It started in the garden.
I was walking the perimeter of the lotus pool, trying to clear my head after another sleepless night, when I noticed a flower dying at the water's edge. A blue lotus, its petals browning and curling inward, stem drooping toward the murky surface. Something about its slow collapse struck me as unbearably sad.
Without thinking, I reached down and cupped it in my palm.
Light pulsed through my fingers.
Not imagination. Not reflection from the water. Actual light, silver-white, emanating from my skin and flowing into the dying plant like water into parched earth.
The flower straightened. Brown retreated from the petals like water evaporating in desert sun, replaced by vibrant blue so intense it almost hurt to look at. The stem firmed, thickening visibly. New buds appeared along the stalk where none had been before, swelling and unfurling as I watched. In the space of three heartbeats, a dying plant became the healthiest specimen in the garden—stronger than any natural flower, its petals almost glowing with vitality.
I jerked my hand back, stumbling away from the pool's edge. My palm tingled with residual warmth, a sensation that had nothing to do with the morning sun. Something had moved through me. Something that wasn't entirely mine.
"No," I whispered, staring at my hand as if it belonged to a stranger. "No, no, no."
But the flower remained. Blooming. Impossibly alive.
I fled to the palace's interior, heart racing, telling myself it was a coincidence. The flower had simply recovered on its own. I'd imagined the light. The warmth. The impossible resurrection.
I almost believed it until I passed Iti in the corridor.
She was one of the younger servants, barely sixteen, carrying a basket of linens with red-rimmed eyes. I'd seen her around the palace but never spoken to her directly. As I passed, something shifted in my perception—like a door opening in my mind that I hadn't known existed.
I knew her mother was dead.
Not suspected. Knew. With absolute certainty, as if the information had been inscribed on my bones. I knew her mother's name was Mutnofret. I knew she'd died three days ago from a fever that wouldn't break, sweating through her linens while Iti pressed cool cloths to her forehead. I knew Iti had held her hand at the end, felt the moment the grip went slack, and that her mother's last words had been about the garden where they'd planted vegetables together when Iti was small.
I knew the garden was behind their house in the craftsmen's district. I knew the vegetables were onions and leeks. I knew Mutnofret had a scar on her left hand from a cooking accident when Iti was seven.
I knew things I had no way of knowing. Things that poured into my mind like water through a broken dam, unstoppable and overwhelming.
"Your Majesty?" Iti had stopped, noticing my frozen expression. "Are you well?"
"Your mother." The words came out before I could stop them. "Mutnofret. The garden—she loved that garden."
Iti's face went white. The basket slipped from her fingers, linens scattering across the floor.
"How do you—" Her voice cracked. "How could you possibly—"
I ran.
Through corridors, past startled guards, up stairs I barely saw. My chambers. I needed my chambers. Needed walls between myself and the world before I learned something else, saw something else, touched something else and watched it transform.
I slammed the door and threw the bolt. Leaned against the wood, gasping.
My hands were glowing.
Faint silver light emanated from my skin, concentrated around my fingertips but spreading across my palms, my wrists, creeping toward my forearms. It pulsed in time with my heartbeat, brightening and dimming in a rhythm I couldn't control.
I stared at them like they belonged to someone else. To something else.
"Stop." I shook them, as if I could dislodge the light. "Stop it. Stop."
The glow intensified.
I pressed my palms against my thighs, trying to smother it. The light bled through the linen of my dress, turning the white fabric luminous. My birthmark burned in answer, Nephthys's symbol blazing on my collarbone like a brand.
I was changing. Actually changing. Not the slow transformation Seth had warned about, but something faster—my body responding to the countdown Horus had imposed, as if the divine ultimatum had accelerated whatever was happening inside me.
I stumbled to my mirror, dreading what I'd see.
My eyes were still dark. Still mine. But the silver light in my hands cast strange shadows across my face, making my features look sharper, older, as if time itself was shifting around me. For a moment I saw someone else looking back—a woman with my features but different somehow. More angular. Infinitely more powerful. Her eyes held knowledge that spanned millennia, sorrows I couldn't fathom, and a terrible patience that made me want to weep.
Nephthys. Looking out through my eyes. Waiting.
I lurched away from the mirror and collapsed onto my bed, pressing my glowing hands against my stomach as if I could push the power back inside, back down, back to wherever it had slept for so long.
A knock at the door. "Your Majesty? The servant Iti is asking—"
"Go away!"
"But she says you knew her mother's name, and she wants to understand how—"
"I said go away!"
Footsteps retreated. I was alone with my fear and my impossible hands and the growing certainty that I was becoming something I couldn't stop.
The flower had been dying. Now it lived.
The servant had been grieving privately. Now she knew I could see her pain.
What would I do next? What would I touch, see, know? Would I wake tomorrow unable to distinguish the living from the dead? Would I reach for Ram and accidentally transform him into something inhuman?
Would there be anything left of Enet by the time the full moon rose?
I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, hiding my glowing hands beneath the fold of my body. The light pulsed against my thighs, warm and steady, completely indifferent to my terror.
Twelve days until Horus's deadline.
And I was losing myself faster than I'd imagined possible.
The silver glow finally faded as afternoon shadows lengthened, leaving my hands looking normal but feeling foreign. Like they belonged to someone else. Like everything about my body was slowly being claimed by a goddess I'd never asked to carry.
I stayed locked in my chamber until dark fell, watching shadows move across the walls, flinching at every creak and footstep. Twice more I felt the power surge—once when a bird landed on my windowsill and I suddenly knew it had flown from Memphis, had a nest with three eggs, would die in six months from a hawk's talons. Another time when I heard a guard's voice in the corridor and understood his wife was pregnant with twins though she hadn't told him yet.
The veil between what was hidden and what was known was dissolving around me. And I had no idea how to rebuild it.
Ram came knocking at dusk. Then again at full dark. I heard him speaking through the door, his voice worried, then pleading, then quietly determined to wait until I opened it.
I couldn't face him like this.
I couldn't face anyone.
So I pressed my pillow over my ears and prayed for a sleep that wouldn't come.