"Of Death"
I gasp and sit ramrod straight in bed, reaching blindly for blue gauze long gone. Sha'uri is awake instantly, turning to me in concern.
"Daniel?" she asks. Are you alright? What nightmare has plagued you? I can hear her asking. It's not the first time I've woken in a cold sweat, clawing at that sticky, awful material that is nothing more than a memory, a figment of my mind.
My breathing steadies. I'm not there, not any longer. Ra is dead. That terrible sarcophagus is nothing—literally. Not even little pieces of drifting stone in the atmosphere.
"Nothing. It's nothing," I tell her. As I have always told her. "Go back to sleep."
With one last worried glance, she settles back onto the pillow and sleep claims her.
I can never bring myself to tell Sha'uri about my dreams. They're private and precious, even if they're nightmares. Nightmares of nothing and everything and what lies between. Of blinding pain and the shock of life. Of gunshots and staff-blasts and the dull thud of skin connecting with skin.
My nightmares are full of his alien voice and feminine fingers ghosting over my skin. They're full of the blinding nothingness of death. And of the helplessness of dying.
You see, three weeks ago I died. And three weeks ago I woke up, lying in an ornate stone box, gasping my way back into life. But that's the thing: I'm alive.
So why does my death haunt me so persistently? I was dead for less than a day, Sha'uri says—I don't know. For me it could have been days or merely moments, years or millennia; time isn't a factor in death.
Humans, as a race, tend to fear what they don't understand. I don't, as a rule. But death terrifies me; I know what it holds. Nothing—a void with no light, no darkness, no sound, no silence. It's the absence of everything. I've always been doing something, seeing something; the nothingness scares me.
Death is supposed to be some great mystery, the end of everything and the beginning of something else entirely according to some religions. It's a paradise in others. A step down a different path.
Death is none of those things. Though I wish desperately that it was.
The thing is, my death had a purpose, inadvertent was it was. Ra's dead. The people of Abydos are free. I have a wife I love more than life itself, and a family, and a place where I belong and feel welcomed. Yet my death, my revival, won't go away. In the end, my death was a good thing—a step in the right direction, if you will. But it lingers.
Like the smell of blood and the memory of pain.
I fear death. I fear death like any self-respecting being should.
Because next time, there might not be a sarcophagus to bring me back.