Seratis Daughter of the Sun Read online

  He had a beard, defined around his gaping mouth and fleshy lips. If he closed that mouth and didn’t look so idiotic at the moment, I’d say he was a very…charming man.

  “Amazing.” His brows eased down as his gaze adhered to mine.

  The way he looked at me decreased my apprehension to ask about my…aging condition. Perhaps I had been a mummya for a hundred years, but I still remembered how a man would look at a woman he found beautiful. “How has the grave touched me?”

  “What grave? You’re mesmerizing,” he whispered, and then his lashes fluttered as if, suddenly, he became aware of his ridiculous staring. “I mean…you haven’t changed at all.”

  “You do know how I looked like before?”

  “Yes. I know everything about you and your companions, Goddess.”

  “Don’t call me that.” I rose to my knees and flung mummya arms in the air.

  Without having to ask him, he stood and unfolded them bare. I studied the back of my hands, then my palms. Several times. Marveled at them. No wrinkles. No sagginess. No swelling. Nothing. Exactly the way I remembered them.

  “I really didn’t age at all.” I laughed in surprise. “A complete success. How wondrous!”

  “Wondrous indeed.”

  A pungent scent mixed with a tinge of sickening sweetness rushed through my nose. The smell of death that had surrounded me for a hundred years, yet from which I was protected. “Except for the smell.”

  “It’s from the tomb, not from you.”

  I smiled at him. “You are Ari’s bloodline, aren’t you?”

  He swallowed. “Yes. Apologies, my Queen. For not introducing myself properly…and for being late. I fear it took me more time than anticipated to find my way through the traps and reach the right entrance. I’m Drusus, one of Ari’s great great great…” His lips pressed shut. “I’m one of Ari’s great grandsons.”

  I grunted. As much as I was disappointed that one of the brightest minds and greatest teachers of his time had such a…an intellectually unimpressive offspring, I was more than thankful for this man’s presence today.

  For the loyalty that wasn’t deformed by time.

  For the faith.

  For the dedication.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Drusus.” I started to remove the not-white-anymore cloth off of me. “An odd name you have.”

  “For Your Majesty, yes. A lot has changed since you’ve been…asleep, my Queen. My name is a quite common one now. It means strong.”

  “In what tongue?”

  He gulped. “In… Uh…in…”

  “It doesn’t matter.” A smirk tugged at the corner of my lips as I studied his figure. Tall. At least an arm taller than myself. Broad shoulders. Enormous muscles in his bare arms, calves and the little exposed area of his thighs. His red tunic barely fit him as his chest and abdomen strained against the thin fabric. Over all, I could see where he got his name.

  “Names might have changed, but clothes not so much.” My gaze, clear as a cloudless sky now, fell over the bulging sac on the ceramic tiles. This must have been the item he’d laid on the ground and made that thud earlier. I rose and stepped out of the pooling linen around my feet, the pain that was taking over my body almost nonexistent. “Do you happen to have any in there? I hate to wear anything of what was buried with me. It must be outdated.”

  His big eyes grew bigger. His jaw fell low, and he uttered a peculiar sound at the back of his throat.

  I chortled as his heart skipped a beat, his awe-struck expression more than amusing. The outline of his growing erection was even more entertaining.

  And…remarkable.

  Perhaps he wasn’t bestowed with much in his brains, but he was compensated heavily in his manhood.

  “How much longer are you going to stare at me before you speak?” I asked.

  His cheeks turned crimson, and his gaze dropped. “Apologies, Goddess,” he rattled and squatted to untie the sac.

  “I’m not a goddess. Immortality only comes in the afterlife. How could you possibly believe in that? Hasn’t Ari taught you anything?”

  “He did. He taught us everything about you, Queen Meha. How your blood runs pure from noble kings and queens, not the divine myth only found in story and song. A pure human and one rightful queen. How you reject the false divinity cloak under which pharaohs hid. But…” He brought a royal blue dress out of the sac and handed it to me, his eyes still down.

