“No one is beyond hope. You especially should know that.”
Horus sank in his chair, a scowl marring his handsome features. “After all he’s done to me, I’d like to think you’d take my side.”
“I did take your side. Time and time again I took your side. Even when it might have changed the outcome if I hadn’t.” Amun-Ra turned to me. “Horus makes Seth out to be a horned devil with a forked tongue and cloven hooves, and perhaps in some instances, he depicts himself in such a way, but that is not the boy I knew him to be.”
“You knew him when he was young?” I asked.
“Has no one told you the story of Seth?”
I shook my head.
Amun-Ra frowned. “Perhaps it will be better understood if I start at the beginning.”
I sat back in my chair and basked in the warmth of Amun-Ra’s presence. Tia dozed like a sleepy cat—half of her listening and aware while the other half stretched out lazily in perfect serenity.
“I was the first god who came into being,” Amun-Ra began. “At one time there was a space in the cosmos where matter collided, a sort of primordial jumble of thriving energy. We called it the Waters of Chaos since the matter ebbs and flows there like a multifaceted ocean. It remained confined in one place as well as if the fluid material comprising it were trapped in a colossal ball of glass. When one of our stars—not a sun such as you know, but the magical orbs that ring our world—fell, it collided with the Waters of Chaos and I was born.
“For a long time I wandered from place to place, discovering the limitations of my strength, but as the eons passed, I found I was lonely. I determined to make myself companions and used my power to hurl two more stars into the waters. Shu and Tefnut emerged from the Chaos. They married and Tefnut gave birth to Nut and Geb. Do you know of them?”
“Amon told me about Nut and Geb having to be apart.”
“Yes. That was my fault. By the time Nut and Geb married, we realized—let me rephrase, I realized—what we had done. And as a result, I forbade them from having children.”
“What do you mean? What did you do?” I asked.
“You see, we were never meant to be. When I rose from the Waters of Chaos, I took something from it. The warmth and life-giving heat of the stars went with me. I did not know it at the time, but my creation left it lesser, and when Shu and Tefnut were born, they rose with the power of the wind and of the water. When they did, those elements went missing from the Waters of Chaos.
“I was alarmed by my discovery, to say the least. The others didn’t believe me, and Nut and Geb were far too enamored with each other to listen to my warnings. Even though I sent their father, Shu, to keep them apart, they managed to find a way to be together. They gave birth to Isis, Osiris, Nephthys, and Seth, and when their children came into their various powers, my theory was proved correct. After that, there were only small fragments of life-giving energy left in the Waters. It was undeniable. The rest of my family finally agreed with my theory.”
“So what did you do?” I asked, fascinated by the story of his origin despite the distraction of having to repeatedly kick Horus’s foot away from mine. Finally I shifted my chair far enough out of his range that he would have had to get up to reach me. Vexed, he shot me a tormented look so full of wanting, heat crept up my neck.
“Nothing at first. We weren’t sure what we could do. But ultimately we decided to finish what we had begun. Through eons of study, we learned that the Waters of Chaos had been, at one time, the birthplace of all life in the cosmos. The circumstances of our creation had left it nearly bereft, sterile. The nine of us came together in a great council called the Ennead, and even though the children of Geb and Nut were still too young to understand fully, we made a pact.
“We fashioned lesser gods from the remaining traces of the Waters of Chaos. Anubis, Ma’at, Thoth, Khons, Bastet, and several others came into being at that time. We carefully distributed the remaining powers of the Waters of Chaos between them and then