Chapter 5 The Warrior #2
I sagged against the archway that opened from the corridor into Seth’s home, my knees weak and trembling and heart still pounding.
I glanced behind me, taking in more of the humble living space.
It was small, a single cozy room with bare amenities, but everything inside was so beautiful.
The furniture was carved from the stone itself and inlaid with more of those glittering scales.
Indeed, everything was made from reddish-brown stone and Apophis’s red and black snake scales, giving everything from practical items to artistic decor a ruby shimmer.
There were bones here too, used as decoration with the scales, some even forming the full animals they once had been that I assumed Seth had hunted and eaten, like antelope, similar to his mask. He lived among death, entombed all alone. As beautiful as it all was, I felt an instant sinking sorrow.
I heard snuffling like from a dog and whirled back around. Ra’s boat was leaving, transforming as it unmoored from the night boat to the bright and colorful one for the day. I couldn’t see Ra, but I knew he was there, ready to bring the morn.
At the far entrance into the corridor stood the silhouette of a jackal.
I lurched backward. No. That was the Seth animal on all fours, hidden in shadow. Was he a man with an antelope skull for a crown, or some chimera yet unknown? Having spent my time with Ra, I had to remind myself that both could be true.
As I continued to back up until I felt my legs reach the table, the animal trotted toward me.
It was too low to the ground for the torchlight to fully illuminate it, but just as it reached the archway and would become bathed in light it couldn’t escape, the torso of a man stretched upright, like Seth had simply been crawling.
He was the warrior I had seen, with a skull mask and long red hair.
With no weapon.
“Your spear?” I questioned, for Ra’s boat was out of sight and Apophis long gone too.
Seth held out a hand, and a roar echoed, more distant than any of the others but also more pained, as the spear was summoned from the eye it had been lodged within, as if the monster had already started to heal around it, only for the wound to violently reopen.
Next, I heard the slicing song of air being cut until the spear found its home back in Seth’s grasp.
It showed no stains, perhaps having cleaned itself during its flight, and Seth hung it upon the wall just inside the archway on a custom-made hook.
He spread his arms, and his armor, dismissed from him like he had shrugged off a robe, hung itself on the wall beside the spear, leaving him in a simple red tunic that may as well have been dyed with blood.
The skull mask remained, and as Seth moved his hands to either side of it, I knew not what to expect or whether the headdress was only a headdress.
I opened my mouth to speak.
“Do not tell me I need not hide my nature,” Seth snarled, easier to recognize now as his voice than when he was yelling at me. This was the same snide and unimpressed tambor I had taken as his when the gods offered me these trials.
He removed his mask, revealing very human reddish-brown eyes and a stunning visage.
The crimson god was somehow more beautiful to me than all of those before him, maybe because of his fierceness, his obvious anger when the others had all been benevolent, even Geb, who had frightened me at first, and Ra, who had proven mischievous.
“I am whatever form I choose to be, when I choose it, and no other,” he said, and threw the headdress at me.
I caught it on instinct, and in my hands, the hollows of its eyes glowed red, startling me into dropping it. But, before it could hit the ground, it flew over to the wall to hang itself above the armor. “O-of course, my lord. My apologies,” I stammered with a bow.
Seth stomped into the room past me, tall and lithe and absolutely holding my attention so there was nothing I could do but turn with him and follow where he went.
He tossed himself upon his daybed, spreading out like a lounging cat.
“Welcome to a part of the Duat no mortal ever sees,” he said, gesturing with one arm to encompass the room. “Pitiful, isn't it?”
Already, he was baiting me. This would not be the same as my time with the others.
I moved toward him, stopping just in front of the bed. I didn’t dare join him until bidden, and there weren’t many other places to sit. The table and chairs—no, chair, for what need did he have of two—felt too far away from where the daybed rested.
“I actually find it quite lovely here. Not your solitude, but what you have crafted and built around yourself, while not a substitute for company, is beautiful.”
Seth huffed, sounding very similar to the snuffle from his jackal-like form. “Even a brute can have an artistic eye.”
“You are no brute.”
“No?”
“Brutes aren’t clever.”
Seth huffed again, but this time, I caught the tease of a smile on his lips. “Go on,” he said.
“My lord?”
