Screeches dogged their steps as Heshtat and Maatkare careened around the corner of the archaic hallway. This one was in good condition, their last portal having delivered them to a relatively hale section of the temple.

  Heshtat ignored the beautiful mosaics lining the walls and spared no consideration for the delicately arched stonework above. All he could hear was his frantic breath, the pounding of his footfalls, and the staccato clacking of too many pincers on the stone behind them.

  “What maniacal god created such a creature?” Maatkare half shrieked, half laughed in his wake.

  Heshtat couldn’t quite hide his smile as he turned to see the mix of fear and exhilaration on his friend’s face. They were being pursued by a behemoth of a Desolate, a chimeric blend of centipede and auroch that seemed to have the rage of both and the brains of neither. Its many legs drove it forward with impressive speed, but its bulk hampered it in the small hallways they sprinted down, and its constant screeches were an indication of how often it smashed into the walls as it chased them.

  “Who knows?” Heshtat replied over his shoulder as he turned back to the hallway in front of them. “Why not ask—”

  He cut off abruptly, seeing the chasm ahead.

  The hallways continued, but a long section of the floor was missing, slabs falling away for perhaps a dozen yards or more. There was little enough time to inspect it before they reached it, so Heshtat threw a hasty warning over his shoulder before leaping to the wall.

  Preternatural balance and agility let him hit the wall with barely a loss of momentum, and he snatched a few quick steps before his weight could bring him down. Just as he began to slow, his muscles bunched. A second leap saw him hitting the opposite wall, and he repeated the manoeuvre three times, leaping from wall to wall. He had seen stray cats doing the same in Idib, scuttling between houses and scrabbling up walls like they were born to traverse the city.

  He turned as he landed, the hole in the floor now behind him and his feet on smooth stone once more. Maatkare stood staring at him, his face slack jawed. Heshtat beckoned him over.

  “Well I can’t fucking do that, can I?” his friend called out. He threw a rude gesture Heshtat’s way for good measure, just in case he missed the man’s indignant tone.

  Heshtat looked down into the pit, seeing the floor some ten yards below, though it was nearly swallowed by darkness. The gap was only twenty yards long, but that was too far for someone of Maatkare’s current power to cross. Heshtat had only made it thanks to his greater cultivation of Khet, not to mention the specific blessing of Bestat on top of it lending him the necessary skills.

  “It looks like darkness for you then,” Heshtat said. “Hurry though, the creature gains on us!”

  Maatkare grumbled, but he sheathed his tulwar and slipped over the edge, lowering himself until he dropped the final few yards to the ground. He would have been invisible to Heshtat through the gloom if not for his enhanced eyesight, but even still he struggled to make out the details as Maatkare landed.

  There was a crunch and a strange whistling noise, and Maatkare let out a guttural curse. Something scuttled in the darkness, then more. Soon the small chasm was alight with a horrific buzzing noise, and Heshtat heard his friend let out a strangled cry. His eyes widened as a tongue of blue-white fire flared in the darkness, illuminating his friend covered in hundreds of small black beetles. He twisted and slapped at them, panic clearly setting in as he tried in vain to free himself from the horde of tiny creatures that swarmed up his legs from the floor of the chasm.

  Heshtat stepped forwards, face drawn in horror as he frantically tried to think of a solution. To be eaten alive by a scarab swarm in the darkness was a fate worse than the death Heshtat had just saved him from.

  Then Maatkare immolated. One moment he was wheeling this way and that, small tongues of fire shooting from his hands as he tried to knock away the biting bugs, and then next he was a pillar of flame himself. Every inch of his body alighted with a whomp and the hallway echoed with the dying squeals of thousands of beetles being cooked in their shells.

  The burning form of Maatkare sprinted through the short stretch of darkness, pace slowing as he waded through what must have been thousands and soon millions of the tiny beasts. They filled the gap, more pouring from the walls and scuttling up from the floor, drawn by the movement of their brothers and sisters even as they were cooked by Maatkare’s mere presence.

  He would make it, but it would be close. Heshtat could see the man’s flames flickering at their edges, the white tips dying back to the cool blue of Anubian’s funerary fires. There was little enough he could do to harm the swarm, but he could help his friend speed things up. He ripped the shawl from his back, wrapping it around his hand a few times before pulling his khopesh from its iron ring at his belt. The magical blade gleamed in the firelight, but he cut the flow of essence to it, returning its edge to a midnight black.

