the--morning--room

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 16: The destiny of the pioneer

"She had, I thought, a remarkable countenance, instinct both with power and goodness. I took sudden courage." -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

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CONTENT WARNING: Mentions of suicidal ideation and a suicide attempt. Nothing graphic.

In the entire emotional kaleidoscope of human existence, there is nothing quite like the slow, torturous monotony of grief.

The Thorn slept, and breathed, and cried, and put off eating for as long as Layla would allow. She never left the warm yellow bedroom, save for the occasional sluggish trek to the toilet. The white bed, its sheets growing increasingly grimy from her unshowered body, could have grown vines around her and swallowed her whole, and she would have welcomed the darkness and the cool, comfortable prison.

It seemed to her like she never slept, when in reality she slept almost constantly and only woke to the sounds of Layla coming in to check her pulse and temperature, offering food and water that the Thorn tried her best to refuse, answering her vibrating phone with a dramatic sigh ("What, Marc?...Yeah, she's fine...Well, if you don't care, why do you keep calling?"). From Layla's side of these conversations, the Thorn was able to glean that she was in Layla's father's apartment, and that the colossal mess in the bedroom was Marc's work. Marc, she gathered, was back in London. She wondered if Steven had gotten a new job yet. She listened for a mention of Arthur, simultaneously dreading and longing for knowledge of him. The very thought of him made her stomach curl up like a dog afraid of being kicked.

Only at night would she allow herself the guilty thrill of imagining his presence. After closing the curtains, shutting out the mocking stare of the moon hovering over the pyramids, she lay awake in the bluish dark and felt his rough fingers combing through her hair, his arm wrapped protectively around her body. She moved closer to him, nuzzling into his chest, feeling his heartbeat and the smooth, rumbling vibrations of his voice, and then with a sharp suddenness he was gone, the world was real again, and all she could remember when she thought of him was the panic in his voice as he begged her not to leave.

If he were alive, it wouldn't be too late. The Thorn knew he would take her back if she went to him, begging forgiveness, groveling before him and his goddess, and let Ammit turn her into a monster. A reasonable price to pay for a lifetime of marital bliss, right?

How many times would she repeat this pointless argument with herself? Too many to count, reader, and I won't waste your time recounting every one of them. Suffice it to say, it was never long before her agony proved too great to be kept inside her, and so it leaked and poured from her eyes, accompanied by a symphony of sobs that shook her crumpled body and left her head pounding with regret for her weakness and shameful indecision.

Layla was kind enough not to speak of these episodes, though she could certainly hear them through the walls of the small apartment. In return, the Thorn pretended not to notice the redness around Layla's eyes, the telltale sniffing and the hoarseness of her voice. They spent those few days in a peaceful sort of symbiosis, existing side by side, each in their own private hell.

"You do know that most people would pay obscene amounts of money for this view, right?" Layla thrust open the curtains. "I didn't have to give you this room, you know. Would you rather have the boring city view? Because we can switch."

The pyramids stared. They look sharp, thought the Thorn, and she imagined taking them in her hands and letting the ancient points pierce her skin. Too sharp, no, I don't like that. She turned over, reaching out for Arthur, waiting to be pulled into his comforting arms.

"I'm going back to the Pyramid, and then to Alexander's tomb," Layla announced. "I've put it off long enough. Someone's got to clean up the mess your fiancé left behind, someone who knows what they're doing and isn't just hungry for treasure."

The Thorn lay motionless, feeling the emptiness of the bed, wanting it to swallow her.

"I thought, given your academic background, you might want to come with me. Since I don't have Steven anymore." Layla's voice cracked. She stopped and took a slow, deliberate breath. "I don't think I can face it again, not on my own. So, are you staying here, or do you want to make yourself useful?"

"I don't know," said the Thorn. I want to die.

"Well, you've only got a couple more hours to decide, so let me know soon. Either way, I got you some new clothes. Hope they fit." She flung the outfit on the bed before leaving the room. "Please take a shower before you put them on."

The clothes were clean, plain and practical, and the simple cotton fabric felt like silk on the Thorn's tired hands. She bought these for me. She looked at them, said "yeah, those will suit her," and bought them with her own money so she could give them to me. The frank, straightforward kindness of it made puddles in her eyes. She could have bought anything else with that money.

The lights blinked. The shadow of a beak flashed in the corner of her eye. Soft, light fabric slipped through the Thorn's fingers and fell limply to the bed. There was a presence behind her, a presence so vast that it eclipsed the sun-baked window and shrouded the space in a looming gray darkness. A crash sounded from down the hall.

The Thorn heard a low, sonorous laugh. She felt it, and she felt the brush of thin, ancient clothing against her back. A bony touch dusted her shoulder, and as if struck by an electric current, she bolted from the room without a backward glance.

She found Layla in the kitchen, sweeping a mess of broken porcelain into a neat, circular pile. Her knuckles were bright white, like tiny full moons wrapped around the broom handle.

"Watch your step," she said tersely. "I really liked that mug. Just one more part of my life Khonshu's ruined."

"Sorry," said the Thorn. The word sounded more like wheeze. Her heart throbbed in her neck.

"I'm assuming he was in your room? I can't think of anything else that could have motivated you to get out of bed."

Another flicker of the lights. An invisible curtain of dread fell over the room.

The Thorn clutched the counter, watching as every hair on her arm sprang to attention. She felt the presence move through her body, shake her bones and infect her heart with delicious dread. It entered her soul, soaked up her memories, basked in her fear and guilt and despair.

Layla cursed, hurling the broom aside so that it hit the wall with an earsplitting clamor. "My answer is no!" She screamed the last word, her eyes flashing, trembling limbs revealing the terror behind her rage. "No, okay? That's never going to change!"

In another flicker, I stood before the Thorn. The end of my beak stopped inches from her face. She stepped backward without thinking, and a shard of smashed pottery sunk into the soft skin of her bare foot. She felt it creep slimily through the layers of her skin, each line of her body's natural defenses failing her one after the other. A fitting punishment, she told herself, for what she'd done to Arthur. For what she'd done for him, and what she had failed to do for her fellow human beings. Bad girl. Evil.

A cry of pain flew from her mouth. She looked down and lifted her heel to see the small, tooth-like shard peeking out through the bloody hole in her skin. The pain was sharp and unyielding.

"Shit," said Layla, moving carefully toward the Thorn. "Let me—"

"I got it." She sat down, pinched the shard, sucked in her breath and yanked. The pain surged; she heard herself yell out again. Blood dotted the linoleum floor.

Layla stared at her. "Wow," she said. "Okay."

"I'm sorry, I'll clean the floor. I'll clean everything." The Thorn felt tears in her eyes; she saw the room around her blurring. Please don't be mad. Don't call me evil.

Layla sighed. "I've lived with Marc. Believe me, I'm used to having blood all over the floor." She threw open a cabinet door and extracted a First Aid kit. "You seem determined to take care of yourself, so here." She handed it to the Thorn, who clicked it open and started to sift through the contents.

"I don't know why I didn't anticipate this," Layla said as she swept up the remnants of the mug. "I guess I assumed he'd try and get Marc back as his avatar, not double down on harassing me." Her voice was cool and dismissive, but her knuckles were even whiter than before. "I couldn't have rejected him any more clearly, you know? He's worse than any creep I've ever met in a bar. It's embarrassing for the other gods, really."

The Thorn fingered helplessly through the overstuffed First Aid kit, finally choosing a product at random. Some kind of cream, probably—she'd rather risk infecting her cut than let Layla discover how poor her Arabic was.

"Honestly, I tolerated him way longer than I should have, for my father's sake. Khonshu was his favorite god."

"I know," said the Thorn. "He was my mentor."

"Yeah," Layla replied blankly as she poured the remains of the mug into the trash. "I connected those dots pretty soon after we met. I thought your name sounded familiar, I just couldn't place it. Then one night, it suddenly hit me. I was starting to think you'd never bring it up."

The Thorn averted her eyes sheepishly.

"He liked you a lot," Layla said. "He was always talking about wanting to introduce us. By the way, do you actually want that cut to heal? Because if so, you probably shouldn't be dumping hydrogen peroxide on it."

Cheeks burning, the Thorn hastily tossed the bottle aside and pretended to search for a more appropriate medicine. Arthur had forbidden her from using anything but water on his bloodied feet, preferring to let them fester disgustingly. One exception had been the night they spent with a community of Followers in rural Vietnam. A young woman around the Thorn's age bounded eagerly up to Arthur, thrusting her hands into his, her eyes shining with religious adoration. The scales turned red, and her cry of anguish shattered the quiet evening. She tried to run, was restrained and punished. Later that night, Arthur ordered the Thorn to rub vinegar into his wounds. She remembered how he strained, his body at war with itself. He bit his lip to hold back a scream, and blood trickled onto his chin.

Layla sighed, sinking to the floor across from the Thorn. "You could have just told me you don't read Arabic. It's not a big deal." She handed a small tub to the Thorn. "Use this."

"Petroleum jelly? Really?"

"Yes, really. God, you're helpless. How did you not die in the desert? I'd be surprised to see you make it out of a grocery store in one piece."

The Thorn shrugged and spread the slimy cream over her cut.

"What were you planning to do with your life before you met Harrow?"

"I was an anthropologist."

"Yeah, duh. I mean, what was your actual plan?"

"Finish my dissertation. Graduate."

"Then what?"

The room suddenly felt oppressively hot. Had it always been that way, or was she just now beginning to notice?

"My father was going to offer you a job," Layla said. "Did you know that?"

"What?" The Thorn felt her hands freeze around the tub of petroleum jelly.

"He was working with a cultural anthropologist who needed an assistant. Apparently he forbade the guy from hiring anyone other than you. That was at the temple of Khonshu, so he was probably planning to call you around the time he...you know."

The Thorn was looking anywhere but at Layla. Awkwardness snaked through the open window, threatening to trap her around the throat. Did she want to believe this? That Abdallah El-Faouly had intended to hire her to work on an actual dig?

You would have sucked at it. It's good that it didn't work out.

"So," Layla said, "back to what I asked you earlier. What's your plan? I mean, in general."

"What?"

"I assume you wouldn't have left Harrow if you didn't have some kind of plan."

"The plan was to get away."

"And you accomplished it. Good job. So what's the new plan?"

The discomfort settled on the air, thick and muggy.

"Sorry," said Layla, sitting back against the cabinets. "I'm not trying to be hard on you. I know you loved—I mean, you still love him. Clearly. I can't say I understand why, but, I mean, people might say—well, they have said the same thing to me about...Sorry," she said again. "What I meant to say was, I know how it feels. Kind of. And I know I can be really intense, so I'm..." She stopped herself, seemingly wary of saying "sorry" a third time.

The Thorn forced herself to breathe, finding her voice. "Why do you care, though? About me?"

"Because I'm..." I'm lonely. "...I'm trying to do the right thing. I'm the avatar of Taweret, you know? I can't just leave a woman to die alone."

"You could have left me in the hospital."

"And then where would you have gone?"

"Anywhere. It doesn't matter."

Layla snorted. "You wouldn't have lasted a week."

The Thorn's face burned. "Good. The shorter I last, the better."

If the words shocked Layla, she didn't show it. "When Marc walked out on me, I felt like that. He'd left some of his medication behind, and I thought, well, if he's not going to use it..."

The Thorn tried not to look at her. The embarrassment was torture; she felt it oozing over her like cold tar. Her heart gave a few weak pumps against her shirt. Arthur. Arthur. Arthur.

"I had just screwed the top off the bottle—right there at the sink, in front of the window—and I happened to look up and see it."

"The pyramids?"

"Yeah, but also the city. Egyptians, still living and thriving here after four thousand years—and longer. There's so much history in this land, and too many pieces of that history are just gone. Stolen. Sold to buyers who don't give a shit about them, except as status symbols. Damaged or destroyed by improper handling."

The Thorn looked down, contorting her foot so she could see the bloody hole in her skin. Arthur, Arthur, Arthur, Arthur. There would definitely be a scar. It's grotesque, isn't it, the way a body can be so subtly and yet so irrevocably altered forever in less than a second?

"I'm not the only Egyptian who does what I do for a living, but I am one of the best. Those people down there in the city, they deserve to have as much of their history preserved as possible. Even if most of them don't know my name, I serve a purpose in their lives. Who am I to take that way from them?"

The Thorn was rubbing her finger over the cut. She remembered her reaction when Arthur had admitted to raiding Egyptian tombs in his past. She had laughed. Why had she laughed?

"So that's what made you stop wanting to die?" she asked Layla.

"No. Nothing's that simple. But it did make me throw that bottle of pills away. And it reminded me that I have something to exist for, something bigger than me and my trainwreck of a marriage. Something to get out of bed for, you know?"

The cut felt slimy under her finger. "You're losing so much blood," she'd said to Arthur one time. "The poison of past sins leaving me," he'd replied, "making space for true healing in the soul."

"Maybe it's not the healthiest thing, relying on work to distract me," Layla continued. "But it's better than lazing around all day, hoping my life will just stop if I ignore it long enough."

"How long have you been doing this?" she'd asked Arthur. "Shouldn't that poison be all gone by now?"

"Are you listening to me?" Layla asked. "I'm trying to help you."

"Sorry." Bad girl! Devil child!

Layla rolled her eyes. "Stop apologizing. You're not going to get a decent job here, not until your Arabic improves a lot. And something tells me you can't afford to live on your own yet, job or no job. I'm not just giving you a place to live, I'm offering you paid work in your chosen field, and trust me, you don't want to squander that. So, are you coming to the pyramid with me, or not?"

The idea of a job had been hammering at the back of the Thorn's mind since she first woke up in the apartment. What would she need to get a job? A resume and a reputation. The first of those was still trapped in her dust-caked laptop in Arthur's study. The second had been doomed from the moment Arthur burned the symbol of his goddess into her arm. The fact that her tattoo had disappeared wouldn't bring back the bridges she'd burned in the world beyond her failed engagement.

But new bridges can be built, can't they? And for some reason, Layla was offering her the tools to begin construction.

She wondered if her laptop was still on Arthur's desk. She imagined reaching out to it, sweeping the dust away. There was a sticker, Lowood University, Burns School of Arts and Sciences, Class of— What year was it again? Oh, well, it didn't matter anymore.

She pushed the computer aside. Under the sea of dust, the corner of a page stuck out like a drowning hand. She crouched down and blew the dust away, rescuing the paper and lifting it to the light. It was a letter of recommendation signed by Dr. Abdallah El-Faouly. It was long; she tried to skim it. Some phrases fell off the page, and she caught them with her eyes. "...Extraordinary writing and research skills..." "...curious and passionate..." "...the mind of a historian and a scientist..."

"Who's he talking about?" she wondered. Then she caught her name. No, not me. "Extraordinary?" Come on.

She sifted through more dusty artifacts: Diplomas, books, a photo of seventeen-year-old Marc, a makeshift slingshot. She was on the floor now, plunging into the pile of memories, wheezing as dust coated her throat, until at last she reached the bottom, the final treasure. She knew now what she had been looking for, as she shook the cobwebs off her worn canvas Bessie hat. Lifting it to her head, she felt a soft tap as a crumpled sheet of paper fell to her lap. Smoothing it out, she saw a girl in a school uniform, standing on a plastic chair and wearing a magnificent crown. FEEL BETTER, from Marc and Randall.

Tears blurred the faded crayon strokes. She blinked, and was back on the kitchen floor with Layla across from her.

The lights flickered.

"Okay," she said. "I'll come."

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F! Reader) Chapter 15: A cold, solitary girl again

"That bitter hour cannot be described: in truth, 'the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire: I felt no standing; I came into deep waters; the floods overflowed me.'" -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14

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I don't know if you're aware of this, reader, but the human body is quite poorly made. The temperature in the desert that night was not nearly low enough to freeze one to death, but it was enough to harden the Thorn's joints until she could no longer move her fingers to wipe the sand from her eyes and mouth. Her breaths came painfully and haltingly, and once her knees failed her she knew she had no choice but to rest. She clutched the thin, whitish hairs of the jackal and let it lead her, half-crawling like a primordial beast, to the relative safety of a cliffside, where she sandwiched herself between the chilled, sandy rock and the jackal's body.

"Thank you," she told it, and patted its slimy head.

There was a faint silver line along the edge of the horizon. The coming dawn, or the distant Cairo skyline? Either way, why was the light growing so quickly?

The whiteness expanded until it enveloped the sky, erased the desert and the jackal, and the Thorn knew nothing but white.

She'd been here a while, she thought. Of course, she'd just gotten there, but she knew that place, didn't she? The columns, the checkered floor. The information desk, where a "Tomb Buster" poster sat upright in a swivel chair. The gift shop with its window full of ushabtis, standing like a tiny army. And of course, the art. Stacks of prone statues, safely mummified in protective wrapping.

Everything was white and silent.

"...And here we have—oh, you! Yes, you. I'm supposed to come and find you. Hellooo..." The friendly Scottish voice cut through the quiet, and an arm was waved in front of her face. That tattoo looked so familiar. She turned to him.

"Billy!" The relief nearly knocked her over. She threw her arms around him, and was met with a sickening squelch.

"Oof. Sorry, love. This happens," Billy said, red-faced, as his stomach fell open and spilled its slimy contents onto the pristine floor. The two visitors he'd been leading, a crocodile and a hippo, exchanged annoyed glances before turning and walking away. Both wore tutus and oversized pointe shoes.

"Can I, um...get someone for you?" the Thorn asked awkwardly. "A doctor, maybe?"

"'S fine. Just something I have to get used to," Billy replied, gathering up his intestines. "Reading room's back that way," he jerked his head, "through the armory, then take a left."

She followed his pointing finger, wove through the suits of armor and past one massive, silvery-gray getup made of material resembling a mummy's wrappings. It was holding a sign: "Reading room this way," then the Thorn's name and an arrow.

Thoroughly creeped out, she followed the arrow. What other choice did she have?

A rush of book-smell swept over her as she crossed through the doorway. It was a wide, cylindrical room lined with shelves of books and a staircase that spiraled endlessly into a ceiling of clouds. Despite the seemingly infinite shelf space, the floor was crammed with stacks of even more books. For once in her life, however, the Thorn had no interest in books. She could only stare in astonishment at the man in front of her.

He said her name, smiling through his beard. "We meet in person at last!"

Indeed, she had never seen his face outside of a computer screen. She knew him, though. The beard, the glasses, the smile that radiated both kindness and intelligence, and that fuchsia scarf he was never seen without. She remembered the first time she'd seen him, years ago, presenting a paper to a livestreamed conference. He had been wearing a simple blue suit, and the bright, cheerful color of his scarf was a welcome contrast to the general stuffiness of the event.

The last time they'd spoken was over email. He'd sent a letter of recommendation to Lowood, he wished her luck and promised to meet her in person the next summer. That never happened, of course. Dr. El-Faouly was dead before summer.

He was dead, and yet there he was now, standing before her. In order for this meeting to be real, one of them must have traveled between worlds. The Thorn knew which of them it was more likely to be.

"Is this the Duat?" she asked.

"You figured it out much more quickly than I did. But, of course, I am actually dead. Well, fully dead. There might be a difference in the way one's consciousness reacts to the change if—"

"Wait, I'm not 'fully' dead? What does that mean?"

He pursed his lips sadly. "Your hands."

She looked down to see her fingers flickering. Invisible—then not. Gone—and back again. She blinked, and in that tiny fraction of a second she felt a shock of excruciating cold, her body crying out with hunger and thirst, her heart wailing its brokenness, and sand everywhere. There was even sand in her throat—had she tried to eat it?

"Your body is unconscious," Dr. El-Faouly explained. "Your only hope now is to be rescued, but I'm afraid at this point it would take a—"

"—Deus ex machina." She blinked again, and heard the roaring of the desert wind. Her fingers were frozen.

"Yes."

She let out a hopeless laugh laced with tears. "I think the gods might be a little busy right now," she said. "I'm probably the least of their worries, especially since..." Her voice caught." Since I helped...I helped Arthur..." She broke down.

He looked at her with weary eyes. He said her name, lifted a hand to her shoulder—it passed through. She felt no comforting touch, only cold and wind and sand and hunger.

"Come," he said, and two plump chairs appeared nearby.

They sat. The Thorn pulled her flickering knees into her chest, sobbing into them.

"It's peaceful here," Dr. El-Faouly said. "You're in a good place. Don't cry."

"My scales are unbalanced," she said through a curtain of messy tears. "I won't be staying here."

"Who told you your scales lack balance?"

"Well, Ammit."

