Living Sands: Going Forth By Day
Oct. 18th, 2005 06:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aithne[This is the last recap for this game, since we finished this last Sunday. New campaign will start up in January next year. There will be many, many dragons, it looks like.]
We had been stranded on the wrong side of the world, an ocean away from home, and Anubis was in the process of taking over Egypt.
It was time to find a way home...
19 Koiak, Inundation, Year 4 of the Reign of Rameses II (November 6th, 1275 BCE)
We looked around at the various doors in the portal room, each of them marked with cryptic labels. "This one says The Land of Burning Sands," Pepy said. "Maybe?"
"That's the Red Land, though, if it's anywhere near Egypt," I replied.
"How about this one? 'The Land of Flattened Pyramids'," read Mayet. "Maybe it's Nubia? They have flattened pyramids."
We all agreed that was the one that sounded the closest, and stepped through the gate. We came out, stopped, and looked around.
There were about five men standing in front of us, dressed in outlandish clothing and wearing sickle-shaped knives. We were indeed at the top of a pyramid, it seemed, but the land all around us was wrong. It was almost like what we'd seen in Zoser's tomb, lush and strange-smelling.
The other thing we noticed was that there was no portal leading back. We were stuck until we found another portal. On the whole, though, if we had to be stuck somewhere, it was at least an interesting place to be stuck.
Grrrbek stepped forward, cast Tongues, and began to converse with the men in their own language. After a little while, he turned to us and said, "They actually summoned us, they think we're their gods. These people are having problems with fire giants messing with a local volcano. Seems they're also guarding another portal. I told them we'd fix their problem for them. The neighborly thing to do."
We all stared at Grrrbek. Finally, I asked, "What's a volcano?"
That was explained, and we were received with gratitude and, yet again, a feast. Maybe this whole traveling the world thing isn't so bad, if you're greeted like this everywhere you go. Again there were women, this time ritual virgins, offered to us. No male ritual virgins, I noticed. I did spend my time watching the men; they're an uncommonly good-looking people, and the young men especially were well-favored.
They introduced us to a tall, lean man who would be our guide to the volcano, and then we slept.
The next morning, we set out without a premonition of what was going to happen in the next few days. I'm not certain it would have been helpful to know what was going to happen, but perhaps it might have given us second thoughts about a few of our choices.
We arrived at the volcano and our guide left us, then Amunet and Terik scouted around. We didn't really want to walk into the front door, and they found a side tunnel that was barely big enough for the larger members of our little group to crawl through, guarded by a small lizard with a very large breath weapon. I felt sort of bad about killing it, but it was in the way.
The tunnel led into the mountain and eventually opened out into a larger chamber and tunnel, dusty and obviously disused. "That's odd," said Terik. "There's been someone through here in the past week. And they're wearing sandals made like ours."
Another Egyptian? Perhaps the portal here led home!
I cast my arcane eye spell (thank goodness for granted powers!) and explored. I found the fire giants, led by one that appeared to be no larger but quite a bit meaner than the rest. They were all carrying rocks out of a runnel, dumping them on a hillside.
I tracked the giants back to where they were coming from, and saw that they were in a very hot area of the mountain, probably close to a shaft of molten rock. In a channel dug in the tunnel were dragon eggs.
Red dragon eggs, to be exact. They have to be very, very hot in order to hatch, I'm told.
Down another side tunnel was a room with four portals in it, and the tracks that we had been following led down to one of the portals in particular and disappeared.
We decided to sneak across and not mess with the fire giants, who were big, scary, and mean-looking. This, after all, wasn't our fight. Unfortunately, Terik decided he was dying to talk to a giant, stepped out into one's path, and asked, "Where is my companion?"
The rest of us froze. I covered my mouth and tried to muffle my giggles. Ah, Terik. Always guaranteed to do something to make the rest of us look positively cautious.
The giant set the boulder down and scratched his head. He rumbled something incomprehensible. Terik tried talking to him, but finally the giant just picked him up and carried him to the foreman.
I and Amunet were in a place to hear the conversation between Terik and the foreman, who spoke serviceable Egyptian, oddly enough. He told Terik that the man, Lord Anubis, had been by looking for people that sounded remarkably like us. He asked if we'd been sent to check up on them, and when Terik said yes, said that they would be finished in three days' time.
Terik asked them if they needed anything, and they said more growth potions. Amunet and I looked at each other. All right, this was very likely our problem.
The portals at the end were useful--one led to a place of blowing sand, another to a snow-covered meadow, one back to the larger portal room we'd come from, and one...
Well, it was moving. It was with an army of Unas, marching through a desert that looked remarkably like the Red Land.
Home. Or as close to it as we were going to get.
I watched with my arcane eye for a little while, and realized the Unas were all drugged. Taking this back to my fellows, we hatched a plan.
Mayet would disenchant the growth potions that the fire giants had, and under the pretense of creating new ones simply create potions of random low-level spells, thus decreasing the chance that we'd be confronted with hundreds of newborn but huge red dragons. Mayet asked Hathor to make the dragons all good, so Pepy wouldn't feel obligated to crush the eggs. With a judicious divination, I found a portal in the large room that led us to a place where we could get a goodly supply of psi nuts. We would dose the Unas, then go back to Egypt.
