god that could only be reached by those who stood on the ground of a battle that they had personally taken part in.

  All of this Heshtat knew, and so he was not surprised when he failed to meet Wusis herself. Indeed, while every fragment of a god was different, most were similar in that there was little personality or real communication between mortals and the fragments. Anubian had been an outlier, something Heshtat still didn’t understand, and wasn’t particularly relevant here because of it.

  Regardless, he hadn’t been expecting to meet Wusis in the flesh. Since she was often depicted with the body of a woman crowned with a sun disc between two elephant tusks for a head, it would have been a strange and disturbing sight. However, while his expectations had been tempered already, he still hadn’t expected his communion to begin as it did.

  Heshtat opened his eyes, and found himself within a memory.

  Instantly, he knew it. This was a memory that plagued him. When he closed his eyes at night, he relived this conversation. When he washed himself alone at the end of each weary day, he tortured himself with thoughts of the exact words he could have said to create a different outcome, then spun those alternate histories out into the future in a bizarre thought experiment that always left him morose and full of regret.

  As his eyes alighted on the stained gravel that marked the floor, saw the bottom of the iron-banded door, and heard the rattling of chains as his younger self shuddered for breath, Heshtat knew intimately where he was and what was about to happen.

  And yet he knew he could do nothing. He stood to one side, in the corner of the cell. Watching himself. It was a bizarre out of body experience, but Heshtat didn’t spend long studying his past self. He simply braced himself for the emotional turmoil to come.

  It took only a few minutes. A figure entered the cell and stood over his chained form. The two people of memory shared words, and then the figure left. Heshtat—the younger version that knelt, chained to the gravel—crumpled further, while the older Heshtat—the watcher that hovered in the corner—observed with sympathy, regret, and a small amount of frustration.

  “Why show me this?” he eventually asked of the world.

  Nobody answered, and it seemed the figure on the ground couldn’t hear him either.

  “What is it I am supposed to take from this?” Heshtat asked again. “Your domain encompasses love. Is this a test of mine? Or my loyalty? If so, why choose such a moment of failure? I have my regrets, and you surely know this ranks among them.”

  Heshtat frowned then as a thought occurred to him. “If you can pluck the memories from my mind, and sort them according to whatever virtue you wish for me to demonstrate, then I know you can see my feelings, too. You know how I feel about this, about myself and her. What does this prove?”

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  But the fragment of Vengeful Wusis that he sought communion with did not answer. Not with words at least.

  The younger Heshtat began to weep, but rather than salt water, his eyes wept blood. It gushed out in fat drops, somehow filling the entire cell in moments, until it reached the kneeling man’s chest.

  The older Heshtat—the real Heshtat—rolled his eyes at the scene. “Always so melodramatic,” he muttered to himself. “You are the goddess of healing, too. Would you like to see me tend to his wounds? They are not lethal. It is a different ailment that threatens his life now.”

  It felt strange to admit that. He’d never told anyone and had taken the cowards path there on his journey, but his destination had been clear. The year of drinking that lay in wait for the kneeling man was not recreational—it was an attempt at absolution. For the only true judgement that matters.

  It was only in the speaking that he put the two thoughts together though. He sought the blessing of the goddess of love and healing. Wusis had not let reason—mortal or divine—keep her love from her, when Osirion had been killed by his own brother Sutekh and cast through the Final Door. Long had she had laboured, and with dogged determination and her impossible intellect she had reached out between realms that should have been sealed. She had pulled from beyond the Final Door a soul that should never have returned. And then with that soul, she had forced life back into a body that had been scattered to the four corners of Amansi by familial jealousy.

  A goddess that would go to such lengths for love, that represented not just the desperate longing that Heshtat had known for so long, but also the fervent desire to alter the very circumstances that kept him from that love… What would such a goddess desire to see in those she blessed? The answer came to him easily once he marshalled his thoughts into the right shape.

  Simple: she would wish to see the impossible.

  Heshtat pulled his blade free from the iron loop on his belt with a ringing of bronze. No matter that his fist gripped the hilt of his obsidian khopesh, for his soul was far more used to mortal bronze and iron, and so that is what this dream conjured. He rolled his shoulders and stepped forwards, letting breath fill his lungs. The weapon felt light in his hands, more so even than it had the last few days. He may be only an acolyte in the real world, but his soul remembered him as a trifold adept, and that strength flooded through his veins now in Wusis’ strange domain.

  He couldn’t influence this memory, couldn’t change the past. This breaking of two spirits had happened a decade ago, when he had failed in his duty. First, he had failed to protect his pharaoh, but Heshtat realised now that that was not the real crux. It was the first failure, the lesser failure, but it was not what burned the bridge between them. It was simply the match.

  The true failure had occurred nearly a year prior when he had spurned her. Not her advances, for he had fallen for those long ago, but in the unwitting way that a young man often does; he had placed his own desires above hers. He wished to be known and considered his duty sacred, unlike her wishes. Only once the wool had been pulled from his eyes by failure had he realised how wrong his priorities were, and there was no easy way to explain that.