"And you know better than to take Ammit's word as law, don't you?" He laughed scoffingly. "For goodness sake, the Ennead doesn't even regard her as a proper goddess."

The Thorn's lips quivered with a sudden, familiar need to defend her goddess. No—not her goddess, not anymore. "Praise revoked" and all that. She looked down at her flickering forearm (the flickers were fewer and further between now). Bare.

"The goddess Taweret weighs hearts on the scales of Anubis," Dr. El-Faouly explained. "Ammit has no say in deciding the fates of the deceased." He smiled. "Your heart is safe."

"Even without Ammit, I don't think my scales are going to balance," the Thorn confessed.

"Why do you think that?"

She dragged a hand across her face, and it came away slick with tears. Her flesh was completely solid now. "Like I said, I helped Arthur. I found the scarab for him, I protected him from Marc and Khonshu. And," she heaved a wretched, shuddering sob, "to be honest, I don't regret any of it. I don't regret loving him, no matter what I did for him, what I let him do..." She covered her face, drowning in shame.

He looked thoughtfully at her. "Do you regret leaving him?"

She nodded, sobbing violently.

"Even after he betrayed you so terribly?"

She paused to try and breathe, disgusted by the feeling of so many sticky tears racing down her hot cheeks.

"You didn't want to be Ammit's avatar, did you?" he pressed.

She sniffed. "Of course not."

"Well, that was Arthur's plan for you. Do you think he would ever change his mind, regardless of how artfully you may have argued against him?"

"Never," she admitted, wiping her eyes.

"Then what exactly do you regret?" he asked kindly. "Sparing yourself from a fate you would have hated?"

"I could have handled it," she said sullenly.

"Really? You could have handled committing murders in the name of a deity whose cause you don't believe in? You could have handled living under her abuse?"

"I could have sucked it up," she said after a stubborn pause.

"You have done more than enough 'sucking up' in your life," he frowned. "No more. You deserve to be treated well, to make your own choices and live your own life."

"What about love? I deserve that too, right?"

"Of course you deserve love, but not if it comes at the cost of your freedom."

Freedom. What was it she'd said to Arthur about freedom? "I have a free, independent brain." She pictured herself as a bird triumphantly escaping its cage, soaring out into the bluest of skies only to find itself promptly shot down. Would that little bird miss the safety of its cage as it plummeted to its death?

"Will he be okay?" she asked. "If he really loves me like he said he does, and he finds out I died while leaving him..." Her eyes were drowning all over again.

Dr. El-Faouly reached out and took her hands. Her flesh was solid now, no more flickers. "You are not responsible for his feelings toward you."

"He was always trying to protect me," she said. "He's going to think he failed."

"It's not your responsibility," he repeated, gripping her hands. "He's a grown man; he can take care of himself."

"But what if he..."

"He will grieve, he will recover, and he will move on. And you will do the same."

"I can't." She shook her head at the wall of books, unable to look her mentor in the eye. "I can't."

"I said the same thing when I arrived here, knowing I was leaving my loved ones behind. I worried so much for my daughter, thinking she would never be able to move on. But of course, she did. She had to."

"You don't know Arthur. He's," she interrupted herself with a high, panicked laugh, "he's a professional sufferer. He never gets over anything. He needs—"

"He needs a kind of help that you were never equipped to give him. Either he gets that help, or he doesn't; either way, it has nothing to do with you. You renounced his love. He is no longer yours to worry about."

She was remembering the nights she spent pulling shards of glass from Arthur's shredded skin, and how each shard would leave a sickening deluge of blood and pus in its wake. That's what Dr. El-Faouly's words had done to her heart—not that she herself hadn't caused the wound. She had left Arthur behind. She had rejected his goddess and broken off their engagement.

He would never have abandoned her. She would have only had to stay by his side, loyal and silent, and let him make her Ammit's personal killing machine. In return, he would have loved her, cared for her, kept her company for the rest of his life. A few million sinners' blood on her hands, in exchange for a lifetime of romantic bliss...if that wasn't a fair trade, what was?

No. No, she would have hated it. It would have been hell, serving Ammit, and living with Arthur would have been even worse. Didn't his goddess always bring out the worst in him? Ammit would have been a plague on their marriage. The most loving, sincere religious fanatic is still a fanatic, and even his most passionate kisses would never have been able to love the sticky sheen of guilt off her heart.

She bent her body into a pathetic curve and let out a long, slow wail into her knees. Waves of hot sand beat at her dying body. She could feel the brightness of the sun behind her closed eyes. There were voices, two of them, arguing above her.

"What if I hurt her?"

"Steven, look at her. You carrying her to the car isn't going to damage her any more than the desert already has."

"I just don't know, she looks so frail..."

An exasperated sigh. "Fine, let Marc do it then."

"No! Wait! I can do it, just let me—"

Her hands were disappearing, blinking away before her eyes. "I'm going back," she said. "No, I don't want to. No, stop," she cried in a panic, unsure of who or what she was pleading with. "Let me stay here, I want to stay here!"

"It looks as though your body has other plans," Dr. El-Faouly said. "We'll see each other again someday. Say hello to my little scarab for me."

"Your what?"

He smiled. "She's right next to you. Tell her—"

She blinked, and was alive.

The first things she knew were yellowness and hot air, then a sliver of morning creeping in through a pair of thick curtains. There was just enough light for her to note that nearly everything in the room was broken, and the various pieces of things had been scattered across a loveseat in the corner. Someone had apparently begun cleaning up, but never finished the job. A cracked mirror across from the bed showed the Thorn that she was in a white bed, and wearing white clothes: A man's T-shirt and baggy shorts. Her hair felt clean, and smelled like an unfamiliar shampoo. Nearby, another woman sat cross-legged on top of the bedside table. She was balancing a laptop precariously on her knees, and seemed either unwilling or unable to look at the Thorn. The light from the computer screen exaggerated the pronounced circles under her eyes.

"Morning," said Layla.

"Little scarab." The words slipped from the Thorn's mouth so unexpectedly that she almost felt as if the words weren't her own.

Layla slammed her laptop shut with a ferocity that left the cracked mirror vibrating like a cowering animal. Her face was stony. "If one of you people," she growled, spitting out the word people as if it were a deadly curse, "ever calls me that again..." Wet bullets of grief shone in her eyes.

"I'm sorry," the Thorn said reflexively. "I don't know why I—"

"Just stop." Layla shook her head and put a frustrated hand to her face. She took a single loud, tremulous breath, lingering on it as if considering making it a sob. She stood up suddenly, nearly knocking the small table to the ground, crossed the room in a few staggers, and flung the thick curtains wide to reveal a stunning panopticon of Cairo, pyramids and all.

"Wow," the Thorn breathed.

Layla paused in front of the window, her back to the Thorn. "Yeah," she agreed, apparently with some reluctance.

"Thank you for, uh," she could think of no less awkward a way to put it, "saving m—"

"Thank Marc," Layla said curtly. "And Steven. One of them, can't remember which, but he saw you in the sand when we went back to get some stuff we left in that car."

"Are they here?"

"No." She moved away from the window, started to sit on the sofa only to note the mess covering its cushions, and sank down to the floor instead. "No, we're...we're kind of taking a break."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

Layla's face was shifting oddly. Sometimes the shadow of a beard, the glint of a pair of studious glasses, and the shout of fuchsia-colored fabric around her neck would appear, just for a glimmer of a fraction of a second. It seemed to the Thorn that she had yet to entirely leave the Duat—or maybe the Duat wasn't ready to let go of her. Or, it could simply be the ghost of Dr. El-Faouly materializing around his daughter. Of course, she could also have been hallucinating. Even I'm not certain what the truth was.

"Well," said Layla, "don't you want to know what happened?"

A clump of dread had been growing in the Thorn's stomach, anticipating this subject. Clearly, Layla and Marc had survived Ammit's wrath. That fact didn't bode well for Arthur.

"I don't know," she said.

"He's alive," said Layla. "Does that help?"

A tear slipped down the Thorn's cheek and hovered saltily on her upper lip.

"You were supposed to be Ammit's avatar, weren't you? Is that why you left?"

Avoiding Layla's gaze, she nodded.

Layla mirrored her nod, an infuriating knowledge in the way she pursed her lips. "Yeah," she said, "I saw that one coming."

"You did?"

She shrugged. "I always thought something about you and him together didn't really add up. It seemed wrong. And this explains it."

"What do you mean? Are you saying you don't believe he could love me?"

"No. Well, maybe. I find it hard to believe he could love at all."

"And what gives you the right to make that judgment?" the Thorn retorted wildly, her voice climbing in pitch. "Who do you think you are, saying something like that about another person's relationship? As if yours is so perfect."

Immediately she felt herself tense and recoil, shocked by her own cruelty. Layla, however, only hardened her jaw. A deadly silence followed.

"I guess that's fair," Layla said. "But I do know what it's like to be lied to."

The Thorn, of course, wasn't sure what Layla was referring to—but she nodded anyway, wary of opening her mouth for fear she might let loose another needless barb of cruelty.

"I had to hear the truth from Harrow before Marc had the balls to tell me himself. How fucked up is that? To have to learn something like that from the man who shot my husband?"

The Thorn swallowed. "The man who what?"

Layla closed her eyes. "It was so loud," she said, "and the echo...and the blood on his white clothes..." She was shaking.

"He shot Marc?" the Thorn heard herself say. "Arthur did?" His name had never felt less pleasant in her mouth.

Layla nodded, swallowing a sob. "I wanted to kill him."

"He would have killed you first."

She let out a short, mirthless laugh. "Yeah. For sure."

From there, she told the whole story, up to and including the battle between the three avatars in Cairo.

"Stop," the Thorn said suddenly.

"Really? Now?" Layla had reached the point in the story where, sutured to the side of an overturned van by one of Marc's crescent darts, she watched Arthur approach Marc's prone body while Ammit and your humble narrator tangled in combat on the horizon.

"I don't want to hear any more." Tears were dripping from her chin and staining the white sheets between her legs. "Not yet." Never, she thought.

"Suit yourself," Layla said with a tired shrug. "You probably want some food or something, right?"

The Thorn shook her head. Her stomach cried out pathetically, earning an unamused look from Layla.

"I'm getting you some food," she said. "After all that's happened, it would be really stupid if you died of hunger now."

She left, and the Thorn let her body descend into convulsive sobbing—but not before crossing the room to yank the curtains shut. The pyramids would not be a witness to her suffering.

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 14: I care for myself

"'Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments at this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be.'" -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

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Being in the ushabti was like being trapped in a very small space, like a box or a coffin, only the walls themselves were made of my body. Think about that, reader. Just try to imagine. Imagine being unable to move, to shift or even wiggle. Complete entrapment.

However, you aren't here for my pitiful story. You're here for the Thorn, who, after arriving back to the digsite from Mogart's mansion, was promptly left on her own in Arthur's tent, with only a jackal and a few bodyguards for company. And the staff, of course.

The cold night air crept under her skin one layer at a time, and settled comfortably into her bones. Her hands, stiff from the chill, were paralyzed in her lap. From opposite her, the staff beckoned to her as it had done that afternoon.

She took it into her freezing hands, and the goddess wasted no time situating herself in the Thorn's mind like a melodramatic film heroine draping herself over a chaise longue.

Poor Khonshu, she purred gleefully. He never learns.

What'll happen to Marc? the Thorn asked.

Nothing of great consequence. He will no longer have access to the suit and its useful healing properties. The physical strength, speed and agility lent to him by Khonshu will have vanished as well...in general, he will be physically weaker.

That sounds like a great consequence to me.

It would be quite interesting if he died, the goddess mused coldly. His scales are neither balanced or unbalanced. Poor little Taweret—I won't envy her having to handle that situation.

Do you know something?

Are you asking if gods can see the future? She laughed wildly. How sweet—I'm beginning to understand why my servant enjoys your company.

Well, can you see the future?

No. Yes. And also, no—mostly no. Speaking of which, has my servant divulged his reason for keeping you so well preserved?

He lo—

He loves me! He loves me! Ammit mocked. If I cared to hear such melodrama, I would give my servant the dream in which he strangles you to death. I never tire of hearing him beg for mercy.

He would never hurt me.

Has a careless shepherd never inadvertently slaughtered his prized lamb? Oh, and he is growing careless, have no doubt of that. He is becoming desperate.

If you're just a fraction of Ammit, then what's the real Ammit—I mean, the full Ammit—like? If you torture him with bad dreams, what will she torture him with?

He will not be hers to torture. At least, he doesn't think so.

What does that mean?

You're intelligent enough. Mull it over, and it'll come to you. I'm frankly surprised you haven't worked it out already.

Can't you just tell me?

That would ruin the fun.

Outside, she could hear the scratchy sound of tires on sand.

Tell me! Now!

And what good would it do either of you? Even a god cannot stop the inevitable folly of humankind.

A car door slammed.

Ammit! Tell me what he's planning, or I'll—

The canvas door rippled. She flew into a panic, hurled the staff away from her, and watched it land on the ground at Arthur's feet just as he entered the tent.

There was an interminable silence.

"What did she tell you?" he said.

"Nothing."

He looked down at her with something that may have been a glower, had his face not been sunken with fatigue. "I will not tolerate lies," he said, and she thought it was the coldest his voice had ever been.

"Neither will I," the Thorn retorted. "What have you been hiding from me?"

He stiffened. "You're tired, sweetheart. Let me tuck you into bed." He moved to pull her into his arms.

"Arthur, stop."

"Come now, my lamb. Let me—"

"STOP CALLING ME THAT!" She tried to shove him away, and he caught her wrists in an iron grasp.

He said her name. His face was dark with shadows. "Do. Not. Test me. You know what I'm capable of."

"You can't kill me. My scales are still balanced."

"Your scales balance because I have kept them balanced. I'm the one who shields you from the sin of doubt, who has lifted you out of the mire of your own dark past, and who will lead you into the paradise of a world cleansed of evil. I have gifted you with the stability and security you've always craved—and I can take it all away if I see fit."

"Oh my god." She had a sudden, awful urge to laugh in his face. "Do you even hear yourself? 'The sin of doubt,' 'lifting me out of the mire and the darkness,' you've got to be kidding me."

"So, it's true. You doubt our goddess."

"I've doubted her since the day I met you!"

It felt good to admit it.

"Have you?" he said. His hands, locked around the Thorn's wrists, were shaking, whether with rage, anxiety, sheer exertion or anything else, I couldn't say.

"Have you?" he repeated, louder, his top lip betraying an almost-imperceptible tremble.

She swallowed, suddenly aware of her fragility. Not since standing on a chair in front of her fifth-grade class had she felt so vulnerable, so weak and exposed. And this time, there was no Marc to encourage her with a smile and a thumbs-up.

But no—there was still a Marc, wasn't there? A broken, beaten-down Marc, a Marc with sad eyes and a family-shaped hole in his heart. A Marc who had tried to warn her away from Arthur, who looked out for her at the risk of his own life, despite having every reason to feed her to her own guard-jackal and never look back.

"Come on, I know how smart you are," he had said, as if her intelligence were a well-known, indisputable fact. And she was smart. How could she have forgotten that? She was an anthropologist, and a good woman, and she didn't need a PhD or a confirmation from a goddess to prove it.

"It's perverse, Arthur," she said. "Ammit, the scales, you and your creepy cult, the whole deal...it's evil," she told him, liberated by her own honesty. "It's sick."

His nails dug into her wrists. She could count the red veins in his bloodshot eyes.

"I don't want to be her avatar," she continued. "That's what you were planning, weren't you? This whole time, I thought you loved me, and you were just preparing me to be her slave. Because that's all I'm good for in your eyes, right? Doing what I'm told. Following someone else's lead. Never asking hard questions. That's why you were attracted to me in the first place."

In a flurry of pained noises and thumping fabric, he threw her onto her back and planted his knee in her stomach. He had a hand on her neck, the other gripping her wrist.

"You vile little thing," he seethed. "How dare you try and divine my thoughts? You know nothing of the contents of my heart. You cannot understand the torturous dilemma you've put me in by appearing in my life like a firestorm of hope, any more than I can understand why you suddenly talk to blasphemously of the goddess who brought us together. You wicked, wicked creature."

"I'm not wicked," she said calmly, "or vile, or evil, or anything like that. I'm not good, either. I'm just a normal person. So are you. So is everyone. The scales are bullshit, Arthur. There. I said it, and I'm not taking it back. If you don't love me anymore, just tell me. Tell me quickly, and get it over with."

A strangled cry came from his mouth. He released her, sat up on the cot, and lowered his face into his hands. Another silence held them like a vice.

Finally, he turned to face her. "You think if you were a sinner, I would no longer love you?"

The Thorn had propped herself up on her elbows. "I...well, I don't..."

"If you do, then you dreadfully underestimate my love for you. You are my one happiness, my one hope. Every atom of you is precious to me, and all this would remain true no matter which way your scales tipped. If you renounced Ammit, I would love you as much as I did when you praised her. If you put a knife in my heart, I would use my last bit of energy to put my arms around you and kiss you as I died. And if those roles were reversed, and our goddess tasked me with ending your life, I would hold you no less tenderly, and cry for you no less wretchedly."

"So she told you. You know about my scales, and how they're only barely balanced."

He looked pointedly away from her.

"Did you think," she said, "if you didn't acknowledge it, it would stop being true? Did you think if you forced me to be her avatar, that alone would absolve me?" She let out a trembling breath disguised as a laugh. "You're completely in denial. It's pathetic."

He reached down and picked up his cane, turning it over in his hands, inspecting it guiltily. "I begged her to tell me your sin, so I could prevent it and save you. She wouldn't. So I was left to protect you from an unknown fate. Every precious moment I spent with you was poisoned with the fear that it would be our last. I began judging you as you slept, and each time the scales took longer to make their verdict. All those nights, all those times I thought I would have to..." His voice broke, he took a shuddering breath and began again, "...It's painless. So quick you would never know. While you slept, I could just..."

"Stop."

"I dream of it. I see it so clearly."

"She gives you those dreams. She does it to manipulate you, to terrorize you. She thinks it's fun, Arthur. She told me. Will you wake up already? I don't understand why you can't see her for what she is. Someone like that isn't going to heal the world. She'll only make it sicker."

"You think preventing future suffering is a sickness?"

"I think denying human beings their free will is a sickness."

He chuckled mirthlessly. His eyes shone with panic. "Listen to yourself, love."

"I am, Arthur. For once, I actually am listening to myself. I'm learning from my mistakes—something Ammit will never allow humans the chance to do—and I'm finally listening to my own brain. Did you even know I had one of those? A free, independent brain, with its own conscience and everything? Well, I do, and it's been saying some interesting things ever since I met you."

"Of course you have a brain, my sweet," he said patiently. "What is it saying?"

"You're not the only one of us who has awful dreams. Since being with you, I've had the same nightmare over and over again. I come home to our community, and it's been destroyed. Bodies everywhere, faces all kinds of disfigured. Sometimes there's been a fire, and I can't breathe from the smoke. Sometimes I can't move without stepping in blood. But always, always it ends the same way: I think of you, and how much I love you, and how none of this destruction would have ever happened if not for you."

He came over and crouched in front of the cot, his face inches from hers. "Darling, those dreams are nothing but your own subconscious fears. Look around you; you see how our community thrives. And as for me, you have only to reach out and touch me—here, touch me now—" He took her hand and brought it to his clammy cheek. "There. I'm real, aren't I? And I'm here, with you. Is that not enough to ease your mind?"

"Yeah, I know what dreams are, thanks." She pulled her hand away. "But the thing is, I'm never afraid in the dream. I'm disappointed in myself for not noticing the warning signs when I should have, months ago. These dreams are clearly warnings, and I've been stupid enough to think I could ignore them. Well, I'm not going to ignore them anymore."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying, I think it's only a matter of time before that dream becomes reality for us. And I've decided I'm not going to be there to see it."

"You're leaving me?"

She paused, then nodded.

"No. No."

"Yes."

"No. Lamb, you're not thinking."

"I told you not to call me that."

"You're tired. You're overwhelmed. It's been a long day."

"Please stop talking to me like I'm a child."

"You can go back to London. Wait there while I release our goddess. We'll get married after that."

"We're not getting married." She sat up, slid the purple jewel off her finger and held it out to him.

He shook his head emphatically. "No. No."

"You want to be a martyr for your goddess, don't you? Well, you can do that by letting me go." She kissed the tip of his head, his hair smelling like dusty sand, and started toward the door of the tent.