It would take us a few days, but it seemed worthwhile.
Two of us had favors of our gods coming to us. I requested to be Rememberer and Chosen with Isu once again, at least taking that from Anubis, the hyena god once more filling our heads. And Raam requested that one of our items each work once more.
For a few days we worked, rested, and prepared. The only truly strange thing was that sometime on the second day, the boy Isu called Imhotep slipped away from us, back to the large portal room, and disappeared. Where he'd gone and why was anyone's guess. Isu, upset at the boy's disappearance, made a racket for hours on end, and then went out hunting when I told her that she was either going to have to shut up or leave.
She came back in a much sweeter temper and with a dead thing dragged behind her--some sort of large cat, black as midnight, with soft, thick fur. I recognized an apology when I saw one, and she lay quietly next to me while I skinned the creature and gave her the meat and bones to eat.
21 Koiak, Inundation, Year 4 of the Reign of Rameses II (November 10th, 1275 BCE)
We executed our plan, setting it in motion three days later. Amunet sneaked to the other side of the portal to spike the food that the Unas were eating with ground psi nuts, and when they shook it off he stood up and waved. One of them, the leader, recognized him and asked him if he was with Raam. Evidently, Anubis had captured all of them and had was marching them towards Pi Rameses.
We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and stepped through the portal.
Of course, Anubis was waiting for us to step foot in Egypt again. My suspicion is that he was actually waiting for Pepy; the rest of us mattered far less to him.
The Unas scattered away from us as we stood staring at the god. Anubis smiled at us. "Back so soon?"
As one, we attacked.
I fell back into a support role as Mayet abandoned her usual role of healer and began to throw spells at the god. Anubis first rendered Grrrbek into dust, then killed Terik. (I brought Terik back, dusted him off, and sent him charging back into battle.) Amunet wasn't focusing on attack, simply trying to cut away the items he had on him. First he took a sword that was strapped on his back, that he quickly found threw dragon breath weapons. Then he cut away a pouch that fell to the ground and resurrected Grrrbek literally at the god's feet. Grrrbek had only to surge upwards to hit Anubis in a place where it hurts a lot.
Raam had taken on a form even uglier than the terrasque, something large and tentacled and slimy. I wasn't about to argue with his choice, though, because despite the hideousness of the form, it was an extremely effective one for fighting in.
Anubis moved almost too quickly for the eye to see, but the warriors managed to hit him anyway. Isu sang her hyena battle song, laughing and howling.
In the end, almost all of us hit him at nearly the same time, and the god lay dead on the ground before us. I knelt beside the god, a spell on my lips, then paused.
You will choose, Sitefnut. One of us will live, the other will die. It was Imhotep's voice. Choose, and cast.
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly gone dry. Choose the god I loved, or the one I had been bound to? The god of magic and medicine, or a god of death and devouring? Choose the one I knew, or the one I did not know?
It was a long few minutes indeed.
Finally, I said, "I choose." I reached out and touched the corpse of Anubis, concentrating on him, thinking of the god whose soul I wanted to call into this body.
The body shimmered and changed. Imhotep opened his eyes. The hyena god departed my head with a final spate of laughter, leaving behind emptiness once more.
Imhotep sat up. "It's over," he remarked, mildly.
And then he kissed me, and all was abruptly right with the world.
Quotes:
"He's a god for very small values of god."
--Amunet
""Ah, Quetzalcoatl, yes..."
"Don't be agreeing!"
"This is worship, I recognize this. I get it all the time."
--Grrrbek, Raam
"We're the Department of Hitting Things Over the Head with Rocks."
--Raam
"You can partake in the ritual virgins."
"I like traveling."
"Ritual virgins--one use only."
--Storm, Grrrbek, Amunet
"I've got disconjunctivitis."
--Amunet
"I can sneak up and stab people in the back really well, and I can sell sand to a Nubian, but aside from that I don't have much to work with here."
--Amunet
"I want to cast Holy Crap."
--Mayet
"I am the ugliest sumbitch on the block."
--Raam
"Back so soon?"
"We just couldn't do without your scintillating--oh, fuck it, I attack him."
--Anubis, Raam
"I'm right by Anubis's knee?"
"Yup."
"I'm gonna cut off a pouch, all right."
--Grrrbek, Storm
*****
three years later
Sitefnut sat at a long table, studying the object she held in her hands with a fierce attention. It was a dagger, wickedly curved, the handle engraved with runes. "Now I know I've seen you before," she muttered, turning it over. "What are you, and where have you been, little one?"
"Check the guards," a male voice came from across the room. "There should be a catch."
She did, and there was, and the dagger writhed in her hands as it began to well water from the blade. "Ah," she said. "I remember this one now. One of a set of six, wasn't it?"
"It was." She looked up as Imhotep crossed the room towards her. They were in her inner sanctum, the workroom at the center of the artifact archive in the palace in Pi Rameses. "I called them something terribly pretentious when I made them, if I recall correctly. I was trying to impress someone. The first Intef, I think."
She turned the catch again and the water stopped. "Oasis daggers," she replied. "The other five are buried here and there. I think I'll keep this one here just for posterity's sake." She made a notation on the papyrus scroll she was working on, then attached a tag to the knife, rose, and stretched, her bones creaking an cracking. "I'm just going to put this away. I think it'll be pretty in the knife rack next to the Staff of Ra, don't you?"
