She broke away and nipped at my lips, her tongue darting out. I couldn’t think past her. Couldn’t remember. This was wrong. Wasn’t I meant to be the one in control? I’d come here to stop this, hadn’t I? Something about a skull and a fight with Shukra, but all that seemed so trivial.
“The light and the dark, day and night,” Isis whispered, the words hissing over her lips and into my mouth. “So clever… this lock. Impossible to break. In what world would light and darkness agree?”
I caught her face in my hands, and for a second, I fooled myself into believing I could break free. But then I looked into her eyes, and her soul squirmed and teased and beckoned. I was already damned, so why not take what couldn’t be taken? Goddess of Light. Do not touch. But I could, and I would. My grip tightened. My black heart thudded. And I locked my gaze on hers. It didn’t take long. This place—KV5, the Valley of the Kings—this me. I was too strong here. The hungry part of me surged in through her eyes toward the soul that shone like a thousand stars. It burned and thrashed and threatened to consume me, but impossibly, I had it in my thrall. Even as the goddess screamed, I had her—owning her the only way I could, by devouring. I’d tried to swallow Thoth’s soul and it had slapped me down, but this was different. Here, I was different.
“Cukkomd. Let me in.” And she did. Her golden eyes burned, but she couldn’t escape. I drew her soul from her center and drowned her light inside my darkness.
This shouldn’t be possible.
Her light bucked and twitched, but I had her, all of her.
Monster.
I DON’T WANT TO BE THIS.
My darkness knotted inside her light, choking her.
Oh, but I do. For all the times she and her husband had forced me to my knees. For all the lives they’d had me take at their whims. For their tricks, their scheming, their control. For the girl who had eyes like mine…
More than darkness…
But I was the darkness. Wasn’t that why Ammit had given me up to Osiris? To stop me? Wasn’t that what everyone was afraid of?
But I’d changed. I was something else. Someone else. Someone trying to right his wrongs. I saved people. I helped them. More than darkness.
Not like this.
I cannot be this monster.
I let Isis’s sweet soul slip through my fingers. I could have taken her, I still wanted to, but a human part of me clung to the tiny threads of control.
I slammed Isis against the wall. “Stay down.”
I didn’t see where she fell—couldn’t look for fear I’d finish what I’d started. Power thrummed beneath my skin. Hungry power. I wasn’t done here. I needed to know why. Why she’d brought me here. Why this place pushed me away and drew me in at the same time.
The voices were strangely quiet as I strode deeper down narrowing passages, closer to the presence watching, waiting, calling. Hieroglyphs glowed, lighting my path, and fizzled beneath my touch, turning to ash in my wake. Forbidden. Barred. But the old magic couldn’t stop me. Nothing could.
The shrine Senenmut had constructed for Isis hadn’t been built; it had been hollowed from inside the al-Qurn mountain, creating a vast cavern. Writings coated the bare rock walls, lit from within by the same invisible power that throbbed all around.
Isis’s name glowed with flourishes, but this wasn’t her space anymore. Despite the light, there were shadows, hungry voids that erased the writings in patches—and those shadows stalked the edges of the cavern, watching like the constant other presence did, but without revealing itself.
An empty limestone throne sat dead center. Unlike the walls, the stone was unmarked. It beckoned, like all thrones, but this one looked… familiar.
I crossed the floor, stirring up a layer of ash as soft as feathers. My boot dislodged the ash directly in front of the throne, revealing a mark carved into the floor. I recognized it. I’d carved it into my arm, seen it on a box warded against me, and read it on an unfinished scroll. The snake-headed jackal.
“It is all in a name,” Isis croaked. Her voice traveled deep into the cavern, deeper into a larger space than the walls could account for. She came closer, chin up and shoulders back, but she couldn’t hide the ashen color of her skin or the haunted look in her dull eyes. She looked at me differently now, like the second I turned my back, she’d stab me in it. She was afraid, and so she should be. It was only the small fragment of good in me that had stopped me from ripping out her soul. I wasn’t sure how long that little piece of good would last.