  “But what?” I slid the silk drapes over my head. “You never truly believed it was true?”

  “Oh, we believed. We believed with all our hearts, Godde… Majesty.” He shook his head, his arm digging inside the sac. “It’s just… It’s hard to explain. I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I came here, I didn’t know what to expect. And in all honesty, I was hoping Ari’s teachings were nothing but a senile, mad scholar’s hallucinations because this is beyond sanity.” He finally stopped digging and gave me a hand mirror he’d brought out of the sac. “But you’re here, awaking from a grave, looking like this. I mean, look at you.”

  Panicking or not, it was such a nice gesture from him to bring a mirror. I was dying to see for myself how I looked.

  Evening my breaths, I stepped out of the sarcophagus and grabbed the mirror.

  “Neither time nor burial has touched your face.” He cleared his throat. “Or…body.”

  I scolded him with a pointed look, but I was laughing on the inside.

  “Uh… I mean your hair, your long black hair hasn’t thinned or grayed. It’s shining for Gods’ sakes.” He jumped to his feet. “Your lips were dry and cracked and white when I arrived. Now look at them. They’re bright red.”

  The high pitch of his voice pierced my ears as I traced the reflection of my features he was describing. I didn’t know whether I was more sensitive to sounds since I woke or his astonishment was annoyingly excessive.

  He did have a point about the swift recovery of my flesh and skin, though. I couldn’t help but link that note with the rapid vanishing of my muscle and bone aches.

  “Your skin is milky white, not pale, milky and flawless without a single line,” he continued, and I touched my cheeks, studying them in the mirror.

  My glance lifted to him. “Which is exactly the outcome we anticipated and hoped for. The goal of the mummification from the start. Complete preservation of the body. This should confirm Ari’s story not make you skeptical.”

  “I think we both know the outcome is a little more complicated than mere preservation. I’m not the brightest person in the room—in any room—but if I can deduce that you didn’t only stop aging, so can you, Majesty.”

  I looked back at my image, examining the delicate details. The corners of my eyes. The shade of my skin. The shape of my mouth.

  Free of pain. No imperfections of any kind. Unaffected by time or the Long Sleep.

  “To prove what I’m saying, here.” He dug through his sac again and got out a piece of papyrus. “As far as I was taught, you loved the sun. You had a darker skin in the few pictures Ari had drawn for you.”

  He unfolded what turned out to be a colored drawing of my face. I didn’t need to inspect it to know he was speaking the truth.

  “If your body wasn’t working at all, you should be waking up in the same state you were when you…slept,” he said.

  “You’re right. The current color of my skin was the one I was born with. Not the one I had when I was buried,” I said, my mind running with endless speculations. “But it doesn’t prove what I think you’re saying. It could be the result of various possibilities.”

  He shook his head. “Did you have any scars, Queen Meha, before the burial?”

  Many. I was at war with my half-brother. One in particular I could never forget.

  Bessen Ra’s arrow had missed my heart by a digit. The wound had barely healed by the mummification time, leaving a hideous scar on my breast.

  I touched my chest,
feeling the mark that should have been there, reluctant to expose my skin and see the evidence with my own eyes.

  My stomach tied in a knot when I couldn’t find any traces of the wound. I pushed away the thin, silk drapes, almost tearing them in pieces.

  A gasp escaped my mouth.

  “You had one here, and now it’s vanished, hasn’t it?” he asked.

  My chest heaved as my eyes lifted to him. He tore his gaze from my half-exposed breast, biting his lips.

  Swiftly, I adjusted the silk to cover myself, glaring at him, distracting myself from a discovery I wasn’t ready for. “Haven’t you seen a woman before?”

  He swallowed. “Yes. But I certainly haven’t seen a goddess till now.”

  “Stop being absurd.”

  “I don’t think it’s absurdity that’s controlling my behavior at the moment. I feel like…I’m out of willpower.” His gaze locked with mine. “And these big, bright eyes, these bottomless black abysses you possess. With what I know, I should have known better not to look into them.” His voice hushed now. “The way they—”

  “No!” Something rumbled inside me.