"If you say so, love." The god was laughing as they walked out of the workroom side by side.
The vaults were massive, filled with cases and boxes from floor to ceiling. Perhaps one quarter of the cases had something in them, and as she unlocked the case she wanted to put the knife in with a touch, Sitefnut frowned. She still had so much work to do. It was never-ending.
"You like it, though," Imhotep said in response to her thought.
"Happy as a hyena in a mud wallow, Imhotep." She grinned at him. "Speaking of, Isu's close by--
The door opened, nosed by a heavy head. Isu came into the archive, her head and tail held high. Sitefnut told me you'd dropped by, she said with a toothy grin. I came back early just so I could see my favorite divine being.
"I'm glad," he said, dropping to his knee and ruffling her ears. "How are the children?"
Isu gave a soft growl of pleasure. Well. My third daughter grows strong. I think she'll be the one.
"I'm glad to hear it." Imhotep stood again and came to Sitefnut, shoving her nose into her hand. She scratched her beloved familiar behind the ears and smiled.
Pepy and Xeres are back, by the way, Isu said to them. Mayet wanted to know if you're coming to dinner.
"Of course." She looked over at Imhotep. "I don't suppose you'd join us?"
He chuckled and shook his head. "No, love. Besides, someone else comes who'd like very much to escort you to dinner. Give everyone my regards, if they choose to hear them. Tell Mayet that she'll be pregnant again before the floods come."
Sitefnut laughed and kissed him. Things have changed so much since Anubis died, she thought. The nature of their relationship had gradually changed, as it needed to--mage magic had been returned to the world and Imhotep had returned to his place in the divine realms, and his presence was no longer a constant in her mind in anything other than the priestly sense. Though they still loved each other, he was only an occasional visitor, and they spent most of his visits looking at artifacts together, doing the work that Sitefnut loved. She saved some of her hardest puzzles for his visits.
Things had taken a little while to settle down after Anubis had died. Terik had taken off for parts unknown, leaving the surprised Amun with his parents, but had come back a few months later looking shamefaced. (He later admitted that his god had given him a dressing down for leaving unfinished business behind.) He'd promptly married Amun with his parents' fervent blessing--she'd ingratiated herself with them during her stay with them, and they desperately wanted grandchildren--and the ranger split his time between staying home with Amun and running off into the wilderness after reports of marauding creatures or, better yet, undead.
Pepy, too, had taken off after Anubis had died. Xeres, however, was not nearly as content to wait for her lover to return home as Amun had been. She tracked Pepy, Rosetta strapped to her back, for six months before she found him in a small town on the edge of the desert. Sitefnut had always imagined the ensuing fight with a smile on her face--Xeres, far from the meek girl she had been while tied into the curse, had turned out to have a very strong will of her own.
Xeres and Pepy spent most of their time traveling, even when Xeres was pregnant, which she seemed to be nearly constantly. Both of them seemed happy, though Pepy still had his moments.
Grrrbek had gone to Abydos to be with his followers, and was working on becoming a major god. Sitefnut wished him well with that, though she didn't think she'd live to see it happen. He occasionally dropped by the palace--he liked Mayet's two children, and they adored him.
Amunet, too, was still traveling, working out deals in various parts of the kingdom. His affiliation with the royal household was proving to be an undeniable
Mayet, Raam, and Sitefnut had returned to the palace at Pi Rameses. Mayet had caught a child before Anubis died, it turned out, and her oldest was a bit over two years old, and her younger son was almost one. Sitefnut had fallen to her new work with a will, and now relied on Amunet to bring her curious artifacts and other magical objects--in exchange for gold, of course. She also occasionally talked Grrrbek into taking her places with him, seeking out new magics to add to the collection.
There was a knock on the door, and Sitefnut shook herself out of her reverie. She knew who it was, of course; only six people could get close enough to the vault doors to knock on them, and only one would have any reason to be here at this hour. She unlocked and pulled open the door to see a familiar man standing outside.
"I take it supper's on, Ibenre?" she asked him.
A ghost of a smile hovered on the First Prime's lips. "Of course. Are you coming?"
"I thought I would." She tilted her head at him, and the briefest of smiles crossed her face.
He offered her his arm and she took it, and the two of them strolled down the hall. Behind them, Isu bumped along, grinning her toothy hyena grin.
In the back of her mind, she could feel Imhotep's smile, and then the sense of his presence faded.
*****
Rameses the Second ruled, officially, for sixty-six years, one of the longest and most prosperous reigns in Egypt's history. Monuments that Rameses built littered the landscape of the Nile, and he did gain his wish, in a way--he will be forever immortal in the eyes of those who can see his works, even millennia later.
After reigning for about thirty years, Rameses fell ill, and his then-successor was a son that nobody, including his father, liked very much. He and Raam hatched a plan. Rameses and Raam changed places with very few people being the wiser, and Rameses departed Pi Rameses forever, leading the Unas and the maresh from Abydos into the desert. Rameses lived for five years before he died, long enough to lead the Unas to a land of their own, a desert kingdom.
