Lion Head Mesa Tiger lily

Beside her reflection appears the stoic dark prince.

“Oh, Khaem!” She breathes, hand dropping. He has seen her a hundred times, but there is a vague sensation that she’s been caught at something private.

Ridged in gold, he is elegant. Beautiful, in a wholly otherworldly way. Like daddy, but somehow sharper. If she and Den were a dulcet pair, then Khaemwaset was her inverse; a yin of shadow to her sunlit yang.

She loved him. Loved him just as much as Den, if in a different way. A shiver trickles over her spine. The golden sister could almost feel her crocodilian brother alive in the night’s shadows, watching, even as he was fast asleep in bed.

Suddenly they are locked in cascades of shimmering ivory! The girl gasps, blinking heavenward through feathers born aloft with gusts of girlish laughter! She whirls breathlessly and catches the fair plumes upon her crown and the backs of her paws!

“It is beautiful!” She smiles broadly, first to his strong profile and then with an adoring list of cheek as it rests upon the obsidian cut of Khaem’s shoulder. The last of the swan feathers fall around them like glimmering stars through the moonlight.

In silence she gazes down at their reflection, stroked in the gentle rippling of the softest eiderdown. She’d spent so little with her brother as his affections were always for Satakh. She felt in some ways Khaem was more a stranger to her than brother. So she soaked in the time they had together now, allowing her eyes to explore every curve of his proud face.

“I see a king. A glorious king of the shadows,” the amiirad whispers with a grin.