  Gingerly, he grabbed the sharp blade, leaning down to offer the hilt to the darkness below, and praying that none of the biting insects would notice his actions given the chaos his friend was causing lower down.

  The scuttling and screeching of the insects was soon overshadowed by a heavier, weightier clacking as the massive Desolate gained on them, and Heshtat winced as he spotted a single solitary scarab scuttle over the top of the ledge. He smashed it with his forehead, closing his eyes against the gruesome sensation, and leaned back over the edge to watch his friend’s progress.

  Maatkare had made it to the end of the chasm now, pulling himself up slowly from the floor, but Heshtat could see that he was tired. His flames were weak, barely burning away the creatures that even now leapt to the deaths in their attempt to inflict the briefest flicker of pain on him. His limbs were heavy, weighed down by the crawling bugs that desperately tried to find purchase on his burning skin.

  “Maatkare!” Heshtat shouted, jabbing the hilt of his khopesh at the man’s head. “Take the blade!”

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  His friend needed no further urging and grabbed onto the handle. The moment his fingers closed around the grip, Heshtat heaved, pulling his friend clear to safety with his enhanced strength in one easy motion.

  He fell backwards, slapping at his arm as a few wayward scarabs leapt from Maatkare’s form onto his own. Maatkare stood, burning brighter for a single instant to ash the creatures still on him, and they both ran several yards to put distance between themselves and the swam that writhed beneath the lip of the chasm.

  “You have my thanks, my friend,” Maatkare said, gasping in breaths as he patted himself down. “We are safe, yes?”

  Heshtat shook his head though and pointed down the hallway where a hundred sturdy legs stabbed into the stone beneath, bearing a titanic creature towards them with frightening speed.

  “Oh for—” Maatkare started, but Heshtat just yanked him around.

  “Run!” he shouted, and the two of them sprinted off once more.

  ***

  “We must stop, my friend…” Maatkare panted. “Please, I cannot go on like this.”

  His breath was ragged, his posture defeated. Sweat soaked through his shendyt and pinned his normally vibrant curls to his forehead. In short, he looked like a man that had run for near an hour with the hounds of Anubian on his heels all the while. It wasn’t too far from the truth.

  Heshtat hesitated. He was tired, but nowhere near the exhaustion of his friend. They had awakened different aspects, and their strength wasn’t yet comparable. Still, he could sympathise. “I think we have lost our pursuit. A few minutes rest would not hurt.” He nodded to himself, guiding his friend over to sit on a short wall nearby.

  Heshtat stood and looked out over the plateau they had emerged onto only moments before. It was stone, as everything in this temple seemed to be, and likewise decorated with fine engravings and carvings. Torches were ensconced upon the walls behind at regular intervals, so that the platform they stood upon was well lit by bright orange torchlight.

  Another arching bridge connected them to a central spire that ran high above them, and as he looked around, he saw many more platforms like theirs, thin stone bridges likewise spanning the empty space. It appeared they rested within an enormous central cavern, and that the pyramid itself was mostly hollow, this cavernous space filled by a single spire that ran the length from top to bottom. He could not see the walls clearly, only the platforms were illuminated, but he counted at least three others.

  He turned back to Maatkare, examining his friend with a critical eye. The man was recovering well though, seemingly just overdrawn from the headlong sprint from that titanic creature. They had long stopped hearing its footfalls, and so Heshtat was happy to take a moment to recover. They needed to plan anyway.

  “We must consider our next channels,” he said to his seated friend. “I am thinking we stick to minor gods for now. Anubian felt… I am not sure, but there was something off about him. The Ennead are notoriously hard to reach, and I suspect the more minor and narrow the domains we seek power from, the easier we will find it to connect.”

  “Sensible enough. I assume you will choose Sed?” Maatkare asked. “I thought it would be nice if we both had jackal-headed gods in our souls.”