“Ask me already. Ask about my interestingly dressed salad.”
Oh. That was one of the odder parts to his story with Horus.
“Isn’t it what all you mortals wonder about?” Seth pressed. “Whether that story rings true?”
It felt awkward standing there, but he was taking up the entire bed, seemingly on purpose, leaving me no place to go. “Stories can become corrupted over the years, my lord, and it has been well over a thousand since the first accounts of yours.”
“Tell me what you know of it, Nakht.”
Not even Anubis’s voice had made my knees feel quite as weak as Seth saying my name. The pounding of my heart had yet to slow either.
With the request, Seth gestured not for me to sit or lie beside him but to the floor beneath where he lounged.
So be it. I was not yet certain how to navigate this trial, but I knelt like a humble servant before my master and recounted the story I knew.
“During your contendings with your nephew, Horus, between challenges, you sought to seduce him to claim victory. You brought yourself to hardness and pierced between his thighs, but he caught you and you came in his hand instead of inside him. He showed his mother the shame of your seed, who threw it away, and then Horus released his seed upon a bundle of lettuce that was later fed to you as a trick, proving the one who had been bested and claimed was you.”
Seth remained impassive through the retelling, watching me with a sharpness in his ruddy eyes that matched that of his spear’s blade. Then he waited, and waited, but there was no more to tell.
Was there?
Eventually, Seth grabbed my chin and tilted it higher, as if studying my face.
“M-my lord?”
“You haven’t asked yet.”
I had to be careful with this god of chaos. “Is it true?”
Seth leaned down closer to me, so very close, enough that I felt the heat from his breath when he whispered, “No. Not even that Horus is my nephew.”
“He isn’t?” I sputtered when Seth released my chin.
“How simplistic you mortals are with family and relations. The gods are all kin in a way, but not in the same sense that you could have a brother or nephew.”
“I suppose that makes sense.”
“Horus was never a child either. None of us were. He was inexperienced when we met but still a man. And what fire he had.” Seth’s eyes danced with remembrance. “What drive, intent on bringing order to my chaos at all costs. Shall I tell you what really happened between us?”
Seth reached for me again, this time to stroke my hair, and as he did, I caught a glint of something catching the light.
His nails were longer than they had been a moment ago, like claws.
“I tried to seduce Horus to spite Osiris,” Seth said, running his new claws through the unbraided sections of my hair, occasionally stopping to stroke the plaits and adornments woven into them.
“To spite all who thought me unworthy of the throne, not out of any true want at first, yet in my cruel self-serving seduction…” He drifted off, his words and his gaze, as if seeing the past replay in his mind the same way Meryt was experiencing memories.
There was longing in his eyes and all the sorrow I had felt when looking upon his solitary home for the first time.
I knew that loss, for I had worn the same expression not long ago.
“You fell in love with him.”
Seth’s eyes snapped to mine, and the hold he had on my hair became twisted and tight. “My intentions were impure, regardless of the outcome. My atonement is to all creation, to ensure the next day always comes until Apophis no longer rises anew.”
“But the beast regenerates,” I said, careful to hold still while he had such a brutal grip on me. “Will there ever be such a day?”
Seth didn’t answer, and something else caught my attention from beneath his tunic.
A tail was slithering out of it, but not from any animal I had ever seen before. It was forked like a barbed whip more than any usual appendage, and it undulated like a snake as it neared me.
I looked back at Seth’s face with a spike of fear, only for another spike to pierce me, for the rest of him had changed as well now.
I didn’t have to look back at his headdress to know it remained on the wall, yet he looked once again as if he wore it, only it was part of him now, his actual face, antelope-like, skull-like, with tall horns and eye hollows glowing red.
Seth twisted my hair tighter around his clawed fingers, forcing me to lean forward with my chin practically in his lap.
“Every day, I must prove worthy. How lovely finally to have someone who must prove such a thing to me. Do you think you can, Nakht?” His growl was so similar to Apophis’s roar that I started to shake.
“Can you submit to what your god asks of you and still resist when I make my final offer?”
Frightened though I was, I had no other answer. “Yes. I bested four gods before you, and I will best the four remaining, starting with you.”
“A bold statement.” His red eyes flashed brighter.
“Then ask what you will of me and let me prove it.”