Who Is She? | Jaz Anderson

• twenty-two •

Even with a squadron of gods and magicians at their back, this wasn't a battle they were likely to win. Ayden got clued in to that fact as they charged closer and the world seemed to fracture. Ayden realized Apophis wasn't just coiling in and out of the desert, wrapping himself around the pyramids. He was coiling in and out of the Duat, splintering reality into different layers. Trying to find him was like running through a fun house full of mirrors, each mirror leading to another fun house filled with more mirrors.

Their friends began to split up. All around them, gods and magicians became isolated, some sinking deeper into the Duat than others. They fought a single enemy, but they were each fighting only a fragment of his power.

At the base of the pyramid, snaky coils encircled Walt. He tried to force his way out, blasting the serpent with gray light that turned his scales to ashes; but the serpent just regenerated, closing tighter and tighter around Walt. A few hundred feet away, Julian had summoned a full Horus avatar, a giant green hawk-headed warrior with a khopesh in either hand. He sliced away at the serpent's tail — or at least one version of it— while the tail lashed around and tried to impale him. Deeper in the Duat, the goddess Serqet stood in nearly the same place. She had turned herself into a giant black scorpion and was confronting another image of the serpent's tail, parrying it with her stinger in a bizarre sword fight. Even Amos had been waylaid. He faced the wrong direction — or so it looked to Ayden — and sliced his staff through the empty air, shouting command words at nothing.

Ayden hoped that they were weakening Apophis by forcing him to deal with so many of them at once, but she couldn't see any sign of the serpent's power decreasing.

"He's dividing us!" Sadie shouted. Even standing right next to her, she seemed to be speaking from the other side of a roaring wind tunnel.

"Grab hold!" Carter held out the pharaoh's crook. "We have to stay together!"

Sadie took the other end of the crook and Ayden the middle, and they forged ahead.

The closer they got to the serpent's head, the harder it was to move. Ayden felt like they were running through layers of clear syrup, each thicker and more resistant than the last. She looked around them and realized most of their allies had fallen away. Some she couldn't even see because of the Chaos distortion.

Ahead of them, a bright light shimmered as if through fifty feet of water.

"We have to get to Ra," Carter said. "Concentrate on him!"

Ayden knew he was probably more worried about finding Zia.

Ayden could hear Zia's voice, summoning waves of fire against her enemy. She couldn't be much farther maybe twenty feet in mortal distance? Through the Duat it might have been a thousand miles.

"Almost there!" Ayden shouted.

You're too late, little ones, the voice of Apophis hummed in her ears. Ra will be my breakfast today.

A snake coil as big as a subway car slammed into the sand at their feet, almost crushing the siblings. The scales rippled with Chaos energy, making Ayden want to double over with nausea. Without Nephthys shielding her, she was pretty sure she would have been vaporized just standing so close to it. Carter swung his flail. Three lines of fire cut through the snake's hide, blasting it to shreds of red and gray fog.

"Okay?" Carter asked the girls.

Sadie looked pale, but she and Ayden nodded. They trudged on.

A few of the most powerful gods still fought around them.
Babi the baboon was riding one version of the serpent's head, pounding his massive fists between Apophis's eyes, but the serpent seemed only mildly annoyed. The hunter goddess Neith hid behind a pile of stone blocks, sniping at another snakehead with her arrows. She was pretty easy to spot because of the palm fronds in her hair, and she kept yelling something about a Jelly Baby conspiracy. Farther on, another serpent's mouth sank its fangs into Nekhbet the vulture goddess, who shrieked in pain and exploded into a pile of black feathers.