The desert stretched endless beneath a sky thick with stars.
I knew I was dreaming—recognized the particular quality of moonlight that existed only in this space between waking and sleeping. The sand beneath my bare feet held warmth from a sun that had never actually set, and the air tasted of myrrh and something older.
"You always did love the desert."
I turned, and there he was.
Seth stood among the dunes with none of the translucence that marked his waking appearances. Here, in this realm of dreams, he was solid. Real. Crimson hair caught the starlight, falling past shoulders that looked carved from bronze. Those impossible red eyes held warmth that the corporeal world denied him.
"You made this." I gestured at the landscape around us—the exact stretch of sand where we'd hunted together months ago, before everything changed. "This place."
"I remembered it." He moved closer, and my breath caught at the simple miracle of his footsteps actually disturbing the sand. "Every detail. The way the dunes curved. The specific shade of sky. The exact spot where you almost shot me instead of the hare."
"You shouldn't have startled me."
"You shouldn't have been so beautiful in the moonlight." He stopped an arm's length away, and the space between us felt charged with everything we couldn't have in the waking world. "I was distracted."
I reached out—slowly, half-expecting my hand to pass through him as it always did now. But my fingers met solid flesh, warm and real, and a sound escaped my throat that was half-laugh, half-sob.
"You're here." I pressed my palm flat against his chest, feeling the beat of something that might have been a heart. "You're actually here."
"Only in dreams." His hand covered mine, holding it against him. "This is the one realm where I can still be whole. Where the rules of the mortal world don't apply."
"Then why don't we stay here forever?"
"Because you'd waste away in the waking world." He smiled, but sadness threaded through it. "Your body would lie still while your mind wandered here with me. I won't let that happen."
His free hand rose to my face, thumb tracing my cheekbone with devastating slowness. I leaned into the touch, starving for contact after weeks of reaching for smoke and shadow.
"Do you know how maddening it is?" Seth's voice dropped to something rough. "To see you all day and never feel you? To watch you walk through corridors, speak to servants, sit beside Ram at meals—and know that if I reached out, my hand would pass through you like you were the ghost instead of me?"
"Seth—"
"I stand beside your bed every night." His thumb traced lower, following the line of my jaw. "Watch you sleep. Count your breaths. And I can't touch your hair, can't feel your warmth, can't remind you that you're mine in the ways that matter."
His hand slid to my throat, not pressing, just resting there. I felt my pulse jump against his palm.
"Here, though..." He stepped closer, eliminating the distance between us. "Here I can do this."
He kissed my neck—a real kiss, warm lips against sensitive skin. I gasped, my hands fisting in the linen of his tunic. Weeks of deprivation made the simple contact feel overwhelming, every nerve singing with sensation I'd thought lost.
"And this." His mouth traveled higher, finding the spot below my ear that made my knees weaken.
"Seth." His name came out breathless.
"And this." He kissed my shoulder where the dress had slipped, then the hollow of my throat, then the corner of my mouth—teasing, promising, never quite giving me what I wanted.
My birthmark flared with heat as his lips hovered over it. He pressed a kiss there too, and I felt the connection between us pulse like a living thing.
"I've missed this," I admitted, my voice unsteady. "Missed you. The real you, not the shadow version."
"I'm always real." He pulled back enough to meet my eyes, his expression fierce. "The body is just a vessel. What exists between us doesn't require flesh to be true."
"But it helps."
His laugh was low, dark, delicious. "It does."
He kissed me properly then—deep and claiming and everything I'd been craving. I melted into him, letting the dream carry us both into sensation that felt more vivid than waking life ever had. His hands found my waist, my hips, pulled me flush against him until I could feel exactly how solid he was in this realm.
"I want you," I breathed against his mouth. "Here, where I can actually have you."
"Then have me." His voice was rough with need. "Take whatever you want."
His hands found the shoulders of my dress and pushed them down, the fabric pooling at my waist, then my hips, then the sand at my feet. The desert air kissed my bare skin, warm as breath, and Seth's eyes traveled over me with a hunger that made my core clench.
