Heshtat felt divine power fill him, and his soul shattered into pieces.

  The pain was immediate and all-consuming. It rampaged through his soul, rushing through his broken and tangled pathways, and crushing any blockages it found. The power surged through channels not properly reinforced for the task, and many of them burst, leaking the power of a goddess out into the Other to stain the sands red with Heshtat’s heart blood.

  For a brief eternity, his mind was lost in a sea of agony, drifting unmoored from his conscious control. But slowly, piece by piece, he began to pull himself together. First came the realisation that he was still alive. Then followed the awareness of his position in the Otherworld. The dreamscape’s purple twilight glow soothed his cascading thoughts into a semblance of order, and then he turned his attention to what was occurring within his soul.

  Heshtat had done this before. Twice now, he had built his soul from the ground up—once with the aid of the God-Queen’s elixirs amongst his fellow Janissaries, and once in Amansi with the aid of its many gods and goddesses and the support of the Tomb Guard and priests. There were likely only a few people alive that had more experience awakening the soul and reinventing one’s cultivation, but that didn’t mean that Heshtat was ready for the soul-rending agony of the task.

  Still, his duty was clear, and there was no force in all of existence more dire to Heshtat than his duty. He gritted his teeth and pushed, forcing his mangled pathways into shape by dint of will alone, reforging the broken links and shoring up the weakened edges of his soul. Brick by brick, pathway by pathway, he rebuilt the structure of his soul until it stood proud and strong and whole once more.

  His job wasn’t done though. His soul may be healed, but he was still weak as a newborn babe in this dream-like reality, and the creatures of the Other were being drawn by the exodus of power flooding from the leopard in the sky. Heshtat took that power and channelled it into Khet—the aspect of the soul representing the Physical Body. The sliver of a goddess’s power flowed into the pathways of his now awakened aspect, filling it with divine light. It took an age to occur, and Heshtat endured agony every moment, but his heart burned with vicious pride. He was whole again, and his soul was shining once more.

  He caught shapes twisting around him at the edge of the corona of golden light that flooded from his body with every second, and knew that spirits, sprites, wraiths, demons, djinn and a dozen worse things were creeping closer with each moment. He didn’t have long, but he was almost there. Another few heartbeats of excruciating pain and then his soul flared brightly for the second time.

  And just like that he had crossed the boundary from human to something more. Mortal no longer, having awakened the first of his aspects and ascended into the realms of cultivators once more, Heshtat screamed at the sky.

  It was a wordless wail, more sound than language, but it encapsulated everything he had held bottled up over the last decade. A repudiation of the hatred and guilt and self-loathing that had kept him chained, and a promise to the creature in the sky to do better, to do more, to fulfil his oath once more.

  Great golden eyes held his own for a beat, imparting a final whisp of power before blinking closed and disappearing into the night. But it was enough. A sliver of a goddess’ power was a potent thing indeed, and Heshtat had channelled it for as long as he could bear.

  Not even just an awakened, Heshtat realised as he surveyed his soul. He was now an acolyte of Khet, and a grin split his face as he felt the newfound power surging through his body.

  With the departing of the creature in the sky, the shadows at the edge of his sight thickened, became more real. They crept forwards and twirled through the twilight desert on contorted limbs. Their twisted laughter filled the air as they sniffed him and scented his power. But that was their mistake. That was their arrogance. They caught a whiff of power and thought it could be theirs for the taking, assuming him a lost traveller, out of his depth and alone in the land that they ruled.

  But Heshtat was not a lost lamb. No, he was far from defenceless, and far from prey in the land of endless twilight. As a Janissary, he had trained with the greatest teachers and warriors an entire empire had to offer. He was Tufan Shen, the Sandstorm, one of the hundred first blades of the God-Queen’s wrath, and a future champion of Sasskania. As a Tomb Guard, he had been the elite among the elite. Captain of the most specialised fighting force of the province, able to walk the lands of the Waking and the Other with equal ease. He had been a tripartite adept, a senior adept of Sah, and had been the bane of malevolent spirits for years before his fall.

