Nico's quest

chapter 3

Some people might think that it was fun to ride a giant jackal across a vast, time-twisted nether-world desert.

Some people were morons.

And Nico could attest that there was nothing remotely fun about it. He had decided that he hated the Duat. It was a world with rules all its own, some of which only seemed to apply in certain parts of it, which made everything all the more confusing. There were plenty of mythical places from Greek mythology that were similar to certain parts, as far as rules or things like time speeding up or slowing down went, but at least those dimensions each had their own consistent rules.

Nico felt a little nauseous and more than a little disjointed as the world abruptly shifted from a desert to what seemed to be the inside of a huge pyramid, forgoing the normal stages of transition like doors and walls. The two segments of the world just kind of blurred together, so that one minute Anubis and Nico were traveling at top speed through the desert, then for ten seconds they were in this in between stage where giant stone blocks hung at random intervals in the air, along with a semi-transparent death mural and hieroglyphic display. Then the next they were loping down a long, long, long dark passageway like the kind found inside of pyramids.

"Stop!" Nico shouted suddenly and scrambled to jump off Anubis' back before the jackal-god even came to a complete stop.

"What's wrong?" demanded Anubis. He spun around to where Nico had leapt off and was leaning against the wall clutching his head. "Are you ill?"

"I thought I was going to throw up for a second," admitted Nico. "I didn't want to throw up on you. That would've sucked."

Anubis, still in jackal form, regarded him with an almost sympathetic expression, and it was testament to how messed up Nico's life was that he had no problem thinking that a jackal could look sympathetic.

"We should not linger here longer than we have to," Anubis said after Nico had taken several seconds to try to pull himself back together. "In this part of the Duat time is very compressed."

"What does that mean?"

"That time is passing very quickly in your world, and that if we spend an hour here then we may miss the equinox completely."

Nico swore in Italian. "Why didn't you tell me that sooner?" he demanded, climbing back onto Anubis' back as quickly as he could.

Anubis didn't answer, not with words, anyway. Nico could feel what he was thinking through their link though. Anubis was still worried about him and didn't want him pushing himself too hard. What had happened during the ritual must have really freaked Anubis out.

Unconsciously, Nico started to remember the event, but the memory that he ended up remembering actually wasn't his own, probably because Nico's own memory of the ritual going wrong had been washed in both adrenaline and magic to the point where it had dissolved like papyrus in vinegar. But when the images and memory came to the forefront of his mind, at first he didn't realize that they weren't his own, but Anubis'. Anubis had been inside Nico's head during the ritual, after all, using him as a conduit for the magic that was needed, so their memories of the event were parallel to begin with.

He'd been chanting in Egyptian as hieroglyphics appeared in the air around his host, shimmering with an unholy light that he was sure looked totally awesome. In fact, he really wished that one of the Mythomagic artists could see it, because it would have made an awesome illustration for a card.

And thinking of those cards, he really needed to find a way to get in contact with their creators, because he'd heard rumors that they were doing two cross-pantheon series, one themed around divine, life-giving, holier-than-thou gods and entities, and another around death gods and their ilk, and if it was true he did not want his new card to end up gimp. His card stats needed some major upgrades, doubly so since he was using a son of Hades as his host, and maybe that hadn't been a deliberate choice, but there was no denying that it made him epicly badass. Hundreds of Egyptian gods had failed to do what he'd done by accident, and now that it had happened he could understand why those gods had risked starting a war with the Greek pantheon.