"Beautiful." He traced a line from my collarbone down between my breasts, following the silver path of my birthmark. "Every time I see you, I think I've memorized you. And every time, you surprise me."
I reached for his tunic, pulling it over his head with an urgency that made him laugh. But the laughter died when my hands found his chest—solid muscle under warm skin, the body of a god made real in this space between worlds.
"Lie down," he commanded, and I obeyed without thinking, settling onto sand that felt soft as silk beneath me.
He knelt between my thighs, and for a moment he simply looked—drinking in the sight of me spread before him in the starlight. Then his hands began to move, tracing patterns on my skin that made me arch and gasp.
"Weeks of watching you," he murmured, his fingers trailing up my inner thigh. "Weeks of wanting this."
His hand found my center, and I cried out at the contact—finally, finally, the touch I'd been craving. He stroked me with devastating skill, fingers circling and pressing in patterns that built pleasure with ruthless efficiency.
"Seth—" His name came out broken.
"I know." He lowered his mouth to my breast, tongue flicking across one nipple while his fingers continued their work below. "I know exactly what you need."
He did. He played my body like an instrument he'd been studying for lifetimes, finding every spot that made me writhe, every rhythm that pushed me higher. When he slid two fingers inside me, curling them just right, I nearly shattered then and there.
"Not yet." He pulled back, and I whimpered at the loss. "I want to feel you come around me. The real me."
He positioned himself between my thighs, and I felt the thick press of him against my entrance. In the waking world, he was smoke and shadow. Here, he was heavy and hard and gloriously present.
"Look at me," he ordered.
I opened eyes I hadn't realized I'd closed. His crimson gaze burned into mine as he pushed forward, filling me inch by inch, stretching me until I couldn't tell where I ended and he began.
"This is what we could have," he said through gritted teeth. "Every night. In dreams, I can give you everything."
He began to move—long, deep strokes that touched something profound inside me. I wrapped my legs around his hips, pulling him deeper, urging him faster. The sand shifted beneath us, warm and yielding, and the stars wheeled overhead in patterns that had nothing to do with astronomy.
"You feel—" I couldn't finish the thought. Words scattered like the sand beneath us.
"I know." He drove into me harder, and I felt the coil of pleasure tightening in my core. "I feel it too. Every time. Like being unmade and remade all at once."
His hand found the place where our bodies joined, thumb pressing against the bundle of nerves that had me seeing stars that weren't in the sky. The combined sensation—his thickness inside me, his fingers working me from outside—pushed me to the edge of endurance.
"Come for me," Seth commanded. "Let me feel you break apart."
I shattered with his name on my lips, waves of pleasure crashing through me, my inner walls clenching around him in rhythmic pulses. He groaned and drove deep one final time, his own release flooding through him, filling me with warmth that felt like divinity itself.
We lay tangled together in the sand afterward, his weight pressing me into the softness, both of us breathing hard. I could feel his heartbeat against my chest—or whatever passed for a heartbeat in a god's dream-form.
"That was—" I started.
"Everything." He pressed a kiss to my shoulder. "That was everything I've wanted since the moment I marked you."
I wanted to push further, to demand real answers about what Nephthys had done, why she'd turned against him, what their relationship had truly been. But Seth kissed me before I could form the words—deep and thorough and clearly intended to distract.
When I finally surfaced, gasping, the dream was beginning to fray at the edges.
"Dawn's coming," Seth murmured against my temple. "You need to wake."
"I don't want to."
"I know." He held me tighter. "But the waking world has enemies you need to face. Ptahmose hasn't stopped scheming just because you're sleeping."
"Will you come again? Here, where you're real?"
"Every night you'll let me." He pressed a final kiss to my forehead as the dream dissolved around us. "Dream of me, little blessing. I'll always find you."
I woke gasping in my chamber, my body flushed with remembered heat, my birthmark still pulsing against my collarbone.
The questions about Nephthys remained unanswered. But as I lay watching dawn paint the ceiling gold, I realized that might have been intentional.
Seth was hiding something. And whatever it was, it had to do with the goddess whose mark I carried.
I would find out eventually. Even gods couldn't keep secrets forever.