His hand shot toward her and gripped her arm like a handcuff. The ring fell from her grasp and lay pitifully in the sand.

"No. I won't do it," he rasped. "I won't let you go. Not even for her."

The eyes of the staff lit up, and the Thorn thought she heard a hissing bellow from deep in its metal core.

He stood. His hand slid down her arm, finding her wrist and turning it. The scales on his arm were moving.

In her past judgments, you'll remember that Harrow opened the photo album of the Thorn's life, flipping hungrily through its pages like an incredibly nosy houseguest. This time, it was the Thorn who handed him the album and guided him through it. Look at this memory, right here. See how I disrespected my own mother. Isn't that awful? Here, watch me skip class in college. Watch me with this boy, this one right here. See what I let him do to me? That was sinful, wasn't it? Sooo sinful?

The scales faltered.

Not quite sinful enough, huh? Well, what about this: Did you know I caused Randall Spector's death? Marc wouldn't have even known about that cave if not for me. So how about that, Arthur? Ammit? I'm basically a murderer. What do you say to that?

The scales quavered. They tipped.

I'm done, Ammit. Praise officially revoked.

The scales shuddered, stopped, and turned blood red.

The eyes of the cane shone greedily. Outside, the night was still. Arthur's hands were stark white against the Thorn's skin. His breathing was ragged and hollow.

"Well?" said the Thorn. "Are you going to get it over with?" Her voice came from somewhere outside of herself, independent of her mind.

Harrow's breaths came in an irregular rhythm, a catch in some of them. When the Thorn finally dared to look up at his face, she saw little pools in his eyes and a clammy sheen on his skin. A bright flash of shame hit her. I did this. His suffering is because of me.

"Kill me," she pleaded, almost in a whisper.

His hands tightened around her wrists.

"What will Ammit say if you let me live?"

He looked her in the eyes, opened his mouth, and was interrupted by a roar of celebration from outside.

"They're in," he said, looking toward the sound and relaxing his grip ever so slightly.

A chance, a narrow one, had been handed to her. She slipped one hand out of his weakened grip and placed it behind his head, clutching his hair. Rising onto her toes, she leaned forward and kissed him.

"Be a good man," she said, before breaking away completely. She slipped roughly through the door flaps and ran, followed by the jackal that had been guarding the tent. There was a general flourishing of panicked noise behind her. Voices shouting her name, Arthur's voice among them. Many pairs of running feet in the sand, silenced by the hellish tearing of jackal teeth on human skin. By the time the jackal caught up to her, fresh blood staining its satisfied jaw, the camp had shrunk into the distance and was covered by rocky hills. Everything was blue in the late desert night. Everything was still, and it was so cold.

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 13: Conscience, turned tyrant

"'Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world. I was not born for a different destiny to the rest of my species: to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale—a day-dream.'" -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

AO3

Like all gods, reader, I am first and foremost a performer. Unlike the others, however, I am not hypocritical about this. Do you truly think my colleagues don't enjoy the attention lavished upon them by human worshippers? Think again. Osiris may say he only means for his avatar to "observe," but reader, allow me to let you in on a scandalous little secret: Osiris' avatar is a passionate environmentalist and aspiring politician, well-known and respected in his field. The avatar of Hathor, Yatzil, is a prominent musician and social activist, and the avatars of the other gods who remain in the Ennead—Horus, Isis and Tefnut—each have their own illustrious careers in ornithology, gynecology and hydrometeorology, respectively. My own Moon Knight is no less a reflection of my values, and I encourage him to be no less performative and self-congratulatory in his work. Arthur Harrow was, admittedly, quite skilled at this. Marc Spector, on the other hand...well, you know.

Like all gods—and all great performers—I prefer for my work to be recognized, marveled at, and properly feared. Not slept through. And yet, the Thorn was asleep in Arthur's and her private tent while I enacted what would come to be my second-greatest performance of that day: The fastest solar eclipse, so far, in human history. A casual reminder to the planet Earth that if I had my way, I could overtake their source of warmth, light and life in mere seconds, only to return it when I felt like doing so. You humans, you think your kings, queens and presidents have so much power. Ha. You know nothing of power.

Her mind blurred into consciousness, and she rolled over on the cot. There were screams outside. It was too dark to be daytime still, which meant she must have slept through the entire day. It had been fairly soon after sunrise when the scarab had tastefully folded its wings into a downward arrow over Arthur's hand, stopping him in his tracks. "We found Ammit. She's here."

He had never looked so happy, the Thorn had thought, and he had never seemed so far away. "She's here," he was saying to everyone, "she's here, she's here," and then suddenly he was saying it to her. "She's here, my darling, my love. She's here."

"She's here," the Thorn had echoed into his lips, wondering if the others were watching him claim her. I'm happy, she told herself, so happy. He loves me. Everything is perfect. Nothing is wrong.

Then he had sent her (forced her, really) to the tent and commanded her to rest, as if she were unfit for such unseemly work as digging. Too delicate. Too weak. Too precious. Had it never occurred to him, she thought in a flame of resentment, that she had dreamed of this journey just as he had, and that she too would feel honored to contribute to the work of uncovering the lost resting place of their great goddess? She had a hard-earned Master's degree in anthropology, after all. What did he have?

No, her heart sternly corrected. No. She loved him. He loved her. And if he wanted to keep her out of the hot sun and the dry, sandy winds for her own protection, so be it. What right did she have to be angry at him for caring about her? Ungrateful bitch. She should feel grateful to him for not abandoning her in the desert to die alone, like she deserved.

In a rough, whooshing storm of canvas, Arthur entered the tent. "You're awake. Good. I need you." The sky behind him was reddish-purple—a sudden twilight in the heat of midday.

"What's going on?" she asked. He needs me. He loves me. He needs me.

He tore the protective shemagh scarf from his hair and plunged a hand into the duffel bag which held both their belongings, pre-packed weeks ago for the journey. Extracting a decorated vest, he put it on over his hand-flecked shirt while explaining the situation. "Any moment," he said, "a portal will open for me. Be ready for that."

"Am I coming with you?" the Thorn asked, unable to disguise the hope in her voice.

"No. You will stay here and look after the staff. We can't let the gods of the Ennead lay eyes on it."

This was too much. "I didn't come all the way to Egypt just to lay around in a tent." I. Am. An. ANTHROPOLOGIST.

"Correct. You came here to assist me in freeing our goddess. I don't owe you a glorious, swashbuckling adventure, little pet. What I do owe you is protection and care."

Anger overwhelmed her. How dare he. "You honestly think I—" she started, only to fall silent on noticing the tent's entrance had changed. It was now a deep, stone tunnel.

Arthur looked into the portal with a strange expression that almost resembled fear. He came over to her cot and knelt before her. They locked eyes.

"I love you," he told her. "My sweet, precious little angel." He gave her a quick kiss and smiled wanly. "Keep your eyes on the staff. Do not let it out of your sight." He stepped through the portal, and was gone.

Reader, have you ever been alone with an instrument of pure evil? No? Then you cannot possibly understand the uniquely agonizing dilemma of the Thorn's situation. However, it is my job to explain her story to you as well as I can, so explain it I must.

The staff of Ammit may have looked like a mere cane, but it was obvious to anyone close to it that it was anything but. This is why Harrow was unable to bring it into the Great Pyramid—there was no explaining it away as simply an eccentric fashion accessory, especially in the presence of Ammit's own fellow gods. it pulsed with the power of life and death, beckoning to those near it, and at this moment it was beckoning especially enticingly toward the Thorn.

She scooted guiltily to the edge of the cot, an arm's length from where the staff was leaning against the table. She reached out a single finger and touched it. Save for a surge of anxiety washing over her, a nearly unbearable feeling of impending doom and fear of inaction and inconsolable loneliness that made her want to scream...nothing happened. Her hand didn't turn purple, or burst into flames, or shrivel up and rot into dust. So she wrapped the rest of her fingers around the staff and brought it into her lap.

Even I find it hard to describe the sensation she felt on clutching the staff in both hands. It's hard to describe, reader, with any word other than Ammit. The goddess was inside her, and watching her from outside, and surveying her mind and soul in a 360-degree sweep.

Stop it, the Thorn said without thinking. Well, technically she thought it, but it was more than a thought because the goddess was in her thoughts—are you getting this, reader?

A laugh bubbled up from within the staff.

Are you Ammit? she asked the laugh.

A fraction of her, it replied. And you are the human who stole the heart of my most loyal servant. Congratulations.

Are you jealous?

That laugh again. He thinks of you constantly. He worries for you. He dreams of you—nightmares. Your dead body, sprawled at his feet. Your eyes still open, your skin sallow and gray, little more than a skeleton.

My scales are balanced. He knows that.

Reader, that laugh would echo in the Thorn's mind for the rest of your life.

Your scales balance, but barely. Even the smallest transgression into sin may tip them out of balance. Tread carefully, little one.

So the scales can change.

Did you think otherwise? Human nature is always shifting, always changing in reaction to new circumstances and experiences. Oh...he lied to you, didn't he?

No.

The ghastly laugh echoed from inside the staff, through the Thorn's hands and arms and into her chest cavity, where it played a duet with her pounding heart.

Oh, dear, it said, it seems you don't know your lover very well.

No! No! No! No! Her heart was like a battle drum.

What a shame. He showers you with all the affection and sweet words your mousy little heart could ever desire, but where is the true devotion it craves?

He loves me. He loves me.

Oh, of course he loves you. I never claimed he didn't. His love may be twisted and ugly and diseased, but that doesn't make it any less real.

How can I save my scales? She hadn't meant to ask, but her traitor of a mind was too quick for her.

The laugh grew louder, thunderous. It echoed around the tent, filling its canvas walls, holding tyrannical court over the dry, sandy air.

You ask me? it shrieked through its cackling. I crave souls like yours, the same way your kind craves sugary treats. If I were a whole goddess, not just a piece of one, I might devour you right now, just for the fun of it—and you, arrogant little vermin, sit before me and piously ask how you can save yourself from me?

I want to live. I want to be happy.

Your happiness is my concern. Your life, however, might be.

What do you mean?

Ask your lover—my servant. Ask him why he keeps you caged away like a prized animal while your fellow disciples labor in the heat of the desert. Ask him why, if you're not working with the others, he brought you to my homeland in the first place?

He loves me. We're getting married. He loves me.

Yes, you've made it quite clear that you love each other. It's very touching. But if you think that fact alone will protect you from what lies ahead—

The Thorn heard her name shouted, echoing as if through a tunnel. Scrambling, she returned the cane to its resting position against the table, and leaned back on her elbows in a pathetic caricature of "quick, act natural." Ammit's laughter no longer echoed in her mind, but the goddess's presence was still unmistakable. The empty, jeweled eyes of the staff stared at her over an equally hollow smile.

Arthur came back into the tent, and the portal closed behind him. Every line of his face was deepened by the mellow faux-twilight. His shoulders rounded just the slightest bit, and there was a mild stagger in his walk. She wondered if this was the first time he'd walked on glass without the assistance of his cane. She wondered which was worse, the agony in his shoes or the even more constant torture of his fractured goddess laughing in his head. She would be with him every second he was touching the cane.

She tried to ask him about the Ennead, but found her throat too tight to form sounds.

Luckily, he could see the question echoed on her face. "I have committed no offense," he answered, turning away.

"Was Marc there?"

"He was."

"What about Khonshu?"

"He spoke to the gods through Marc."

"What about you?"

"I spoke for myself." He had removed the decorated vest.

"Are you going somewhere?"

"I have men trailing Marc Spector. We will be following in their wake."

"We?"

"I want you close to me. That exhibit at the Kunstmuseum, do you remember it?"

"The one where we first found the scarab?"

"Yes. Do you remember any of the other artifacts displayed there?"

"Yeah, there were some masks, and a—"

"A sarcophagus. Do you remember whose?"

"No one super important. A fairly obscure medjay named Senfu."

He was still facing away from her, but she could sense the budding smile in his voice. "Not super important, you say?"

"Well, it's always fascinating when a sarcophagus is uncovered. This guy had some star charts buried with him, which is unusual...at least, they're thought to be star charts. Why he wanted them interred with his body is up for debate, but—"

"Not anymore." He turned to her, and now he really was smiling.

"You mean the star charts have something to do with Ammit?"

"Not something, my love. Everything. And we must intercept them before Marc Spector."

By the time they arrived at Anton Mogart's sprawling estate, the afternoon had dissolved into night. The romantic lighting on the property was not unlike stage lighting—not that I know anything of that, of course. My theater is a great, dark dome, glinting with countless fiery spheres. From the rooftop of Mogart's mansion, I watched the scene unfold.

"This is the guy who bought the scarab, right?" the Thorn asked.

"Yes."

"Are we going to give it back?"

"No."

"Then what—"

He cut her off by pushing lightly on her collarbone, guiding her behind him. There was a tacit order in the gesture: Be quiet, and follow.

This was the pattern of their relationship, wasn't it? At least since the onset of their engagement, if not before. "Follow me. Do as I say. Be a good little lamb—quiet, meek and demure. Stay behind your shepherd, where you belong. Let him lead you down the path of goodness, and shield you from the ever-reaching claws of sin."

Reader, it was beginning to get old.

"Whatever they've told you, I'm sure I can offer you something much more tangible." The scarab hovered glitteringly in Arthur's outstretched hand.

Layla—was she "Layla Spector?" Or had she kept her family name?—pleaded frantically with a man the Thorn could only assume to be Mogart. "He's going to kill millions, trust me!"

"Are you seriously talking about trust?" Mogart, from the Thorn's perspective, looked almost too much like a caricature of an asshole to even have his assholeishness taken seriously.

"Please, there's no need to descend into violent accusations." Smugness poured from every aspect of Harrow's being. It oozed from his words as he continued his pretty little sermon, contaminating his otherwise gentle voice with a power just as sinister as the purple glow of his cane. The Thorn heard it in pieces—Layla's father's murder, Marc unworthy of love—her heart sinking with every silken barb hurled at their adversaries.

"That's just a taste of the godly power I offer," he purred as the violet-tinted ashes of Senfu's sarcophagus settled delicately around the ruin. He turned, and the Thorn saw his face for the first time since they'd exited their Jeep. She barely recognized the man she loved underneath the grim mask of hatred he wore—or was it his usual, kinder self who wore the mask? She knew nothing at that moment, save for the sudden remembrance of the ominous words of the Ammit fragment: "It seems you don't know your lover very well." And then, Layla's words to Mogart: "He's going to kill millions, trust me."

Arthur had a firm hand on her back; he was leading her away from the others. Behind them, chaos erupted in the form of a silvery-white figure swooping, bat-like, form the tip of a glass pyramid. Gunshots speckled the air with fire.

"They're killing each other," she heard herself saying. And you started it, she was tempted to add. She had an awful, sickening feeling that if she and Arthur had never come here, if he'd never opened his mouth to unleash his velvet-toned sabotage, then that silver suit would have stayed safely tucked away, and those guns as well.

Why? Why did he say those awful things to them? Why did he bring her with him? Why was she in Egypt at all, if she wasn't allowed to work and dig with the others? Why did the Ammit fragment say she would need protection from what lies ahead?

The whys had been piling up in her mind like dirty dishes in a too-small sink, and now they toppled and crashed to the floor, flooding it with filthy water and soggy, congealing crumbs.

Arthur moved to grip her shoulder, stumbling and grunting with a sudden pain. On the sandy ground, a thin trail of rusty red was lengthening behind him as he walked. The leather of his shoes was noticeably darker near the soles, and slicker, and ever so slightly crimson. The Thorn's own boots were new, barely scuffed, a gift from Arthur to protect her feet on their pilgrimage.

Why am I here? Because I love him. And because I am an anthropologist. And because no tree can ascent to the light of heaven if it doesn't descend to the depths of hell.

And then, she remembered Senfu's precious star charts.

Reader, I saw it all from the rooftop. I saw her bolt from Harrow's embrace, running as if possessed, dodging black-suited bodies on the ground and nearly tripping on one, her limbs almost blurring as they moved her toward the ruined sarcophagus in a pathetic panic. A gunshot screamed over the top of her head. Another one went past her ear. She saw her arms in front of her, gathering up the tattered scraps of ancient knowledge. Then there was another arm, a glint of goldish brightness in its hand, wrapping around her neck and tightening. A curtain of dark curls fell into her vision.

"You get one chance," Layla said. "Hand it over, and I'll let you live to see your fiancé fail."

The Thorn struggled in the headlock. She saw the world turn fuzzy, dissolving into a screen of tiny flashes and then into a thick, dark void. She found herself on the ground, and then in the air, hoisted over someone's shoulder. Everything was black, she thought, I've gone blind, but then she noticed the blackness was moving, and it wasn't sightlessness after all, but the slick suit of the man carrying her.

He hurled her at Arthur's feet. She saw the shoes, reeking of blood, and then the tip of the cane.

"Take your pet and go," the man told Arthur. He was one of Mogart's bodyguards. "And think about maybe keeping her on a leash."

"With a shock collar," another of the suited men called out, and they laughed hatefully together.

Arthur said nothing as he pulled her to her feet. She wondered if he would ever speak to her again. The wild adrenaline had died away, and it was gradually dawning on her that she had been humiliated, fully and irreparably. This must be why he didn't want her helping with the dig, she thought. This was why he preferred her silent and submissive, always behind him. After all, the shepherd doesn't lead his flock because he cares for them. He leads them because they are helpless on their own. A lamb without her guide is nothing but wolf food.

She was no anthropologist. She'd barely begun her PhD before failing out of Lowood. That Master's degree she was so damn proud of, it was from a no-name college in the middle of nowhere. Even her Bachelor's had been completed at her safety school.

What would she do now? No career, no husband, no home...no future. Why, she thought, reveling in the masochistic fervor of self-pity, was she still next to him, her body flush with his in the backseat of the Jeep, the two of them watching the sprawling night sky together like the perfect couple they weren't? She should be raging at him through heaving sobs, rolling out the door of the moving Jeep and screaming her shame and rage and love and utter, utter confusion into the gaping foreverness of the starry sky.

But she couldn't do that, of course. She had to be calm, because he was calm, and because Calm was the only thing that was safe for her to be. That thing she saw in the cave as a child, neither living nor dead nor a mere medical symptom, it had never left her. It was her penance, the price she paid for the sins of pride and anger. She would never go back to that. Never.

"Arthur," she said in a whispery rasp, "I'm—"

"Don't."

"I was freaking out. I lost control of myself. I'm—"

"No, lamb."

"I'm sorry."

His silence blanketed her in terror. Thank the gods for the sounds of the Jeep and the city around it, she thought, or she wouldn't have been able to bear Arthur's silence.

"I...I feel so terrible," she struggled hard to contain her panic, "I know you're mad at me, and that's okay, but," the shame pooled in her eyes; so much for remaining calm, "please forgive me."

More silence. The shame was drowning her, it was pouring down her cheeks.

"You think I'm angry with you?" he said at last.

"I...I mean...well, you were acting like—"

"I was acting afraid. Darling, I was frightened for you. I've never been so terrified as I was back at that house, seeing them shoot at you, seeing that woman strangling you, and knowing I might not be able to get to you before..."

For the first time since she'd known him, he seemed to be at a loss for words. Now it was her turn to feed the silence. She felt only shock, then a staggering relief, and for some reason her body chose to express this with a pathetic sniff.

"You don't know how quickly a single gunshot can change everything. You can never know until you see it—and, my love, I pray you will never see it."

The stars behind his head were changing far too rapidly for the speed of the Jeep to account for. Reader, the time had come for me to perform my greatest performance of that day, and it would be the second great performance the Thorn would coldly ignore in favor of Arthur Harrow. She leaned against him, put her arm through his, and soaked up the vibrations of his voice through his body as he spoke:

"You brought this upon yourself, Khonshu."

Reader, I despise that man.

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 12: Away with evil presentiment!

"I feared my hopes were too bright to be realised; and I had enjoyed so much bliss lately that I imagined my fortune had passed its meridian, and must now decline." -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

AO3

"Steven Grant has been fired."

Arthur's words hit her ears like the crash of a wrecking ball—a crash she had suspected would come sooner or later, but which devastated her nonetheless. Poor, poor Steven. Poor Marc.

"Ronnie told me," Arthur explained, taking his seat next to the Thorn. It was late morning, and the community hall was nearly empty. "I'm growing impatient, my lamb. We must have the scarab today, tonight at the very latest. Bobbi and Billy have been dispatched to Steven's apartment, with orders to return with either the scarab itself, or with Steven. These are desperate times, love. Have you eaten anything today? Don't tell me that coffee is all you've had."