  Not rage.

  Energy that had gone wild.

  A force so strong and unique.

  Dangerous.

  Startled, he stared at me, his forehead glistening with sweat. “Apologies if I’ve upset you, Majesty. I surely didn’t mean to. Are you well?”

  I held onto my brains, the mind that made this wondrous dream a reality, and used it as a shield from the unrecognized power engulfing me.

  “The mummification process might have affected me in an ambiguous way yet to be examined, but it is definitely not what you have in mind,” I said.

  “Your Majesty must understand how difficult it is to believe otherwise.”

  “Don’t you dare think that way. All that nonsense about Seratis, the Goddess of Sleep, the mesmerizing eyes that put men under my spell and commanded them to do whatever I wanted, was never true. A filthy myth.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not divine or magical.” I used all the strength left in me to stop myself from bursting in his face, and with that foreign force inside me, it seemed I could literally explode. “No human ever has been. I’m a woman and Queen. Nothing else.”

  “No queen has returned from the dead before.”

  “I wasn’t dead.”

  “I know. You were mummified. Alive. I also know about the legend—”

  “Fable,” I interrupted. “Not legend.”

  “Of course. Yes, the Seratis fable Bessen Ra created to make people fear and hate you. But this… You…” His exotic eyes trailed over me, his heart banging violently, annoyingly. “Ari’s teachings were nothing but big fat lies he’d passed on for a thousand years—”

  “Enough!” I growled. “All your facts are muddled, and your little brain would rather ridicule a great knowledge master such as your great grandfather, believe in an outrageous lie than to understand the truth.” I clenched my teeth. “And it’s a hundred years, not a thousand.”

  He ran a thumb over his eyebrow. “Uh… Um…about that—”

  “Not another word. I’d like you to stop stammering now, give me something to wear on my feet and help me wake my friends. Their time has almost come.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Regeneration.

  That must be the answer.

  The mummification didn’t only preserve my body. It revived it. With an accelerated effect that repaired each and every physical damage had ever been there.

  Healed it.

  An amazing yet frightening possibility.

  Did it only take effect after I’d wakened? Or had it been building slowly in my sleep? How did it happen in the first place? How did—

  “Majesty?” Drusus interrupted the questions jamming my head. “Have you forgotten the spell to open the secret door?”

  I glanced from the engravings on the wall tiles before me to him, and then back at the wall. The only barrier that separated my burial chamber from my companions’. “Of course not. I’m only a little distracted.”

  “Allow me. I’ve always wanted to do that,” he said quickly, already reaching for the tiles.

  “Are you certain you can open this chamber without sinking us into a pit instead? You said you had trouble earlier finding your way around the traps inside the tomb.”

  His eager hands stopped in their tracks. Then he stared at me for a moment before giving me a huge grin, his teeth unrealistically white against his skin color. “Good thing Your Majesty is here now to save our ars…souls. To save our souls if I initiated a trap by accident.”

  I laughed under my breath. Somehow, I found his silliness humorous. “Go ahead.”

  His eyes sparkled. “Thank you, my Queen.”

  I listened to him as he recited a prayer followed by the sequence to open the door, making sure he did know it.

  “Ankh. Udjet. Khebri. Protect the guard, the scholar, and the servant. Find the rays to the sun, and let the rebirth begin,” he started.

  I nodded in confirmation and reassurance. Despite the composure of his body, I detected a huge sum of nervousness coming from underneath. I didn’t know how, but I could feel this man. His energy. Only by standing next to him.

  He touched the first symbol. Ankh. The key of life. Then Udjet. The eye of Horus. The symbol of healing. And finally, the scarab. Khebri, protector of the heart.

  A sequence hidden in a prayer to protect my faithful friends.

  The stone rumbled as the first bolt on the other side of the wall moved and unlocked one of the two wooden locks securing the chamber.