“What is this place?” I hissed. It wasn’t a shrine. Light had filled it once, but the magic here wasn’t Isis’s. Someone else had moved in, someone connected to me. The mark proved it.
“As blinding as daylight…” Isis whispered. She pressed a hand to her chest and stumbled forward.
“What is this hieroglyph?” I kicked the ash aside and pointed at the incriminating snake-headed jackal.
Isis’s dark lashes fluttered, her eyes heavy. “Erase a name and you erase the spirit, the soul, from all eternity. From memories, from the past, present, and future. Yours was hidden in plain sight, for all to see, but no god could look closer at the monster.”
“Whose name is that?!” I demanded and started back toward her. I’d yank her damn soul right out of her if she continued speaking in riddles.
Fear flashed in her golden eyes. “Yours.” The goddess smiled her infuriating smile, but it vanished as she struggled to stay standing.
“You’re telling me this mark is my name, my true name? Why is it here? Why did you bring me here? What else is here? You had better start talking, Isis, or I’ll take more than your pride.”
She lifted her hand, palm out. “Listen… Listen and I will tell you. Ammit was the only one who suspected you were not as you appeared to be. When you began consuming innocent souls, she knew only Osiris had the power to temper your hunger. But she didn’t trust him with her suspicions. She came to me, told me how she had found you as a nameless boy nestled among the river beasts as though the River itself had birthed you. She found a box with you too, and your sword… Alysdair. Whenever she tried separating you from either, you fell into a rage. You frightened her. The Great Devourer was afraid of the Nameless One. She sought answers for that mark, but found none. Nothing. You didn’t exist.”
“Why was the name erased and by who?”
“After the sundering, chaos ensued, cities crumbled, the greatest of all civilizations fell, and millions of souls perished. You saw these things in the Journey of the Twelve Gates, but they were not fantasies. Those were your memories. You are not this man standing before me, you are not Ace Dante, and you are not the Godkiller, the liar, or the Soul Eater. And now, you are no longer the Nameless One.”
For all my life, I’d wondered who I was. I’d thought I knew, but Isis’s words, this place, this mark, they spoke of things that couldn’t be. Could they?
“Say my name,” I demanded.
“What if the apocalypse wasn’t an event, but a man?”
I knew who she spoke of, this monster of hers. Worse than Seth, worse than anything inside the Twelve Gates. Only the great god Amun Ra could stand against it. Ra defeated the dark every night so the light may prevail, so that the sun would rise and life would go on. People and gods worshipped Amun Ra, and they worshipped against Apophis.
“Say my name…” I pushed the compulsion into the words and watched the Goddess of Light squirm under its grip. Power. Mine.
“Apep,” she spat with a snarl. “Apophis, Lord of Chaos, a curse, a scourge. The embodiment of evil. That is what you truly are. Your very existence offends the gods. You are the nightmare and Amun Ra’s eternal enemy.”
The seconds dragged on. Silence settled around us, broken only by Isis’s breathless gasps. She believed I was Apophis? That’s what all this had been about? Her insane fantasy of creating a villain to her heroine? “Oh, you’re something… I knew time had taken its toll, Your Highness, but I didn’t realize how far gone your mind was. You
could have said I was Amun Ra and it would have sounded just as ridiculous.”
Her eyes widened. “After everything the Gates showed you, you do not believe me?”
“I’m not Apophis. If I were, Osiris couldn’t compel me. No god could touch me.”
She raised a fine eyebrow. “You’ve hidden yourself in this… illusion of being the Nameless One, but you are not a soul eater. You are not any of the things you taught yourself to be. The truth was taken from you.”
“By who?! Who could take anything from Apophis?”
“You! You are the one who stole it. What better way to hide than to hide from yourself?”
No, it wasn’t possible. Sure, I was bad, but I wasn’t that bad. “Where’s the proof? This mark scratched into rock? Is that the best you’ve got?” But even as I said the words, the missing pieces of my past shifted into place. I’d always felt… disconnected, wrong, and her words had cracked open a long-hidden facet of my mind. Godkiller, Nameless One—nameless because I’d been erased. Because I’d erased myself to ensure no one could find me. But if I was Apophis, that made me a true monster—all the darkness, all the sins, all the evil in the world. Apophis embodied wrongness and turned it against the light, against life itself. Apophis was the End. Isis was right about that, but not about me.
