A/N: My part of an art trade with ChocolaPeanut (see my profile for the link to the lovely drawing she did for me!). She asked for Avishipping or Lingershipping. I split the difference. :) In the same continuity and sequelish to the Avishipping chapter of Song of Hathor, but they both stand alone. May become a two- or threeshot in the future.
Her footsteps echoed in the quiet of the empty hall. No torches were lit, but she knew her way too well to be hampered by the dark. She was no stranger to the shadows.
The linen of her shift rustled as she sank to her knees. The stone was cold against her knees. She lifted her hand and brushed her fingers over the inscription she could not see, but knew was carved into the stone. The hieroglyphs tingled faintly under her fingertips.
She let her hand fall. She shivered, suddenly cold. A deeper gloom seemed to settle over the hall, lugubrious and absolute.
Then, in the blackness, a spark of light kindled.
Her hand clutched at her throat. The heavy gold smoldered under her touch. The visions whirled before her eyes with dizzying speed. They were familiar now—the scenes of suffering and pain, of evil, and darkness, and her brothers, scattered with the faces of people she had yet to meet and things that she had yet to do. It had astounded her, the first time she had seen herself in the Necklace's visions—tall, elegant, dignified, yet with weary, weary eyes. It had frightened her.
Almost everything she saw had frightened her.
Now, she regarded the awful visions with a cold, dull horror and began to understand why her eyes had seemed so weary. So much evil. So much suffering. The images haunted even her natural dreams now. They crept into her waking thoughts. There was no escape from them.
The visions faded into a sea of hazy gold and purple. Eventually that too dissolved into nothingness.
She rose to her feet—slowly, dizzily—and rubbed her neck where the heat of the Necklace had singed it. It had been less than two months since her father's death, since the world she had known her whole life had shattered into a million pieces. Two months of grief, of confusion and turmoil, of tracking her brothers, of learning to take over the clan she had never been meant to lead. Two months of the Necklace and endless visions of doom.
The woman she had seen in her visions had been about twenty years of old. Ishizu doubted she would last to sixteen.
She slumped against the wall, the cold stone bracing against her back. "Show me something good," she begged the Necklace. "Show me something to make it worth going on."
Heat flickered at her throat and the world started to spin around her. She closed her eyes and waited for the vision. Desperately, she longed for a glimpse of Marik as he had been, an innocent, smiling child, or—she hardly dared even hope—Marik as he would be, cleansed, somehow, from the evil that had enveloped him.
Light flooded through her senses. Slowly, it faded, and the figure of a boy appeared. Ishizu's breath caught. The vision sharpened and focused. Ishizu exhaled. It was not Marik.
He was about Marik's age, or perhaps a little older. His skin was the same dusky gold—or perhaps a little darker. He was Egyptian, just as she was, but his was skin that had seen the sun. It shone on him now, the gold on his neck and arms gleaming.
His eyes were royal purple, and nearly as round as the grapes that shared their color. Yet the heavy lines of kohl that lined they gave them a sharper, angular shape—the shape they would one day grow into, no doubt. She found herself oddly fascinated by those eyes. There was something so soft and innocent about them, yet another glance rendered them proud and almost ruthless.
Yet, for all that, it was his hair that commanded attention, and it was his hair that told Ishizu who this was. Its color was outlandish—black, gold, and a hint of crimson—and stood in tall spikes that Ishizu would have recognized anywhere. Hadn't she seen it countless times, in stone relief or scraps of papyrus? Hadn't her fingers traced those sharp angles so often she could draw them in her sleep?
It was the Nameless Pharaoh.
Only he was not Pharaoh, not yet. There was no royal uraeus on his brow, no golden Puzzle around his neck, and no weight of responsibility on his shoulders.
He was smiling.
A curious warmth spread through her. His smile…how many times she had imagined it? Her fingers twitched as though they could still feel the stony line of the scowl carved into the Tablet. As a child, she used to stare up at his face, willing the stern expression to change into a smile. The miracle had never happened. Eventually, she had stopped expecting it to. But she had never lost that wistful desire, the longing to see him smile.
He was not smiling at her. He could not even see her. She did not exist to him, not yet, would not exist for millennia. Yet she could not shake the feeling, ridiculous though it was, that he was looking straight at her, that the careless, carefree grin on his face was for her, just for her.
The next moments shattered the sensation. There was a cry—a name, she thought, though she could not make out the sound—and he turned away from her. An old man hobbled towards him, expression grave. He bowed—too low, too long.
She watched the smile slip from his lips.
The words that followed were hushed and low. Ishizu could not make them all out, but she did not need to. The grief that filled his face told its own story, a story Ishizu knew only too well. For a second, she longed to reach out to him, to touch his shoulder, to squeeze his hand, to comfort him in all the little ways that no one had been left to do for her. Her hand was half-outstretched before she recalled herself and let it fall back to her side.
The past could not be altered. Everything she saw had happened millennia ago, and so had the events to follow. Besides, it was only a vision. If she reached out to touch him, her fingers would meet only the cool air of the underground hall. There was nothing she could do.
So she watched, fingers digging into the weave of her linen shift, as his shoulders slumped, and then straightened under the burden of kingship he must now bear. She watched them offer him the Puzzle, watched him run his fingers over the glinting eye at its center. For a second, raw pain flickered through his eyes. Then it was gone, the somber, kingly mask falling back into place. He lifted the Puzzle, pulled the leather cord around his neck.
Ishizu swore she could feel the thud as the Puzzle slammed against his chest.
Her eyes flew open as the vision vanished. She fingered the gold at her throat and found it cool to the touch. Usually, the Necklace left her feeling drained, but not this time. Instead, a curious strength seemed to well up inside of her, a resolve equal to the challenges that lay ahead.
A resolve like the Pharaoh's.
He was not so far-off as she had once thought. Though he was the king and she just a lowly servant, he was no so far removed from her, despite all his power and might. He knew the pain of loss. He knew the burden of leadership, and the loneliness of duty. Somehow, it made her own loneliness lessen, and her burden easier to bear. The sacrifices she had made did not seem so senseless anymore. No longer were they directed at some arcane, shadowy figure of legend. No longer did they feel like the empty forms of duty.
There would be other sacrifices, she knew, even greater than the ones she had made. But she would find a way to bear them.
She would make them for him.