  “Good. Proceed. Find the rays to the sun to unlock the second one,” I said.

  “This one is a little more complicated.” His gaze roamed the symbols. “There are no rays or sun hieroglyphs.”

  “Look closely. The answer to this riddle is very simple,” I encouraged him.

  “I know, and I read it somewhere in Ari’s notes, but it’s slipped my mind.”

  “All right. I shall give you a hint. What else resembles the sun, Drusus?”

  He swept the wall with his eyes. Then they landed exactly where they should. “Of course. The sunflower, Your Majesty’s favorite plant.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “I’m such an idiot sometimes.”

  Sometimes? I bit my lip on a laugh.

  He rushed to press the tile.

  “No!” I stopped him. “Don’t touch it yet. That would have opened the pit.”

  His face contorted in panic. “Sorry.”

  I would reprimand him, but I didn’t wish to. Watching this strong man, who could tear down this wall with all his huge muscles if he had to, vulnerable like that evoked a strange feeling inside me. Along with the clarity of the energy emanating from him—it was as if I could read how he felt—it formed some sort of…

  I didn’t know what to call it. And I didn’t know why I wished to give him a hug.

  “It’s all right,” I finally said and dragged my gaze off his face. I could push the right tile myself, but I wouldn’t. I wanted to help him solve the riddle, give him the confidence that he could accomplish this task himself. “Find the rays to the sun, not press the sunflower. If you look up, you will find—”

  “Spears.” His eyes shone with the discovery. “Slated like rays.”

  I smiled. “Exactly. Trace them to see where they point.”

  His index finger tracked an invisible line over a row of tiles. “Here, but there are many of them. Which one would… Oh, I know.” A grin of triumph painted his lips. “The blue lotus, the symbol of rebirth.”

  “Let the rebirth begin,” I confirmed.

  He touched the right engraving, and the wall shook with a thunderous tremor, torturing my sensitive hearing.

  We stepped back, allowing space for the door that protruded from the wall and sprayed us with debris.

  He pushed the door open as I dusted myself. Then we entered the second burial chamber.


  A wave of joy and gratitude engulfed me as I spotted the three sealed sarcophagi. “Excellent job, Drusus. Do you want to solve more riddles and help set my friends free?”

  “Thank you, Majesty. Yes, I’d love to.”

  “I shall open my guard’s. You do the rest.”

  Approaching Redamun’s grave carefully, I could hear him breathing inside. I could hear them all, feel them all come back to life.

  My heart danced as I unlocked my loyal protector’s sarcophagus while Drusus worked on the other two.

  Time to see my companions again. To reunite in the new world.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Remarkable,” Redamun, now clothed in a tunic similar to Drusus’s, eyed himself in the mirror. “We haven’t aged a day, and I feel as strong as ever. Perhaps even stronger.”

  I gazed at my escort with admiration like I always had. At his beautiful black hair that hit his broad shoulders. His hazel eyes and long lashes. His body that had always made me feel tiny yet safe whenever he was around—and he was always around me.

  Protecting me.

  Keeping my secrets.

  Endlessly listening to my madness without tiring.

  I had missed him so much.

  All of them.

  “It’s amazing.” Tia twirled in her new, white dress, her chin-length hair swirling over her little face. “But as much as I love it, being so alive and seeing my Queen again, I think I might be hallucinating from the stiff air. I could swear I heard Your Majesty talking in the other chamber before I regained full consciousness. And I truly believe I’m hearing each and everyone’s heartbeat in this chamber.”

  “I don’t think you’re hallucinating, Tia. It’s either that or we’re both having the same illusions.” Nur folded his arms across his chest, his big brown eyes narrowed.

  “Me too.” Redamun nodded in agreement, his expression an unspoken question.

  “Did Your Majesty experience anything similar as you woke?” Nur, my student, an insatiable scholar like myself, couldn’t restraint his curiosity.

  They were all looking at me now, anticipating my answer. I wished I’d had something to say better than the truth to ease their minds.