“Why are you doing this?” Heshtat asked, panting as he held his wound tight. Blood seeped over his hand, deep and dark, and he knew what that meant.

  “Come, my friend,” Maatkare parried, his grin a ghastly thing with his red-stained teeth and mangled face. “Is now really the time for trivial conversation?”

  “It is not trivial,” Heshtat grunted back, wrapping a bandage around his waist and cinching it tight.

  “How is the weather? And your parents—are they well? Yes, the barley grows nicely this year, what a promising harvest we have!” Maatkare chuckled, though his grimace put a lie to the light words.

  “Ah, now you mock small talk, but is yours so much better?” Heshtat challenged, hissing as he levered himself up to lean against the crumbled stone wall. “’Are you single, Maatkare? My, what beautiful hair you have Maatkare! Have you ever been with two women at once, Maatkare? … would you like to?’” Heshtat quoted, putting on a high falsetto to imitate the licentious women Maatkare had pursued in his youth.

  His friend laughed then, more of a cough than anything, and blood spattered to the dusty ground, leaving a red stain on the golden scarab carved into the broken masonry. “Is that a real question, my friend? The weather versus the love of a good woman?”

  He’d walked into that, and they were getting off track. “Why are you still here?” he asked again. “You can still leave. The face wound might hurt your chances with the young maidens, but perhaps this will finally help you attract a real woman, hey?”

  Maatkare snorted. “Please, it adds character,” he said, pointing at the gruesome wound in his head. He’d received a nasty gash that crossed from forehead to jaw, somehow missing his right eye in the process, but leaving little else spared. His nose was barely hanging on. “And what a story to tell, my friend. ‘Did I ever tell you of the time I journeyed into the mythical tomb of Amin-Ra himself? How I wielded a burning blade, black as the night, and with it slew creatures conjured from the depths of the abyss?’”

  He turned to Heshtat, one eye nearly swollen shut but the other wide with joy and mirth. “I suspect I’ll have more success than ever.”

  Heshtat tried to laugh, but the shaking of his stomach caused a lance of agony to shoot through his belly, and he winced and spat instead. The sound of his spit hitting the ground was wet and heavy—more than phlegm. He knew what that meant, too.

  “You know I always thought it would be you,” Maatkare said casually as he tied off the bandage.

  “What’s that?”

  “The hero. I always thought you would be the one to claim the Eye and bring it back to our queen. I had hoped to be there, I must admit, but I thought it would be you as the returning hero and myself as the plucky—and extraordinarily handsome—sidekick.”

  “Aye, well… enjoy the glory, you old goat,” Heshtat said with a faint smile. “You deserve it.”

  “Indeed,” he preened. “Perhaps our queen would even recognise my heroism and reward me with her favour, hmm?” He glanced sidelong at Heshtat, quick enough to see the hot flash of anger on his face and laughed. “I knew it! Just admit it, my friend—you still love her. It is okay, there is no shame in it. Our queen is a magnificent woman, and you could do far worse in a partner.”

  “Pah!” Heshtat huffed. “You can have the glory, but you’ll get no further satisfaction from me. Let me die in peace, you bastard.”

  His friend chuckled again. “I am sorry to see you go. You were the best of us, Heshtat. Old Greybeard could see it clear as day, even back then,” he said wistfully, and Heshtat felt himself transported back on wings of memory. “Even those first few months, when you were wild and wilful… gods, but the arrogance on you! Do you remember your face when Seti beat you in sparring one-handed?”

  He laughed, and it sounded like home to Heshtat. Simpler times. He found himself smiling.

  “Funnily enough,” Heshtat replied with a pained grimace; not quite a grin, but close enough. “I had other things to worry about. Like a mouthful of sand.”

  “Ha! I remember. Spitting like a viper, you were. ‘He’ll not make it two summers’ I said. But then you started cultivating the proper way, left all that Sasskanid alchemical nonsense behind and communed with the true gods, and then there was no stopping you. Who was your first channel again?”

  “Bestat,” Heshtat confirmed. “I channelled her power through Ren, back before I knew what I was doing, so it didn’t help much beyond the general benefits of awakening an aspect.”

  “A stupid thing to do,” Maatkare said with a smile. “The goddess of cats channelled through the Name… Only a foreigner could cultivate with such little forethought.”

  “She is goddess of more than cats, my ignorant friend,” Heshtat corrected. “The home, fertility, protection magic and pregnancy. She has many aspects, despite being a minor deity.”

  “Heshtat—the champion of fertility. Ha!”

  “Do not laugh,” he rebuked. “You had a channel to Min, did you not?”