It was her fifth cup; she would never admit this to him, but she wouldn't need to. If he wanted, he could get this information from any of her fellow Followers.

"I'll eat something later," she said.

"Your body can't function on coffee alone. Your mind will suffer, as well." He pushed his tray toward her. "Here, have some of my food."

"I'm not hungry."

"Please, love."

"You're going to make everyone stare at us." Her eyes flickered toward the table nearest them, where a small group of Followers was eating in conspicuous silence, clearly eavesdropping.

Arthur was unfazed. "You are the one acting stubborn and childish. If anyone is to blame for starting a scene, it's you."

"If I'm being childish, it's only because you're treating me like a child!" She took a sloppy sip of coffee and slammed the mug down on the table, splashing the cheerful yellow tablecloth. "Since when are you allowed to dictate my eating and drinking?" she demanded.

"Since you began to develop unhealthy habits," he replied calmly, "such as drinking five cups of coffee in immediate succession on an empty stomach."

Her empty stomach twisted in on itself as the meaning behind his words sunk in: He had asked the others about her, and he wanted her to know it.

"I've only done that today," she said. "It's hardly a habit."

"Yet," Arthur corrected sagely.

She felt her lips tighten. Staring into the mug, at the shadow of her reflection in the little brown circle of coffee, she could make out the dark pockets under her eyes, the sallowness of her skin, the dry split ends of her unwashed hair. She was thinner, too; she knew this without having to step on a scale. It was as if some unseen poltergeist were stealing tiny pieces of her, one after another, and she hadn't noticed until now.

"Sweetheart, what's really behind this behavior?" Arthur asked kindly. "It's not like you to be so belligerent."

Her hand twitched, longing to hurl the dark, bitter coffee into his smug face. "I'm belligerent?" she spat. "That's rich, coming from you."

He cocked his head in an infuriating show of mock innocence. "What do you mean by that?"

"Oh, come on. You're fluent in Coptic, of all things, but you're telling me you don't know the Latin root of 'belligerent?' Please."

"Lamb," he said dangerously, "if you're making the accusation I think you are, I would advise you to be very, very careful."

There was a heavy silence between them, into which a light, twanging arpeggio floated from above. "In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need..."

"Bob Dylan," the Thorn observed pointlessly.

"He's one of my favorites."

"He's Steven's favorite, too, according to his Facebook. Does that have anything to do with why you're playing him on the loudspeaker today, of all days?"

"I want Steven to feel welcome, just as I try to welcome every newcomer to our community."

The Thorn thought back to her own first entry into the great, vaulted hall. Had there been music playing? What music was it?

"Speaking of Steven," Arthur brightened suddenly, as if struck with the weight of his own blasted brilliance, "can you show me that very useful Facebook page of his again? I'd like to see if we can discover any foods or dishes he's particularly fond of."

She sighed, pulling her phone out of her pocket. With a series of annoyed taps, she opened the desired page and set the tiny screen down on the table between her and Arthur.

"You haven't sent him a friend request," he said, apparently disappointed.

"Something tells me he wouldn't accept it, given that I was complicit in his almost dying by jackal," she said with a pang, "and we're technically responsible for getting him fired, too."

Arthur was tapping and swiping feverishly on the Thorn's phone, exploring Steven's profile with the same obsessive attention he'd shown the ancient papyrus at the Library of London. There was something equally hilarious and endearing about the unlikely juxtaposition of Arthur Harrow and social media, and as the Thorn watched him, the same fingers that moments earlier had wanted to throw coffee in his face now twitched with an urge to grab his hand and hold it tight.

Instead, she took a handful of napkins and used them to soak up the coffee she'd splashed on the tablecloth. She pushed the napkins and mug off to the side, and slid closer to Arthur. He absently put an arm around her shoulders, still perusing Steven's profile.

"I wouldn't have thought he was the type to post this often," she observed.

"But luckily for us, he is."

"Wait." She stopped his hand on a photo from Sunday night: A shiny, untouched plate on a posh tablecloth. "Steak time!!!!!" read the description. "I thought he was a vegan?" the Thorn said. "What was he doing at a steakhouse?"

"You said yourself, these records are not always accurate. I believe your own profile still describes you as a student, yes?"

A stab of shame, somewhere deep in her stomach. "I guess he was trying to impress someone," she said, scrolling down to older photos. There was one of Steven's goldfish ("my little one-finned wonder!!!!!"—he seemed partial to exclamation marks, she thought), and one showing a collage of international postcards (Thanks Mum!!!!!). Many, many selfies. There was a goofiness in his smile that seemed unintentional, almost like he was about to burst out laughing for no reason.

"He's never with anyone else," she realized. "No family, no friends, not even an acquaintance. It's like he doesn't know anybody."

"Well, that's only to be expected, isn't it?" Arthur replied. "'Steven' is an alias, a façade. A mask used by Marc to hide his true identity."

"But why would he make a social media profile for his fake identity if he were trying to hide?" she asked. "Something isn't adding up here. I called him Marc to his face, and he looked baffled."

"It's called acting, darling. Many people do it for a living."

"But you said Marc was a mercenary! What kind of mercenary is doing unpaid method acting on the side? I'm telling you, it doesn't make any sense!" Her voice was climbing in pitch, matching the panicked confusion she'd been trying to hide since Arthur used the word "alias." The truth was, she'd forgotten to look at Steven as an invention of Marc's. She couldn't shake the idea of him as a complete individual, nothing like Marc at all, save for the identical face...but then, there was that smile, the "Marc smile" she'd thought she would never see again. And his name, Steven Grant, just like Marc's own childhood hero—with or without a distinguished academic title, it was still a coincidence she couldn't ignore.

Arthur hushed her, rubbing her back in circles. "I know this is hard for you," he said, "and you're doing so well."

"How?" she couldn't help thinking, crushed against his shoulder as he continued scrolling down Steven's—Marc's? page. Just when she thought that sweet, tragically innocent smile would be bored into her thoughts for eternity, the photos stopped.

"That's weird," she said. "He only joined Facebook two months ago? Most people our age joined when we were kids."

"Most people your age aren't trying to hide their true identities. There is good news, though," he said with a smile, indicating Steven's first-ever Facebook photo.

"He made his profile picture a bowl of soup," the Thorn said, stifling a tsunami of inexplicable protectiveness.

"Lentil soup," Arthur smiled. "Let's get to work."

The Thorn always enjoyed cooking with her fiancé, and would later look back on their time in the community kitchen with heart-shattering pangs of nostalgia. This, to her, was true romance: Helping Arthur choose the perfect recipe from the community's shared collection, gathering the necessary vegetables and herbs from the garden, and dividing the work of cutting, dicing and mincing. At the stove, she stirred while he added each ingredient, piling scent upon savory scent until the aroma drifted into every corner of the kitchen and settled on the very air.

"Like this," he instructed, covering her hand with his and guiding the spoon—as if she had never stirred anything before. "It smells wonderful, doesn't it?"

She nodded, leaning against him to soak in his warmth. She was like the solar-powered lights the community had recently installed: She needed a daily exposure to Arthur, and if she were away from him for too long, she would simply shut down into a wallowing, self-contained darkness.

"We ate soup together the night we met, didn't we?" he said. "Butternut squash, if I remember correctly."

She hadn't remembered the type of soup, only that it tasted of comfort and home. "Did you make that for me?"

He laughed lightly, reaching out to lower the heat on the stove. "I didn't research you on Facebook, if that's what you're asking."

"Did you research me in...other places?"

"I read your published thesis, as well as a paper you'd written about the modern cult of Khonshu. Needless to say, that captured my attention. Put the cover back on top of the pot, darling."

"Nothing else? Nothing more, you know, personal?"

"Only your name. Nothing else. You were a mystery." He smiled and gave her nose an affectionate tap. "Cover the pot, darling."

She covered the pot. "Now we wait for twenty minutes, right?"

"Thirty. Twenty won't be long enough for the lentils to soften."

"We may as well get rid of the recipe tin, since you know everything in it by heart." She retrieved the blender and set it up next to the stove. "How about serving butternut squash soup at our wedding, since it was the first thing we ever ate together? I think people would like that."

"I'm sure they would, love, but you seem to be forgetting our arrangement."

"How? I mean, I know we're not having a regular wedding, but couldn't we have some kind of ceremony later? A party, maybe?"

"Oh, darling," he said mournfully, "has it not been clear? I'm afraid our life is going to be very different once we're married." His voice was like the bottom of a cup of hot chocolate—sweet in an ugly way. "After our goddess is set free, you and I will live to serve her. We may or may not live here anymore; it's possible we may not even live together. It all depends on what Ammit thinks is best for mankind."

"If we're not going to live together, what's the point of getting married?"

"I only mentioned that as a possibility. We must plan for anything, even something as difficult as being separated from one another."

His phone rang. "Excuse me," he told her, as if she were a mere colleague, and glided out of the kitchen. "Ah, hello Billy," she heard faintly.

A wave of sadness attacked her behind the eyes. A sob rose in her throat. You should have seen this coming, some evil within her chastised. Did you really think he would be satisfied with a normal marriage?

She should be ashamed, she told herself, for expecting so much. Making breakfast for each other, kissing good morning and good night, cuddling on the couch—these were "normal people" things, meant for ordinary couples who lived without the burden of a world-saving mission. And Arthur was anything but ordinary, she'd known that from the start. It was why she'd fallen in love with him, wasn't it? Why would she want to diminish him by forcing him down to her level, dragging him tooth and claw into the stainless steel cage of contented domestic mediocrity, when he was meant for so much more? He wished to elevate her, guide her to a holier life, mold her into an agent of change—and yet here she was, in painfully stereotypical fashion, discontented with wedding plans.

"Yes. Wonderful. Thank you," Arthur said into his phone as he stepped back into the kitchen.

"They have the scarab?" the Thorn asked, turning away to hide her brimming eyes.

"They have Steven," he replied. "I know this is overwhelming, dearest."

"It's not that." The tears spilled over.

"What then?" He slid an arm around her waist, turning her to face him.

She wished they were characters in a drama, so she could rail against him and scream "Choose! Me or Ammit!" But alas, this was real life, and she knew very well what his answer would be.

"What's the matter?" he asked again. He hugged her against him, and a series of wretched sobs escaped her as if activated by his embrace.

"I'm hungry," she said brokenly into his chest.

It takes longer to drive across London in heavy traffic than a non-Londoner might think. By the time Billy's car crawled its way into the community, Harrow's lentil soup had been completed, stored, re-heated, and served to most of the community members. The Thorn half-hoped it would run out before Steven arrived.

"Can I still eat with you?" she asked Arthur, who sat in stiff, expectant silence next to her. A walkie-talkie lay on the table in front of them, next to Arthur's dilapidated, secondhand phone.

"Of course you can...on two conditions."

"I'll let you do the talking."

He put a hand on her leg. "Good girl. That was condition one. Condition two: If I tell you to leave the room, for any reason, under any circumstances, you do so immediately. Go straight to the study and hide. If necessary, I'll send protection. Do you understand?"

"Yeah." It wouldn't happen, she was sure. Steven was too nice. Too innocent. But then, what if Marc emerged from beneath the mask of innocence? What if he donned that gleaming white suit, pulled a crescent-shaped blade from his chest and—

Arthur squeezed her leg. "It's going to be all right," he said thinly.

The walkie-talkie screamed with static. Bobbi Kennedy's voice somehow found its way through the noise: "Here."

The Thorn's heart leapt in panic, as if trying to escape her chest.

"Wait here." Arthur's hand left her leg as he stood, his jaw tight and his mouth paper-thin, and made his slow, crunching, purposeful way out of the hall.

And there she was again, alone with her thoughts, and with the acoustic lilting of Bob Dylan. Well, I'm the enemy of treason, enemy of strife / I'm the enemy of the unlived, meaningless life...

Steven would be fine, she told herself. So would Marc. Arthur would never allow her to stay if he planned to hurt them.

I've searched the world over for the Holy Grail / I sing songs of love, I sing songs of betrayal...

They were just going to talk. Arthur, Steven, maybe Marc. And Steven had already been judged. There would be no reason to harm him.

Don't care what I drink, I don't care what I eat / I climbed the mountain of swords on my bare feet...

Arthur had said himself, many times, that words were always the most powerful weapon. But if he really believed that, why did he kill that poor old woman?"

You don't know me, darlin', you never would guess / I'm nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest...

"Shut up," she told the music. "Stop." When did she start talking out loud to nothing? Was that something normal people did?

I ain't no false prophet, I just said what I said / I'm just here to bring vengeance on somebody's head...

She scrambled for Arthur's phone, hit the "next song" arrow with a violent whup, and let out a long, anxious breath. The soft arpeggio opening of "Every Grain of Sand" filled the room: Since morning, they had worked through the entire playlist. Arthur probably wanted to hear the whole thing, make sure it was perfect, just the right length and content to ease and enable his manipulation of Steven.

As if ushered in by the song, Arthur strode into the hall, leading a palpably uncomfortable Steven. "You hungry?" His words floated across the room, magnified by the high, Gothic ceiling. "The food's free. You're a vegan, right?"

"Yeah," replied Steven, looking around with an air of nervous awe.

"So am I," Arthur said, as if this were a surprising coincidence, a mark of kinship between the two of them. "You might want to try the lentil soup. I made it this morning. It's Victor's recipe." He called out his thanks to Victor, perched like a vulture on a high balcony. "He's from the Yucatán," he explained to Steven. "He's very funny."

The Thorn hated Victor's jokes.

"Here." Arthur handed Steven a tray, and took one for himself. "I know being on the right side of things is important to you. Khonshu always tries to ensnare those with a strong moral conscience."

A violent, metallic crash shattered the peaceful atmosphere of the hall. The Thorn jumped in her seat, whirled around frantically—Who did that? Where did it come from?!

Yes, reader, I lost my cool—can you blame me? Who does Harrow think he is, to talk about "the right side of things," and to throw his own betrayal of me back in my face with all the passive-aggressive nonchalance of a seasoned con man? I ensnare no one, reader. Never forget that. I save and protect those humans whom I deem worthy of my godly patronage. I once made the mistake of affording Harrow this privilege, and he threw it away like the ungrateful worm he is.

"You don't have to listen to him," he told Steven dismissively, almost amused. "He often throws temper tantrums, like a two-year-old. None of the gods respect him. Perhaps that's why he's banished." Wretched, crawling, slinking vermin. I could have smote him on the spot, if only that parasite Steven would surrender control to Marc.

A bowl of soup appeared in front of the Thorn, and she felt Arthur next to her. "Here you are, sweetheart." He rested his cane on the side of the table, and sat. "What's he saying now?" he calmly asked Steven. "'I am real justice?' Thank you, love," he added, taking the salt shaker passed to him by the Thorn.

An eerie burst of laughter erupted from the crowd of Followers scattered through the hall.

"He's here?!" the Thorn cried out before she could stop herself. Under the table, Arthur put a warning hand on her knee.

"Can you hear him?" Steven asked.

The Thorn was suddenly overwhelmed by the same constant, nagging unease she'd always felt when exploring the woods, knowing snakes and spiders roamed the undergrowth beneath her. How could Arthur be so calm, eating soup and chatting as though the very subject of both their nightmares weren't with them at that very moment, invisible and unheard, probably waiting for the perfect moment to unleash the wrath of his avatar upon the community?

"Is she okay?" Steven indicated the Thorn.

"She's a little tired." Arthur reached up and stroked her cheek adoringly with the backs of his fingers. "We've had a lot on our minds lately, as you know."

She felt like an antique doll, there to be admired, touched only with the most careful of caresses, unfit for anything more. There was a river of panic swimming in her throat, and chilled drops of sweat gathered on the back of her neck.

Steven looked quizzically between the two of them. "The soup's...yeah, it's very good." He seemed to be scrambling for words. "Ace, yeah. It's lovely."

"Khonshu punishes those who have already walked an evil path," Arthur explained patiently. "His retribution comes too late. By the time..." blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Reader, I simply cannot continue transcribing his vile words. You've heard them before, anyway.

"Right," said Steven, "but...wait, isn't that a bit dodgy? Like, trusting the judgement of a weird crocodile lady?"

The Thorn turned to look at Arthur, so suddenly that the motion sent a sharp pain through her neck.

Arthur only smiled that soupy, slimy smile of his. "You don't need to doubt her judgement. Ammit will..." Oh, I don't know, reader. It was probably something about good and evil. "...Which brings us to the scarab."

A collective scraping of chairs, and the Followers of Ammit got to their feet in near unison, turning to face their leader.

"That scarab functions as a kind of compass, leading us to Ammit's tomb. She's out there..." blah, blah, blah. Something about screams. "Evil eradicated." Something about Heaven. "So," he concluded, "the scarab."

Steven seemed almost relieved. "Oh, I-I don't have it."

"No?"

"Honestly, I don't have it."

Told you, thought the Thorn blasphemously.

"Hm. Well," Arthur said placidly, "maybe you know someone who does? Hm? Maybe Marc?"

The Thorn flinched at the sound of Marc's name.

"No," Steven reiterated, after an odd glance at his reflection in a bowl of bread. "I don't."

"May I speak with Marc?" Arthur asked.

Please say no, the Thorn thought, please please please, say no.

Steven stammered incoherently.

"Marc," said Arthur, "what has Khonshu promised you? That this is your last mission? Then you'll be free? Trust me when I tell you, Khonshu is a liar. There's always one last thing."

Reader, it takes one to know one.

"Sorry," said Steven, "if Ammit judges people pre-evil, like, before the fact, then isn't she judging an innocent person?"

A bead of sweat on the back of the Thorn's neck grew into a bauble, then slid under her collar and down her spine.

Steven continued. "I mean, a thought can't be evil, can it? I think about killing my boss all the time, but I wouldn't actually do it."

"Steven," Arthur said. A subtle warning.

"What about a child? Would she kill a child for something they might do in thirty years?"

More drops of sweat—two, four, eight of them—followed the first one, gliding down her skin and pooling in the small of her back. I should wipe them away, she thought, but couldn't make herself move.

Her name came to her, spoken far away in Arthur's voice. She heard it spoken by others, too—Mother, Teacher. Bad girl. Evil girl. Devil child. Sinner. Stop it, she told herself, stop. My scales are balanced. The scales do not lie. This is the face of a good woman. The scales are forever. The scales see everything. Praise Ammit. PRAISE. AMMIT.

Her name again, louder. She looked up to see a thousand warnings and a threat, all etched in the lines of Arthur's face. "Go," he said, "now."

She stood so suddenly that her chair fell to the ground behind her.

"Go," he said again, and she fled. She flew up the stairs, sweat falling into her eyes now, stinging them as she ran. She flung herself into the study, slamming the heavy double doors behind her. Hide—somewhere to hide. She scrambled under Arthur's desk and pulled her knees into her chest.

There had been a child in the community—a little boy, the youngest Follower the Thorn had ever met. She used to read books to him. She remembered him tripping one day while playing outside, his round little face collapsing into sobs, and Arthur scooping him into his arms and comforting him as if he were his own son. Less than a week later, that boy was gone.

The scales see everything. The scales do not lie.

Maybe that boy was a monster in the making. The next Hitler, the next Mussolini, the next Thanos, even...or maybe he was like Marc—and Arthur, for that matter—primed for badness by a string of bad things in their own lives. Death, loss, injustice, illness, abuse...those single stones thrown one after another, slowly reducing their victim from a warm, breathing person to a rumpled corpse, slimy with blood.

She thought of the saints, who Arthur admired so much. Vincent, Sebastian, Catherine and Margaret, Joan of Arc. Their sufferings—physical, emotional, spiritual—strengthened their souls, even as they waged war on their bodies. Was that why Arthur studied their stories over and over? So he could try and learn the secret to their goodness, their strength in suffering, their emerging from persecution as more holy, more whole? Did he envy their spiritual completeness, their love for their god, and the way their god seemingly loved them in return?

"Did any of them walk on glass?" the Thorn asked him once.

"They did not need to."

The scales are forever. The scales do not lie. Countless hundreds of times, she had heard Arthur say these words. But if the scales were forever, why walk on glass? Why torture himself with penance, trying to correct something that could never change?

With a suddenness that halted her breath, she heard the doors slam open. "Bolt the door!" someone shouted. A woman.

"Oh my god." It was Steven's voice, quavering with terror. "I'm going to die in an evil magician's man-cave."

Evil magician? Was that what he thought of Arthur? Her hero, her rock and her protector, was that how he appeared to the rest of the world? Evil magician. How diminishing. How disrespectful. Heresy.

