I woke up with my birthmark on fire.
Not the familiar warmth that signaled Seth's presence—this was different. Sharper. Like someone had pressed a heated brand against my collarbone while I slept. I gasped and sat up, clawing at my skin, expecting to see blistered flesh.
The mark looked the same as always. Faint silver lines tracing the symbol of Nephthys. But beneath the surface, something pulsed with light I could feel more than see.
Then the room shifted.
For a heartbeat, I wasn't in my chamber anymore. I stood in a throne room made of stars, infinite darkness stretching in every direction, the floor beneath my feet glowing with constellations I didn't recognize. A woman sat on a throne of silver moonlight, her face obscured by shadow, her voice echoing from everywhere at once.
Child of my blood. Vessel of my blessing. The time approaches.
I blinked, and I was back. My chamber. My bed. Morning light streaming through the windows. But my heart was pounding like I'd run from Memphis to Thebes, and my hands wouldn't stop shaking.
"My lady?" A servant appeared in the doorway, carrying my morning washing water. "Are you well? I heard you cry out."
"Fine." The word came out hoarse. "Just a dream."
She didn't look convinced but knew better than to argue with the Queen. She set down the basin and began preparing my morning toilette, chattering about the day's schedule. I barely heard her.
The time approaches.
Time for what?
I made it through the morning ablutions, through breakfast, through a meeting with the household steward about some dispute among the kitchen servants.
I smiled and nodded and responded in all the right places, but my mind was elsewhere—trapped in that star-filled throne room, hearing a voice that resonated in my bones.
It happened again during the meeting. One moment I was listening to the steward explain something about grain allocations; the next, the walls flickered transparent and I saw through them to a river of silver light flowing beneath the palace. Souls, I realized with sick certainty.
I was seeing the dead passing beneath us on their way to the Duat. Hundreds of them, thousands maybe, a constant stream of luminous forms drifting toward judgment. They'd always been there. I just hadn't been able to see them before.
I must have made a sound, because the steward stopped mid-sentence. "Your Majesty?"
"Continue." I gripped the arms of my chair until my knuckles went white. "I'm listening."
He resumed his report, but his voice came from very far away. The river of souls dimmed, faded, returned to solid stone walls—but I could still sense them there, just beyond the edge of perception. Waiting.
The visions came and went throughout the day. Brief flickers, half-glimpsed images overlaying reality like reflections in water. A woman's face superimposed over a serving girl's—not replacing her features, but existing alongside them, as if two people occupied the same space.
Hieroglyphs carved into pillars that rearranged themselves into words I shouldn't understand, messages in a language dead before the pyramids rose. The smell of lotus and myrrh where no incense burned, sweet and cloying and unmistakably divine.
And the voice. Always the voice, whispering in a language older than Egypt itself—a language I somehow understood perfectly.
Wake, child. Wake and see.
The veil grows thin.
You are more than mortal now. Embrace what you are becoming.
I didn't want to embrace anything. I wanted it to stop. Wanted to be ordinary again, just a woman with a strange birthmark and complicated romantic entanglements. Not whatever this was. Not this terrifying dissolution of the boundaries between what was real and what lay beyond.
Ram found me in the garden that afternoon, sitting by the lotus pool and staring at nothing. Or rather, staring at the ghostly figure of a woman walking across the water's surface—a figure only I could see. She moved with impossible grace, her feet leaving ripples in both the physical water and something deeper, something I could feel resonating in my mark.
"Enet." Ram sat beside me on the stone bench, his voice gentle with concern. "You've been distracted all day. The servants are worried. I'm worried."
I forced my eyes away from the phantom on the water. She faded as I broke my focus, dissolving like morning mist. "I'm fine. Just tired. The coronation, the priests, everything—it's overwhelming."
"You flinched during the council session. Twice. Like you saw something that startled you." He reached for my hand, and I let him take it. His grip was warm, solid, undeniably real. I clung to that realness like a drowning woman to driftwood.
Had I flinched? I couldn't remember. The day had become a blur of visions and whispers, reality and unreality bleeding together until I couldn't always tell which was which. Sometimes I wasn't sure if the person I was talking to was actually there or just another phantom overlaying the world.
"I'm fine," I repeated. The lie tasted like ash on my tongue.
Ram studied my face with those warm brown eyes that saw too much. "If something's wrong—if the priests threatened you, or if Seth—"
"It's not that." I made myself smile. "Really. I just need rest. It's been an eventful few days."
He didn't believe me. I could see it in the tension around his mouth, the worry creasing his forehead. But he also knew when not to push. He squeezed my hand once and left me to my ghosts.
That evening, I dismissed my servants early and sat alone before my bronze mirror, trying to make sense of what was happening to me.
The woman's voice said ‘vessel of my blessing.’ Nephthys. The goddess whose mark I carried, whose power had freed Seth, whose name I'd invoked without understanding what I was calling upon.
Was she waking up inside me? Was I becoming her, or was she becoming me, or were we merging into something neither of us had been before?
I stared at my reflection, searching for changes. My face looked the same—golden hair, dark eyes, features that still sometimes surprised me with their elevation to royalty. The Queen's crown sat on its stand nearby, heavy gold catching lamplight. Nothing different. Nothing to explain the visions, the voices, the growing sense that reality was a thin curtain I could see through if I tried.
Then my reflection blinked.
I hadn't blinked. I was certain I hadn't blinked. My eyes had been fixed on the mirror, unmoving, but my reflection's lids had definitely closed and opened.
I leaned closer, heart hammering against my ribs. My reflection leaned too—but slower, like it was moving through water instead of air. And its eyes...
Its eyes flashed silver.
Not the black I'd known all my life. Silver, bright as moonlight, luminous as the goddess's throne in my vision. The color lasted only a heartbeat before fading back to normal, but I'd seen it. I knew what I'd seen.
I scrambled back from the mirror, nearly knocking over my chair. My breathing came fast and shallow, chest tight with panic. In the polished bronze, my reflection watched me with eyes that were mine again—but for how long? How long until those silver eyes stayed? How long until the woman in the mirror wasn't me at all?
You are more than mortal now.
The whisper came from inside my own skull, intimate and inescapable.
I pressed my hands against my temples and tried very hard not to scream. Tried to remember that I was still Enet. Still myself. Still human.
But even as I thought it, I wasn't sure it was true anymore.