  “Yes, but Min is the god of virility as well. And look how I have used it! I have spread my seed across the desert, while you pine after a woman from afar for an entire decade. Tell me; which of our gods is best pleased by their champion, hmm?”

  “Ah, you are incorrigible!” Heshtat moaned. “Leave me to my fate. I heard there is dignity in death, but I shall not cross the Final Door with your nattering in my ear! You would consign my soul to the Gobbler if great Osirion judged my heart and it was weighed down by your poisonous words.”

  They shared another wheezing laugh, though both couldn’t muster much strength any longer.

  “What did you see?” Maatkare asked. “When you awakened your first aspect? What vision resulted from your first channel?”

  Heshtat hummed in thought for a moment, letting the pleasant memories take him. He knew what Maatkare was doing, and loved the man for it even as his heart broke that he could not do the same for his friend. To die with good memories gave the soul direction in its final journey, and the opposite was also true. Maatkare’s soul would wander far before finding its way to the Final Door.

  “I saw eyes in the night,” he said, voice slowing as he became lost in the past. “The eyes of a great leopard. They shadowed my steps for an age before I faced them, and then I saw the creature itself step forth from the gloom. Gods, it was beautiful, Maatkare. Golden light poured into form, the epitome of feline grace and fearsome power. There were fields of barley and the Nikea rushed by in the distance, but we were in the Badlands of my homeland for some reason.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “I remember not thinking it strange. It approached me, that great cat, and lowered its head to nuzzle my chest. Its purring set my spine to rumbling, and the earth beneath my feet shook with its power. And then it looked into my eyes, and I awoke.”

  “That is all?” Maatkare asked, nonplussed. “Usually there is more to it. That sounds…”

  “Anticlimactic? Aye. I suppose in some ways it was. But that was the point. I had spent my life until then worshipping the God-Queen. The monarch of Sasskania, the One Above All. She is a figure of power and myth and awe, even now.” He broke off with a slight cough, then took a wheezing breath in. “There are many reasons the undying Pharaohs stay in their provinces in Amansi, but one of them is that the way east is barred by her power. To encounter another deity, and to interact with a sliver of their power…”

  He sighed and looked down at his blood-stained hands. “I felt it when I looked into that creature’s eyes—divinity. True divinity, unmarred by mortal pretentions, and I realised it was nothing special. There are gods by the hundreds in this ancient land, and there are more beyond the horizon. It made me realise I could reinvent myself by new rules, could grow and change and perhaps overcome the man I’d once been. I’d realised I could make myself into someone that could find a home in Amansi, beneath the eyes of foreign gods.”

  “Oh, Heshtat,” Maatkare said with a sigh. “You hopeless romantic. You loved her even then, did you not?”

  Heshtat looked away. His friend heaved himself over, coughing once more as the movement disturbed wounds that were too deep to heal but too shallow to kill swiftly. He grabbed Heshtat by the shoulders and wrenched him round to look into his eyes.

  “You were broken once before. I know the terms of the trade, as well as you, yes?” At Heshtat’s nod, he continued. “Your soul rebuilt itself from cracked foundations once already. Do so again.”

  Heshtat blinked. It was not good advice; was nothing revolutionary and it was nothing he hadn’t thought of before. But the blunt delivery, the lack of care for his excuses, caused Heshtat to consider it once more.

  “I cannot simply open a new channel. Even if Amin-Ra’s remnant will does not kick me from this place the moment I do, how would I make it to the Other in the first place? Without the priests and their rituals to breach the veil, and without their guidance to find the correct gods…”

  “I do not care,” Maatkare said, eyes drilling into his with intensity. “We are getting you home. My soul will not rest until you deliver the Eye to our queen. I shall not pass through the Final Door until I witness you take her in hand and admit your love for her. I swear it by the gods and the devils, by the million souls of Amansi and all the grains of sand in the Endless Desert.”

  Heshtat widened his eyes at the solemn oath, knowing the effect it would have. His friend had bound his soul inextricably to the Waking until his task was fulfilled. Were he to die before then—which was looking likely based on his blood-drenched armour—his soul would wander the Other as a cursed thing until he was banished or destroyed. It was not a vow to take lightly.

  “What have you done?” he whispered.

  Maatkare’s gaze bored into his unflinchingly. “I trust you, my friend. Don’t make me a liar before the gods. Fulfil my oath.”

  The words hit Heshtat like a sledgehammer. ‘Fulfil your oath’ was something he had heard long ago when running through the Other at the height of his power. His pharaoh—that ‘great man’ Maatkare had opened his eyes to, the one Cleo had once loved and now hated—had said the same to him long ago. Screamed it at him when the Desolate had caught up to them.

