Chapter 4 The Shifter #4
“No,” I said again, despite how it felt to get a taste of Ra’s celestial power and freedom.
His searing heat was accompanied by a strange chill now like a desert night wherever I touched his galactic skin dotted with stardust. “Power like that… might seem like I could be selfless with it… but to choose it would still be selfish first. Because the core of me that is always free… is only ever Meryt’s. ”
Yours, I mouthed to him, eyes only for my beloved, who smiled at me and repeated it.
Yours.
“But people change,” Ra hissed in his cosmic voice, and when he looked at me, the sun and stars truly gleamed from his gold and silver eyes.
There was something slenderer about him, feminine, and his right eye glowed brighter than the left.
The Eye of Ra. This was the wilder, more feral and genderless aspect of the god that proved the duality of the universe. The higher and lower pitch of his voice was a mix of male and female too. In that moment, he was neither and both in the same immortal breath.
And he rode me from that backward position, allowing me to feel the tight chasm of the cosmos that I had first only tasted, driving me deeper inside him like I might be swallowed by the void.
Ra brushed his left hand up my thigh, and frost erupted where his fingertips touched.
Shit.
“Time changes all, Nakht.” He brushed his right hand up my other thigh, spreading heat so intense that I feared my skin might blister like when Meryt gave me my matching scar. “What happens when he changes, hm? Or when you do?”
Ra spread the frost and smoking heat over more of me, at first by his touch, then it spread on its own, covering all of either half of me like a cross section between day and night.
It hurt, but it also didn’t. I felt scorched and frozen but equally numb to everything save the pleasure of Ra riding me where his heat and cold met.
As heightened as I was from the sensations coursing through me, amid the extremes in temperature fighting for balance, my desperation to not lose this trial kept my release at bay.
And I was even more desperate now to make sure Ra finished first.
I sat up, startling him as he flailed to find purchase on his knees, only I kept him close so I could continue to fuck him with both of us upright, making it easier to reach around him and grab hold of his cock.
He had one in the shape of a man’s, but he had another entrance now too, between where I entered him and the fall of his sac. I alternated between stroking his shaft and fingering this new opening, this culmination of his forms like he was all of them in one.
As I thought that, horns grew from his head, ram-like but black now, and feathers sprouted in his celestial hair. The long, thin, tongue-like appendage on the tip of his cock returned too, teasing my pulse point with little licks when my strokes passed it.
Thrusting into him with renewed zeal, I reached around with my other hand so the first no longer had to rotate, allowing me to stroke his length and finger his feminine lips in fevered chorus.
As Ra gasped and moaned in his whisper/hiss voice, I centered my eyes where they always should have remained.
On the dusk to my dawn and his proud smile.
“We will weather those changes together,” I said, conquering Ra at last, for his heat and frost were spreading into each other now, soothing my skin and leaving it glistening and wet.
“That is all I can promise… but I would never trade Meryt for an eternal crown…
even if that risks him growing beyond me.
“I choose him,” I asserted, and did not stop reclaiming the power Ra had stolen from me until he cried out and spilled over my fingers, and I felt a flood of wetness from his other entrance too. “Always.”
I closed my eyes as I pumped through my own release within the glorious god of the sunlit sky, and when I looked again to the boat’s deck, Meryt was gone, but I could have sworn he had ended half the distance from me than where he’d started.
I hoped so.
As soon as I disentangled from the cosmic Amun-Ra, I felt the energy I had been gifted from tasting his sunlight drain out of me.
Ra turned, still in his combined majesty, and helped to lay me down upon the bed.
With him hovering over me, I could have been looking at an actual eclipse with how his eyes glowed in that mesmerizing darkness.
Ra brushed some of the hair from my face, and I felt the familiar tingle of this strange form of his, both hot and cold on the edge of too much. My tiredness seemed to increase at his touch, but so too did I feel myself cleansed. My skin was taut and dry, rejuvenated from its purge in fire and ice.
“Rest,” he said, “more than you did after Geb. When you wake, you will meet your next trial. Unless you have changed your mind?”
I smiled. His malleableness, ever-changing, did make him tempting, and not only for the added promise of power, but I shook my head. “I choose him,” I said again.
Ra nodded.
“My lord?” I had to ask, for with success came clarity, and being ageless and untouched by disease did not mean I couldn’t be killed. “Would I truly have reigned forever as Pharaoh, or only until someone thought it time to lead a coup against me like what led to Meryt’s death?”
Ra didn’t answer directly but granted me a grin.
Tired as I was, I thought it would be impossible to heed his request—to rest, sleep—when I was only halfway through my trials?
But as I lounged and Ra got up, still remaining a celestial phantom like the night sky formed into a horned and feathered man—or rather human, since he was man and woman both—I found my eyes growing heavier, and they closed as if a spell had been cast upon me.
If Pasht returned to brush her fur against my skin, I did not notice, other than perhaps the faintest sound of purring.
Or was that a distant roar again?
Regardless, I fell into the deepest sleep I had ever known. In the mortal realm, we had to sleep lightly, for Pharaoh or others might call upon us at a moment’s notice, but the gods had granted me true sleep with the comfort and promise that I was safe.
I awoke feeling refreshed and gave a great stretch when I opened my eyes to see if Ra remained with me.
A giant snake’s maw as large as my entire body, with fangs the size of my forearms, was lunging down to devour me in a bite!
I rolled, just narrowly escaping that perilous end, as the snake’s fangs sank into the daybed. Apophis, that was whose roar I had been hearing, the snake that would eat the sun if not defeated each morning.
For now, Ra had said when saying nothing could harm me here, and he was nowhere to be seen.