Mayet was one of the few people who knew that the switch had been made. Though she remained a royal wife, she never shared the bed of the pharaoh again after the true Rameses departed. In the twenty-five years before that, though, she bore Rameses twelve living children. One of these, her fourth child Merneptah, eventually succeeded the throne. Mayet eventually became the head of the Hathor temple in Pi Rameses. She outlived not only Rameses and Raam but her son the pharaoh, dying a natural death in the second year of the reign of Amenmesse.
Raam finished out the later half of Rameses' reign, upholding his duties as the pharaoh and a mortal deity. He was responsible for about thirty of Rameses' hundred children, and as history shows, lived a long and prosperous life for a human. It has been suspected that his death at such an early age for an Unas was because of all the time he'd spent as a human, aging as a human does.
The body of Rameses that is exhibited today is actually Raam's, and very few indeed are the wiser. On his death, the amulet disappeared, taken back into Imhotep's custody in case it is ever needed again, it is said.
Pepy and Xeres finally settled down in the far south of Egypt, on the border of Nubia, where most of the followers of Anubis had retreated when their god died. Pepy occupied his time with hunting down and killing them, one by one. One day, in the thirty-fifth year of Rameses' reign, he went out and simply did not return. Xeres followed him into death no more than a year later.
Terik, fifteen years after the death of Anubis, still in his fighting prime, stood up to a fight that he really should have backed down from. He was killed for the last time in the sands outside Amarra, near where the Black Pyramid was originally located. Amun remarried about three years after his death.
Amunet, due in large part to the fact that he was Sitefnut's major supplier of artifacts, grew very, very rich. With the capital he'd gained from his adventures and selling artifacts back to the crown, he built a major trading empire. In his later years, he also grew very fat, but he truly didn't seem to care. He married four wives and outlived all but the youngest.
Sitefnut's husband Soren lived until the thirty-first year of Rameses' reign, mostly in Pi Rameses. He and Sitefnut did eventually become friends, and he adored each and every one of Mayet's children. Mayet's mother Senit came to visit but despite being repeatedly asked if she would move to Pi Rameses, was never comfortable with palace life, and stayed in Gebelein for the rest of her life.
The First Prime and Sitefnut came to an understanding about four years after the death of Anubis, a very quiet relationship that lasted until Ibenre's death in the nineteenth year of the reign of Rameses. Sitefnut grieved deeply when he died, and never seemed to have an inclination to see much of anyone else, except occasionally Imhotep, who she kept company with until her own death.
Isu lived the rest of her life with Sitefnut, dividing her time between the palace and a hyena clan that lived about twenty miles outside the walls of the city. She would go out, spend six months with her clan, and then come back with a new cub or two, much to the horror and dismay of the servants who knew that inevitably gardens would be ruined and expensive furniture gnawed to smithereens by curious baby hyena mouths. Her third daughter became the matriarch of that clan, and it was that daughter's granddaughter who led that clan and several others on the long trek across the desert to climes less peopled and richer with game. The few remaining spotted hyenas in northern Africa either died or were hunted to extinction sometime before 0 AD.
It is unknown what happened to Sekath. There is a possibility that he may be alive somewhere today. He disappeared about a century after the death of Anubis. It is speculated that, without being locked into the hyena god's will as Chronicler, he was free to travel and left for other climes. Peribsen, too, disappeared soon after Anubis died; whether he finally died of old age or still travels the world attempting to atone for his sins is anyone's guess.
Sitefnut was the artifact archivist for Rameses for twenty-seven years. Though the amulet that let her shift between mage and cleric still worked, after a few years it became harder and harder for her to shift to mage, and she finally stopped trying. Finally, it seemed, she had learned how to be happy as she was.
She was never able to speak to any hyenas but Isu again; and being now normal animals instead of animals with a fragment of a god inside of them, they saw her only as a human who was protected by a powerful, dominant one of their own, never anything more.
Sitefnut occupied the time of two scribes for an entire year, telling the story of her adventures with her odd pack, and getting what hyena stories she knew written down.
As she grew older and more frail, she moved her bed down to the artifact vault. Though her eyes began to fail her in the last few years of her life, her mind remained as sharp as ever, and she trained Mayet's youngest daughter Nafrini in her work. One day, in the thirty-first year of the reign of Rameses the Great, Sitefnut finished her work for the morning, cleared off her workbench, and lay down for a nap. Isu, by now as creaky and fragile as the woman she was bound to, joined her.
They were found by Nafrini that afternoon, both of them cold already. Isu lay with her head beneath Sitefnut's chin, Sitefnut curled around Isu, her arm thrown over the hyena. Sitefnut had a small smile on her face, as if she were dreaming about something pleasant.
A fresh lotus flower had been tucked behind her ear. That flower, in the weeks it took to prepare her body for burial, never faded or wilted. It was buried with her and Isu in the most secret of Imhotep tombs, a burial ground so well hidden that it will likely never come to light.
And if it does...
Her tomb's walls are not covered with scenes from the Book of Going Forth By Day. Instead, the priests who carved her tomb and laid her to rest wrote hyena stories on the walls, from the first Rememberer to Imhotep to Sitefnut, the last Chosen.
And somewhere in the heavens, in the spaces beyond the stars where dead gods go, a god ancient when the deities of Egypt were born runs, and laughter swirls in his wake.