  Heshtat remembered becoming the Sandstorm once more, but this time his blade was backed by the power of a tripartite adept blessed by multiple war gods of Amansi. It hadn’t been enough, of course—nothing could be in the face of what he had seen, and the pharaoh had known it too. ‘Find my daughter,’ he’d screamed at the last. ‘Fulfil your oath’. And then he had drawn power from the Otherworld and flung Heshtat back to the Waking, to stand trial for his failures.

  The memories washed over him, and he felt his soul quake. He had volunteered for the breaking. Indeed, it was a spiritual procedure that could not be undertaken without the cultivator’s assent and was always at risk of undoing as the soul sort to heal itself. He had undergone monthly inspections from the palace guard as part of his exile, to ensure he did not hold new essence in his cracked and broken soul.

  But that promise to never again cultivate rested upon the foundation of an older and more profound oath—to protect one’s Pharaoh. The sentiment that every Tomb Guard is inculcated with from the start of their training to the end of their service. And beyond that, even more resonant with Heshtat and his soul, was a more primal truth. ‘Find my daughter. Fulfil your oath’.

  Heshtat’s soul shook, and he reached out to the world around him. Beyond the crumbled masonry filling the long hallway they huddled within and the blood and dust coating their armour. Beyond their weapons lying useless by their sides, beyond the hordes of gibbering monsters clamouring at the chamber door.

  He reached out to the Otherworl, that twisted mirror of the Waking within which the power of the gods dwelt. And as he did so unreservedly, as he let his soul flex and mend, baptised anew in the ambient essence that eddied in thick currents all around them, he realised what had been nagging at him ever since he had stepped foot in the ancient temple.

  The shadows of the torch flames in that first hallway, waving as if underwater, moving counter to the flames in the sconces above. The impossibly thick essence wafting about, the presence of the Desolate, and even the strange translocation portals… it all pointed towards one thing.

  They were already in the Otherworld.

  To step inside the Temple of Amin-Ra was to enter the Other in physical form. That was why the structure felt so strange, why distance and time seemed unmoored, why creatures that should only exist in the Other without an anchored gate to the Waking were here. It even explained how they had switched from perfect temple to ruined tomb without notice.

  Heshtat had already reached that realm, that upside-down dimension where reality was inverted and twisted on the whims of emotion and magic. He had been in it for hours now. When he had first entered and marvelled at the power on display, wishing to simply take it into himself, to awaken his soul and once more cultivate… Now he could.

  He focused, drawing in his mind a picture. He could sit still and cultivate—draw the energy of the Other to him and filter it with his own understanding and intention-—and aim to draw a god’s notice the traditional way without priestly guidance. Such an effort would take weeks though, even in an environment as rich in ambient essence as this one, and that was time he didn’t have. Not with the Desolate pounding and scrabbling and scratching at the door.

  Instead, Heshtat focused on a memory. Feline eyes in the distance, and a golden leopard stalking the canyons and valleys of his homeland. He pictured the creature: the scent of it, the way its great head felt as it crashed into him, the tickle of its fur and the way its voice vibrated down his spine. The spiritual flavour of it, the all-encompassing feeling of what that creature represented. Most of all, he focused on what the goddess that it represented had given him once before and could give him once again.

  He held the visualisation in his mind’s eye for an eternity, and as he screamed his intention with all the power of his shattered soul, he felt the Other respond. His eyes snapped open as the clamour at the barred doorway redoubled, inhuman screeches and cries coming from a dozen throats and beaks as the Desolate responded to the power blooming within the room.

  No golden leopards approached, but the room did shift. Heshtat found himself in the desert. The stone beneath his feet was replaced by endless sand, and the crumbled pillar he’d used as a backrest had vanished, alongside Maatkare, though the temple walls remained around him.

  Then the ground shook. It happened again, and Heshtat clambered to his feet, sinking into a crouch for stability. Soon enough the very earth was shaken by footsteps as heavy as the horizon.

  A wet leopard growl split the temple apart, and Heshtat found his gaze drawn up towards the purple sky now visible above. Beneath the gentle curve of the twilight sun and the twinkling stars behind, two great eyes blinked open in the sky. Feline, vertically slitted and blazing with a golden light, they stared into and through Heshtat’s soul.

  Assessing him, drinking in his essence, before blinking slowly.

  A soft rumble, setting the fine grains around his feet to dancing, and Heshtat heard a sound like a footpad stepping carefully onto sand. One of the great dunes a mile away was enveloped by a black pillar of night, and he was given the impression of a something dark and huge rising into the heavens, as vast as the world itself. Those golden eyes bored into his own, and then blinked closed once more, before a quiet purring filled his mind.

  Then the power came rushing into his soul, and Heshtat screamed.