  Even though he might now understand the past, perhaps even know how it could have been avoided, he couldn’t change it.

  And yet.

  Heshtat stepped forwards, channelling everything within his soul into a single strike. The chains binding his younger self to the floor broke under the force of his conviction, and his memory looked up with shock. Then Heshtat took his head on the backswing. He turned from the corpse, letting it sink into the waist deep lake of blood, and looked to the ceiling.

  “I am no god, and I cannot replicate your divine feats,” he said, praying the fragment of a god’s attention was focused on him and his words. “I cannot change the past, only state my intention to change the future. I was weak; self-absorbed, unwilling to see the world as it was, and more focused on a future that could not come to pass. I am no longer. I know what I want, Wusis, and you will see that, whether you lend me your divine blessing or not.”

  He sheathed his blade, dark obsidian dipping into a pool of blood to rest at his side. “I will not make the mistakes of my past anew. When I am face to face with the woman I love, I shall tell her so. If our enemies block our way, I shall cut through them. If the world comes between us, then I will move it. If fate writes another path for me, I shall change it. That is my vow.”

  The corpse of his younger self still floated somewhere below sight, and its neck must have kept pumping, for the blood rose higher with every second. Heshtat closed his eyes and let it come. He had a new vow, one made not by some all-powerful God-Queen or appointed Pharaoh, but by himself. As the red waters covered him, he kept one hand wrapped around the grip of his weapon, and the other clutched to his breast in salute of his final vow.

  His solemn oath, written in blood and carved from his heart.

  ***

  Heshtat shivered as he returned to his companions in the Other once more. Another aspect awakened, another god’s divine will channelled through him, and yet he had still paid no price. It felt sacrilegious, and yet with each instance he grew only more certain that he was not the first to do this. How the Pharaohs had managed it without the aid of the Eye that sat even now against his breast, Heshtat couldn’t say, but his suspicions were growing.

  Such thoughts passed quickly though, for he was more taken with the new power coursing through him. A third aspect; once more he was a trifold awakened. Now he stood shoulder to shoulder with most of the powerful cultivators in Amansi. Their cultivation may run deeper, but he had the breadth to rival theirs now. All that remained was to grow his own expertise in his new soul arts.

  The boost in power wasn’t entirely physical. Or even mostly. Unlike awakening the Khet, where an instant rush of power was felt, this time it was more subtle. Heshtat experienced a solidifying of his person; muscle, bone and sinew strengthened minutely, senses sharpened and his thoughts quickened, but only slightly. The true effect was more intrinsic.

  Heshtat had awakened the Jb. The Heart aspect, as it was known, governed one’s will and desires. It let a cultivator lace essence into their very words and command the world to see the truth of their statements.

  Senusret—the serpentine bastard that Heshtat had worked under for so long—had also awakened the Jb, and his power allowed him to sniff out lies. To taste them on the air. Heshtat wasn’t sure exactly which channel the man possessed, though he wouldn’t be surprised if it was Apopis himself, the primordial serpent and great demon that both Sutekh and Haruw had banished from the realms in an epic battle that had healed the Ennead with its courage.

  Heshtat’s power was different. He could still lace his words with power, though his focus was not on command or deception. When speaking with conviction, his words would resonate. He could shout through a storm, his words travelling through water and stone to be heard by ears far distant, but only when proclaiming a truth which resonated internally. He also instinctively knew that he could cut through illusions with but a word.

  There were cultivators that could turn the truths of Jb into a fractured path of deception, weave lies from the twisted truths of their hearts, and they were some of the most dangerous combatants, especially in the lower ranks of awakened and acolytes. A cultivator of Jb could strike from anywhere, and you’d still never see them coming.

  Khet made him strong and fast, Sekhem gave him utility, and Jb allowed him to defend himself from a foe that couldn’t be fought physically. Finally, Heshtat was beginning to round out his arsenal of abilities, to walk the endless path of cultivation once more.

  He took a deep breath, feeling his sense of self solidifying further, bathed in the promise of his vow. Find Cleosiris, declare his love, and cleave apart any that would seek to stop him.

  He looked over to his companions. The bodies of nightmarish creatures surrounded them: bloody little tornadoes sweeping away across the sands where wind sprites had been killed, bipedal man-goat hybrids laying eviscerated nearby beneath the perpetual twilight glow, armoured crickets the size of small horses crushed and battered beneath a barrage of Khet empowered fists. The plateau they stood upon was rumbling, and when he looked to the horizon, he saw that same river of chittering carapace flowing towards them, barely a mile distant now.

  None of his companions were close enough to any of their sleeping aspects to awaken one with the threat so close, and they had learned that travel through the Other was far too dangerous with the Eye as it was.

  “Back to the Waking then?” Heshtat asked, hefting his khopesh.

  Maatkare grinned back at him, Neferu rolled her bare shoulders in readiness, Harsiese cracked his knuckles, and even Ahhotep twitched on his sled, though perhaps that was simply optimism on Heshtat’s part. He smiled at their eagerness, despite the deadly journey awaiting them on the other side of the veil.

  “Time to cross the desert.”

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