  The joke was poor, though the question not unexpected. Sed was a minor god that protected the concept of kingship. He was a common channel for Tomb Guard, and Heshtat had once awakened the Jb with his power. To awaken the Heart aspect with a channel to a divine bodyguard of kings had felt right for Heshtat once, and had certainly been a smart political choice for those that worried over his split loyalties. But such political concerns were behind him now, and Heshtat had not been a protector for many a year.

  “No,” he replied. “I was thinking something more direct. Nemty, the ferryman. We know he is still present from your vision earlier, and judging by our experiences thus far, we may have need of alternate methods of crossing space.”

  Maatkare nodded slowly, though he remained silent.

  “And you?” Heshtat asked.

  “Sepa.”

  “Sepa?” Heshtat asked. “Why—oh. That seems… short term.”

  “It is the best chance we have if that creature follows us, and I was always terrified of the crawling, biting creatures that swarm. This is better protection against them than anything else.”

  “Well,” Heshtat said with a shiver. “I wish you luck. Who first?”

  Maatkare squared his shoulders. “I’ll go. Better to face your fears than dwell upon them, so they say.”

  “Old Seti?” Heshtat asked with a smile.

  “The very same. Watch me, brother.”

  And with that, Maatkare dropped into a cross-legged sitting position against the low stone wall and closed his eyes. Heshtat felt the exact moment his friend left this strange half-waking, half-dreaming location they were trapped in within the temple and drifted across the sands of the Otherworld in truth.

  He looked around, hand on his blade and senses straining. Maatkare’s breathing ceased entirely, his body almost suspended in time as he communed with divinity in a faraway realm. The torchlight flickered, the shadows wavering in and out of the rhythm they should stay in—a subtle hint they were no longer fully in the Waking that he had missed upon their first entry to this strange place.

  While his friend sought to awaken another aspect, Heshtat had time to think, his mind turning to his meeting with the Lord of the Hounds. Anubian had been… different. He was more, somehow. Like a fully realised personality where the other gods seemed more like mere aspects of the one they represented.

  Bestat’s power had manifested as nothing more than a puma, and while that manifestation had felt as vast as the cosmos itself to Heshtat’s meagre senses, it had still felt like a shard of the divine. Anubian had felt complete. He had spoken with the god—shared actual words with divinity. This was unheard of in modern times. Not since the days of the ancients had those of low station spoken to the gods directly, and after the Desolation, it was only the high priests and immortal Pharaohs that had achieved real communion after expensive rituals and careful preparation. And it had only gotten rarer since then.

  Heshtat’s ear twitched as a familiar clacking drifted from the tunnel behind him, but his mind was still caught in the currents of his earlier encounter. What did it mean? That was two cryptic warnings he’d received now about changing events and cataclysmic happenings. One was from a high priest—or at least the demon that hid within his shadow—but the other was a god. Mercurial they may be, but all would do well to heed their tidings when the gods spoke directly.

  A dull crash sounded behind, and Heshtat whipped around, thoughts scattering in the face of the loud noise. It was close. Closer than the earlier clacking, at any rate. And not a moment later it continued—the familiar sound of carapace stabbing into stone, like a group of mad stone-masons hacking away at a house in dis-synchronous rhythm.

  He turned to his friend, seeing Maatkare still sitting cross-legged and serene as he begged for power from beyond the veil. This was up to Heshtat now.

  He paced about, searching for a weapon or tool that could save him. Perhaps some trick in the environment he could exploit to outwit the creature—it shouldn’t be hard, after all. The Dreaming Tide mimicked the intellect of the creatures it incorporated, but neither the centipede nor the auroch were particularly known for their cunning.

  Heshtat positioned himself directly before the tunnel mouth, his back to the bridge and with the chasm hanging empty behind him. As if demonstrating what they were known for, the chimera burst through the tunnel mouth with a sound somewhere between a screech and a snort, great shaggy head waving back and forth in a shower of broken masonry. Twisted horns and snapping pincers caught the torchlight and gleamed in the air, and Heshtat had little trouble imagining all the painful ways he would be torn apart if the creature got its clacking mandibles around him.

  Still, he stood his ground.

  His friend sat calmly to one side, none the wiser of the duel about to take place. A monster the size of a city street facing down a single man with a single shining blade in hand.

  With a strangled bellow, it surged forwards.

  you rated this story yet?

  Do it.