The woman was talking again. "Your name is Marc. There is a suit. I've seen you use it. You bring it out."

A horrible banging at the door; a scratching sound behind it.

"...please, please, both of you, please stop!" Steven begged.

"Listen to me! Your name is Marc. There is a suit. I've seen you use it. You bring it out!"

The Thorn's knees were trembling, tapping violently against her chin. Not the suit, not that damned ghastly suit, please, god, any god, don't let him put on that suit...

"It's all right," the woman said to a now thoroughly panicked Steven, "it's all right, okay, we'll just find another way."

A cataclysmic boom, an the doors were open.

"Jackal!" Steven spluttered. "Jackal! Jackal!"

With a tangled clambering of limbs, the Thorn freed herself from under the desk. "Don't worry," she called out, a catch of uncertainty in her voice. "I won't let it hurt you."

"What?" said the woman. She was staring at the Thorn, her face seemingly unable to choose between an expression of bafflement and disgust. Still, she was striking. There was an unmistakable strength, an air of sheer competence to her that no fear of present danger could shake.

"It's here to protect me," the Thorn explained. "It won't attack you unless you attack me first."

The jackal trotted over to her, folding its legs to sit obediently in front of her. It tossed its bony head and let out a drooly growl of assent.

The woman looked quizzically at Steven.

"She's his...I dunno, girlfriend or something," Steven explained awkwardly.

"Fiancée," the Thorn corrected tersely.

The woman raised her eyebrows. "Come on," she said to Steven, beckoning him toward the ladder that led to the roof. "Let's get out of here."

"What's that in your pocket?" the Thorn asked.

Steven blanched. "Spare change." His hand went straight to the small bulge in his jacket, cupping it protectively.

"You must be fond of it. You keep patting it, like you're scared to lose it."

"Steven." The woman grabbed him by the wrist. "Now."

"Can I see it?"

"I told you, it's just spare change. I need it for the bus."

"Let me see it."

"No."

"Maybe it can fetch it for me." She looked pointedly down at the jackal.

On hearing the threat, Steven seemed to launch into a violent fight with himself. He staggered sideways, nearly crashing into a heap of stolen statues, and emerged as another person.

"Marc!" the woman cried out in obvious relief, and the Thorn realized who she was.

Marc turned to his wife. "Layla," he said, "get out of here. I'll take care of it."

Layla looked from Marc to the Thorn, back to Marc, and reluctantly set about climbing to safety.

Marc turned back to the Thorn. "Do not do this," he said. His voice was low and patient, with a shadow of a warning in its undertones. "It's not worth it. He's not worth it."

The jackal was impatiently grinding its skeletal claws on the floor.

"Give me the scarab, and I won't have to do anything," the Thorn said.

"Don't you realized what it is you're fighting for? Millions of people will die if Ammit is released. Millions."

"And millions more will be saved."

"Do you really believe that? Really? C'mon, I know how smart you are. There's no way you're actually buying this crap he tells you."

"What, like you buy everything Khonshu tells you?"

"That's different."

"Is it? How many people have you killed for Khonshu?"

"Don't you dare talk to me about that. You don't know anything about it."

"I know you wouldn't have had to kill them at all if Ammit had been around. She would've judged them before they committed any sins."

"Listen to yourself! You sound just like him! Is he really worth it? You love him that much, that you're willing to throw countless innocent lives away just to give him what he wants?"

"It's not about him. It's about Ammit. It's about healing the world."

"Whatever you need to tell yourself. But you're not getting the scarab, I can promise you that. If you want to get to that tomb, you're just going to have to find it some other way." He started toward the ladder.

"Fine, then! So whenever something horrible happens that could have been prevented by Ammit, I hope you know it was all your fault!"

"Fuck!" Marc exploded. He gave the ladder a violent kick, sending it into a noisy, quivering frenzy. "I dare you to say that again!" he roared at the Thorn. "I fucking dare you!"

That was all the jackal needed. It leapt forward, bounding toward Marc.

"Shit," Marc said under his breath. "Well, I guess I kind of asked for it." With the cool competence of an Olympic diver, he launched himself toward the back window and leapt artfully through the glass.

The Thorn screamed. The jackal turned, looked at her once with its milky, dead eyes, and, with surprising grace, followed Marc through the shattered hole in the window.

The scarab. Her legs were moving immediately; they knew where she was going before she did. Reader, I must admit I was impressed. I would never have guessed the Thorn could run like that, flying desperately down corridors and stairs, through the community hall, shouting "move! let me through!" to baffled Followers, and finally emerging into the damp, chilly night air. Pulling out her phone, activating its piercing white-blue flashlight, she scoured the brick sidewalk for anything small, shiny and round.

When she finally saw it, gleaming gold, she let out a dry sob of relief and dropped to her exhausted knees. She flung her phone to the ground, doubtless shattering its screen, and clutched the precious scarab to her chest. Praise Ammit. Praise Ammit. Praise—

"There you are." The tip of his cane preceded him, landing with a soft tap on the bricked street in front of her.

Still kneeling, she looked up at his smiling, perfect face, and held the scarab out to him, cupped in both hands like an offering.

"You really are my little angel," he said approvingly, taking the scarab and raising it to his face, inspecting it intensely. There was something strange in the way he looked at it, something that sent spiderlike chills racing up and down the Thorn's spine.

"Our pilgrimage begins," Arthur said, and the Thorn didn't know if he spoke to her or to the tiny gold relic. "The dawning of a new world."

The dawning of our marriage, she realized, and for the first time, the thought filled her with something akin to dread.

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 11: I am not an angel

''I will myself put the diamond chain round your neck, and the circlet on your forehead...and I will clasp the bracelets on those fine wrists, and load these fairy-like fingers with rings.'" -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

WARNINGS: Domestic abuse (emotional, physical), descriptions of blood and gore, discussions of self-harm and a mention of suicide

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

AO3

Dear reader, do you recall when, in an earlier chapter of this cursed story, I mentioned that Harrow had told the Thorn three big lies, which would need to be uncovered in order for her to be freed from his spell? If you do remember, and if you have been keeping track, then I don't have to remind you that by this point, two of these three lies had been revealed to the Thorn. The first lie was that Harrow frequently committed murder in the name of Ammit. The second was that Marc, the Thorn's cherished childhood friend, was my avatar. These facts may be second nature to you, knowledgeable reader, but try to think what they were to the Thorn:

Her love for Arthur Harrow was like an ugly coat of paint, and the truth was like an old paint scraper coated with rust. When the first truth was revealed to her, it dusted the rust off the tip of the blade. The second truth gave it a new handle. The blade was still dull, though, and rendered it impossible for the Thorn to make more than the slightest dent in that hideous coat of paint.

Approximately twelve hours after Harrow's words, "there's chaos in you," had rung through the marble-tinted silence of the museum, Harrow strode through the lobby slowly, deliberately, as if claiming ownership over the very floor he was torturing with the repeated stabs of his cane and the crunch of his glassy footfalls. The glass was louder these days, the Thorn thought, then told herself this was only her paranoid imagination. She was holding Arthur's hand, and he was gripping hers back. They crossed the lobby, Arthur nodding to each bewildered member of the museum's cleaning staff—"good evening." "good evening." "good evening."—and went through the open twin doors into the foyer. A sweet, happy couple, heading out after a romantic day at the museum, ready to settle into the security booth and make poor, stupid Steven Grant suffer.

And it had been a romantic day at the museum. If there's one thing about human beings I will never understand, reader, it's the absolute obsession you have with looking at things. Put any object in a glass cage, slap some words on the wall next to it, and humans will flock to stare at it, slack-jawed and idiotically mute. In the Thorn's defense, she was certainly not mute—on the contrary, I don't believe she stopped talking for more than a minute. Prattling on and on to Arthur, gushing like a geyser of excitement, while he looked back at her with a soft, approving smile.

"And why do movies always make it look like everything was so dirty back then?" she ranted at one point. "I mean, do people really believe that the same culture that was able to create this—" here she gestured wildly to a massive stained-glass window (French, 13th century, as if I care)—"never bathed?" She let her arm fall dramatically to her side, pursing her lips as if to say I rest my case, while Arthur looked down at her with a smile, and the glass saint in the window looked down on both of them.

Something shifted outside, some tree or cloud or maybe even the sun itself, and the colors of the window erupted in a dance of shades and moods. The benevolent, almost-smiling gaze of the saint, whose raised palms and bare feet dripped with blood from the holy wounds of the stigmata, darkened and turned brooding, then hateful, and finally murderous. The colors around him glittered, all blood-reds and ocean-blues and honey-yellows, the full color carnival of Earth and humanity pressed into glass and displayed for the glory of a far more popular god than I.

Then it was over, the saint was kind again, the colors soft, and Arthur was still smiling. It hadn't even been a second. He smiled, and smiled, and smiled. He loves me, thought the Thorn, almost gasping, as if she'd never fully believed it before. He really, really does love me.

"It's almost closing time," she said with a glance at her phone. "We should get ready."

They emerged from the studious gray walls of the medieval wing, into the white-gray marble pomposity of the lobby.

"It's thrilling, isn't it?" Arthur said, squeezing her hand as they walked.

"It is?" she replied with a nervous glance at the gift shop, where Steven labored listlessly with a scanner and a basket of pretentiously-packaged snacks. A horrible impulse surged within her: What if she were to make herself like a human alarm bell, waving her arms and hollering at Steven, Run! Run away! Forget your job, forget your shitty boss, just save yourself and run!

"What are you thinking about, little lamb?" Arthur asked, in a voice that had the consistency of molasses. Molasses killed 21 people in 1919, the Thorn remembered suddenly.

"I'm excited," she said. It wasn't a whole lie. She was excited by his presence next to her, his warm, strong hand sheltering hers, his smile caused by her and no one else.

"Good. So am I." He raised her hand to his lips and blessed it with a kiss. "In an hour or so, we'll have the scarab. Our holy pilgrimage will finally begin."

I think you're perfect, her heart said. So perfect, you make me want to cry. She angled her steps, brushing against him, nuzzling his shoulder with her cheek. He smelled like home.

Ronnie was waiting for them in front of the security booth, keys at the ready. Arthur thanked him, and led the Thorn into the booth. The lights dimmed, then died. Ronnie disappeared into the shadows. They were alone.

What am I doing? The thought nudged the Thorn's consciousness. What the hell am I doing here?!

"Now what?" she asked.

"Now, we wait."

"How long?"

"As long as we need to." He was watching Steven on the black-and-white security feed. The light from the cameras cast his face in a ghostly glow, planting a predatory glimmer in his eyes.

"We're not going to hurt him, are we?" the Thorn couldn't stop herself from asking.

"If he complies, he has nothing to worry about."

In her stomach, she felt the eerie, sudden downward motion she'd always associated with quickly-moving elevators.

"You're troubled," Arthur said, his glittering eyes fixed on the cameras. "You don't like what I said."

"It just doesn't seem right," she said. "There's no way we'll get away with this."

"My darling, are you worried about the law?" He finally turned to her, smiling and pinching her cheek. "Is that why my little bit of sunshine has turned so gloomy?"

She reluctantly nodded. The law was part of it, maybe, but was that really what she had meant? Even she wasn't certain.

"When citizens living under Hitler's rule fought and rebelled against the Nazis," Arthur said, "was that the right thing to do?"

Now it was her turn to look away, suddenly finding his gaze intolerable. "Well, obviously."

"And yet they were breaking the law. Here, today, we find ourselves in a similar position. Does that make you feel better?"

Before she had the chance to work out what these two situations could possibly have in common, he was continuing the bizarre sermon. "Even if we were to be caught," he said, "I would protect you. However, I can promise you that won't happen. My precautions have been so thorough, I could walk through this museum right now, pluck any item from its casing, and bestow it on you as an early wedding present, without ever facing legal consequences. Go ahead, pick something. Anything you like." Catching the look of horror that immediately overtook her face, he gave a soft laugh. "I'm joking, of course."

"Oh." She forced herself to echo his laugh.

"But if I were to take something home for you," he said, fixing his eyes again on the tiny black-and-white Steven, "say, one item—for simplicity's sake—what would you choose?"

Safely in the realm of the hypothetical, she could now breathe freely. The answer was quick and simple: "That desk. The French rolltop desk with the marble shelf, remember that one? That's what I want."

"I do remember. You admired it for a long time. But sweetheart, a desk? I offer you any work of art in this great museum—"

"Hypothetically."

"—hypothetically, I offer you anything you want, and you choose a desk?"

"Yeah. I would put it in your study, and then we could work sitting next to each other."

"I already let you use my desk whenever you want to. Is that not enough for you?"

"No." Were they arguing? Why were they arguing? "It's fine for now, but when we're married I'm going to want something of my own."

"I only wish you would choose something less plain, less practical. Something that suits you better."

"What would suit me better than a desk?" I am...an anthropologist! "Okay, fine. I choose one of the vases in the porcelain gallery. The sort of teal one, with the birds. I could use it to store water for when I take care of your feet."

"That's very kind of you," he smiled, reaching out to squeeze her hand. "Very kind. But still quite practical."

She threw up her free hand in exasperation. "Fine! Tell me what you want me to pick."

He smiled a full smile. This, she realized, was what he'd wanted her to say all along. "Do you remember," he said, "that sparkling comb with the orchid and the gold-flecked leaves?"

She almost laughed out loud. "That? That's what you think suits me?!"

"Of course. It's elegant, pure," he turned to face her, cupping her cheek and stroking it with his thumb, "stunningly beautiful. Just like you."

NO! STOP! WRONG! She felt herself recoil from his words. "That's definitely not practical," she conceded. "I would never wear it."

"Not even on our wedding day?"

Her head was spinning. I need to sit down, she thought, only to remember that she was already sitting.

"Come here." He lifted his cane parallel to her head, and took a chunk of her hair in one fist. He spiraled it around the rough cylinder of metal, binding her to the cane. She felt a shock of energy, and the small booth filled with purple light.

"Well, it's settled." Arthur gently pulled the cane away. The light disappeared, and everything was grayish-blue again. "Our goddess agrees with me: You look lovely with your hair done up."

"I don't like it. It feels wrong."

"I'll see about having a replica made of that comb. The first of many gifts to my perfect bride."

"I don't want it!" she exploded, her voice ringing across the marble walls. On the small screen, Steven glanced up, looked back and forth, then shrugged and resumed the packing of his messenger bag.

"He's preparing to leave," Arthur said, standing. "It's time." He gripped his cane with both hands.

"How can I help?" asked the Thorn, her face hot with shame after her outburst.

"Stand aside to make room for our friend," he commanded, "then join me in watching our victory unfold."

Friend? Was Ronnie coming back? she wondered, then hastily clamped a hand over her nose as the stench of sulfur overtook the cramped space. Arthur was on one knee, chanting in Coptic. He finished his eerie purple ritual on a triumphant shout, and the gaunt form of a jackal slunk past the Thorn and out toward the gift shop. It wasn't too late, she thought. There would still be time to warn Steven.

She took her seat next to Arthur. He'd given the more comfortable chair to her. He loves me.

Steven had heard the whimpering of the jackal, and they watched as he wandered the museum, in and out of the shadowy forest of artifacts, in a state of innocent confusion.

"He thinks it's a dog," she observed. "He thinks some poor dog has gotten lost, and he's trying to help." She looked pleadingly at Arthur.

"I understand," Arthur said, "but he has the scarab."

"Does he, though? Earlier, he said he didn't. I'm not even sure he knows what it is."

"He is the avatar of Khonshu. Like it or not, he is involved in this." There was a chilling finality in the way he said this, and that was when the Thorn noticed his eyes. They were bright with excitement; the beginning of an unconscious grin touched the corner of his lips. He leaned forward, gripping his cane with one hand and the PA microphone with the other.

Steven cowered behind a display, clutching his bag to his chest. Behind him rose the looming shadow of the jackal, magnified in all its hellish glory.

Arthur grasped the microphone to his lips. "Steven Grant of the gift shop," he said coolly, "give me the scarab, and you won't be torn apart."

Torn apart. The words launched a barbarous slideshow in the Thorn's imagination. She heard the ghastly ripping of flesh; she saw the pieces of Steven go flying, wetting the museum walls with his fluids. Blood drenched the art itself, defiling the holy relics, the sculptures and pottery, the sarcophagus which already contained more than enough death. Even the obelisk fragments were slickened with gore; it dripped from the grinning jaws of the painted Ammit.

Steven ran.

"He threw his bag," Arthur said. "A red herring, no doubt. The scarab must be somewhere on his person."

"Or he just doesn't have it," said the Thorn.

"He has it," Arthur insisted. "He must."

Steven flew down the darkened hallway in a perfect storm of panic. His screams echoed through the maze of marble walls, making their way into the booth.

"Make it stop," the Thorn heard herself saying. "Arthur, make it stop."

"You know I will not."

"You summoned it! You can kill it just as easily! I've seen you do it!"

"Lamb," he growled, turning to look her in the eye, "you do not want to be the person who gets in my way." Half his face was shrouded in darkness; the other half was stark white with light from the cameras. The eyes of his cane lit up with quiet malice.

The Thorn shrunk into herself. "...I'm sorry."

The purple light of the cane dimmed away. Arthur turned back to the cameras, and the Thorn followed his gaze. There was no sign of either Steven or his assailant. The Thorn held her breath.

She wondered if Arthur would make her go with him to search Steven's body for the scarab. Would there even be anything left to search? Would the body be identified, or would he simply be declared missing, to be halfheartedly searched for until the outside world forgot him entirely?

And Marc—he had a wife. Someone would need to tell her. Would she want the truth, or prefer ignorance? Then there was Elias, poor Elias, who had already lost one son as well as his wife. He would want to have a shiva. The Thorn would be invited. It would be horrible.

Someone was emerging into the light of the camera, someone with the clothes of Steven and the face of someone else entirely. Marc looked at the camera, looked Arthur straight in the eye, an expression of pure menace bringing life to his haunted dark eyes. Nice try, motherfucker.

They had lost.

They were driven back to the community in silence, and climbed the steps to the study side by side. On the final flight of stairs, Harrow let out a sudden shout of pain and doubled over. With an excruciating scrape, his cane failed him. His free hand found the Thorn's shoulder and clutched it, claw-like, in desperation. She lunged at him as he stumbled, clasped her arms around him and steeled herself for the inevitable fall.

It didn't come. They stood, absurdly, holding each other, the last few steps before them seeming higher than the Great Pyramid.

It was the Thorn who finally broke the interminable silence, her hands slick with bloody water as she bathed Arthur's feet. "Did you mean for it to chase him into the bathroom?"

"No," he replied calmly, gripping his cane over the side of his chair. "That was a fortunate accident. The treasures of the museum remain unharmed, and according the surveillance footage, poor Steven is a very disturbed man who sees things that are not really there."

"Will he get in trouble?"

"That is not our concern."

"It should be."

"Why?"

"Because we're the whole cause of this, damn it!" She yanked a sizable shard of glass from his skin, almost reveling in the perverse satisfaction it gave her. Satisfaction gave way to guilt as a waterfall of blood poured from Arthur's foot into the bowl, staining the Thorn's fingers on its way. Arthur let out a yell, his cane falling to the ground with a metallic clamor. His chest heaved with ragged breaths.

Without a word, the Thorn took the cane and placed it back in his grasp, gently curling his fingers around the head of the tiny Ammit. Watery chunks of blood ran down her skin to touch his.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Go and wash your hands," he told her flatly. "I'll finish up here."

She did as she was told.

"You're angry," Arthur said after a long silence.

Her eyes filled with tears.

"You should be," he added. "I was hard on you."

The tears escaped, ran down her cheeks, and she found herself grabbing the soap and lathering it on her hands. A flame of stinging pain erupted on the inside of her thumb, and only then did she notice the fresh crimson stripe decorating her skin. How fragile the human body is, reader. How pathetic.

Some number of minutes later—it could have been five or thirty—she heard the low clanking of porcelain on porcelain, and the bowl was placed in the sink in front of her. She felt Arthur's chest against her back, his arms encircling her, his hands joining hers in the soapy, bloody mess.

"Let me," he rumbled into her ear, his hair brushing her cheek. He settled his cane against the side of the sink, pumped a small pool of soap into his palm, and spread it carefully over the Thorn's hands.

"There is so much I hope to share with you," he said, "and there are so many things I wish to give you. This," he ran his thumb over the Thorn's cut, "is not one of those things. My penance is mine and mine alone."

