I woke to find him sitting beside my bed.
Dawn light filtered through the shutters, casting pale stripes across my chamber. Ram sat in a chair he must have dragged from my writing desk, his ceremonial robes replaced by simple linen, dark circles bruising the skin beneath his eyes. He'd been there all night. Watching over me while I finally slept.
"How did you get in?" My voice came out rough, scraped raw.
"I'm Pharaoh. I have keys to every door in this palace." He leaned forward, studying my face. "Your hands aren't glowing anymore."
I looked down at them. Normal. Human. As if yesterday had been a fever dream.
"It stopped after dark. But it will come back." I pulled the blanket higher, suddenly aware of how vulnerable I must look. "You shouldn't be here."
"Where else would I be?"
"Running Egypt. Managing the crisis. Preparing for—"
"My vizier can handle routine matters. And the only crisis I care about is you."
He said it so simply. As if the statement were obvious rather than extraordinary. As if a pharaoh abandoning his duties to sit vigil over a woman was the most natural thing in the world.
"I scared a servant yesterday. Told her things about her dead mother that I couldn't possibly know." The confession tumbled out before I could stop it. "She looked at me like I was a monster."
"You're not a monster."
"I brought a flower back from the dead, Ram. I looked in the mirror and saw someone else looking back." My voice cracked. "I don't know what I am anymore."
He reached for my hand. I flinched away instinctively.
"Don't. I might—I don't know what will happen if I touch someone."
"Then we'll find out together." He took my hand anyway, his grip warm and steady. Nothing happened. No light, no visions, no flood of intimate knowledge about his past.
I stared at our intertwined fingers, waiting for the wrongness that didn't come.
"See?" Ram's thumb traced circles on my knuckle. "Still just us."
I should have pulled away. Should have insisted he leave, protect himself, maintain the distance that safety demanded. Instead, I held on like he was the only solid thing in a world that kept shifting beneath my feet.
Over the next three days, Ram brought an army of experts to my chamber.
Healers who examined my hands and pronounced them physically normal—no scarring, no unusual heat, no explanation for the light I described.
Scholars who pored over ancient texts about divine manifestation, pulling scrolls from temple archives that hadn't been opened in centuries, and found nothing that matched my symptoms.
Priests from half a dozen temples who offered prayers, blessings, protective amulets, and wildly contradictory theories about what Nephthys's awakening might mean.
A priestess of Hathor suggested I was being blessed with fertility magic. A priest of Thoth insisted I was receiving divine wisdom. An elderly woman from the Temple of Isis claimed I was being punished for past sins and recommended three days of fasting.
None of them had answers. None of them even asked the right questions. But Ram kept searching, kept sending messengers, kept bringing anyone who might offer a fragment of understanding.
"There's a scholar in Memphis," he said on the second day, pacing my chamber while I sat curled in my chair, trying to ignore the way shadows seemed to move in my peripheral vision. "He's spent forty years studying the old cults, the ones that existed before the temples consolidated. I've sent riders to bring him here."
"He won't know anything either."
"Maybe not. But we won't know until we ask."
The scholar arrived on the third day. He was ancient, half-blind, and smelled of papyrus dust. After examining me for an hour, he declared that I was either becoming a living goddess or suffering from an unusual form of hysteria. Possibly both.
Ram had him escorted out with pointed courtesy.
That night, the visions returned.
I was helping Ram review a stack of administrative scrolls—he'd insisted on working from my chamber rather than his study—when suddenly I wasn't in my body anymore. I stood in a vast darkness, silver rivers flowing beneath my feet, and a woman's voice spoke words I couldn't quite hear.
When I came back, I was on the floor. Ram was holding me, his face pale with terror.
"Two minutes." His voice shook. "You were gone for two minutes. Your eyes went silver and you stopped breathing and I couldn't—"
He pulled me against his chest, his heart hammering beneath my ear.
"Don't do that again. Please. I can't—" He broke off, pressing his face into my hair.
I held him while he trembled. The Pharaoh of Egypt, shaking with fear over a woman who might be losing herself piece by piece. Who might wake tomorrow as someone else entirely.
"Why are you still here?" I asked when his breathing steadied. "Why haven't you—"
"Locked you away? Called the priests to perform an exorcism? Handed you to Horus and hoped for the best?"
"Any of those. All of those."
Ram pulled back enough to meet my eyes. His were red-rimmed, exhausted, and utterly certain.
"Because I love you. And love doesn't abandon people when they're breaking."
"I might not be me tomorrow."
"Then I'll love whoever you become. Or I'll mourn who you were. But I won't leave you to face this alone." He cupped my face in his hands, his callused thumbs brushing away tears I hadn't realized I was crying. "You spent months watching me fight Seth for control of my own body. You never flinched. Never looked away. How could I offer you anything less?"
I hadn't thought of it that way. Had never connected my vigil over his possession to his vigil over my transformation. But he was right. I'd watched him struggle. Held his hand through the worst nights. Believed in his humanity even when Seth's influence seemed absolute.
Now he was doing the same for me.
"You're a fool," I whispered.
"So you keep telling me." He kissed my forehead, gentle as a prayer. "Get some sleep. I'll be here when you wake."
He was. And the next night. And the next.
He read to me from scrolls of poetry when the visions made sleep impossible. Held my hands when they started glowing at random moments, his grip steady even as silver light leaked between our fingers. Talked me through panic when I woke screaming from dreams I couldn't remember.
He asked for nothing. Expected nothing. Simply gave, and gave, and gave again.
Somewhere in those sleepless nights, I stopped seeing Ram as Seth's former vessel. Stopped measuring him against anyone at all.
He was just Ram. A man who gave away everything and someone who fought with his council and held my hand through the darkest transformation I'd ever faced. A man who'd chosen to be here when he could have been anywhere else.
The realization hit me on the fourth morning, watching him sleep in the chair beside my bed. He'd refused to leave, refused to rest in comfort while I suffered, and exhaustion had finally claimed him. His face was peaceful in sleep. Younger, somehow. The lines of worry smoothed away.
I reached out and brushed a strand of hair from his forehead. He stirred but didn't wake.
This was what devotion looked like. Not grand gestures or desperate declarations. Just presence. Just staying.
I let him sleep and turned to watch the sunrise through my window. Nine days until the full moon. Nine days to find a solution that didn't end with someone I cared about destroyed.
But for the first time since Horus's ultimatum, I didn't feel entirely alone.