Here ends The Living Sands,
a chronicle of the Egypt that never was
but the Egypt that should have been.
We had been stranded on the wrong side of the world, an ocean away from home, and Anubis was in the process of taking over Egypt.
It was time to find a way home...
19 Koiak, Inundation, Year 4 of the Reign of Rameses II (November 6th, 1275 BCE)
We looked around at the various doors in the portal room, each of them marked with cryptic labels. "This one says The Land of Burning Sands," Pepy said. "Maybe?"
"That's the Red Land, though, if it's anywhere near Egypt," I replied.
"How about this one? 'The Land of Flattened Pyramids'," read Mayet. "Maybe it's Nubia? They have flattened pyramids."
We all agreed that was the one that sounded the closest, and stepped through the gate. We came out, stopped, and looked around.
There were about five men standing in front of us, dressed in outlandish clothing and wearing sickle-shaped knives. We were indeed at the top of a pyramid, it seemed, but the land all around us was wrong. It was almost like what we'd seen in Zoser's tomb, lush and strange-smelling.
The other thing we noticed was that there was no portal leading back. We were stuck until we found another portal. On the whole, though, if we had to be stuck somewhere, it was at least an interesting place to be stuck.
Grrrbek stepped forward, cast Tongues, and began to converse with the men in their own language. After a little while, he turned to us and said, "They actually summoned us, they think we're their gods. These people are having problems with fire giants messing with a local volcano. Seems they're also guarding another portal. I told them we'd fix their problem for them. The neighborly thing to do."
We all stared at Grrrbek. Finally, I asked, "What's a volcano?"
That was explained, and we were received with gratitude and, yet again, a feast. Maybe this whole traveling the world thing isn't so bad, if you're greeted like this everywhere you go. Again there were women, this time ritual virgins, offered to us. No male ritual virgins, I noticed. I did spend my time watching the men; they're an uncommonly good-looking people, and the young men especially were well-favored.
They introduced us to a tall, lean man who would be our guide to the volcano, and then we slept.
The next morning, we set out without a premonition of what was going to happen in the next few days. I'm not certain it would have been helpful to know what was going to happen, but perhaps it might have given us second thoughts about a few of our choices.
We arrived at the volcano and our guide left us, then Amunet and Terik scouted around. We didn't really want to walk into the front door, and they found a side tunnel that was barely big enough for the larger members of our little group to crawl through, guarded by a small lizard with a very large breath weapon. I felt sort of bad about killing it, but it was in the way.
The tunnel led into the mountain and eventually opened out into a larger chamber and tunnel, dusty and obviously disused. "That's odd," said Terik. "There's been someone through here in the past week. And they're wearing sandals made like ours."
Another Egyptian? Perhaps the portal here led home!
I cast my arcane eye spell (thank goodness for granted powers!) and explored. I found the fire giants, led by one that appeared to be no larger but quite a bit meaner than the rest. They were all carrying rocks out of a runnel, dumping them on a hillside.
I tracked the giants back to where they were coming from, and saw that they were in a very hot area of the mountain, probably close to a shaft of molten rock. In a channel dug in the tunnel were dragon eggs.
Red dragon eggs, to be exact. They have to be very, very hot in order to hatch, I'm told.
Down another side tunnel was a room with four portals in it, and the tracks that we had been following led down to one of the portals in particular and disappeared.
We decided to sneak across and not mess with the fire giants, who were big, scary, and mean-looking. This, after all, wasn't our fight. Unfortunately, Terik decided he was dying to talk to a giant, stepped out into one's path, and asked, "Where is my companion?"
The rest of us froze. I covered my mouth and tried to muffle my giggles. Ah, Terik. Always guaranteed to do something to make the rest of us look positively cautious.
The giant set the boulder down and scratched his head. He rumbled something incomprehensible. Terik tried talking to him, but finally the giant just picked him up and carried him to the foreman.
I and Amunet were in a place to hear the conversation between Terik and the foreman, who spoke serviceable Egyptian, oddly enough. He told Terik that the man, Lord Anubis, had been by looking for people that sounded remarkably like us. He asked if we'd been sent to check up on them, and when Terik said yes, said that they would be finished in three days' time.
Terik asked them if they needed anything, and they said more growth potions. Amunet and I looked at each other. All right, this was very likely our problem.
The portals at the end were useful--one led to a place of blowing sand, another to a snow-covered meadow, one back to the larger portal room we'd come from, and one...
Well, it was moving. It was with an army of Unas, marching through a desert that looked remarkably like the Red Land.
Home. Or as close to it as we were going to get.
I watched with my arcane eye for a little while, and realized the Unas were all drugged. Taking this back to my fellows, we hatched a plan.
Mayet would disenchant the growth potions that the fire giants had, and under the pretense of creating new ones simply create potions of random low-level spells, thus decreasing the chance that we'd be confronted with hundreds of newborn but huge red dragons. Mayet asked Hathor to make the dragons all good, so Pepy wouldn't feel obligated to crush the eggs. With a judicious divination, I found a portal in the large room that led us to a place where we could get a goodly supply of psi nuts. We would dose the Unas, then go back to Egypt.
It would take us a few days, but it seemed worthwhile.
