Chapter 33 - Awakening

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The dreaded moment had arrived

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The dreaded moment had arrived.

His consciousness fought its way up from depths as unfathomable as those below the seas the faraway ancestors of his people once sailed.

He tried to go back, tried to fall asleep again—but it was no good. The dark ones had promised him exquisite pain, until the last spark of his personality fizzled out. Physical discomfort was not what he feared. Pain had been his companion for a long time.

It was his failure that hurt. It had all been for naught.

Nothing stopped those lunatics, they continued their evil. Their numbers kept  swelling as others came to huddle in their shadow. When the Holy Council decided with Pharaoh to shift Kemet into the other world, during those months when the pylon was built—all this time the dark ones continued their burrowing.

If he believed the Lector Priests, there would be neither dark ones nor demons in the mirror world. Experience told him, though, not to believe everything they said.

And it appeared the dark ones were winning. They had captured him, dragged him along when they went forth to destroy the Device of Life. Pharaoh and the Guardians followed on their heels, and the dark priests feared them much. But they reached that hall first and he had to watch as they went into a frenzy of destruction.

When the bearers of the light exploded through the access in the ceiling, the dark priests threw him into the vessel that was to absorb the energy from the shift. There were many dark ones, with great powers. He had not harboured much hope for the light to prevail. And even if Pharaoh's warriors vanquished evil, how would they tell him apart from those criminals?

Should the forces of the light have won, they would go through the portal soon. That would be the end of him. Unless the device had been destroyed. Should he hope for that? How could he?

It all was too much. Any moment now. He waited.

Nothing happened. Instead, he realised he was breathing.

He could not do so before. Things had changed.

He opened his eyes. The next moment he wished he had not done so. There was no point, and if somebody watched him, they would see he was alive. Or was he?

He concentrated and noticed the Lady Nut stretching across the heavens among little five-pointed stars. A frieze ran around the ceiling, and he saw images of the gods on the walls.

A tomb then.

Had the warriors taken him out and laid him to rest after all? Was his ba—he dared not to harbour foolish hope, this happened too often. But if he had died and his body was still intact, his ba would not dissolve, the netherworld would be open to him.

No, this could not be right, for he was breathing. And hurting.

The afterlife was not supposed to be painful, but then the Lector Priests proclaimed a lot of things that hid the truth. People might not give donations if they found out they would hurt for eternity.

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