I was pacing back and forth, every step another doubt, another misaligned truth falling into place. The memories that couldn’t be mine, the power I wielded, the lies surrounding me.
When Isis spoke, she kept the words soft, speaking them gently so as not to break me. “Only with the combined might of Osiris, Seth, and Ra could Apophis be confined. Here, inside this shrine, locked away from time, for all eternity, or so we believed. But Apophis escaped and vanished at the same time the Usurper rose and murdered Osiris. I knew the events were connected. Apophis and Seth made formidable allies, and the timing was too convenient. I should have seen it sooner, but I had to save my husband. By the time I noticed the shrine had been breached, Apophis was gone.”
Wait. What was she saying? That I was involved with Seth’s attempt on Osiris’s life and throne? These things had happened thousands of years ago; they were truths fallen into legends. Long ago, Osiris’s brother, Seth, had murdered Osiris and tried to make it stick. It hadn’t. Osiris being Osiris, he’d lorded it up over the underworld instead, and Isis had brought the bastard back, now with the new title of Lord of Rebirth. But she was implying that Seth and Apophis had orchestrated something else. A jail breakout. Apophis had used Osiris’s death as a distraction to escape the shrine I currently stood in. This would make the throne behind me Apophis’s and—according to Isis—mine. This was my shrine. The blank, undecorated throne was mine.
If this had anything to do with me, I’d have felt it, right? If she spoke the truth, I’d surely know it. But all I felt was… empty. Her so-called truths made me a genuine monster, and I wasn’t ready to believe that. I needed time. I needed to get away from Isis and her poison. I needed to get away from Egypt.
I laughed, but it sounded strangled and wrong. “Did you bring me all the way out here to feed me this fantasy in the hope I’d—what? Believe I’m an anti-god so I’d agree to fight Osiris for you?”
“No. I brought you here as my opposite. You are the Dark to my Light. We are the key. You and I. Dark and light, here together.” She believed it. Her intense glare, the press of her lips, the solid stance all said so. “I was right, and now the end finally begins.”
Isis bit her bottom lip, drawing her own divine blood from the wound, and spat it into the ash coating the floor. “Blood is paid, Lord of Red!” She lifted her voice and let it sail into the dark places. “The lock is open. The debt is paid. You are free.”
There are moments that turn lives around. Moments that define each of us or kill us. As I turned my head toward the vast well of power bleeding out of the carved walls as sand, I knew Ace Dante was a joke. His little office, his bottomless bottle of Vodka, and his cursed demon counterpart. All of it was a useless exercise, like hunting for patterns in a sandstorm. The truth was far worse than I could have ever imagined.
Red desert sand pooled and swelled, forming the outline of a man I told myself I couldn’t recognize, but my memory told me I knew him. Sand shaped and swirled, building up muscle and form and then hardening into armored plates. His red armor didn’t shine like it would have on any other god. On this “man,” it was dull like dried blood.
The man made of desert sand took up the throne, shifting comfortably to one side and resting his chin on his knuckles. His russet hair hung in multiple braids woven with gold. He looked down at his sister and then flicked his blood-red eyes to me.
“Urd kreamd.” Old friend. Seth’s words grated against my thoughts like sand trapped between stones. The contained power beating against the cavern walls was his. He’d been here, trapped in the dark, for millennia, and I stood before him, broken and hollow. Whatever happened next wouldn’t end well.
Gods and humans alike would drop to their knees in front of the Lord of the Desert, but I was neither, and I was only now realizing the truth of exactly who—what I was.
Seth watched me with eons-honed patience—the kind snakes possessed as they waited motionless for days before they struck and devoured their prey.
“Uir borsoem cukak su krieseum.” Our bargain comes to fruition.
