The brass doorknob turned with a slow, grating squeal, dissolving into rust-colored dust. The door exploded inward, collapsing into a mound of fine sand.
In the doorway stood the demigod. It was a shuddering, coalescing nightmare of absence. A 20-foot-tall silhouette of swirling Saharan dust, within which glinted the hollow-eyed skull of a starved calf and the desperate, grasping hand of something buried alive. Its eyes were two swirling voids of blinding, sterile white. A low, constant sound emanated from it—the deep, groaning thirst of the earth itself cracking open.
"Thief,"
it hissed, its voice the sound of a desert wind scouring over rock. "Little thief of power. You spill water in my deserts. You bring life to my graves. I am Sekhet. This rot is my domain. You upset the balance."
Deo's breath vanished. His newfound divinity, a moment ago a roaring sun within him, shrank to a guttering candle flame before this ancient, visceral hunger.
He had no time to plead, no time to think. Sekhet moved with the suddenness of a dust storm. A limb of solidified, sharp sand slashed through the air. Deo threw up a hand, a weak shield of distorted air his only instinct. It shattered like glass. The force of the blow and the searing pain of the cut across his forearm came simultaneously. He cried out, stumbling back, blood already welling from the deep gash.
This was not a fight. It was an execution.
Sekhet pressed its advantage. It didn't walk; it flowed, a tide of decay. Another gesture, and the air around Deo solidified, turning to dust. He felt his throat constrict, his lungs screaming as the precious moisture was ripped directly from them. He was being mummified alive. Gasping, he pushed back with his will, forcing a pocket of breathable air, but the effort was immense, draining him more with every second.
"Your spark is bright, fledgling," Sekhet rasped, advancing. "But untended. A fire in the wind. It will be a pleasure to devour it."
A concentrated blast of hyper-dusted air hit Deo in the chest. It wasn't like being hit by wind; it was like being struck by a desert. The impact lifted him off his feet and slammed him into the far wall. Plaster cracked behind him. White-hot pain exploded through his ribs. He felt multiple bones crack. He crumpled to the floor, vision swimming, blood trickling from his nose and a cut on his brow. He tried to push himself up, but his right arm screamed in protest—the radius bone was broken.
Outside the apartment, the world saw a freak, localized event. A microburst of wind screamed down the street, shattering car windows. The sidewalk in front of Deo's building cracked with a sound like thunder. It looked like a natural disaster. No one saw the divine slaughter happening inside.
Sekhet was on him again. Deo, in a panic, tried to fight back. He focused his will, trying to summon a torrent of water from the pipes to drown this thing. The pipes in the walls groaned and shook, but only a pathetic trickle of brown sludge emerged—Sekhet had already claimed all the moisture in the building. He was a god of nothing against a god of one terrible, specific thing.
A whip-like tendril of dust wrapped around his ankle and yanked, dragging him across the floor. He screamed as his broken ribs grated together. Sekhet loomed over him, its void-like eyes drinking in his terror. It raised a clawed hand, fingers elongating into sharp, desiccated points, aimed at his heart.
This was it. He was going to die on his apartment floor, his divine reign lasting less than the designated time Deo brazed himself for the inevitable.
And then, everything stopped.
The air, already thick with the promise of decay, suddenly became heavy and granular, like breathing sand. But it wasn't Sekhet's doing. A new pressure filled the room, immense and immovable. It was the pressure of deep earth, of continental plates, of foundations that had endured for eons. The wall opposite the doorway groaned. Not the dry splintering of decay, but the deep, seismic protest of stone under impossible weight.
The plaster bulged, then cracked apart like an eggshell. But behind it wasn't lathe and insulation. It was living rock, a wall of granite that shouldn't have been there, veined with quartz that pulsed with a dull, subterranean light.
From this new, impossible aperture, a second figure stepped into the room. Where Sekhet was shifting dust, this one was absolute solidity. He stood as tall as Sekhet, his form seemingly carved from the bedrock of the city itself. His skin had the texture and color of weathered granite, and his eyes glowed with the steady, patient fire of magma deep within the earth. He moved with a tectonic slowness that was somehow more terrifying than Sekhet's eerie speed.
Sekhet recoiled, its dust form swirling in agitated, angry waves. The killing blow halted. "Kavral," it rasped, its voice losing some of its confident hunger. "This does not concern you. I am claiming what is mine. The fledgling spilled his power in my domain."
