Heshtat cut, and the world peeled apart.

  A seam of darkness split the air, shimmering and hovering in place where the tip of his empowered blade had passed. Heshtat breathed out, the single strike having taken something indefinable from him. A quick inspection of his soul showed all the power of his newly awakened aspect was gone. Drained in an instant.

  It would already be refilling, supping greedily on the thick ambient essence wafting about the temple, but the act had been incredibly essence-intensive. His body felt tired, too, like Heshtat was back on the training yard, weighted bars held out to his sides as he dripped with sweat following a brutal training session under the watchful eye of Old Greybeard.

  “By Min’s virile balls, what is that?” Maatkare muttered, moving to get a better look at the gaping tear in reality Heshtat had wrought on the world with his new power.

  “He Who Travels,” Heshtat breathed in wonder, giving little thought to his friend’s casually vulgar blasphemy. Without waiting to consider the move, he stuck his head in, no doubt disappearing from the neck up in Maatkare’s view. To Heshtat though, the world changed when he thrust his head through the tear.

  Purple light bathed his face as he beheld the inverted dreamscape of the Other. He had cut through the veil between worlds. A minor god, indeed. Nemty had granted him the greatest blessing any in the pantheon could, and Heshtat couldn’t believe his luck.

  He had hoped for some method of traversal that would serve them if they came across further caverns. He’d witnessed the danger that a mere hole in the floor could pose when he’d watched a million beetles vie for the chance to burrow into his friend’s brain. This was the second unnaturally deep cavern they stood in, and they were about to journey across the second thin stone bridge.

  He had foreseen a problem and looked for a solution, but a path across the veil was far beyond even his wildest hopes and dreams. And this was simply the power of an awakened channelled through his blade. What would he be capable of as an adept? And if he worked with an adept of Akh to craft rituals that could take advantage of this power… the possibilities were frightening to truly consider.

  He pulled back, once more returning to the Waking. Although not quite, given the strange state of realm-drift this temple resided in. Maatkare looked like he was about to pop.

  “I cut through the veil,” Heshtat said tiredly, once more feeling the weight of exhaustion that the act had brought on. “It allows travel between the Waking and the Other.”

  Maatkare glared at him. “I shoot fire from my blades, and you can cut through the veil.” He did not sound happy.

  “It is special fire,” Heshtat pointed out, rather unhelpfully.

  Maatkare’s cheek twitched. They looked at one another in silence.

  “Ah, my bastard friend! I cannot stay mad at you! Come, let us move forward. There are more fiends to slay, yes?”

  ***

  “They’re getting stronger!” Maatkare shouted.

  He grunted with the effort of dragging his tulwar from the chest of a hippopotamus-hybrid. Rather than thick, fatty tissue for protection, it was covered in overlapping plates of chitin, and its scorpion tail thrashed about as it squealed in pain. The dark organic armour had melted from the intense spiritual heat of Maatkare’s weapon, and he was having a tough time pulling it from the body while avoiding the appendage.

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Heshtat called back, dancing between two bipedal creatures. Their tall, scaled legs supported plump feathered bodies, like a house on stilts, but their hooked beaks were wickedly sharp, and their long necks both dextrous and deadly quick. They weren’t entirely dissimilar from the Shuti that Heshtat had rode many times before, but they were disturbingly silent—no snapping or croaking.

  He had, in fact, noticed. Only a few hours ago, they had been able to cut through scores of the Desolate, but now their progress was slowing. A claw came dangerously close to his neck, but Heshtat snapped his blade up in time, severing the offending digit with his blazing white weapon. The creature recoiled, still strangely silent, and he pressed the advantage.

  The fights were getting harder, the creatures stronger, but Heshtat still had peerless reflexes and speed for his mere acolyte rank, and when married to his impressive skill, it proved a deadly combination. He cut, swaying beneath a lunge from one creature, while stamping the digitigrade knee of the other backwards as he did so. Another scything cut to open an artery along the thigh, then quick steps sideways to avoid more grasping claws.

  Move. Shoulder-check. Parry, slice, and lunge in to close the distance. Maatkare was grunting and whistling like a frustrated kettle, still embroiled in a desperate roll with the hippo-hybrid, and Heshtat let out his own roar of frustration and joy as he pressed his two enemies backwards. They outnumbered him—four clawed legs, and two vicious beaks—but a single sword in the right hands was worth a thousand weapons in the wrong. That was something he’d learned in the Janissaries, and he proved the truth of it now.

  Two heads soon hit the ground, blood spraying across the wall behind as long necks flopped about drunkenly atop soon-to-be-dead bodies. He looked to help his friend, but Maatkare took that exact moment to finally put the beast out of its misery, silencing the pained and angry squeals with hard steel and spiritual fire.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “We are making progress,” Heshtat said, panting. “But it’s slow. The longer this goes on, the more powerful the foes that are called to this place.”

  “I know. Why do you insist on telling me basic fact? Does it amuse you to think me slow and stupid?”

  “You… are not?”

  Maatkare threw up his hands. “My friend is a lowlife criminal, this I know. But when did he become so cruel? Lord Anubian, please liberate me from this partnership—I no longer wish brotherhood with such a monster.”

  Heshtat rolled his eyes at the melodramatics. “Alright. Be serious now. Our progress is too slow and the danger is only mounting. By the time we make it halfway to the peak, the enemies will be beyond us, even with new strength.”

  “That, my friend, is the talk of a man with a plan. Or a hopeless man too deep into his cups—I trust we are not back there, hey?”