Two of us had favors of our gods coming to us. I requested to be Rememberer and Chosen with Isu once again, at least taking that from Anubis, the hyena god once more filling our heads. And Raam requested that one of our items each work once more.
For a few days we worked, rested, and prepared. The only truly strange thing was that sometime on the second day, the boy Isu called Imhotep slipped away from us, back to the large portal room, and disappeared. Where he'd gone and why was anyone's guess. Isu, upset at the boy's disappearance, made a racket for hours on end, and then went out hunting when I told her that she was either going to have to shut up or leave.
She came back in a much sweeter temper and with a dead thing dragged behind her--some sort of large cat, black as midnight, with soft, thick fur. I recognized an apology when I saw one, and she lay quietly next to me while I skinned the creature and gave her the meat and bones to eat.
21 Koiak, Inundation, Year 4 of the Reign of Rameses II (November 10th, 1275 BCE)
We executed our plan, setting it in motion three days later. Amunet sneaked to the other side of the portal to spike the food that the Unas were eating with ground psi nuts, and when they shook it off he stood up and waved. One of them, the leader, recognized him and asked him if he was with Raam. Evidently, Anubis had captured all of them and had was marching them towards Pi Rameses.
We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and stepped through the portal.
Of course, Anubis was waiting for us to step foot in Egypt again. My suspicion is that he was actually waiting for Pepy; the rest of us mattered far less to him.
The Unas scattered away from us as we stood staring at the god. Anubis smiled at us. "Back so soon?"
As one, we attacked.
I fell back into a support role as Mayet abandoned her usual role of healer and began to throw spells at the god. Anubis first rendered Grrrbek into dust, then killed Terik. (I brought Terik back, dusted him off, and sent him charging back into battle.) Amunet wasn't focusing on attack, simply trying to cut away the items he had on him. First he took a sword that was strapped on his back, that he quickly found threw dragon breath weapons. Then he cut away a pouch that fell to the ground and resurrected Grrrbek literally at the god's feet. Grrrbek had only to surge upwards to hit Anubis in a place where it hurts a lot.
Raam had taken on a form even uglier than the terrasque, something large and tentacled and slimy. I wasn't about to argue with his choice, though, because despite the hideousness of the form, it was an extremely effective one for fighting in.
Anubis moved almost too quickly for the eye to see, but the warriors managed to hit him anyway. Isu sang her hyena battle song, laughing and howling.
In the end, almost all of us hit him at nearly the same time, and the god lay dead on the ground before us. I knelt beside the god, a spell on my lips, then paused.
You will choose, Sitefnut. One of us will live, the other will die. It was Imhotep's voice. Choose, and cast.
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly gone dry. Choose the god I loved, or the one I had been bound to? The god of magic and medicine, or a god of death and devouring? Choose the one I knew, or the one I did not know?
It was a long few minutes indeed.
Finally, I said, "I choose." I reached out and touched the corpse of Anubis, concentrating on him, thinking of the god whose soul I wanted to call into this body.
The body shimmered and changed. Imhotep opened his eyes. The hyena god departed my head with a final spate of laughter, leaving behind emptiness once more.
Imhotep sat up. "It's over," he remarked, mildly.
And then he kissed me, and all was abruptly right with the world.
Quotes:
"He's a god for very small values of god."
--Amunet
""Ah, Quetzalcoatl, yes..."
"Don't be agreeing!"
"This is worship, I recognize this. I get it all the time."
--Grrrbek, Raam
"We're the Department of Hitting Things Over the Head with Rocks."
--Raam
"You can partake in the ritual virgins."
"I like traveling."
"Ritual virgins--one use only."
--Storm, Grrrbek, Amunet
"I've got disconjunctivitis."
--Amunet
"I can sneak up and stab people in the back really well, and I can sell sand to a Nubian, but aside from that I don't have much to work with here."
--Amunet
"I want to cast Holy Crap."
--Mayet
"I am the ugliest sumbitch on the block."
--Raam
"Back so soon?"
"We just couldn't do without your scintillating--oh, fuck it, I attack him."
--Anubis, Raam
"I'm right by Anubis's knee?"
"Yup."
"I'm gonna cut off a pouch, all right."
--Grrrbek, Storm
*****
three years later
Sitefnut sat at a long table, studying the object she held in her hands with a fierce attention. It was a dagger, wickedly curved, the handle engraved with runes. "Now I know I've seen you before," she muttered, turning it over. "What are you, and where have you been, little one?"
"Check the guards," a male voice came from across the room. "There should be a catch."
She did, and there was, and the dagger writhed in her hands as it began to well water from the blade. "Ah," she said. "I remember this one now. One of a set of six, wasn't it?"
"It was." She looked up as Imhotep crossed the room towards her. They were in her inner sanctum, the workroom at the center of the artifact archive in the palace in Pi Rameses. "I called them something terribly pretentious when I made them, if I recall correctly. I was trying to impress someone. The first Intef, I think."
She turned the catch again and the water stopped. "Oasis daggers," she replied. "The other five are buried here and there. I think I'll keep this one here just for posterity's sake." She made a notation on the papyrus scroll she was working on, then attached a tag to the knife, rose, and stretched, her bones creaking an cracking. "I'm just going to put this away. I think it'll be pretty in the knife rack next to the Staff of Ra, don't you?"