He spoke so sweetly, every cadence of his voice laced with love and care—so why did she feel as though she were being chastised? Once a bad child, always a bad child, she thought. Next, he would probably send her to her room without dinner.

"Why do you do it?" she asked. "You know it won't undo anything. It won't bring them back."

His hands froze, still gripping hers. She felt his breath catch, his body tensing. He snatched a towel and rubbed it hastily, almost roughly, over both their hands. "Come," he said, taking his cane. "Sit with me."

They returned to the worn leather chair. The Thorn perched on Arthur's knee.

"My scales are unbalanced," he said.

"I could have told you that the day I met you." She regretted her words immediately. Bad girl, always talking back. Devil child. She imagined herself snatching at the words in the air, cramming them back into her mouth and swallowing them whole. If only.

Arthur gave a dry laugh. "So honest," he said. "I've always admired that about you."

If I were honest, I would tell you how much I hate you sometimes. How I hated watching you release that monster and terrorize Steven. How I wish you would forget that stupid scarab and just let us have a normal, comfortable, blissfully boring life together.

"You know what I've always admired about you?" she said. "How much you care. About Ammit, about your communities, about..." She swallowed, trailing off.

"About you," he finished. "I care about you."

"Yeah," she said with a glance down at her tired legs, draped over his. "You have the most caring heart of anyone I've ever known."

"And yet, you're not surprised to learn that my scales lack balance."

She watched her fingers tumble together in her lap. "According to my research," she said carefully, "a person's scales balance when their heart contains more good than evil."

"That's correct."

"I know you did horrible things for Khonshu. He forced you, it wasn't your choice, but the blood was still on your hands."

"Yes."

"But that was in the past, and since then you've had the chance to change. You can make your scales balance by doing enough good things to outnumber those crimes. That's how it's supposed to work, right?"

"In theory, yes."

"But in practice—for you, at least..."

He had a hand on her back, lightly traveling up and down her spine in a tingling caress. "I can't judge myself the way I judge others," he said softly. "I put the staff between my wrists, but nothing happens. Still, I know I am unbalanced. I've always known. I can feel it. So I throw myself into my—Ammit's work, recruiting more and more followers to her cause, judging and punishing those who would otherwise bring harm to the world. And still, I remain unbalanced.

"And that's why you put glass in your shoes? How is that supposed to help? I mean, sorry to be blunt, but like..." Bad girl. Evil girl. "...how is that an act of goodwill? It just seems like another act of violence—against yourself, but still. You're one of Ammit's people, too."

He began to press harder against her back. "The tradition of mortifying one's own flesh is as old as religion itself. You know this."

"You're talking about a primarily Christian tradition, though—the original purpose of self-flagellation was to emulate the passion of Christ, and as far as I know, Ammit was never nailed to a cross."

"Correct on both points, but different religious groups have often borrowed ideas from one another. I may have been inspired by Christian saints as well as holy people of other faiths, but my penance has nothing to do with Jesus Christ. It is an act of repentance, of purification. My present agony allows me to exorcise past sins and make room for—"

"Future sins?"

There was a dangerous silence.

"—For atonement," he continued, ignoring the Thorn's reckless interjection, "and the beginning of a new, purer life."

"Pure in what way?"

"Well, for instance, when I spend time with you, I experience something close to happiness."

"Thanks?"

He laughed softly, squeezing her shoulder. "It is a compliment, though it may not seem like one. You bring me comfort—my little guardian angel. But with that comfort comes the danger of slipping into a sinful life, too focused on my own bliss, with less of my heart to give to my goddess, and to the world that needs her.

"But if you're in constant pain, you can never experience complete happiness."

"Exactly. Precisely." He patted her leg approvingly. "Do you understand now?"

"I guess I understand better. I still don't understand why it has to be so painful, though. Can't you do something less, you know, gruesome? Maybe a hair shirt or something?"

"If you knew the depth of my sins, you would not ask that question."

"Then tell me the depth of your sins! I can handle it!"

"Would you still love me? Can you look me in the eye and tell me that, no matter what came to light about my past, present or future, regardless of how abhorrent my actions may be to you, that you would still love me? You would still take me as your husband?"

"I could ask you the same thing. If I did something terrible one day, and my scales stopped balancing, would you...you know..."

"The scales do not change. Your scales were balanced when I met you, therefore they will remain balanced. The scales do not lie. They are forever."

"Just answer the question. Hypothetically, if that happened, would you accept my scales regardless of the outcome?"

"I would have no choice. You know that."

"And would you still love me, even then?"

"Yes."

"You would kill me, still loving me?"

"Why do you ask questions that you already know the answer to?" he demanded furiously, the echo of his voice bounding across the walls.

"I just want to hear you admit it."

In a single movement he had thrown her from his lap to the floor and stood, cane glowing in his hand, towering over her prostrate body.

"Yes, I would kill you for Ammit," he hissed, "and yes, I would love you as I did it. And afterwards, with the permission of my goddess, I would kill myself. Now, I've admitted it. Is your curiosity sated?"

I'll never look at the color purple the same way again, was all she could thing as he stared her down, his face lit up by the fluorescent eyes of the cane.

Reader, I confess that I was surprised by the Thorn in that moment. If she had been my avatar, I would have commanded her to stand up, snatch that foul stick from Harrow's hands, and splash his brains across the cement floor of his own study. What she did instead was, in my opinion, even more reckless. She stayed where she was, sprawled on the frigid, dust-caked floor, and stared up at his violet-tinged face. All of him was stone cold except for his eyes, which were wild with passion.

They stared at each other until the heaving up-and-down rhythm of Harrow's chest slowed to a tired normalcy. The purple light dissipated, taking with it the passion that had glittered in his eyes. Suddenly, he looked exhausted. Even the lines around his eyes drooped with fatigue. Wordlessly, as if shocked into silence by his own outburst, he reached down and pulled the Thorn to her feet. He tentatively reached out to her, pulling her into him. She kept her arms limp at her side.

"Sometimes," he said carefully, "I feel that violence is the only form of touch I really know. I perform benevolence because I must, and people believe that performance is the truth. Perhaps they're gullible and superficial...or maybe I should have been an actor," he said with a mirthless chuckle. "But this, right now—holding you, having you close to me—I understand this. I understand what I feel for you. I understand that I need you. Don't leave me, lamb. Don't make me have to separate us. Promise me," he pleaded, "promise me that won't happen."

She put her arms around him.

"I won't make you do anything," she said, and hoped that would be enough of a promise for him—for now, at least.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Here's some of the art that was referenced...

(I actually do want this desk lol)

I was lucky the orchid comb was in the museum's magazine, because I couldn't take a picture of it irl thanks to it literally being too sparkly. The magazine photo doesn't do it justice though, it was seriously one of the most sparkly things I've ever seen.

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 10: Am I cruel in my love?

"He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol." -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

AO3

Once again, reader, you already know much of what happened that day. You know that the scarab was publicly contested between Arthur Harrow and Steven Grant, the latter emerging tentatively victorious (thanks to the timely intervention of Marc Spector and I) and escaping the village in a "borrowed" cupcake van. Harrow's followers were unceremoniously dismissed, and Harrow himself returned to the temporary lodgings he shared with his fiancée.

"I expected to find you in tears," he said by way of greeting. "You never fail to surprise me." He joined her on the bed, where she half-sat, half-lay against the clean white wall. She resembled a rag doll in the way her arms fell limp at her sides, her legs stretched straight in front of her, and her gaze fixed before her on nothing at all.

Harrow slid a pillow under her back. "Better?" He grabbed her by the hips and lifted slightly, guiding her body so it sat upright. "There we go. I'm no chiropractor, but I'm sure it can't be good for your back when you crumple it up that way." He settled himself at her side, wrapped an arm tightly around her shoulders, squeezed her hard. "You left too early," he said. "You missed all the excitement."

A glistening drop of blood escaped through the slats of one of his sandals and settled neatly on the soft cotton bedspread, where it bloomed scarlet.

"Your old friend made an appearance," Harrow continued. "Marc. How's that for a coincidence, huh? Just last night you were telling me you saw him in Chicago, and now here he is—halfway across the world, in such a remote village...it's almost as if he's following us." He let out a bemused laugh, an uncharacteristically boyish falsetto, almost a quack.

The Thorn had heard this particular laugh before. They'd just been engaged, and the sheer impossibility of this, him loving her, the absolute perfection of it, enveloped her in a sudden rush of mindless giddiness. The door had barely shut behind them—complete privacy at last—before she was covering his face in kisses, her arms around his neck, awash with the relief of no longer needing to hide her passion from him.

He stumbled backward, steadied himself, and they both heard the cane clatter lightly to the floor. Thrilled at having shocked him, even for the briefest of moments, the Thorn let out a giggle—yes, reader, that kind of giggle—and buried her burning face in Arthur's shoulder. That was when he laughed, an oddly high-pitched noise that was so different from his usual soft, rumbling speech.

It must be his real laugh, she'd decided then. The one he used with his community was fake, but this was a real, personal part of himself he was sharing with her. The first of many small intimacies they would share, learning each other like textbooks.

It was the same laugh that she heard from him now, but this time it was sardonic, cutting, an accusation. She hated it. She never wanted to hear it again.

"Do you agree?" Arthur asked innocently. "Marc Spector, here, today. What are the odds?"

She wanted to cover her ears and scream. She wanted him to stop—to stop doing what exactly, she didn't know.

Not for the first time, a sudden confession slipped out of her. "I saw Marc and followed him to the ceremony. That's why I was there." She blinked, and the room blurred. A tear fell down her cheek, then her neck, then finally nestled in the collar of her shirt. "I'm sorry." For what? she wondered.

For disobeying him. Obviously.

"Oh, darling," he said sweetly, "I'm not angry with you. How could I be? You only wanted to witness the power of Ammit. I understand the craving for her justice, you know I do." His fingers slithered across her cheek and cupped it, turning her to face him. "The first time is hard. It was hard for me, the first time I had to...when the scales turned red."

There were tears in his eyes. The Thorn turned and curled herself into him, surrounding herself with his body. He'd been right about her back hurting—how long had she been sitting like that while her mind, in its relentless cruelty, tortured her with flashing memories of that poor woman's face as it was carried past her in the alley? Pale gray, bloodless. At least someone had the decency to close her eyes, she remembered thinking. Arthur, probably. It was the kind of thing he would do.

"My poor lamb," he said, hugging her. He held her so gently. "I had hoped to protect you, to shield you from this darkness. But now I see how foolish I was to think I could keep you from it forever." He buried his face in her hair. "Forgive me," he choked. "Forgive me." He said her name, whispered it like a prayer. "Please."

There were so many words in her. So many questions, scrambling among each other in a snarl of whys. Why did that woman have to die? Why did her death have to be so horrible? Why do it in front of so many other Followers, as if to make an example of her? Why was Marc there? Why did Arthur bring up the Thorn's story of seeing Marc in Chicago? Because of Khonshu? Why was Khonshu in her dream last night, and why was the dream so real? And why...well, why Steven?!

So? came the nagging voice within her, rising once more to the surface. Are you going to forgive him? He seems like he's really sorry.

Marc, Arthur, Khonshu. She pictured their names scribbled in a row. She thought of putting each name on an index card, sliding them around, hoping some connection would materialize with a fresh combination of letters.

How many times has he been there for you when you're upset? How many nights of sleep has he sacrificed to comfort you after your stupid nightmares? Have you ever thought of how exhausting it must be to listen to you going on and on and on about your petty insecurities, when he clearly has much more important work to be doing instead? And even now, when he's the one who needs comfort, you're still trying to find some way to make everything about you.

She imagined a cork board in a dusty office with three faces tacked onto it. Marc—Arthur—Khonshu. Two men and a god. She put Steven slightly to the side of Marc, unsure what to make of him. A web of strings began to weave itself across the collage in brightly saturated primary colors. More images appeared: The stolen artifacts in Arthur's study. The blood-soaked body of Grace the Breakfast Lady. A news report, years ago, of an ancient tomb robbed of priceless artifacts.

Do you know how many people would give anything to have your life right now? To have someone who loves them as much as Arthur loves you? He would do anything for you, you know that. So you can do this one, tiny little thing for him, right?

A small, golden crescent moon, glistening with fresh blood, Arthur turning pale as death at the very sight of it. And of course, the memory the Thorn had tried to suppress more than anything, but which never failed to make an appearance in each of her nightmares: The man in white standing over Arthur as he slept, wielding that moon-shaped menace aimed right at his heart...

Well? It's just three little words. "I forgive you." Just say it. Don't you love him?

She thought back to her time in college, to Dr. El-Faouly speculating on the personalities of his favorite Egyptian gods. "Khonshu fancies himself judge, jury and executioner." (Guilty as charged, reader.) "I expect he would look for an avatar who could be easily manipulated, molded into a human weapon to commit unspeakable acts of so-called 'vengeance.' He might be drawn to those with traumatic pasts, maybe veterans, certainly the mentally ill...people at their lowest points. Rock bottom."

The truth overwhelmed her with its obviousness. She spoke at last: "Marc is Khonshu's avatar."

It wasn't a question. She knew.

A knock at the door. Arthur gathered himself, took his cane and went to answer the summons. The Thorn laid down among the rumpled sheets and blankets, and feigned sleep.

She heard the door open. Arthur's voice: "Yes?"

"Three confirmed casualties so far. Steven Grant has the scarab." It was one of the henchmen. The Thorn could never tell them apart, certainly not just by a voice.

"Thank you, Lloyd." The door shut.

"What are we going to do?" the Thorn asked, sitting up.

"I'm thinking," Arthur replied carefully. He stared before him at the slightly open window and its postcard-worthy view.

"I could talk to Marc," she offered. "He remembers me—at least, I'm pretty sure he does. I could make him listen."

Arthur's immediate "NO." made its thunderous way around the circumference of the room and lodged itself like a brick in the Thorn's stomach. Her eyes puddled with tears of shock. He had never raised his voice to her before.

"I'm sorry, darling," he said, coming over to sit beside her. "I shouldn't have spoken to you that way."

"It's okay."

"It's not. It was unforgivable." He took her hand, brushed his thumb over the soft skin. "But you must understand, the Marc you knew in childhood is not the same man who serves Khonshu today. You see your friendship with him through the sweetening haze of nostalgia. It's been many years, my love. That friendship is gone. It's time you let go of relationships that have died," he leaned toward her, gazing at her lips, "and embrace the ones that live." He closed the distance between them with a deep, hungry kiss.

"How naïve do you think I am?" she shot back the moment his lips left hers. "Do you really think I don't understand that people change in sixteen years?"

"Of course you understand," Arthur murmured, "but nevertheless, it can be difficult to let go. To you, Marc embodied your lost childhood. Seeing him again now that you're both grown, you may have found yourself believing that childhood can be regained somehow. Am I wrong?"

Irritation seared through her. Of course he wasn't wrong, and he knew it.

"But sweetheart," he continued in a voice syrupy with condescension, "Marc has been responsible for the deaths of many of our own. Those three who died today—our brothers in Ammit—would still be with us if not for Marc.

"And have you forgotten," he added, hugging her closer, "he nearly killed me, as well?"

"But was he really responsible for all that?" she asked. "Khonshu forced him, didn't he? Just like he forced you to do horrible things. It's all Khonshu."

"Gods are powerless without their avatars. Khonshu needs Marc to commit atrocities, just as he once relied on me." He tangled his fingers into her hair, guiding her head onto his shoulder as if claiming her. Silence took the room in an embrace.

"Arthur."

"Hmm?"

"How long have you known about Marc and Khonshu?"

Her heart was a still, cold rock as she awaited the answer.

"I first suspected it at the Library of London," he replied. "That man who called himself Steven, who you mistook for Marc, resembled a vicious mercenary who had been targeting our brothers and sisters. I pieced the rest of the puzzle together over time. But one element continued to elude me until today."

"Steven."

"Yes. However," he went on with assured confidence, "if today's events have brought us one good thing, it's that this last little piece of the mystery has now been resolved. 'Steven Grant' is clearly a simple alias."

The Thorn tried to reconcile the disjointed images in her mind: Her ten-year-old friend and his "Marc smile," teasingly stealing her hat. The man in the silvery suit of death, moments away from puncturing Arthur's heart. The sweet, nervous man who called himself Steven and addressed her as "love" less than a minute after meeting her. These three people couldn't possibly be connected; the very idea that they were all, in fact, the same person was beyond illogical.

"Are you sure?" she asked. "One hundred percent?"

"One hundred percent? Well," he said slowly, "as close to it as I can be while still acknowledging the general unpredictability of life." He rubbed her chin with his thumb and gazed adoringly into her eyes. "This face of yours," he said softly, "I love it. An hour ago, I thought the sweetest sight in the world was that scarab...but I'm lucky I have my good little lamb to keep me grounded." He smiled soupily and leaned in for a kiss, but at the very moment their lips touched—

"Wait," the Thorn exploded, "Steven Grant?!"

Memories overtook her all at once, overlapping: Marc and Ro-Ro chattering in awkward British accents. The Thorn, her beloved Bessie hat drooping over her eyes, announcing haughtily, "I am an anthropologist!" Ro-Ro adding, "And I'm just a lad trying to do his best." Then Marc, puffing out his chest: "And I'm..."

"Dr. Steven Grant?" the Thorn asked again.

Arthur looked at her strangely. "Doctor?" He laughed. "I highly doubt that, love. He claims to work in a gift shop—we'll just have to find out which one, won't we?"

"We're going to stalk him?"

His mouth tightened. "Such an ugly word...but sometimes ugliness is necessary. Darling, he has the scarab. Our path to Ammit is in his hands."

"Yeah..." She cast her eyes downward.

His fingers found her chin, tilted it up to look at him.

"I love you, my angel."

"I love you too."

Their lips met; he kissed her like he wanted to devour her alive, and she clung to his neck like she feared he would cease to exist at any moment.

Approximately five hundred and thirty miles away, Marc Spector and I touched ground in London. The sun was just beginning to sink over the skyline, and its golden light glinted off the tip of the key Marc pulled from his pocket. The scarab would be safe, reader—but, as you know, only temporarily.

"Steven Grant," the Thorn proudly announced, looking up from her phone, "works in the gift shop at the National Art Gallery of London. His interests include history, mythology, and cricket. He's a vegan, his favorite artist is Bob Dylan, and he has a pet goldfish named Gus."

"Why, you clever little thing," Arthur purred, sliding sleekly onto the bed next to her. "How did you learn all that so quickly?"

She failed to suppress a giggle. "Facebook."

"Fascinating," he replied, without a shadow of a hint of irony. "What else can Facebook tell us?"

"Um..." She did some scrolling and tapping. "He went to a school called 'Morton.' Not sure if that's a high school or a college—I mean, a university." A notification jumped lazily over the edge of her screen, something from the American Anthropologists' Association. Your membership has expired... Swipe. Ignore.

Arthur's arm was around her shoulders. She wondered when it had gotten there.

"Any family?" he asked. "Girlfriend? Boyfriend? Friends?"

She shook her head. "I don't see anything like that. No family, no relationships to show...of course, that could just mean those people aren't on Facebook. It doesn't necessarily mean they don't exist."

"How sad." His fingers curled around her shoulder and squeezed. "All alone in the world...poor man."

"What do we do now?"

His lips twisted into a smile. "We infiltrate the National Art Gallery."

There had been a time in the Thorn's life when the National Art Gallery of London had held a place of honor at the top of her bucket list. How had she spent so long in London without visiting the famous museum? How many months had she been in London? Had it been a year yet? How long had she been engaged to Arthur? Why had she come here in the first place?

She checked her phone. 7:54 a.m. No messages. Things must be going according to plan. "Steven" was due at the museum at eight, but according to Ronnie, he typically arrived between 8:15 and 8:30. Still, Arthur had decided, it was best to plan for any unusual turn of events, even for something as unusual as Steven Grant coming to work on time. So, the Thorn had been chauffeured to the museum at ten-till-eight, with instructions not to speak to Steven under any circumstances, but to inform Arthur if he were to arrive early.

7:56 now, and no sign of Steven. The Thorn stood awkwardly in the lobby, exchanging the occasional nod with Ronnie across the room and keeping a wary eye on the gift shop.

"...late again, the lazy imbecile, and making me pick up his slack," someone was muttering behind her. A female voice, sharp, abrasive. The Thorn turned around and instinctively stood up straighter.

She was forbidden to speak with Steven himself—Arthur hadn't said anything about Steven's boss.

"Excuse me, are you one of the curators?" the Thorn asked.

