“Meryt?”
I sprang up away from the younger memory of Nakht to race toward the archway, but before I could dive through it to reunite with him, just like before... like before and before andbefore... everything went white.
NAKHT
“Mer—”
I readied to receive Meryt in my arms only to gasp like waking from a nightmare and blink at unfamiliar surroundings. I was on a slab of rock, the same that had shot me up into the sky, and though I was off my feet, reclined, I was dressed and dry with everything the previous gods had bestowed upon me.
What torture this was! I had thought it the proverbial carrot for the horse, but perhaps these glimpses of Meryt were the stick.
And where was I now? This wasn’t the sky. I was aloft amid my surroundings, but although the cavernous space was larger than where I had encountered Geb, the walls and ceiling were still rocks.
I looked below over the edge of my platform. I was dizzyingly high up, but I could see a river beneath me cutting through this hollowed mountain, as well as buildings carved into the rocky walls like tomb entrances. There were braziers that lit up the darkness, and it was exceptionally dark here, much darker than the glittering blue of Geb’s chamber. These rocks were a reddish hue, similar to the surface where I'd tread all my life.
Light blinded me when my eyes drifted up, and from a curve in the vastness of the cave came something even more brilliantly bright than that initial flash. I couldn’t say if it dimmed, or if I simply adjusted, but when I blinked again and tried to look through the piercing glow, I could clearly see what approached me.
A boat floated toward where I lay, but not along the river below. It was as aloft as I was and moved through the air like a gliding bird. It had been emanating that light because the boat carried the embodiment of the sun itself and had descended into the underworld to traverse the night.
The falcon head of the solitary figure standing upon the boat’s bow was unmistakable. It was not so striking as his depictions in art, not as if plucked from an actual bird and set upon the body of a man. There was a human-like face within the feathered visage. A beak-like nose, long and sharp, with a human mouth beneath, and the feathers that lined his outer face continued into a mane like the flow of dark hair. He was blue skinned, a sky-blue like Ptah, his feathers blue-black like Geb’s, and as he drewcloser, I caught the glint of metallic eyes, both gold and silver together, like the sun and stars.
He wore gold armor over his tunic, more elaborate than the outfits of the others, similar to how Pharaoh’s linens were always trimmed with gold stitching, and a thick, gold band adorned his wrist with the symbol of an eclipse, showing only half of the sun displaying its rays.
Amun-Ra.
Even if he hadn’t been visible, I would have recognized his day boat, for it was bright and colorful, painted and adorned like the gods adorned themselves, with a sun disc symbol emblazoned upon its sail. The ship was small, maybe large enough for a half dozen crew members, but there was no crew. There was only him, commanding the boat to move by sheer will.
As it finally reached me and came to a graceful stop in front of where I lay upon my platform, it transformed before my eyes into Ra’s night ship, with that same symbol of an eclipse on its sail where the sun had been. The rest of the ship was midnight blue and black now, sleek and devoid of decoration to better suit the darkness of the Duat.
Ra was as eerily and oddly beautiful to me as Geb. As Anubis too. He had a calmness like Anubis, a regal stature, as he moved to the edge of the boat and offered me his hand.
“Come, Nakht, you will ride with me until the dawn.”
There wasn’t time for me to be awestruck, wondrous as each new god was to me, and so I stood, took his hand, and allowed his uncanny strength to aid me onto the boat.
There was a built-in daybed making up the bow of the ship, near to where he had been standing, where he—and I—might lounge while watching the cycle of night. There was a chair central and another daybed at the back, but Ra led me to the front.
The boat started to move again as soon as we were in place. I had been navigating the Duat all this time, but only now was I truly in the underworld.
“Do not fear,” Ra said. “Nothing can harm you here for now.”
For now.
I stared at Ra’s armor, noticing now that it swirled with color more than just gold, like all the shades of a sunlit sky.
He raised his hands to grip either side of his feathered head, and as he lifted, his bird-like visage began to change.
“Wait.” I turned to face him directly. “You needn’t placate me, my lord, pretending you wear a mask. I accepted Anubis’s true form.”
Ra paused, his falcon head still in place as he smiled. “Then accept mine.”
He continued, removing this version of himself like taking off a headdress, and yet the falcon head itself did not leave him but changed at the bidding of his hands as seamlessly as his boat had transformed, becoming the curled ivory-colored horns of a ram.
With the face of a man still, but a ram-like nose, oblong and black, he looked at me with those same gold and silver eyes, with the same blue skin, yet otherwise, very changed. This form was also oddly handsome, but I was confused.
“I don’t understand,” I said aloud.
“Do you know who I am?”