"If you say so, love." The god was laughing as they walked out of the workroom side by side.
The vaults were massive, filled with cases and boxes from floor to ceiling. Perhaps one quarter of the cases had something in them, and as she unlocked the case she wanted to put the knife in with a touch, Sitefnut frowned. She still had so much work to do. It was never-ending.
"You like it, though," Imhotep said in response to her thought.
"Happy as a hyena in a mud wallow, Imhotep." She grinned at him. "Speaking of, Isu's close by--
The door opened, nosed by a heavy head. Isu came into the archive, her head and tail held high. Sitefnut told me you'd dropped by, she said with a toothy grin. I came back early just so I could see my favorite divine being.
"I'm glad," he said, dropping to his knee and ruffling her ears. "How are the children?"
Isu gave a soft growl of pleasure. Well. My third daughter grows strong. I think she'll be the one.
"I'm glad to hear it." Imhotep stood again and came to Sitefnut, shoving her nose into her hand. She scratched her beloved familiar behind the ears and smiled.
Pepy and Xeres are back, by the way, Isu said to them. Mayet wanted to know if you're coming to dinner.
"Of course." She looked over at Imhotep. "I don't suppose you'd join us?"
He chuckled and shook his head. "No, love. Besides, someone else comes who'd like very much to escort you to dinner. Give everyone my regards, if they choose to hear them. Tell Mayet that she'll be pregnant again before the floods come."
Sitefnut laughed and kissed him. Things have changed so much since Anubis died, she thought. The nature of their relationship had gradually changed, as it needed to--mage magic had been returned to the world and Imhotep had returned to his place in the divine realms, and his presence was no longer a constant in her mind in anything other than the priestly sense. Though they still loved each other, he was only an occasional visitor, and they spent most of his visits looking at artifacts together, doing the work that Sitefnut loved. She saved some of her hardest puzzles for his visits.
Things had taken a little while to settle down after Anubis had died. Terik had taken off for parts unknown, leaving the surprised Amun with his parents, but had come back a few months later looking shamefaced. (He later admitted that his god had given him a dressing down for leaving unfinished business behind.) He'd promptly married Amun with his parents' fervent blessing--she'd ingratiated herself with them during her stay with them, and they desperately wanted grandchildren--and the ranger split his time between staying home with Amun and running off into the wilderness after reports of marauding creatures or, better yet, undead.
Pepy, too, had taken off after Anubis had died. Xeres, however, was not nearly as content to wait for her lover to return home as Amun had been. She tracked Pepy, Rosetta strapped to her back, for six months before she found him in a small town on the edge of the desert. Sitefnut had always imagined the ensuing fight with a smile on her face--Xeres, far from the meek girl she had been while tied into the curse, had turned out to have a very strong will of her own.
Xeres and Pepy spent most of their time traveling, even when Xeres was pregnant, which she seemed to be nearly constantly. Both of them seemed happy, though Pepy still had his moments.
Grrrbek had gone to Abydos to be with his followers, and was working on becoming a major god. Sitefnut wished him well with that, though she didn't think she'd live to see it happen. He occasionally dropped by the palace--he liked Mayet's two children, and they adored him.
Amunet, too, was still traveling, working out deals in various parts of the kingdom. His affiliation with the royal household was proving to be an undeniable
Mayet, Raam, and Sitefnut had returned to the palace at Pi Rameses. Mayet had caught a child before Anubis died, it turned out, and her oldest was a bit over two years old, and her younger son was almost one. Sitefnut had fallen to her new work with a will, and now relied on Amunet to bring her curious artifacts and other magical objects--in exchange for gold, of course. She also occasionally talked Grrrbek into taking her places with him, seeking out new magics to add to the collection.
There was a knock on the door, and Sitefnut shook herself out of her reverie. She knew who it was, of course; only six people could get close enough to the vault doors to knock on them, and only one would have any reason to be here at this hour. She unlocked and pulled open the door to see a familiar man standing outside.
"I take it supper's on, Ibenre?" she asked him.
A ghost of a smile hovered on the First Prime's lips. "Of course. Are you coming?"
"I thought I would." She tilted her head at him, and the briefest of smiles crossed her face.
He offered her his arm and she took it, and the two of them strolled down the hall. Behind them, Isu bumped along, grinning her toothy hyena grin.
In the back of her mind, she could feel Imhotep's smile, and then the sense of his presence faded.
*****
Rameses the Second ruled, officially, for sixty-six years, one of the longest and most prosperous reigns in Egypt's history. Monuments that Rameses built littered the landscape of the Nile, and he did gain his wish, in a way--he will be forever immortal in the eyes of those who can see his works, even millennia later.
After reigning for about thirty years, Rameses fell ill, and his then-successor was a son that nobody, including his father, liked very much. He and Raam hatched a plan. Rameses and Raam changed places with very few people being the wiser, and Rameses departed Pi Rameses forever, leading the Unas and the maresh from Abydos into the desert. Rameses lived for five years before he died, long enough to lead the Unas to a land of their own, a desert kingdom.
