Luneshale Pass pantano

a mystery remained the origin of this boy now caught in murdering teeth.

poor nohkt.

a hand overplayed in earlier exploitation of crocodile's fatherly emotions was a gambit used once and discarded to ash.

the man who had put safiya's eye out held a boy aloft, silhouetted against an autumn sky over the beautiful desert.

the woman tore at him, and her teeth rent furrows of blood in his shoulder, but the crocodile would not be dissuaded; he bulled ferociously into the ribcage of the red bitch, intending to drive her back toward soto.

Anubis, admit this child into Your embrace.

his responsibility! it was to muat-riya, to eset, to all those who dwelt therein. had he not come to save this taken child?

honesty, caramelizing in a mouth that reached inexorably for soto through the fray, through the shouting and wailing; no. he had not come for any child. he had arrived for this one.

injected with the utter coldness of necessity, khusobek saw a choice and took it. killing soto would deal a far greater blow to his fellows than they could wreak against muat-riya. logic warred weakly with instinctual hatred, but only until his breath seemed to stir soto's pelt-hairs in a languid slowmotion state.

and killing him would be sweeter than any pain they might mount against a kingdom of red stone.

go, boy. go to the Land of Reeds. be reborn.

reborn in a way khusobek could not hope. Ammit would devour what was left of him in the end for this atrocity alone. khusobek traded life for life and life again, meaning to strike soto with so much force that he might well crush the priestess' neck. "kill her," he hissed to the maddened white swan, his only words before he shattered the air between them all.

there was but one way to fight those who put out the eyes of girls and throttled pups, and it was to capitulate no longer to any senet demands upon that broken table.