"And he now hides in mine," Kavral, the Demion of stone, foundation, and territory, stated, his voice a low rumble that vibrated in Deo's chest. "You trespass, Sekhet. You bring your decay into my foundations. The Ancient Ones have rules."
Deo, bleeding and broken on the floor, could only watch, his mind reeling. Ancient Ones. Demions. The words meant something, a terrifying hierarchy revealed in the midst of his execution.
"Rules?" Sekhet shrieked, the sound like grinding stones. "The Old One is gone! He has given his mantle to this... this mortal! The rules are breaking! Why should I be bound to the deserts when this power is ripe for the taking? We were worshipped once! We were given names and altars! Now we are forgotten, concepts clinging to the edges of belief, while he holds the core power! The power of the One True God who predates us all!"
"And that is why the rules must stand," Kavral boomed, taking a step forward. The floorboards didn't dry; they petrified, turning to solid, cold stone under his feet. "Without them, we are but chaos. And chaos draws the attention of things even you fear, Dust-That-Gnaws. We are lesser gods, Sekhet. Remember your place. Leave. My city. Now."
"Or what, Rock-That-Sits? You will be slow. I will be gone with my prize before you have lifted your hand."
"You will try," Kavral said, and the room exploded.
It was not an explosion of fire, but of earth. Kavral didn't move; he simply willed the architecture to obey. The ceiling above Sekhet fractured, and a torrent of rubble—lath, plaster, and the very brick of the building—came crashing down on the dust demon.
Sekhet shrieked, dissolving into a whirlwind, the debris passing through its semi-corporeal form. It retaliated not with blows, but with entropy. It gestured, and the stone at Kavral's feet crumbled into sand. The granite of Kavral's arm cracked and flaked away, only to be instantly replaced by new rock flowing up from the floor.
The two Demions were locked in a stalemate of creation and decay. But they were not fools. To unleash their full power in the mortal realm was to risk utter annihilation, and the attention of greater, hungrier things. With a simultaneous, practiced will, they acted.
The air in the apartment shimmered. The space around them seemed to fold, to separate. The sounds of the city vanished, replaced by an eerie, pressurized silence. The walls became a hazy, indistinct painting. They had pulled a pocket of reality with them into a separate layer, a demigod's dueling ground. Here, the shockwaves of their conflict would bleed back into the mortal world as manageable "natural" disturbances—a cracked foundation here, a localized tremor there.
It was the window Deo needed.
The all-consuming focus of the two Ancient Ones was off him for a single, precious moment. The pain was a universe of fire, his body was failing, but the spark of divinity within him screamed to survive. He didn't think of coordinates. He thought only of safety. He thought of the one thread of resilience .
He poured every last ounce of his failing power, his broken will, into a single, desperate, blind leap.
The world dissolved into a nauseating vortex of screaming colors and tearing motion. He had a fleeting sensation of passing through the heart of the storm between Sekhet and Kavral, a feeling of being scoured by dust and crushed by stone simultaneously.
He rematerialized with a jarring, catastrophic thud, the teleportation anything but smooth. He crashed onto a hard, cool surface, the impact sending fresh, shattering agony through his broken body.
The last thing he saw before darkness swallowed him was a woman's face, snapped toward the sound of his arrival.
She was stunning, her features a perfect blend of strength and elegance that spoke of a rich heritage. Her skin was a deep, warm brown, flawless and seeming to glow in the soft light of the lamp on her desk. Her eyes, wide with shock and a quickly dawning professional alarm, were dark and intelligent. Her hair was braided back in a practical yet intricate style. She looked like a goddess herself, or perhaps a queen from an ancient lineage—bearing a striking resemblance to the model Anok Yai, with the same regal presence and captivating beauty. She was wearing simple sleep shorts and a tank top, a medical textbook about tropical diseases splayed open on the desk beside her.
She gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. The room was small, simple, and clean, smelling of antiseptic and soap.
And then her eyes dropped to the floor, to the source of the terrible noise.
Deo lay in a broken heap, his chest slashed open and bleeding profusely, his arm bent at a horrifying angle, his face a mask of blood and bruises. His blood, dark and shocking, was already spreading in a rapidly growing pool across her pale, clean floor tiles.
His eyes, clouded with pain and the fading image of the two warring Demions, met hers for a split second. Then they rolled back in his head, and his body went utterly still. The only sound was the drip of his blood onto the floor and Anya's sharp, terrified intake of breath. The human god had crashed into the doctor's life, and he was dying at her feet.