Two Eyes Cenote [m] Adder

She had no intentions of breaching the Duat with Machiavelli. Still, she walks with him, eyes pivoting through shafts of light, pawsteps quickened to avoid detection from the grieving woman who roamed their palace.

“Eira,” she named, as soon as they had come to the man’s hidden room of concoctions. She was gratified to see it no longer in operation, but there was little time to inspect the space now.

“She called you ‘it’,” Eset continues. “You are not an ‘it.’ Why does she think you’ve done these things, Machiavelli?” the coy asks, stepping into the chamber and inhaling the musky air. She turns to face the hybrid man with a fleeting shift of her own feet.

“If Harrod came, I needed him to see you in our cells. You could not know. No one could. It had to be convincing.” She knew well the intimacy between a slaver and his helots, the power they would always wield over them in suppression.

“Machiavelli- I have wronged you. I never intend for- for you to be hurt.” She sought his crystalline depths, not expecting a response, but hoping that in the flush of her eyes he would see that she meant every spoken word.

“I did not tell Khusobek, he did not know,” she adds lamely. But this was blood upon her paws, for she felt in her heart, the mazoi would not have acted if he had known the truth. “I am sorry, and I will do what I can to aid you now.”