  That, more than anything, confirmed to Heshtat that his friend was struggling. Maatkare liked to push buttons, but he knew exactly where the line was, and walked it with care. Heshtat did not like to dwell on the early years of his exile, and Maatkare well knew it—for him to slip up and make such a comment in jest showed that he was feeling the pressure.

  Heshtat shrugged it aside. “We are limiting ourselves. Half in the Waking, half in the Other, dealing with the worst of both worlds.”

  Maatkare laughed, a gleam coming to his eye as he caught on. “You sly bastard. I’m in. It will be dangerous, though.”

  “True, but we are already in danger. At least we can get out of this temple.”

  “To the sands once more?”

  “Not quite. I say we take inspiration from Great Amin-Ra—half in the temple, half the endless sands.” He could see Maatkare didn’t quite understand, so he leaned forwards, letting a touch of a smile grace his honeyed skin. “We climb up the temple from the outside—avoid all this navigation and teleportation.”

  Maatkare hummed. “Straight to the peak? I like it, my ambitious friend, but can I even follow you through?”

  “Let us find out.”

  ***

  Heshtat had mustered what vigour he had remaining after a hard-fought battle and channelled the gifts of his new god to cut through the world once more. The portal to the golden sands of the Other shimmered beyond the torn veil, and he stepped through, his friend on his heels.

  They emerged again onto the Endless Desert, but the land around was far from featureless. The Other was a strange place—not meant for mortals in its design—and emotion and intention held greater sway than whatever laws governed the Waking World. There were no distances that mattered here in this twilight realm. Heshtat had held in his mind the temple they dwelt within currently, and that intention had led into his strike, carving a seam in the fabric of reality that led to a place near his desired location.

  Amin-Ra’s great temple stood proudly nearby, its white surface looking almost purple in the strange twilight of this world’s black sun. Its lower floors were buried, the greedy sands swallowing the bottom half of the structure and Heshtat didn’t miss that those were the sections that they had already climbed. But it still stood tall. The golden halo that crowned its peak stood out even from a distance, gleaming a signal to whatever beasts and monsters might look its way.

  Heshtat didn’t have a smooth or refined way to see the skein of essence in the world—Waking or Other—but he could brute force it, pushing essence through twisted and mangled pathways to get a confused and murky glimpse of the spiritual sight that so many practitioners of Akh—the Intellect—relied on. When he used that shoddy technique now, the pyramid’s tip lit the world.

  Shining essence spewed forth from it like a light house in night-dark seas, illuminating the sands around for miles with its golden promise. The creator deity had left something there, and it pulsed with power. Heshtat shared a look with Maatkare, and after he used their poor man’s spiritual sight, they winced together.

  That much power, shining forth so obviously to the hungry denizens of the Other? That spoke to a guardian of such potency that the horrors of the Otherworld did not dare breach the temple’s sacred sanctum. But they were men, not monsters, and their bravery—or foolishness—couldn’t be compared.

  Maatkare spoke up. “If we intend to do this, we should do so now. Monsters draw close.”

  “We were Tomb Guard once. The horrors of the Other have no hold on us,” Heshtat replied with a confidence he didn’t quite feel.

  “And you will be again, eh?” Maatkare asked with a grin.

  Strangely, the thought kindled no joy in Heshtat. He had expected it to; it was his nominal purpose, after all. The reason he gave for taking this mission. His reward was the lifting of the exile, the redeeming of his name, but his pride was thin at this point and didn’t hold much sway over his actions any longer. He could retire, find a peaceful life living on the banks of the great Nikea, fishing the waters and watching the sun rise and fall each day in comfort.

  But that wasn’t what he had said to others. He had pretended he wished to rejoin the Tomb Guard, to be one of the storied few once more and retake his rightful place beside his queen. The dissonance surprised him. He’d given it so little thought in practice, and now that he truly considered it, he realised he didn’t want that life. To protect someone, to spend his days constantly looking around every corner, searching every face in a crowd for malice, and stalking the dreams of his charge like a caged tiger.

  What did he want then? Why did he do this? For her, obviously. He couldn’t live in a world where he let her down again. But that wasn’t enough to fulfil a man. Enough to keep him from taking his own life, perhaps. Enough to keep him putting one foot in front of another each day. But not enough to motivate him to great feats.

  How was he here then? Cutting apart the world and fighting with the chosen of True Thrones while still a mere acolyte? Heshtat realised, in that single moment after Maatkare spoke, that he was lacking purpose. He needed a positive vision to aim for, and he needed it soon. ‘We will be free once more’ wasn’t enough—he needed more.

  Time was dragging on and so he turned to his friend. “Would you not rejoin the Guard?”

  Maatkare twirled his gleaming tulwar, the edge chipped but the blade still shining in the perpetual twilight of the Other. “I cannot abandon my creche. I have chosen a new life now, and I would see it through.”

  There was a quiet confidence in those words. A calm acceptance of the future that Heshtat envied. To be so sure of one’s purpose; to know the future that Nenut had written for you and to be happy with her story seemed profoundly brave to Heshtat, and he was awed by his friend’s conviction.

  “Then we shall return you to your students,” he said, taking on a new goal in the short term. “You shall show them the ways of cultivation with deed and word, and there shall be no man in Idib capable of harming them.”

  “The Guardian Sesh,” Maatkare said with a smile.

  “Let us not get carried away with names just yet,” Heshtat disagreed.

  They smiled, then hefted weapons and began their ascent. There was a great temple hiding its treasure, and it needed climbing.