  Now here he stood. Diminished? Undoubtably. But finished? Oh no, Heshtat was far from finished. He flexed his grip on the handle of his khopesh, the midnight blade now blazing white in the twilight of this inverted realm. Its curved surface gleamed with an almost hungry glow, and it felt light as a feather in his fist as he crouched to the ground to run a hand along the desert sands. He let the grains fall through his fingers, and stood to his full height, blade bared and pointing at the smallest shadow before him.

  “Stay back and witness my work here, spirit, and be sure to tell all who will listen that I have returned.”

  Then he turned his back on the creature and fell upon the other malign entities that made this world their home, blade shining with fell light as he carved through them with ease. It had been too long since he had moved with anything approaching his usual grace, but with the power of Bestat flowing through him, he was near untouchable.

  ***

  Heshtat returned to the temple with eyes blazing with essence. The golden light trickled upwards across his forehead before dispelling in a puff of amber smoke, and he jerked in place, pushing Maatkare off of him as he stood. The sands had abandoned him not long after Bestat’s presence vanished, and he had been transported back into the temple mid-battle with the various hungry spirits that stalked the sands of the Otherworld.

  Heshtat stood in a flash. Maatkare coughed and fell back, his surprise morphing into joy as he beheld the speed of the movement.

  “You did it! You crazy bastard, you actually fucking did it!” he crowed, leaning to one side and spitting red drool to the ground even as he pumped an arm in the air.

  “You said you believed in me. Why do you now sound so surprised?” Heshtat asked in exasperation, still willing his body to come down from the high of alertness. His skin was still tingling, the hairs on his arms and neck prickling, and his blood was rushing so loud in his veins that he struggled to hear anything else.

  “Lend me an arm then, my miraculous friend,” Maatkare said, completely ignoring the question and reaching out with one bloodied arm.

  Heshtat obliged him, lifting his friend up and tucking an arm over his shoulder. Maatkare felt pathetically light now, the benefits of Heshtat’s breakthrough shocking. He had healed his soul—that enduring, constant ache at the heart of his being now finally silenced. He’d also awakened his first aspect, taken the first crucial step on the road of cultivation.

  The benefits of awakening a single aspect, any aspect, were general—strength, speed, vitality, energy. He was the same person as before, just slightly more. And then there were the benefits of awakening a specific aspect. In Heshtat’s case, it was Khet—the Physical Body. Much like the name suggested, this aspect empowered his body, bringing a host of advantages with it.

  But it hadn’t been empowered by generic power cultivated from the Other. Heshtat had opened a channel with a god—or goddess, in his case—and that power came with a flavour of its own. Bestat was a fertility goddess, as he had explained to Maatkare so recently; the Matron Mother and Ward of the Young. She was synonymous with protection and magic, but throughout Amansi she was known for one thing above all others: Bestat was the patron deity of the feline. Heshtat had awakened the Khet with a channel to Bestat, and that divine power had flooded his soul, transforming the aspect as it woke, and unfurling it into something more.

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  His body had been remade in that power’s image, and now he was cat-like in his agility. His reflexes were sharper, his vision quicker. He felt so light, so delicate on his feet, but explosive all the same. Like he could leap three times his height with no preparation, could dash faster than a horse, could change direction without fearing gravity’s grasping claws. When he picked his khopesh from the ground and dragged Maatkare into his arms, he knew he could move at such a speed it would startle all but those similarly blessed with the Khet, and some of them even still. Harsiese could match him, but that man was an adept to Heshtat’s mere acolyte status.

  And that was the next thing. He may have taken the first step on the road of cultivation, but in truth, it had been a leap. He’d jumped straight from awakening the aspect to reinforcing it with his chosen goddess’ blessing, and ascended to the heady heights of an acolyte of Khet already. One rank below adept, two ranks below master—the peak of every soul art. It was unthinkable for a mortal to do, but Heshtat had forged his soul anew twice already, and it was only right to be ambitious the third time.

