Chapter 1
Seth, my lord. I’ll always protect you.
I mentally chanted the ritual prayer and put some sand into the bowl. The water from the Nile had arrived today. The only delay I’d ever tolerate in my rituals. The respect I had for Nile was unmatched. Because the Nile was the only force in the desert capable of keeping everything else in line.
But despite that, my admiration for my Lord Seth was beyond everything.
Other minor gods labeled me insane because I had been devoted to Seth for as long as I had existed as the minor goddess of intuition.
As the god of sand, storms, chaos and violence, most gods saw Seth as strong and unbreakable. Indeed, my lord was all of that. But as the god of intuition, I knew he was vulnerable to many things. He might be chaos personified and seem unfazed, but I knew exactly what he had been hiding in his chest for centuries.
And I’d do everything in my power to bring him justice.
He didn’t know it yet. He probably didn’t even know about my existence. But I had planned for everything.
And the first step to fulfill that plan was meeting the Underking of Duat.
Anubis.
The ritual worked. The sand and the water of Nile accepted my plea to pass the eastern gate of Duat to reach the Hall of Judgment.
I’d just have to find Anubis once I reach there.
All of the offerings had been accepted by Nun. No one in the cosmos knew the ritual to worship Nun. But I had seen it in my visions. I had a gift of Claircognizance. But no one knew about it. They only considered me as the minor goddess of intuition because I acted restless and erratic most of the time.
But I didn’t have to speak about it when I could use my gifts to serve my lord.
Thus, I offered the final and most important element to the bowl, my blood. Blood represented the life force of every living entity. Once I offered it, I’d not be barred from entering Duat. Because my life force would be kept by Nun. Not by my own self. And I’d do it with no hesitation. Because, I needed to protect Seth.
I took the obsidian athame and pierced my palm with its sharp pointed head.
As I held my slit hand over the bowl, the blood dripped into the mixture and blended my life force to that of Nile, the Sand, which represented Seth and the Natron salt which represented Anubis.
The mixture then turned into a whirlwind of chaos and rose up from the bowl in a single pole. Then, it engulfed my entire hand and slowly crept toward my heart and bosom and then it parted. One went up and another went down to cover the entirety of me.
In this way, driven by a frantic zealotry to save the god of chaos, I marched straight into the underworld without a single thought for my own survival and landed right outside the Hall of Judgment.
As soon as I landed there, I felt shiveringly cold. It felt like standing at the edge of a great, silent ocean. The air here was thick. Not exactly with humidity. But still and heavy. As if the weight of countless souls permeated the air itself. Here every life was stripped down to its barest truth. No masks. No lies. Just the weight of what a soul had done.
Duat was a place of absolute clarity.
I looked up. I didn’t know the underworld also had a sky. However, it wasn’t a lookalike of the sky we saw every day from the ground above. Here, the sky neither was truly dark, nor truly light. It looked like a bruised violet. Like a perpetual twilight that’d never truly break.
I averted my gaze from above to the front. The arena was empty. My eyes darted around the place. Not a single person was in sight. Duat looked like an empty ghost realm.
I looked down. The ground beneath was fine, black sand. But it didn’t shift beneath my feet even when I took a few steps ahead. Everything appeared so bleak and eerie. Even the pillars. All around the arena there were massive columns of basalt that stretch up into nothingness.
I walked toward one. When I reached close enough, I noticed the names of those who have passed written in medu netjer. The divine words. When I walked a little closer, they hummed. A low, constant vibration that I felt in my vision more than I heard with my ears.
I could also hear the sound of the river of fire from here, which flowed to the east of the Hall of Judgment.
Nile of the dead.
The river didn’t burn like a hearth fire. It burned the memory of the dead. I had heard the stories of the Nile of the dead. But never seen it. The river was impossible to look at directly because of its bright, orange color.
The sun also rose in Duat. No one could stop Ra from roaming across the cosmos.
I turned my head and saw the doors of the Hall itself. The doors were made of ironwood, taller than any mortal temple. And standing before them…well, something born from the shadows themselves.
Were they the guards of the underworld? Informer of Osiris? Those creatures had too many eyes and too many teeth. They looked like, they were waiting for the scales to tip, and the moment it’d, they’d rip the souls apart.
Damn! Hadn’t they seen me yet?
Or… Wait…!
I looked down at my hands.
Did the ritual make me invisible? Even to the guards of Duat?
I frowned, then I swayed the veil attached to my tunic and strode right in the middle of the arena.
And then I screamed.
From the top of my lungs, I screamed one name.
Anubis.
“ANUBIS!!”
“ANUBIS!!!”
“ANUBIS!!!”