Mayet was one of the few people who knew that the switch had been made. Though she remained a royal wife, she never shared the bed of the pharaoh again after the true Rameses departed. In the twenty-five years before that, though, she bore Rameses twelve living children. One of these, her fourth child Merneptah, eventually succeeded the throne. Mayet eventually became the head of the Hathor temple in Pi Rameses. She outlived not only Rameses and Raam but her son the pharaoh, dying a natural death in the second year of the reign of Amenmesse.
Raam finished out the later half of Rameses' reign, upholding his duties as the pharaoh and a mortal deity. He was responsible for about thirty of Rameses' hundred children, and as history shows, lived a long and prosperous life for a human. It has been suspected that his death at such an early age for an Unas was because of all the time he'd spent as a human, aging as a human does.
The body of Rameses that is exhibited today is actually Raam's, and very few indeed are the wiser. On his death, the amulet disappeared, taken back into Imhotep's custody in case it is ever needed again, it is said.
Pepy and Xeres finally settled down in the far south of Egypt, on the border of Nubia, where most of the followers of Anubis had retreated when their god died. Pepy occupied his time with hunting down and killing them, one by one. One day, in the thirty-fifth year of Rameses' reign, he went out and simply did not return. Xeres followed him into death no more than a year later.
Terik, fifteen years after the death of Anubis, still in his fighting prime, stood up to a fight that he really should have backed down from. He was killed for the last time in the sands outside Amarra, near where the Black Pyramid was originally located. Amun remarried about three years after his death.
Amunet, due in large part to the fact that he was Sitefnut's major supplier of artifacts, grew very, very rich. With the capital he'd gained from his adventures and selling artifacts back to the crown, he built a major trading empire. In his later years, he also grew very fat, but he truly didn't seem to care. He married four wives and outlived all but the youngest.
Sitefnut's husband Soren lived until the thirty-first year of Rameses' reign, mostly in Pi Rameses. He and Sitefnut did eventually become friends, and he adored each and every one of Mayet's children. Mayet's mother Senit came to visit but despite being repeatedly asked if she would move to Pi Rameses, was never comfortable with palace life, and stayed in Gebelein for the rest of her life.
The First Prime and Sitefnut came to an understanding about four years after the death of Anubis, a very quiet relationship that lasted until Ibenre's death in the nineteenth year of the reign of Rameses. Sitefnut grieved deeply when he died, and never seemed to have an inclination to see much of anyone else, except occasionally Imhotep, who she kept company with until her own death.
Isu lived the rest of her life with Sitefnut, dividing her time between the palace and a hyena clan that lived about twenty miles outside the walls of the city. She would go out, spend six months with her clan, and then come back with a new cub or two, much to the horror and dismay of the servants who knew that inevitably gardens would be ruined and expensive furniture gnawed to smithereens by curious baby hyena mouths. Her third daughter became the matriarch of that clan, and it was that daughter's granddaughter who led that clan and several others on the long trek across the desert to climes less peopled and richer with game. The few remaining spotted hyenas in northern Africa either died or were hunted to extinction sometime before 0 AD.
It is unknown what happened to Sekath. There is a possibility that he may be alive somewhere today. He disappeared about a century after the death of Anubis. It is speculated that, without being locked into the hyena god's will as Chronicler, he was free to travel and left for other climes. Peribsen, too, disappeared soon after Anubis died; whether he finally died of old age or still travels the world attempting to atone for his sins is anyone's guess.
Sitefnut was the artifact archivist for Rameses for twenty-seven years. Though the amulet that let her shift between mage and cleric still worked, after a few years it became harder and harder for her to shift to mage, and she finally stopped trying. Finally, it seemed, she had learned how to be happy as she was.
She was never able to speak to any hyenas but Isu again; and being now normal animals instead of animals with a fragment of a god inside of them, they saw her only as a human who was protected by a powerful, dominant one of their own, never anything more.
Sitefnut occupied the time of two scribes for an entire year, telling the story of her adventures with her odd pack, and getting what hyena stories she knew written down.
As she grew older and more frail, she moved her bed down to the artifact vault. Though her eyes began to fail her in the last few years of her life, her mind remained as sharp as ever, and she trained Mayet's youngest daughter Nafrini in her work. One day, in the thirty-first year of the reign of Rameses the Great, Sitefnut finished her work for the morning, cleared off her workbench, and lay down for a nap. Isu, by now as creaky and fragile as the woman she was bound to, joined her.
They were found by Nafrini that afternoon, both of them cold already. Isu lay with her head beneath Sitefnut's chin, Sitefnut curled around Isu, her arm thrown over the hyena. Sitefnut had a small smile on her face, as if she were dreaming about something pleasant.
A fresh lotus flower had been tucked behind her ear. That flower, in the weeks it took to prepare her body for burial, never faded or wilted. It was buried with her and Isu in the most secret of Imhotep tombs, a burial ground so well hidden that it will likely never come to light.
And if it does...
Her tomb's walls are not covered with scenes from the Book of Going Forth By Day. Instead, the priests who carved her tomb and laid her to rest wrote hyena stories on the walls, from the first Rememberer to Imhotep to Sitefnut, the last Chosen.
And somewhere in the heavens, in the spaces beyond the stars where dead gods go, a god ancient when the deities of Egypt were born runs, and laughter swirls in his wake.
Here ends The Living Sands,
a chronicle of the Egypt that never was
but the Egypt that should have been.