  He'd also found the Other less dangerous than it would normally be for a mortal, and not just because of his experience. Though it was by no means safe, the presence of the Desolate in and around the temple had scared off other rival predators, and so when Bestat’s avatar had summoned him above the temple in the strange metaphysical way that the Other worked, he had found a relatively empty patch of spiritual space. It was safer to linger than normal, and so Heshtat had taken full advantage.

  Reinforcing an aspect of a soul required immense amounts of power, and while the standard method was to siphon small sips of power at night during a cultivator’s dreams, slowly feeding more power into the aspect in question over years, it could also be achieved by another means. A quicker means. A greater blessing from a deity could widen the channel of shared power between the cultivator and whatever god or goddess they bargained with.

  In other’s cases at least, for Heshtat had made no bargain. Normally a god would bless a mortal with power in exchange for potential. They would create a channel, awaken or reinforce an aspect, in return for the power of another of the mortal’s unawakened aspects. The cultivator that made such a deal, which was nearly all cultivators in modern day Amansi, would forever lose the ability to awaken that aspect of their soul. It was a worthy choice though, for there was almost none with the talent and drive necessary, let alone the means, to awaken more than four aspects of their soul.

  None save the undying Pharaohs—those masters of the soul arts that were said to boast all nine aspects awakened and reinforced. Nobody understood how they had achieved it, as far as Heshtat knew, since awakening a soul aspect necessarily required a god’s power to open the channel, but that was another issue altogether. He’d heard of itinerant monks and madmen that roamed the sands far from civilisation, claiming to have awakened and mastered soul aspects through cultivation alone with no divine assistance, but Heshtat knew it wasn’t common practice. How one could avoid death at the hands of the predatory creatures of the Other, only the gods and True Thrones knew.

  Even with an entire team of highly trained Tomb Guard, with temples and pyramids warded by holy rituals and magical traps and guardians, it was rare for one of the pharaohs or kings to advance a soul aspect in a decade, let alone nine repeatedly. How long would that take? And how could one avoid death for so long? Impossible, surely. But then if so, how had the undying Pharaohs avoided paying the tithe the gods demanded to open the way for them?

  “My friend,” Maatkare called, tugging on his arm. “What is going on?”

  Heshtat shook himself free from the thoughts, the blood loss and near-death experience clearly having addled his wits when followed so swiftly by a massive resurgence in power. It was a heady cocktail of emotions indeed.

  “Come,” he said, pulling Maatkare along with him as they approached the door.

  “What happened?” Maatkare asked, but Heshtat shook his head.

  “A lot, but we don’t have time. What happened in here?”

  “Nothing,” his friend answered. “The creatures still rail at the door, and we still remain trapped by them.”

  “Fine. Wait here.”

  And with that, Heshtat propped him against a broken pillar and marched towards the door of the chamber. It was a sliding structure of marble, perfectly shaped to match the frame, and the only way he could tell it was there was because of the beautifully engraved gilt framing carved into the cleanly cut blocks that made up the wall around it.

  Heshtat took a breath, then fed a sliver of essence into the door, connecting to the spiritual anchor worked within. There was a grinding of stone as minute grains of sand that had gathered beneath the door were crushed to dust, and Maatkare called out from behind in a panic.

  “What are you doing?”

  But it was too late. The way was open, and the gibbering horde of monsters rushed forth like a river bursting its banks. They clambered over one another in their haste, their twisted bodies forming a carpet of limbs and mouths and gnashing teeth.

  Heshtat took a step back, watching the first creature reach out to him. A casual flick of his wrist and the limb was flopping uselessly to the floor. He stepped sideways with the motion, parrying a grasping clawed hand of another monster even as he did so, then cut out to sever a head from its owner’s neck. Looping cuts with the blade followed each other in a startlingly clear sequence, the steps of his sword-form never having felt so clean and precise in the many years since he’d left the Tomb Guard.

