Chapter Text
Tomb-keepers had a long tradition of naming their daemons after the Gods. Although certain accounts said the practice didn’t begin until Islam’s script buried the ancient Gods in paganism, the technicalities hardly mattered - on the birth of a tomb-keeper, their daemons were given name by their father, and that name carried the weight of history as important as any secret.
Marik didn’t know what Kebechet would be if she wasn’t Kebechet. Neither did Kebechet, as it would happen.
A trader loyal to the Ishtar family whispered into the dark that it was a name that could not be contained by dark tunnels, a comment which Marik heard only because the adults thought he was asleep in the room adjacent to their discussion. The Goddess was known for her wandering.
His father replied that she had been known for her purity, and though she wandered, she didn’t stray from what was true. He went on to mention the trader’s parents, and how he respected them greatly, and did not mean offense, but he hoped the trader had the good sense to listen to his elders.
Marik thought the olden stories a little too old, but he was only six, and Kebechet was his friend: a dutiful guardian, the tomb-keepers taught Marik they were gifts from the Gods they were named after, meant to guide where the human body faltered. They were wise, untempted by food or drink, tied to mortality only by devotion to their human. Kebechet said she didn’t mind her name, and that she liked Marik, too, and that there were so many tunnels to explore, so the only thing she cared about was wandering them with him. It sounded like what he wanted to hear, so he accepted it, and soon fell asleep.
Names held great power, his father said. Without them, a person was nothing: no future, no past, no present. To give up one’s name was the greatest sacrifice a person could make, so he had best guard his and his daemon’s closely.
The Pharaoh who had given up his name was akin to a friend, at this point: a hero of humanity, a martyr sent by the Gods. The very least the Ishtar family owed him was to guard his tomb. In truth, Marik heard the Pharaoh's story as often as his own name.
He didn’t fully understand why he couldn’t meet the nameless Pharaoh, but then, he knew there were a great many things he couldn't meet.
---
Kebechet mirrored the paintings on the walls with a twist toward the extravagant, her feathers a variety of flat but vibrant colors, her face human with the curve of a hawk’s beak, her dogs looming and a shining black, her crocodiles with disks and teeth made of gold.
Ishizu thought her over-the-top, but Ishizu’s Nekhbet did the same, so what did she know? The two daemons were like blades glinting in the dark of the tunnels: eye-catching, a danger barely harnessed, two miniature deities with no boundaries aside from how far they could stray from their humans, all pompous pride and I’m bigger than you!
His father’s daemon was a hulking vulture, her eyes old and feathers weathered. His father could walk the tunnels without her, which Marik marveled at - she enjoyed the darkest room most, the room Marik and Ishizu weren’t allowed to touch, the room Ishizu said their mother spent the most time in before she passed away giving birth to Marik.
Frustratingly, Odion kept quiet about the matter, his face closing off whenever asked. Marik didn’t always trust his sister’s word, so he’d hoped his brother could confirm one way or another.
His adopted brother, his father would remind him. Odion’s daemon had no name of her own. Rather, she had one - Marik knew she did because sometimes Kebechet would pull too strongly on her tail and she would whip around to nip at Kebechet and Odion would just barely cut off his ’Sa--!’ in time, which had to be a name, it had to be - but Odion wasn’t supposed to tell because she was a gift, not a right, and her name wasn’t his to give. That Odion’s daemon also wouldn’t tell, Marik tried not to think too much about.
But there wasn’t much to think about in between lessons, especially as Marik grew older and the tunnels grew smaller, so sometimes he looked at Odion’s dog daemon and wondered, and thought, and grew angry, and grew sad, and didn’t know what to do with any of it.
In contrast to his father and his daemon, Marik and Kebechet most enjoyed the room with the skylight. Natural light glimmered through the tombs’ dust, the sky close and far all at once.
He thought he might want to go up there one day, but then he thought of the trader whispering words of wandering, and he looked at his gold-and-sapphire-blue scarab daemon, and didn’t want to fulfill what someone thought was inevitable.
“Odion,” he asked once, when it was the two of them because his sister had her studies when the square of light had almost reached the second pillar, “if you could name your daemon, what would you name her?”
Odion froze, which he did whenever he thought the question Marik asked was inappropriate. Marik supposed it was. But the light felt nice on his legs, and Kebechet was a hornless ox, her short fur a bright red and her eyes glowing white, and Odion’s daemon laughed as she pretended to fight an old clay vase.
Finally, Odion said, “I couldn’t name her. I would have no right to.”
“My father did,” Marik threw back, which he thought was a pretty good argument.
Odion disagreed. “Your father is a great man.”
Maybe, Marik thought, but that doubt was a new thing, as startling as the rare rain. Unlike rain, it made him uncomfortable.
So instead he hummed, and said, “Could I name her?”
“I do have a name,” Odion’s daemon said, her voice polite but firm. Ishizu’s daemon talking to him wasn’t unusual, but Odion’s never did.
