A great deal of future uncertainty should have burdened the young Queen-to-be, and yet she found no duty too onerous, even those tasks which were far beneath her. Today she sought to begin a medicine-store, for they would be in need of a surplus of herbs, astringents, and natural cleansers on this diplomacy voyage. But the flatlands are nearly barren and what life she does come by is dry and crumbling.

“I should have paid more attention to your lessons, Tavina,” Neith smiles to herself, eyes shaded against the flickering horizon. She must expand her search.

---

eheheh

Another shadow cast across the desert—a creature slipping into the cracks and crevices, its tail arched high over its haunches like a scorpion’s sting, just as silent, just as insidious as its venomous kin.

But Tavina is no longer here to help you. Had she insinuated herself into the thoughts of the porcelain-skinned young woman. A laugh, rasping from a parched throat, echoed between a row of yellowed, time-worn teeth. The strange woman had sidled up beside the golden-adorned girl without the faintest warning, with no regard for the unspoken distance that normally holds strangers apart.

At once she turns— gold-banded ears swiveling for the source of that wilted laugh, reclaiming a separation by the grace of her step. She felt the trajectory of sunrent eye before seeing the other had gone milky. She gazes now upon the small, wiry creature, nose testing for scents of recognition and finding none.

How utterly strange to hear her dear sesh's name from the mouth of this woman!

“Though I am no longer alone,” the princess mantles her dignity, raising her chin over narrow shoulders, “what soul walks beside me this day?”

"Though I am no longer alone," To this, the priestess had replied with a solemn nod, then a smile—one drowned in the darkness of her lips.

Indeed, she was no longer alone. But had she ever truly been, since the hour of her birth?
Asra observed her, her face still curled in that sly, knowing smile, her milky eye lingering over every detail the young lady had to offer. She seemed well-bred, perhaps even nobly born; there was in her a native grace, an effortless hauteur that shone in her gaze and led Asra to such a conclusion. Was she one of those born beneath the watchful eye of Râ, blazing like a thousand suns among mere mortals?

Asra. There is only this name I carry with me. And that low, mocking laugh she carried with her wherever she went.

The desert forewarned me. Heka sowed the seeds of your arrival, she confessed, entranced, her mouth parted in a wide, rapturous smile, enraptured to have at last found what the gods had fated her to seek. And now, here you stand, she added, with a chuckle rising from the depths of her chest.

What are you called? Who now stood before her? Had they, at last, brought to Asra what she had yearned for through all those endless years, her gods? ...

“I am Satriya Merneith, Queen to Pharaoh Khaemwaset Khafraemka-wehemibre of Satriya,” the princess looks on as if scarcely knowing whether to rejoice over such words or distrust their magnitude.

The priestess speaks of divine providence and Neith observes with quiet thought this bedouin spirit, thinking of Mother. Would she trust all who claimed the Gods’ foresight? The Queen-to-be is wary, for this desert is not yet her’s. There is no palace here to frame her power; no censers burning frankincense to ward off ill-omens. Just the sand, the heat, the sky, and a silken voice pulling at the marrow of her.

“What else does Heka tell you?” She asks abruptly, turning for that sun-glared eye with her own sharp severity. It takes no wisdom to speak and call it destiny. Was she a hemet, or only a cunning pretender?