  The crane waves at grasses transitioned to the gator seizes the day, then a quick step backwards to avoid a particularly aggressive ball of fur and snapping teeth, gracefully chopped from the air with the weight of the khopesh, and then back to the sword dance with Sasskanian techniques woven throughout. A Badlands kiss sprayed blood across Heshtat’s face, and the God-Queen’s thousand steps kept him out of reach of the pile of scything limbs before he ended three lives with the flick of his wrist courtesy of the cut that clove the canyons.

  Monsters and creatures of nightmare poured through the breach and sought to surround him, to rend him limb from limb and sup on the stuff that filled his bones. But Heshtat’s marrow was not for them, and his reforged body was too fleet and strong for their rushed attacks. Whenever a wailing mouth would come too close, he would simply lean back, his enemies moving almost as if through quicksand—slow and stagnant while he slipped and struck through their ranks.

  He felt like a cat in truth, antagonising a snake and then batting it away when it sought to strike at him. He was faster, more agile. More explosive and canny and tricky and slippy and they couldn’t touch him as he danced and twirled through them. He was the scythe that reaped the barley, the sickle that threshed the grasses. He allowed them to slip into his chamber, into his world, and as they stepped onto his desert sands, he became the Sandstorm once more.

  It took perhaps a minute before he was left alone, surrounded by corpses. He turned to Maatkare, saw the man gape at him with shock written plain across his face. His pain seemed to be forgotten as he stared, mouth hanging open, and Heshtat laughed.

  “Oh, my friend,” he said, unwittingly copying his oldest friend’s delivery. “You must reignite your soul. It feels divine!”

  “I can see that,” Maatkare said slowly. “You’re grinning like a cat that has realised the little old lady that it claimed is secretly a milkmaid.”

  Heshtat snorted, flicking acrid brown blood from the edge of his blade. He sheathed it in the iron ring on his belt and strode over to his friend, unstrapping the shining, napped-bronze bracer on his left arm and beginning the arduous process of placing it on his friend’s wrist. Maatkare tried to fight him, but he was weak as a kitten, the thought making Heshtat laugh to himself, which only further incensed his friend.

  Still, he soon got the man armoured with the magical artifact, though Maatkare wouldn’t accept the amulet. With his soul healed, Heshtat had no reason for the essence repository. After all, his reforged pathways could channel the well of essence that filled his chosen aspect, and his newly awakened soul could take in the ambient essence swirling around them. It eddied within and around all magical places in this world, to greater or lesser degrees, but there would be no pausing to let his soul refill with essence here—it was so thick he could taste it, and just breathing the air let his aspect bloom once more within his chest with divinely flavoured essence.

  Still, not all fights were worth taking, so he let the amulet lay against his chest and moved on. His gut wound still ached—awakening a soul aspect wasn’t a miraculous cure for all ailments, but a body reinforced with the Khet twice over was significantly more durable than a mortal one. What previously would have broken bones would now leave bruises, and a cut that might leave a gash before would now leave only a scratch. He wasn’t immune to injury, by any means, but he was sturdier than before, to say nothing of his ability to avoid blows in the first place.

  Still, while his wound might not inhibit his movement any longer, it did throb—a constant reminder that they were on a ticking clock, as if he needed it. Maatkare was on his last legs, too. No single wound lethal on its own, but their culmination was significant blood loss, and the man was woozy and tired from that alone, to say nothing of the blinding pain of his gruesome face wound.

  Heshtat pulled his friend onwards, out through the chamber they had huddled in, and down the strangely tall hallway. They were not safe here, but meeting further denizens of the temple need not be a death sentence any longer. If only Maatkare could make a similar breakthrough to his own, then they would have a chance.

  His friend had believed in him enough to kickstart his awakening; he would honour that belief with the same faith in Maatkare. He was, before everything, a brother.