It made him sit straighter even as Odion looked ready to scold, his smile wide and interested. This was new. This was more interesting than rain, or the sun, or the moon, though maybe not more interesting than the sky. “You do?” He tried to be polite, but he just sounded excited. “May I know what it is?”
She laughed at him, her teeth white and glistening. She was always some variety of canine, which she said she’d probably permanently be one day; this day she was a mass of fur, her muzzle long and regal but the rest of her a puffy tan.
“Sara.” She said, causing Odion to stare at his feet. Marik’s grin widened. He knew it! He knew it! She did have a ‘Sa--’ name! “You may call me Sara.”
“Thank you, Sara. Thank you very much.” He said, truthfully, before turning his triumphant grin on Odion, who weathered it with good humor.
Kebechet was much less reserved about it - she took the form of a jewel-encrusted Ibis, her wings spread wide with calls of, “Sara! Sara!”
Sara laughed, again, and it was probably the most Marik had heard her laugh in one day since ever.
---
There was more to be learned. The tunnels grew smaller and the sky grew farther away. His father drifted like the clouds: thin, wispy, attention far from his children. Ishizu and he argued more, and Odion bowed his head more, and they grew older, which was much less preferable than staying young.
---
He wanted to touch the sky. Failing that, he wanted to visit the surface.
He could be allowed neither of these things. He had to protect his eternal friend, the nameless Pharaoh.
---
Odion saved his life from a snake and received a punishment. It wasn’t the first. His father grew as dark as his daemon’s favored room, or maybe Marik was just beginning to see the cracks in his father’s eternal wisdom.
Marik wanted to visit the surface and leave behind the dark. He loved the light. He grew greedy for it, as selfish as any God, but try as she might, Kebechet could not transform into a bird large enough to carry him, and could not separate from him as his father’s daemon did.
Ishizu’s eyes grew worried. Then Ishizu’s eyes grew quiet.
He grew as frustrated with her as he did with their father -- she wouldn’t let him talk about the surface for longer than a quarter of a day, she told him to think of the family, she spoke more with Nekhbet than with Odion or her own blood brother.
Odion stayed by his side, but Kebechet no longer wished to wander the tunnels, and soon their studies were all that changed, and those were just words.
---
He grew too fast, his legs aching and his voice warbling. Ishizu hid her grin behind her hand, but Nekhbet and Kebechet found great joy in laughing at his silly, crackling voice. Odion smiled at it, too, which embarrassed Marik worse of all, the feeling that Odion was patronizing him-- he remembered when Odion had done the same! He didn't remember it well, sure, but he knew it had to have happened!
But it wasn't as bad as it could be, and it brought a welcome change in focus from old stories and unchanging faces.
He didn't like it as much when his father only nodded and ordered him a new robe before dismissing him, but he felt determined to hang on to Sara's quiet giggle and not mind that he hadn't seen his father's vulture in months.
---
One day, twirling under the skylight swirled Kebechet into a frenzy. It was the only explanation for why she shifted from pitch black jackal to a flopping fish, scales gorgeous under the sunlight and unfamiliar gills gasping as wide as her toothless mouth in the dry, dry air.
She didn’t look anything like the cut-up fish the traders brought them: she looked like she had taken the lifeless creatures and added the walls’ paintings to them, and she looked to be in pain. She was in pain, her every gasp stinging his heart, his whole body folding in as she kept the shape.
“What is that? Kebechet! Kebechet, please, stop! -- Odion? Odion! Help, Odion!”
Dropping a vase from a height that should have cracked it, when Odion whirled around the corner to the room closest to the surface, he found Marik on his hands and knees, the whites of his eyes stark from fright, knuckles clenched white on the ground.
Marik glanced up long enough to catch sight of his adopted brother, and the terror in his face spurred Odion to race from doorway to skylight, Sara flitting from an unidentifiable mutt to a long-limbed sight hound. She dipped her nose to press against the fish’s gasping side, her words low and inaudible to the humans crowded around the scene. Marik’s voice cracked, but it was no longer amusing: his words tore at Odion, coated as they were in poisonous terror.
“She’s dying!”
“Shh,” he tried, unsure of what else he could do. He couldn’t touch Kebechet - Sara wasn’t even supposed to, but -- he reached out to Marik, and held the boy as he collapsed against his chest. “Shh. She can’t die.”
Marik thought this a silly thing to say, as she very clearly was about to, her eyes wide and glassy and her scales so brilliant but growing dusty, growing faint.
“She can’t breathe!”
“Give her time,” Odion said, but how could he know? Had he seen this before? Fish needed water, he thought, though he didn’t know how or where. Tears collected in his eyes: he tipped his head down, wiped the tears and tried to drip them in her mouth, but Sara snapped her teeth at him and the salty water dropped useless against the ground as he jerked his hand back. He gaped at the hound even as Odion pulled him farther away, his chest tightening with more than Kebechet’s pain.
