NAKHT
“Mer?!” I called wildly into the bright expanse, rushing ahead to break through it.
I had seen him again, I was certain of it. A brief flash of Meryt at my bedside some years back, when I was close enough to death’s door that I might have been among the gods a very different way if Meryt’s constant attention and urgent prayers hadn’t pulled me back from the brink. He had said it was the will of the gods, but it was my will, and his, unable to accept being parted.
Meryt was reliving his life, the gods had told me, and I was seeing glimpses as I neared him with each trial won. I assumed that meant he would watch my next progress too. I longed for that, for his eyes on me again, whatever may come. But it was not him I found at the end of the light.
The doorway I passed beneath was not the one I had stepped through to follow Pasht, or the one I had been standing in when I’d seen Meryt beside that slightly younger me. This was a workshop of sorts, somewhere else entirely.
The room was a good size, twice as large as Anubis’s funerary chamber, perhaps even larger than I could see beyond the shelves covered in various tools and contraptions. In the center of the room was a table just as littered with objects, many I had never seen before—or if I had, I didn’t know how to use them.
To the left of the table was something as tall as I was, covered in a linen sheet. It was large enough to unnerve me, like some creature hidden, but what frightened me more and drew me to it was the window to the table’s right. It was open, but beyond it was no usual view of the night sky. The sheer magnitude of what I was seeing lured me forward even while it filled me with dread.
There were stars, but as if they were swirling together, creating new ones, while others burnt out. Among them were large floating orbs of varying colors, some I didn’t think I had ever perceived before. They too swirled from new life to inevitable destruction, snuffing out one way, exploding another, colliding with each other. It was nonsense to my eyes, madness, and yetthe reality of what I was seeing, what I must be seeing seeped into my mind.
The cycle of creation. The primordial sea where the gods created us, and we were but one ship rocking upon its waves, headed toward the same end as all the rest, for new life to spring forth in our death knell wake. How small and insignificant we were, but specks of dust in that ocean, far smaller than the stars that just as pointlessly came into being and were later erased like they had never been. It was beautiful and yet terrible in its simplicity, all happening right before my—
The window was shuttered with a clatter, causing me to gasp as the view was suddenly blocked. The dread that had been settling in me calmed just as instantly. It seemed the view alone, even with me so far removed from those tumultuous tides being where I was among the gods in the sky, had nearly swallowed me whole.
“Mortal eyes are not meant to see such things,” a calm voice said.
I turned, and beside me, having shut the window with a swift hand… was Ptah, architect of all, creator god, and patron of all makers. He could be no one else, for the color of his skin was as green as Pharaoh’s gardens.
Never in my life had I seen someone with such flawless features, but of course he was immaculate, for he had breathed life into all who came after him, all ranges of mortals and gods, in every shape and feature imaginable, and so, somehow, he was all and none at once and exceptionally beautiful for it.
The more I looked at his face, the more I realized his skin was also… moving. Within that lovely green hue were carved lines, outlining and accentuating his sharp features, handsome and perfectly symmetrical, even more so with how the lines were in constant motion, just like the primordial sea beyond the window.
His eyes were an equally iridescent green, swirling with clashing shades that hypnotized and thrilled me, especially with how they were rimmed in gold so evenly applied that I could not be certain if it was simple pigment or gold leaf like what adorned Anubis’s eyes. He wore a blue and gold collar similar to Anubis’s but more delicate, and upon his head was a matching blue and gold skull cap that also seemed as though the designs upon it were alive and moving, like rivers lapping at their banks.
From his chin jutted a false beard braided with blue and gold but also green like some culmination of the life he represented, but I saw no visible strap or other explanation for how the beard stayed in place.
At first glance down Ptah’s body, he seemed wrapped in linen like one of the dead, but it was not strips that covered him. He wore a sheer white linen robe that clung to him like a second skin. It stretched when he moved, emphasizing his body like the lines on his skin. He wore a small, wrapped loincloth beneath the sheer robe but nothing else, no belt nor embellishments save gold bangles on his wrists.
He was striking, elegant, and made me feel as insignificant as I had while watching worlds being birthed and eradicated in the span of moments.
Perhaps mostly because of how Ptah looked at me.
“Such craftsmanship,” he said, reaching with one of his green-skinned hands to grasp my chin. There were lines on its surface too, on all of him. I could feel them moving as he touched me, tilting my face from side to side. “Anubis dressed and decorated you well, but I would paint you too, and emphasize even more of this fine face.”
“M-my lord… are you admiring your own work?” I asked, I had to, for if he was the creator god, had he not crafted me?
Ptah smiled, and it certainly seemed like the expression of a proud patriarch. “With my hands, my breath, and my voice speaking your name.”
A chill ran through me, not from his touch, but his voice speaking that truth and awakening something in me like a shock of renewed life. I did feel small, like I had with Anubis too, but to have such a powerful being solely focused on me was strange and humbling.
I thought Ptah would lay me upon his work table, cluttered though it was, but instead, he led me to a corner where a daybed rested and laid me upon that. He’d said he wanted to paint me, and it was the most vibrant and shimmering of all pigments he brought over upon a palette, like I was his papyrus. I hadn’t considered that my face was still bare from my mourning when Anubis dressed me.
“My lord—”
“Tell me, Nakht, why do we paint our faces? Close your eyes now.”
“I, um…” The simplicity of the question surprised me, but as Ptah dabbed one of his fingers into a swath of bronze color, the components of which I couldn’t be certain, I closed my eyes in wait of his touch. It was gentle but strange, almost ticklish with the shifting of his skin blending the pigment into mine. “For protection. From the sun. From infection. From evil. And to signify one’s status in Pharaoh’s court.”
“And…?” He worked quickly, and each time he returned from gathering more pigment to apply it to me, I couldn’t be sure what was being applied or of what color, only where.
“And… because it’s beautiful.” Like the blue that outlined just faintly the blackness of the kohl around Meryt’s eyes when we danced.
“You list that last, but it is the only one that made you smile,” Ptah said.