I’d made a bargain with Seth? Of course I had. A dangerous bubble of laughter almost pealed from my lips. I had no memory of any bargain, no memory of knowing Seth, and certainly no memory of being close enough for him to call me friend, but to admit how weak I was would get me killed. Seth didn’t care about Osiris’s curse on my soul. He’d probably see that as a reason to destroy me. To survive these next few minutes, to survive this god—the Usurper—I had to tread very, very carefully.
“I wondered if you would ever return, Dark One,” Seth continued. A slow, creeping smile pulled across his red-tinged lips.
I was the Dark One? But I’d thought Shukra was… That threatening laughter clamored inside my head again. I couldn’t sort through this nightmare. Not here, not now. I had to play their game and get away.
Isis dropped to a knee and bowed her head before her brother. Seth looked as though he expected me to do the same, but all I could hear was my insane laughter. I didn’t feel like Apophis. What I felt like was the butt of a cosmic joke. But if there was one thing I was an expert in, it was lying to save my ass.
Seth shifted and the sands pooled around him sighed. “I resorted to sending the Rekka—”
“I know,” I interrupted. “I own the Rekka. Did you doubt my word? Did you believe I wouldn’t fulfill our bargain?” My heart just about kept on beating, kept blood flowing, while screams and denials tore at my thoughts.
The Desert Lord’s smile cracked. “Let us not dwell on the past. Let us look to the future. You return, as the terms of our agreement bound you, and thus I am free once more. But before I ravage all those who betrayed me…” He pushed from his throne and sauntered toward Isis, parting the sands and stirring up old layers of ash so that his sand and what was my ash combined. “Sister… how wonderful it is to see you humbled.”
Isis lifted her head. “Grant me your forgiveness, brother?”
“I am not a forgiving god.” He thrust his hand forward, plunging it into Isis’s hair, and jerked her upward, arching her against him. “You sought to destroy me!”
“You killed my husband.” She bared her teeth but didn’t lash out. I’d drained her power. She could have fought, but she knew better. Seth was her only weapon against Osiris. She needed him.
“And now you return, groveling at my feet for mercy. Bored, are you, sister? Are your allegiances so easily swayed?”
“It has been thousands of years. Much has changed. Osiris is weak—”
Seth laughed darkly. “I see ambition in your eyes, sister. It is not I you covet. It is my reign. Forever blinded by your light, your beauty, Osiris never understood that abo
ut you.” His hand tightened. Isis hissed in through her teeth. “Osiris isn’t the only weak god, I see.”
By Sekhmet, I couldn’t stand by and watch Seth do this to her, even if she deserved it.
“She’s right,” I said, already regretting the words. “Much has changed.”
The second Seth’s blood-red gaze turned to me and pierced deep, my misaligned soul contracted. He threw his sister down and squared up to me. Taller by at least a foot and broader too, he was built like the mountain of rock surrounding us. Unlike Osiris, who was honed for political games, Seth looked like a god who could wipe out an army with a single swing of his sword. He probably had. Maybe, somewhere in my head, there were memories of him doing exactly that. Had I stood beside him?
“The world is a very different place to what you remember,” I explained.
“Change doesn’t touch me.” His lip curled. “I’ve waited long enough. Those who do not bow down will be consumed by the desert…” His snarl twisted into a lurid grin. “Our rightful place as rulers awaits us, Apophis. You and I have waited for this time and planned for it.”
I smiled back at him, twisting it into something dark by using my slumbering power. “Until the rivers run red.” But something in my answer, or my expression, must have fractured, because Seth’s jubilant grin turned down and the god took a longer look at me, raking his glare from head to toe. My human appearance… just how deep did it go?
“Apophis. Dark One. But you are not him? Who have you created in you?” he asked, genuinely curious.
Well, that was that short-lived charade over with. “Yah know, that’s a damn good question. Clearly, I don’t do things by halves, and I did such a fine job erasing myself that I’m having a hard time dropping the lie.”
“You do not remember yourself?” Seth’s laughter rumbled like thunder. Somewhere beneath us, deep inside the earth, the land recoiled. “Then you do not remember our terms, and I find myself gloriously free to do as I please.” He strode between Isis and me. The sands followed, draping around him like a trailing blood-red cloak.
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