Just when he thought his lungs would burst and his ribs split open, Kebechet shifted into a small, thin snake, black as Anubis and light as the feather that would weigh against their hearts. Marik gasped in air, his eyes wide and terrified, teeth chattering in the after-effects of the anxiety.
She took one look at him and whispered her apology, saying she had only wanted to see if she could swim to the sky.
Absurd. It was absurd.
It was desperation.
Odion’s face shuttered, and Marik didn’t understand, but he knew something was changing.
---
Marik thought he saw Nekhbet in the shadows of his room once as a venomous snake, fangs extended and eyes glittering, rattle silent, but Ishizu denied it when he ran to her room to demand an answer, and the next thing he knew they were arguing, they were screaming, they woke their father before Odion could reach them and the dark became darker and Ishizu was forced to apologize to Marik and then he didn’t see her for a week, and she didn’t see him for a week, and they saw no one for a week, they were in meditation in their rooms under their father’s orders and no one dared to venture close.
Who could venture close? There was no one and nothing.
Afterward, Marik sat and stared up at the sky and sun until his vision burned and eyes watered. Odion’s strong hand blocked the view with a few concerned words. He understood the tombs were as much the Pharaoh’s resting place as theirs.
It wasn’t a surprise. It was supposed to be an honor. Kebechet yowled as a furless cat with jewels stuck under her skin, tearing at the walls with broken claws.
Inevitability watched him from the shadows, venomous as any snake.
---
The very sight repulsing him, he refused to eat the fish the traders brought.
His father did not stand for it.
---
Though he continued his daily tasks without fail, it became obvious that more often than not, Odion’s back was tight with pain, tight with blood, tight with scars. Marik couldn’t remember the sound of Sara’s laugh.
Ishizu refused to speak with him on anything remotely off-limits. They were better off learning what they must, she said. They had a duty. Nekhbet no longer transformed into wondrous shapes to impress anyone, instead clinging tight to her shoulder as this-or-that, formless, forgettable.
Kebechet grew bigger but not brighter: her forms were dark, a twisted version of what they knew of animals from the walls and books, and impossible in the natural world. She was grotesque, Marik knew, but she was also a gift from the Gods, and so people kept their mouths shut when they saw her as a six-legged hound or double-headed bird. She hissed more than she spoke. She threatened more than she walked.
Marik grew fearful of her, though she did nothing to any of them. She simply was, and that was enough to make his skin crawl.
The skylight made the shadows of its room look so much worse.
---
The dark grew darker.
---
The dark grew darker.
---
The dark grew darker.
---
He learned how his father walked without his daemon at his side.
He was to join his father in the ultimate devotion - removing himself from his ineffable guardian and gaining the Pharaoh’s secrets - within the day. They were supposed to wait for Kebechet to decide on her form, but - his father said this with something like disappointment in his gaze as Kebechet, a three-eyed crocodile, snarled at him - they were running out of time. The rite of passage would help her remember her origins, he said. The mortal world must have tainted her. His son was blessed to have a daemon so pure it rejected the Earth below its feet.
Kebechet hadn’t spoken to him intelligibly for days. He begged Odion to take his place. Nothing made sense - everything hurt.
---
Odion was punished.
---
The dark grew darker.
---
Kebechet had three rows of teeth, crammed together in a mouth fit to burst, her glistening, red gums stretched to her sunken eyes. Her jagged claws did not match, and hurt to walk on. Her joints fueled the pain, forced to bend in places an animal’s never could. She could have risen above the limitations of mortal form, but she chose to feel all that she could.
She circled the room as the blade circled his skin, hacking and coughing on thick green phlegm as red coated the slab his father had strapped him to. The dark grew darker. Kebechet cackled through a punctured throat, a whistling, terrifying sound that chased Marik to darkness's edge. He fell.
---
He woke.
---
Odion punished himself.
---
Ishizu gasped, her hand flying to her mouth, but he knew not at what.
---
He hadn’t looked at Kebechet since the day, his eyes instinctively skipping over her whenever she wandered near him. He couldn’t often tell when, or if, she was missing from his side. Guilt pricked at him when he realized he felt relieved, though it was distant and muffled.
Similarly, the world happened through a sheet of dust: he forgot, and then he woke, and his father was dead and the Pharaoh was alive and nothing was right, nothing was familiar. The surface became a must, the surface so vast, and if he hadn’t a goal he didn’t know what he would have done. Odion came with him, Sara his sleek canine-shaped shadow, and he recognized hatred so he held on to it, let it grow, molded and forced it to make up for the gaping hole Kebechet left.
The Millennium Rod tried to help, or he thought it did. It understood he was going to root out an imposter and it lended him its power for the deed, and so he worked with what he had.
It wasn’t the sky, but it was the surface, and it felt inevitable.