"Something like that," the woman replied. By this, reader, Donna meant to say that she was only the manager of the gift shop, but too proud to admit it. "What about it?"

"Well..." The Thorn faltered under Donna's gum-smacking stare. "I mean, it's just that I saw something in the Egyptian gallery that I thought you should know about. A little inaccuracy, just a minor one, but still..."

Donna sighed. "Is this about the Iliad or whatever it's called? Yeah, yeah, I know, there's nine gods, not seven. Who really cares, though?"

"I'm sure Nephthys and Set care," the Thorn retorted. "How would you feel if you got left out of your family portrait? Anyway, that wasn't what I was going to tell you about." By now, it was clear to her that Donna was not, in fact, a curator. Something about the fact that she had lied so casually about this made her less intimidating.

"Well?" Donna demanded.

"Well, I was looking at that sarcophagus over there—it's really beautiful, by the way, incredibly preserved—but the didactic says that in the ancient Egyptian religion, the hearts of dead people were judged by a 'tribunal' of gods. That's not true, though. Anubis was in charge of judging people until Ammit overthrew him and had him imprisoned, and then Ammit did the judging until she was overthrown and replaced by Taweret. There was never any kind of 'tribunal' involved."

Donna stared at her, looking ludicrous with her gum dancing in her open mouth and a tub of stuffed scarabs in her arms. Smack. Smack. Smack. "Okay," she said. "And you got all this from some movie, I presume?"

The Thorn stiffened with indignation. "Actually," she said, raising her voice, "I happen to have a Master's degree in anthropology from—" She stopped short. Where had she gone to college? How could that simple, important fact have slipped away from her so easily? And, come to think of it, had she learned all that stuff about judgment from a university, or was it something Arthur had told her?

Donna scoffed. "Whatever." She turned and walked away.

Now alone, the Thorn paced aimlessly along the gift shop counter, trying to think. She had two lives—before Arthur, and after—and there was no point in trying to link the two together. Still, how could she have forgotten, even for a second, that she'd gotten her Master's at Gateshead University? Without knowing what she was doing, she grasped her wallet and opened it to look at her Student ID. Lowood had kicked her out. Her last connection to the world outside the community was severed. But at least, with this photo ID, she wouldn't forget her name.

"...Obviously, I just mean like, anyone dodgy..." The voice hit her like an injection of pure adrenaline.

"Stevie, can you take these downstairs for me?" And there was Donna. Working for that woman must be a nightmare, the Thorn couldn't help thinking.

A flurry of overlapping, nervous chatter, and then Donna said again, "Can you take this downstairs, please?"

"Oh my god," Steven said, his voice hushed with pure terror, "that woman over there, she's with him. That one, right there!" He pointed at the Thorn, who stopped in her tracks and looked at him like a scared deer.

Luckily, Donna didn't follow his pointing finger. "I don't give a monkey's," she said.

The Thorn's brain suddenly caught up with her fear, and she fumbled recklessly in her bag, looking for her phone, finding it, opening a new message, have to text him, have to warn him, Arthur Arthur ArthurArthurArthur...

"You're still on inventory tonight," Donna called as Steven hurried past the Thorn. Can't let him get away, can't let him get away, ArthurArthurArthurArthur—

"Good work, my love." His hand brushed her shoulder, as if by thinking his name she'd inadvertently summoned him to her side. "Remember my instructions, and be vigilant."

"Can I stay with you?" she asked.

"Follow me, yes, but stay back."

"Okay," She did as he said, a dutiful lamb following her shepherd (though he stalked his prey more like a wolf). The plan had unfolded perfectly, it seemed: Just enough undercover Followers had been planted along Steven's route from his apartment to his workplace, and now, when—as expected—he appealed to Ronnie for help, he received only a "Praise Ammit" in reply.

"Mate, I don't have your bloody beetle, I swear—" Steven's words rang out more clearly than Arthur's, amplified by mounting panic.

Arthur reached out and touched a piece of an obelisk, actually touched a priceless work of ancient art. The last time the Thorn had seen someone do that, she'd threatened to cut their hand off—but that had been her old life.

She caught a few of Arthur's words. "Would you wait to weed a garden till after the roses were dead?"

She'd warned him not to say that. It was too easy to refute. Weeds and roses are fundamentally different species, after all, while humans are all born the same. Equal.

"...Books must've left that part out," Steven said, scrambling for an escape. Every direction was blocked by one of Arthur's followers, the Thorn being one of them. This, she reminded herself, was a good thing. Arthur needed him trapped. No matter how terrified he looked, how cornered and powerless he was, she must keep reminding herself that it was all for the greater good.

"By 'avatar,'" said Arthur, "what I mean—"

"You mean the anime?"

"Steven. Stop it."

"Are you going to kill me?" Steven squeaked. The lights flickered, and for a fraction of a moment the Thorn thought she saw the shadow of a skeletal beak.

Is he going to ask about the scarab? she wondered as Arthur leaned closer to Steven. She saw him roll up his sleeve, take Steven's wrists, balance his cane between them, no no no no no...

They stood, facing each other, for what seemed an interminably long time. The Thorn remembered the face of the dead woman in the Alps, thin and gray and barely human. She pictured a pile of dead faces, dead bodies, with Steven's—Marc's—on top. She saw them drenched in clear fluid and set ablaze, shriveling to black. Ash and bones.

She wondered what Arthur would do if she ran to him now, wrenched Steven away from him, or simply grabbed the cane—anything to stop the judgment in its tracks. Would he kill her on the spot?

"There's chaos in you."

No, her heart insisted. He wouldn't kill her. Not for anything in the world.

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 9: It will atone

"'I cannot see my prospects clearly tonight, sir; and I hardly know what thoughts I have in my head. Everything in life seems unreal.'

"'Except me: I am substantial enough—touch me.'

"'You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all: you are a mere dream.'"

-Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

WARNINGS: Rated H for Harrow (Emotional/Psychological Abuse), Implied/Referenced Self-Harm (they hear him crunchin', they hatin')

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

AO3

They would be married once Ammit was released. That's how Harrow worded it; he didn't provide any further details, and the Thorn didn't need him to. She highly doubted that Ammit herself would officiate the ceremony, though the mental image conjured by the thought was entertaining as hell. More likely, the "plan" was to simply consider themselves married at the moment of Ammit's resurrection. This suited the Thorn just fine, though she still found herself slipping back into old daydreams of flowers and gold rings and the perfect white dress.

These daydreams were easily squashed and buried. The wedding she had formerly dreamed of was now an impossibility. Marc would not be her best man, and Dr. El-Faouly would not walk her down the aisle in the role of honorary father figure. Marc's wife, who according to the Thorn's imagination looked a lot like Bessie from Tomb Buster, would not arrive at the crack of dawn to help her get ready. The Mother would not suddenly learn the meaning of tact just in time for the reception, where her inevitable impromptu toast would be awkward, but not humiliating. These notions were all ridiculous, and it was too easy to cage them away and let them rot to dust with the rest of the now-impossible wishes.

What she had now was better, far better and grander and, well, sexier than the deadest of the Thorn's dead dreams. Arthur—I suppose it's time for me to begin referring to him by his first name, as that was how the Thorn thought of him constantly, ArthurArthurArthurArthur on a never-ending loop in her head—played the part of the gallant lover to perfection. And for the most part, the Thorn was delighted to indulge in the role of the fragile damsel, to cling conspicuously to his arm in public so the community—no, the world—would know that it was she and she alone who had won the heart of their leader. He had chosen her.

The poison of love had crept its sinister way from her outer layers of skin, through to her bloodstream and finally her heart, where it festered and curdled like old milk. From there, it sprouted a noxious blanket of mold which blossomed and spread until no part of her body was free from the infestation that was her ridiculous, blasphemous, idolatrous love for Arthur Harrow.

Her university laptop collected dust, her partially outlined dissertation all but forgotten. A series of emails, each one colder and more impersonal than the last, warned her of her impending removal from Lowood's PhD program. Even if she cared to reply, what could she possibly say that would satisfy them? I'm in love. I'm getting married. I am ridiculously happy. Everything is perfect and nothing is wrong.

Her nightmares returned to her, stealthily at first, then gaining audacity as her guard fell further and further. Why, reader, would she allow her guard to fall? Why would she welcome the nightmares into her mind even as they tormented her? Well, for the simple reason that if she squirmed and writhed in her sleep, and cried out loudly enough, Arthur would wake next to her and tighten his embrace around her body. He would whisper golden sweetness into her ear until she stirred and melted into his shoulder, letting him hold her and caress her with his gentle, capable hands as he professed his love to her all over again.

Everything was perfect, reader. Nothing was wrong.

She never told him what she saw in her dreams, and he never asked. That changed one night in early spring, when she was compelled awake in an unfamiliar bed. She felt the presence of the moon first. She found its face through the shivering curtains, a weird half-pearl hovering over the silver summits of the Alps. Her eyes adjusted quickly, showing her the outlines of windowpanes, then furniture, and of course, Arthur's sleeping face. His back to the moonlit window, his hair a silvery shock framing a face blanketed in shadow, an arm draped in limp exhaustion over the Thorn's body. No nightmares for him—not tonight, at least. She should let him sleep. But he needed to know.

"Arthur." She touched his face.

He woke immediately and covered her hand with his. "Another one?"

She nodded.

"Oh, my love," he murmured, pulling her deep into his chest, stroking her hair—the usual routine. "It was only a dream," he said, kissing her softly on the forehead, I'm right here," smiling and brushing a single clinging tear from her lower eyelashes. "I'll chase all your nightmares away. Every single one."

She turned to rest her cheek on the intoxicating warmth of his chest, staring past his face to the moon that winked through the gauzy curtains. "I saw Khonshu," she said. "He was here."

Arthur's chest stiffened. His arms tightened around her, hands turning to claws against her shoulder and hip.

"Was he alone?" he asked after a weighted pause.

She thought for a moment. "Yes."

He closed his eyes and moved his lips in a silent prayer of thanks. "Sit up," he gently commanded.

She settled herself next to him on the edge of the bed. He laid a hand on her knee.

"Tell me exactly what you saw," he said. "Spare no detail."

"There aren't any details, really," she admitted, mourning the absense of his body against hers. "He was right in my face, staring at me. Then I woke up and he was gone."

"Did he say anything?"

"He sort of…chuckled. That's all."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah. I think he saw that I'd noticed him. I reached out to try and touch him, to make sure he was real, and that was when I woke up. But I know it was real. He was here, for sure."

"Is he still here?" There was a slight break in his voice, and only then did she notice how pale he was, ghostly white and petrified. She wondered if he was gripping her thigh that hard on purpose, and if he knew his hand was trembling.

"No," she said, taking the spectral hand on her leg and bringing it to her lips. She began to kiss his fingers, lingering on each one. "No. He's gone."

At this he let out a deep, shuddering sigh. His head fell into his hands, and there he sat like a dejected statue. His feet were bare on the floor, next to a faint red smudge.

"Your feet," said the Thorn. "Some of the cuts must have reopened."

She made a movement to stand, but Arthur grabbed her shoulder. "No," he said sharply. "Not tonight." He looked up at her, and in the angelic moonlight she saw his unshadowed face for the first time that night. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with pink. "Not tonight," he repeated, the ghost of a sob haunting his strangled voice.

"Okay," she said.

As if donning a mask, Arthur rallied. He straightened, transformed himself with a smile, and held out his arms to the Thorn. Gingerly, she climbed into his lap and let him trap her against him, her head tucked between his shoulder and neck.

"You must have been terrified," he cooed, his lips grazing her hair. "Poor little thing. I wish I could hold your mind and thoughts this way, the way I hold your body. I would sift through your dreams like this," he combed his fingers through her hair, "exterminate the unpleasant, then lock you back up in my arms where you belong."

"That would be a serious invasion of my privacy," she said absentmindedly, drunk from the feeling of him. She loved that everything about him was an exciting mess of contradictions and juxtapositions: Benevolence and ruthlessness, darkness and light, fragility and stoicism.

"What does privacy matter, compared to the safety of the one you love?" He cupped the back of her neck and held it. "Many a tragedy can be prevented by simple honesty, sweetheart. Keeping secrets from the person most capable of protecting you," he strengthened his grip on her neck, his hand warm and strong and unyielding, "that can be a dangerous thing indeed. But I know you would never keep any secrets from me, my sweet lamb…at least, not any secrets that could hurt you."

He kissed her.

"I also saw Khonshu in Chicago," she confessed. "He was on my street. My mom's street, I mean. I'm sorry I didn't tell you.

" He stopped kissing her, his lips frozen just a hair's breadth from hers. He opened his eyes to study her, his gaze so powerful it filled her with pain.

"You saw him…anything else?"

She hesitated. "I kind of had a…dream. Daydream. And he was in it. Then I opened my eyes and I saw him—well, I saw Marc first."

"Marc."

"Yeah, and Khonshu was behind him."

A cry escaped Arthur's lips, something between a gasp and a wail. He clutched her in desperation and rocked her feverishly.

"If you ever see him again, you will call for me immediately," he growled hotly into her ear. "You will. Do you understand me?"

What else could she say? "…Yes."

"To think what he could have done to you, and I wasn't there…" He squeezed his arms tighter around her, so tight it was almost uncomfortable. Almost.

"Do you mean Khonshu," she asked, "or Marc?"

"We cannot take any more chances with him," Arthur said, ignoring her question. "I can't have you leaving my side any more, not even for a minute."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes."

This was too much, even for the Thorn's love-addled brain. "That seems a little…" controlling? abusive? "…unrealistic."

"It's only until we release Ammit," he answered her. "After that…" He trailed off with a distant smile.

"What do you mean? After that…what?"

"Shh, I'll tell you when it's time. Here, I have a compromise." He took his cane from its leaning position next to the bed. No, no, not again, she thought, but he wasn't reading her scales. Instead, he simply whispered to one of the small black crocodile heads in Coptic. A glow of menacing violet. Arthur plucked a single shining crocodile eye from its socket, inspected it reverently, and replaced the cane. "Your ring." He nodded to her left hand. The Thorn held it out for him, and he carefully dropped the tiny jewel into the center of her engagement ring.

"I don't know why I didn't think of this a long time ago," he said with a smile. "As long as this jewel is on your finger, and I hold the artifact it's connected to," he indicated the cane, which had already regenerated a replacement eye, "it will alert me whenever you're in danger. In response, I will send a jackal to defend you—provided I'm not there to defend you myself." He kissed her hand.

Before we continue, reader, allow me to answer your question: Yes, I did enter the Thorn's dream that night. It's not something I make a habit of doing—humans' dreams are so dull, even their nightmares are predictable—but this was a special case. I was, as you may have guessed, looking for the scarab. I knew the Thorn was highly unlikely to be carrying it herself, given Harrow's protectiveness of her, however, she was bound to at least know which of his goons had it—right?

Wrong. I was shocked—yes, reader, I was actually shocked at how little of the situation she knew. Harrow had hardly told her anything, and since their discovery of the scarab's location in Bern, she had barely been involved in the search for it.

The irony of Harrow's pompous little speech to her about the importance of honesty should be apparent to you, even without considering the myriad of lies he was telling his own "sweet lamb" by omission. There were three of these lies, three big ones at least, and the first of them would be revealed to her the very next morning, in the town square of that obscure mountain village.

At roughly the same time Marc Spector and I touched ground in the hills surrounding that idyllic, cursed little town, the Thorn was finishing her breakfast al fresco and admiring the sickeningly elegant purple jewel on her finger.

"Isn't it stunning?" Arthur asked, shimmering with pride. "There isn't another engagement ring like it in the world."

"Will Ammit care that you gave it to me?"

"I think she would agree that if anyone were worthy to wear a piece of her holy relic, it would be you."

One of the hired goons approached the table. He was dressed, as were most of them, in what I suppose Harrow believed to be an intimidating uniform: Rust-red shirt and trousers with a mint-green vest and, of course, a bafflingly large gun. "Sir, the townspeople are ready for you. They're waiting in the square."

Harrow acknowledged him with a nod. "Thank you, Robert. And please, call me Arthur." He reached across the breakfast table to touch the Thorn's face. He ran his fingers down her cheek in a worshipful, lingering stroke, then took her hand and kissed her right above her ring. His eyes flickered up to hers, grave and fearful. "You know what to do if anything happens," he said.

"When will I get to come with you to one of these things?"

He simply smiled. "It's chilly, isn't it? You should have brought a warmer coat." He fastened the top button of her jacket. "When I've finished my work, I'll take you to buy something nice. There are some truly gifted local artisans here. I'll get you a pretty scarf and some mittens, and I'll bundle you up and take you on a walk up to the castle," he pinched her cheek playfully, "where you belong."

A flicker of hot irritation shot through her like a distress flare. "I don't want you to buy me something nice. I want to go with you to the town square and see what it is you do with the locals in all these places you take me to. I want to be involved with your work, not just waiting on the sidelines."

Harrow laughed, actually laughed at her, fanning her irritation into a decent-sized flame of real anger. "Oh, my lamb. Your time will come, don't you worry. And I expect it won't be long now." He stood, picked up his cane, bestowed a soft kiss on her lips and, with a series of crunching steps, disappeared into the maze of deserted streets.

Four continents. Dozens of communities across those four continents, and at least as many judging ceremonies—that's where Arthur had taken her in the two short months of their engagement, and still she had no answers from him. It wasn't just the ceremonies themselves that puzzled her, but the…well, complications that always seemed to follow them. Freak lightning in the Arizona desert. A glacier bursting in the Yukon. The collapse of a water tower in Greece. A couple of Harrow's men dead, then a few more, then entire platoons eviscerated. And each time, Arthur only pulled the Thorn closer to his side, or sent a jackal for her protection, answering her pointed questions with vague statements of comfort.

"Why do you insist on worrying so much, my little darling, when you know I will always be there to protect you?" Arthur had said to her just a few days earlier, after the devastating water tower collapse. "I'm not worried about myself, Arthur. I'm worried about you. And maybe if you'd open up to me sometimes and let me in on what you're doing—like you used to—I'd be able to protect you for a change."

He smiled sadly, caressing her under the chin as if she were a cat or a dog. "What did I ever do to deserve a sweet thing like you?" he said. Then he kissed her deeply, and she was under his spell once more. The subject was forgotten.

Ungrateful! The accusation resounded from somewhere in her brain and echoed in waves down to her heart, which shriveled and balked in shame.

Arthur had gifted her with everything she could ever need or want—shelter, food and financial security, companionship and love, acceptance. Even his exhausting protectiveness was only proof of the depth of his love for her, wasn't it? And he had every right to keep secrets that he thought could hurt her. He had every right to his privacy. Who did she think she was, demanding even more than what he had already given her? What right had she to expect more than she was due?

A chorus of church bells rippled across the roofs of the village. Little pockets of locals—latecomers—hurried past, all headed to the square to see Arthur, her Arthur, her fiancé and the man she adored. All these people, flocking to be in his presence and hear his words. They were going to him because he was special, because he was important, because he was doing work that would change the world. Compared to that, what did she have to offer? Her unfinished dissertation outline? Her middlingly successful Masters thesis?

Ungrateful bitch. The unrelenting chastisement of the bells. She felt her hands clamp down over her ears. A tingling unease tapped at her behind the eyes, igniting little fireworks along the edges of her vision. She wondered if the bells should have stopped ringing by now. Were they broken? Had time stopped? She wondered if Arthur had started the ceremony yet. She wondered what Marc was doing in the Alps.

Her thoughts had been moving so quickly that this last revelation actually surprised her. She'd glimpsed him and thought nothing of it, as if she should expect him to be there. But now the glimpse had registered as a thought, and been processed as a question, and she couldn't not ask…

"Marc? Is that you?"

"Shit," came the voice from under the gray hood. Not Marc.

"…Steven?"

A thousand decisions passed over his face before he apparently decided on one and started toward her.

"Mate," his voice was shot with panic, "please, you've got to help me, I don't know what you're doing here but you must be some kind of a guardian angel or something because oh my god, it's all going to shit…" He pawed aimlessly at his face, seemingly trying to hide.

The Thorn only half-heard him. He looked so much like Marc.

"Please," he whimpered, grabbing her hand. "They're coming. Please help me! Hide me or something, I don't know, just please—"

He stopped. As he had pulled on her hand with a frantic (and painful) grip, the sleeve of her jacket fell back ever so slightly. The sly head of a crocodile peeked over the fabric.

"You're one of them," Steven said. "Oh my god, everyone's one of them…"

"What?"

"Every time this happens," he blustered, "every time, you people with your creepy crocodile tattoos are always there, fucking shit up and trying to kill me. Every. Time."

