AN - understated priest set x maha'ado, written for contest. enjoy. -milly
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He wakes up in the middle of the night to a room dark save for the flickering of a torchlight. It casts creases on the stone ceiling above him.
Set is not at the battlefield; he has been carried here, he has been cleaned and clothed. Or rather, bandaged; he can see that the tip of an arrow makes a tent with the white linen slabs that have been wrapped around his chest.
He wonders why he is here. He should be fighting alongside his men. He should go back; he has always led his armies rather than watch them fight from behind. And he did so even as his body and kaa grew weaker, especially over the last few austere years inflicted to Egypt by a series of droughts.
A rapid succession of scenes flood his mind: the adrenaline surge caused by the surprise raid on their encampment in the middle of the desert, beyond enemy borders; the void in his kaa when the dragon girl retreated, then waned for good; warrior cries from both sides, melting into chaos as his own horse fell under him; the hastily lit torches becoming hazy suns as his vision blurred and the ground came crashing into him.
He does not remember the potent sting of the arrow tip in his chest.
Nor can he feel it.
He sits up, sheds the moist bandages away. The arrow has been cut not too close from the skin. It is smeared in his own blood, slimy and congealed, neither warm nor cold.
Set looks around him. He isn't in his chambers. He isn't being tended to, nor guarded. He stands up and walks out, following the glow of the torches lit in the hallway.
The palace is nearly empty.
There are no birds, no old women tending to the date trees in the inner courtyard, no infants of servants wailing in one of the chambers. Everything is still. Set wanders through the empty warren and out; he walks past a handful of aging guards can be seen napping upright, leaning against the porous gates that lead to the inner city.
He feels nothing for the bony crones and children sleeping in the streets, whose protruding limbs, lying in shambles that rise and fall as their lungs feed on the dry air of their homeland. Their Pharaoh feels neither pain nor compassion, neither resentment nor guilt over having failed these unremarkable souls.
He never was one to pity the weak.
There used to be a market in this wide sandy expanse, and a precious stone dealer there, located behind the weaver shop. Now, standing amidst the black stillness that preludes the coming of Ra, there is nothing. Even the rats have fled.
The sky is paling in the East, where it dips into the Nile.
Set lets Ra guide his steps. Fresh blood trickles down from his still heart, dripping along his legs. It clots in the sandy alleys that roll down to the outskirts of the city. The air thins out as human dwellings grow scarce. The city thins out, from thatched huts to meager tents, to mere wooden posts fallen in the sand, left to be buried by the wind, their moth eaten draperies limp, like forgotten flags.
Grimy sand makes way to flax stems that have dried up before their time, crinkling under the cracking soles of his feet. Set knows he has reached the land that becomes river once a year, when the goddess Isis pours her tears into the Nile, her heart swelling in time with the sacred river and the life that it brings. Has she at last found peace, or Grace? Is she not compelled to cry for her people, for their misery?
The man's feet shuffle the ever growing reeds, fatally flattening under his weight. The soaked arrow stalk in his chest gnaws away at him; he holds onto it with both fists, pulling it out in one stroke. He doesn't feel pain, but his heart does feel heavy from all the crimes he has either endorsed or committed himself.
The sky is darkening in the west, where it leaks into the city ruins.
He resumes his journey. Around him, the reeds are growing, tall enough to brush against the palm of his hands as he treads towards the Nile. Alone in contemplation, he tries to reminisce on the life he has led on this land. He cannot remember the name of the young Pharaoh he saw off to the other world, or the voice of the dragon girl who traded her mortal existence for his. He cannot remember his father, mother, or the smile of the young bride who died in labor at the hands of a stillborn child. He remembers less and less as Ra's holy headdress begins to surface on the Nile, his reflection on the still waters beckoning the man.
The expanse of dry land separating him from the Sun seems infinite. Coarse, dried stalks whip away at his legs and arms.
Soon the man cannot remember his own name.
But he knows he is to journey alone in the promised field of reeds. He was long ago robbed of the company of 'those like him', whose existence are suspended indefinitely in another plane, never quite bound, never quite free; never quite at home amongst the living and never quite at home amongst the dead. Those who became legends while he, and he alone, had to carry on his shoulders the burden of protecting a land he never wished to inherit.
He holds for certain that a certain other man like himself, who fell before he did, can never join him here.
The night rapidly peels away.
The man reminisces the sheer physicality of the mage's life spirit, and the silent rage he suppressed when he lost sight of it. He can taste in his mouth the bitterness of a lifetime spent trying to surpass his immortal rival, in vain. Not even the force of the white dragon, magnified by years of rigorous training and harsh discipline undertaken by its master, could reach the power of the late magician.
As he marches on away from the kingdom of the Living, staring into the nascent Sun of his afterlife, the fallen king and warrior calls out to the one he was never allowed to mourn.
Lightmaker who comes from the dark.
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AN The title and ending line of the story was taken from an Ancient Egyptian poem written for the god of the vital flood of the Nile, Hymn to Hapi.