There was a pure, unmistakable innocence to Steven that was gradually filling the Thorn's heart with dread the way a test tube fills with blood in a doctor's office. She thought back to the first time she donated blood (a service required of all able-bodied Followers). It was done in a back room of the commune. Arthur had knelt by her chair and held her hand with a warm, constant grip, and she recalled studying his forearm, its strength undiminished by advancing age, and the sacred tattoo which adorned it. To her, that symbol was one of hope, of security, of the inevitable triumph of the good over the not-quite-good-enough. But here was Steven—who, she couldn't possibly forget, looked so much like Marc—white-faced and swaying on the spot purely at the sight of it.

Steven's eyes rolled backward, and he seemed to quake from the spine before snapping forward to face her again.

"Oh my god," said Marc. "It really is you. Fuck."

A clamor of shouting voices echoed down the street. Marc craned his neck to peer in their direction, then ran a frustrated hand through his hair.

"Damn," he muttered. "I don't have time for this."

"Wait!" cried the Thorn, but Marc was already running.

Two paths (metaphorical ones, reader) stood before her: Safety, or truth. I think you can guess which one she chose.

She burst from the quaint security of the breakfast table, and ran after Marc.

Reader, you know this scene. You know how the village square looked when it spread before the Thorn like a stage. She'd been to the Globe once (Hamlet, which Harrow, like many humans, is inexplicably obsessed with), and the scene in front of her shared many of its qualities—notably, a vaguely circular shape filled with an expectant mass of humanity ready to stand as long as their legs would hold them. The things humans will put themselves through, just to see a show. It never ceases to amaze me.

When Arthur took her to the Globe, the sky covered itself in gray and poured a deluge of its notorious London gloom on the theater. "I am not a god, and I can't command the rain to stop for you," Arthur told her as if imparting news of a tragic accident, "but I can convince one of those excellent families to give up their seats under the roof." The Thorn shook her head, horribly embarrassed by his suggestion. What would people think of her, standing awkwardly behind Arthur while he gallantly robbed strangers of their comfort just for her sake?

His smile told her he had known she would dislike the idea, and something about this was mildly repulsive to her. There was a sliminess to his smile that she hadn't noticed before—no, that she'd refused to notice—and that she never wanted to notice again. "Are you sure?" he asked pointlessly. "This storm may worsen, and it's a long play."

"Nah," she said, looking past him at the forest of dripping, miserable strangers sharing the audience with them. "It's a beautiful day. By London standards, it's like we're in Heaven."

He laughed, a full smile bathing his face in a sudden light. "You have a generous heart," he said, crushing her warmly against his body. He kissed the top of her head, and she felt his smile against her hair. "My sweet little lamb. My angel."

The sky in the village square was a pure, aggressive blue. The mountains were white, the hills green. A perfectly organized box of unused crayons, with a dense little human clump at its center (I mean "dense" both ways, reader). The Thorn hung back against the painted wall of an alley, tucked safely in the corner of a shadow. She had lost sight of Marc—Steven—whoever he was. It was her ears that guided her now, catching the once repulsive rhythm that now heralded everything good and safe and comfortable in her life: The repeated shredding of flesh piously tortured against broken glass. Crunch.

She saw him in pieces, passing between the throng of disciples that reverently pawed at his tunic and met his warm smile with eyes glassy with blind adoration. His dry, colorless hair. The rusty red of his clothes. Strong, lightly calloused fingers wrapped elegantly around the head of his cane.

Forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum. Her memory handed her the line from Hamlet as if passing a note between desks in school.

"What a beautiful day." His soft voice rang out against the rapt silence. "It's like we're in Heaven."

The Thorn felt something twist in her gut. It wasn't just his repetition of the words she'd said to him at the Globe, but something far less definable in the way he said it. He knew she was there. There was no way he could see her from so far away. How…?

The fucking ring, she realized with a sinking embarrassment. Of course.

"Only it's not Heaven, is it?" Now he emerged before the crowd, perfectly bizarre and eerily perfect, a master wordsmith in his element. "It's a darkness. Sometimes it hides in our very hearts. We are here to make the Earth as much like Heaven as possible."

He could just as well have been reciting the dictionary, reader. His voice carried the calm surety of a well-understood, common-sense truth…but you, of course, know this already.

"Who'd like to go first?"

Reader, I don't have to recount to you Harrow's judgment of those two villagers that day, nor the facial expressions of Steven Grant. This is the Thorn's story, so it is on her heart, pounding with utter rapture, that we must place our focus. Her love for Arthur swelled so greatly that she found herself clutching at her chest. Infatuation pulsed faintly but steadily against her clammy palms, as the power of life and death rocked back and forth between Arthur and a stranger.

"This is the face of a good man," Harrow announced with a crackle of exaltation in his voice. That was me, the Thorn thought. I had just met him, and he took my hands like that and judged me with his cane. She looked at him, and loved him, and she loved his followers for loving him with her.

"Who would like to go next?"

"Please, Harrow, I must know."

"Call me Arthur."

He said that to me, too, when we first met. She loved his name, the subtle ancient majesty of it.

"Will you accept your scales regardless of the outcome?"

"Yes."

The power of Ammit swayed placidly between Harrow and the woman. The silence was so pure, the Thorn heard the click of the verdict resound across the square and into her alley.

"I'm sorry."

Her heart leapt with a sharp, sudden BOOM. She wondered why her hands clutched the front of her jacket so tightly.

"I've been good," the woman pleaded, "my entire life." Why did she plead like that? Why such desperation in her voice?

The memory of the Thorn's own judgment, the efficient perusal of all her life's moments by Arthur or Ammit or some hybrid of the two of them, seized and held her like a vice.

"I understand," Arthur said, visibly weighed down by emotion. "But the scales see everything."

No, not all her moments. That's not how Arthur described it. It wasn't the perusal of a scrapbook, but the sifting of a vast, sandy beach. Infinite pocket universes of tiny, pearly, delicate grains of sand, discarded for the purpose of examining a handful of craggy rocks and dead crustaceans, slimy kelp and putrid plastic litter. The "bad stuff:" Moments of sin and pain. Ammit's mana.

"The scales see everything," Arthur had lied to that doomed old woman. Liar—the word blossomed like a thick, black ink blot in the corner of the Thorn's vision.

"I wish you could live to see the world we make," Arthur said with mournful finality, then he and the woman both disappeared under the heads of their audience.

As I'm sure you, reader, want to pity the Thorn as she silently floundered in the wake of this horrible revelation, I'm afraid my slightly more detached view of her situation may come across to you as rather harsh. But alas, I have vowed to tell the Thorn's story in a way that is accurate as well as entertaining, and in the pursuit of accuracy it is often necessary to impart unpleasant and unflattering truths. So, here are some of those truths:

It is true that Arthur never directly told his beloved lamb that these judgment ceremonies frequently involved murder. It is also true that the Thorn had never, until this moment, seen her exalted shepherd kill another human. But it is also true that she never asked him to explain the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of the occasional community member. She never let herself wonder why he was so much quieter, more subdued and almost robotic in the wake of his returns from the ceremonies, and why the world of nightmares seized upon him even tighter than usual in the following nights. She never questioned him, so she could never be sure.

But reader, she knew. The truth was always clear to her, even as she kept it imprisoned in the darkest and most secret part of her soul, mummified in a cocoon of duct tape and emblazoned with a blood-red, spraypainted KEEP OUT.

The darkest and most secret part of her soul was now open, and its captive was free. The Thorn's worst fear had stepped into the light before her eyes.

A small jumble of human limbs was passing her in the alley: Two of Harrow's ludicrously dressed henchmen balancing a withered bundle of skin and bones with an elderly woman's face.

"'Scuse us," rumbled one of the men as his shoulder knocked lightly against the Thorn's. "First one down," he said gruffly to his colleague. "You think we'll end up with as many as we did in Greece?"

"We'd better not," the other man replied, shifting the weight of the lifeless torso in his arms. "I've still got blisters from digging that giant-ass pit."

"I'll do the digging this time, if you do the burning," said the first man.

They were almost out of earshot, rounding the corner. "Harrow makes us wait 'till they're ash and bones, and that batch in Greece took ages. I thought I would never get the smell out of my clothes."

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 8: Your station is in my heart

"'I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal—as we are!" -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

AO3

As you may be aware, reader, in the tradition of human storytelling, warnings often come in threes. And too often, these warnings fall on deaf ears until it is too late. Consider, for example, the tragic case of one of my own former avatars. He was one of my best avatars—I daresay my favorite avatar of them all—until the fateful day of his defeat. The warnings he received could not have been clearer, in my opinion: First, an uncharacteristically spooked horse weeping tears of blood, then a cup of wine similarly turned to blood, and finally, the sight of a woman washing his own armor of its blood and saying to herself "I am washing the armor of Cúchulainn, who is to die today." Cúchulainn ignored all three warnings, and went on to meet death later that day. I grieve for him still, reader.

The Thorn, as you know, had so far received two warnings against involving herself emotionally with Arthur Harrow: One from Bobbi Kennedy, and the other from Steven Grant. The third was given to her on the morning after Wendy Spector's shiva. The Thorn woke up in her childhood bedroom to the sight of her mother sitting on the carpeted floor, surrounded by the scattered entrails of the Thorn's suitcase.

"I know you only came homoe to try and see Marc," the Mother said by way of explanation, "so I figured after the shiva you'd want to fly back to London as soon as possible. I went ahead and packed for you. You're welcome."

This, reader, was a lie. The Mother had been going through the Thorn's suitcase out of pure nosiness.

The Thorn knew this. "Thanks." However, she was a strong believer in Picking Her Battles.

"I don't recognize this." The Mother held up Harrow's shirt. "It's not exactly your size. Not really your style, either. I would have guessed it was a nightshirt, but you're in your pajamas right now, so that can't be it.

Horror seized the Thorn. It was wrong, seeing the Mother hold that shirt. Unnatural. A sacrilege.

"Do girls in London usually carry men's ratty old shirts around with them? Is that one of those weird British trends I wouldn't understand?"

The threat of bile stung at the bottom of the Thorn's throat.

"You know, come to think of it, here's something interesting: After we got home yesterday and you were acting all loopy and ignoring me, I googled your tattoo. 'Symbol of scales with crocodile heads,' something like that. It took a while to find anything helpful about it; I ended up in some pretty dark alleyways of the internet, but eventually I found a well-hidden website about a group of people who worship some Egyptian crocodile demon. I remembered you saying you were studying modern-day worshippers of the Egyptian gods, and that you were going to London to do some on-site research, so I kept reading. And you know what? There was a picture on the front page of that website, of a man with a tattoo just like yours, wearing a shirt just like this one."

The Thorn considered plucking her eyes from her head and hiding them in her closed fists, so that she wouldn't have to look at the Mother.

"Just tell it to me straight," said the Mother. "Are you fucking this cult leader?"

"No!"

"But you want to."

"No."

"Why else would you sleep with his shirt?"

"It's none of your business."

"How old is this guy anyway? He looks at least fifty."

"Mom, I'm not going to talk with you about this."

"This is a new low for you, you know that? Pining after a man old enough to be your father, that's such a cliché, honey. I'd like to say I'm disappointed in you, but that would imply I had expected better."

The Thorn imagined holding her eyeballs, one in each hand, slick and slimy and delicate.

"When you told me you were going to grad school, I thought you were finally getting your shit together. I was actually proud of you for once. But it seems you've taken this great opportunity for real success, and turned it into just another embarrassing failure."

The eyeballs would roll back and forth of their own volition, and the motion would create a slight buzzing sensation on her hands.

The Mother sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly confidential. "Is this about your father? Some Freudian thing, you know? Trying to 'replace' him with this cult guy so you can feel loved?"

"What?"

"Do you have one of those 'Electric' complexes? Because that would certainly explain why you hate me so much."

"I don't hate you. I never hated you. All I ever did was try my best to make you love me, and the more I tried to, the more you told me I was the spawn of Satan and would never amount to anything. I can't remember the last time you said something nice about me. You don't even hug me. It's clear that you're the one who hates me, Mom, and I just want to know why."

The Mother responded with an icy stare, then applauded slowly, each clap of her hands ringing with venomous sarcasm.

"Are you going to answer my question?"

She stopped clapping. "Being a single mother is hard, you know," she said. "Have you ever stopped to think about what getting pregnant with you did to my life? My career was ruined, I went into all kinds of debt, your father walked out on me, and you know what? If you had been a different kind of kid, I might be able to say it was all worth it. But I can't say that, because you were a fucking nightmare. Even before you were born, you used to kick me so hard that the doctor made a dumb joke about my baby being a Rockette. Easy for her to laugh about it, she wasn't forced to raise you for the next eighteen years.

"Would it have hurt you to at least try being a normal, happy little girl? You seemed so miserable all the time. All you did for fun was read about mythology and watch that stupid 'Tomb Buster' movie over and over, and when you weren't doing that you were moping around feeling sorry for yourself. God forbid we go and, I dunno, get manicures together like a normal mother and daughter. God forbid you crack a smile sometimes. But I guess I'm the bad guy here, right? I'm the villain because I wasn't a perfect mother. You know what? You try it. You try raising a kid like you, see how you feel about me then."

There was a time, not long before this, when the Thorn would simply have nodded and accepted the Mother's words. However, that was before she had found the community hall covered in blood and seen a woman die at her feet. It was before she knelt beside Marc in the street and watched him suffer as old wounds in his heart reopened and bled out in the form of Steven Grant. She had been useless in those moments, a mere witness to pain she could neither prevent nor understand.

But she hadn't always been useless, had she? She'd saved someone's life—nervously, clumsily, but still. "Don't think I've forgotten," Harrow had said. "I owe you my life. I had a feeling I wouldn't regret welcoming you here." And when he read her scales: "You have nothing to hide. Ammit sees only goodness, in your past as well as your future."

"Do you think I wanted to mope around and be miserable?" the Thorn said. "Did you ever stop to think there might be a reason I acted like that? You made me miserable. You made me hate myself for no good reason, just because I wasn't the picture-perfect daughter you wanted. And I wanted to be that perfect daughter. You just never gave me a chance. I think you wanted to resent me for some reason—maybe because my dad left you, maybe because I ruined your career, I don't know and I don't really care. I'm done caring about this—about you. I think I've given you more than enough chances to change, and it's clear you're not going to, so that's it. I don't want you to be in my life anymore."

The Mother's face was no longer ice, but blank. "Is that all?"

"Yes."

"You do know I'm the only family you have, don't you? Cut me off, and you don't have anyone else."

"I have the closest thing to a family now that I've ever had."

"What, that cult?" the Mother scoffed. "That's what you think a family is?" She got up, shaking her head, and went to the door. "You're a lost cause."

She paused and turned around, leaning on the doorframe with her arms crossed. "You say I've never said anything nice to you? Well, savor this then, because I'm about to say something nice to you now, something I wish my mother had said to me before it was too late. You can mess around with—sorry, research—this cult as much as you want, I couldn't care less about that. You can lust after their leader as much as you want—

"Mom!"

"Oh, please. Don't you dare try and deny it. Anyway, I can't stop you sleeping with his shirt. I can't stop you sleeping with him, for that matter. What I can do is warn you. Don't trust him. Don't believe a single word that comes out of his mouth. Even if it's what you want to hear."

"You don't even know him."

"I don't need to. I've known men like him, and trust me, all they do is lie and cheat and manipulate. They trick you into believing they care about you, then you trust them with your secrets and they turn around and use those secrets to stab you in the back."

"Are you sure that's not your 'daddy issues' talking?" asked the Thorn, the words like venom in her mouth.

If only the Mother had loved her daughter more, or at least tried to. If only she'd nurtured her in childhood and respected her in adulthood, then maybe the Thorn would have heeded this warning. Maybe she would have at least considered the Mother's words before returning to London.

But instead, she kept her promise to Harrow and arrived back to the commune less than three days after her departure. Harrow, however, was not there to greet her. Instead, she was met by Billy Fitzgerald and his obnoxious small airplane, and carted off without warning or explanation to a chalky green-and-white nowhere of a village in (she would find out later) Northern Ireland. I have fond memories of Ireland, reader, and of Ulster County in particular; its only great flaw is that it plays host to a branch of the Followers of Ammit.

It was early morning when she found him. The air was heavy with life, and the rusty red of Harrow's clothing stood out like a splash of blood against the lightening horizon. They were just outside the village, and he was standing with his back to her, resting against his cane. He could have been a statue, but for the silver crown of hair blowing softly behind him.

She approached carefully, her shoes brushing whispers over the tall grass.

"You came back to me," Harrow said, turning to face her with a smile, "like the good little lamb you are."

"I'm not a lamb," she replied, aching for his touch. He supplied it, folding her into his arms and placing a kiss on her cheek. She had never wanted him more, and she hated herself for what she knew she must say to him, what she had come here to say. "We're close to releasing Ammit, aren't we?"

A horrible smile cut across Harrow's face. "I believe we are, yes. The scarab is in our possession, and our contingent in Cairo is prepared to assist us when we arrive."

She reluctantly pulled away from him. "I promised to help you find Ammit, so I will. But I never promised you anything after that, so once we've released her I'm leaving the community." The moment the words left her mouth, she longed to take them back.

He didn't look surprised or hurt, as she'd feared and hoped he would. Instead, he simply nodded and said, "I've been thinking along the same lines. Once Ammit is resurrected, I intend to stay by her side as long as she permits. My duty to her will be the sole focus of my life. You, on the other hand, have a long and illustrious career ahead of you, which shouldn't be hindered by even the noblest of causes. As hard as it will be to say goodbye to you, my dear little friend, it's for the best.

"This village houses a branch of our community. They can offer you everything we have in London—albeit with a much lovelier view. You will stay here and finish your research, and I will follow my goddess, and we will forget each other."

"I'll never forget you," she said in a broken voice.

"It feels that way now," he said. "I understand. I must confess, I feel an affinity to you that is unmatched by any of my hundreds of wonderful disciples around the world. With you, I feel the closest thing to joy I've ever known in my life. In an ideal world, I would keep you close to me and never let that connection between us break. But this is not an ideal world, which is exactly why we need Ammit. And besides," he stroked her cheek, which shuddered under his touch and erupted in silent tears, "this is what you said you wanted, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Then why are you crying?"

"Because I'll miss you!" The dam broke, and she was consumed by sobs. "You're the most incredible person I've ever met. You treat me with respect, you support my career, you tell me I'm a good person. You're my family. I don't want to leave you, it's the last thing I want, but I have to, okay?"

"Why?"

"Because it's all an illusion. That's what you do, isn't it? You take lonely, pathetic people like me, and you manipulate them into thinking you care for them. I can't be just another disciple to you. I can't let you use me as a pawn anymore, not even for Ammit. I'm worth more than that, Arthur. And you know what? According to Ammit's own criteria, my scales balance and yours don't. So that means you should be the one begging me to stay with you! You'd be lucky to have me around forever, don't forget that."

Harrow was smiling. "Well said, my love," he told her, and in one sweeping gesture he took her in his arms and claimed her lips with his own. Reader, you should be grateful that you were not there to see it. No one makes romantic passion look grotesque and repulsive quite like Arthur Harrow. The Thorn, however, had her eyes closed and was therefore ignorant of the intensely unsettling look of manic rapture on Harrow's face. All she knew in that moment was a complete and perfect bliss—and yet, less than a second later she found herself breaking away from him and staggering backward.

"What was that?" she cried in a panic. "Why did you do that?"

"Lamb," Harrow said quickly, stretching out a hand, "sweetheart, come here."

"You said you wanted me gone, you were sending me away, and then—"

"It was unforgivable of me. I apologize. Now please, come and let me hold you. I won't kiss you again—not yet—just let me hold you. It's cold; I'll keep you warm. Come to me."

"I can't."

"Then just listen." He knelt before her.

"Please, don't," she whimpered as a fresh cascade of tears fell from her eyes.

"Why not?" Harrow pleaded, taking her hand in both of his, caressing it, kissing her fingers, laying his cheek against it and closing his eyes in reverence.

"You already have a goddess to worship."

"The woman I worship is here. She is more precious than any goddess, for she is the best of humanity. She is beauty and goodness incarnate, and I offer myself to her knowing I am unworthy of her love."

"'Offer' yourself? Do you mean…"

"I am asking you to marry me. Please, my darling, my treasure, please say yes."

His words rung in her ears. I am asking you to marry me. It was too perfect to be real.

"Do you love me?" The question escaped her lips.

"I love you, I adore you, and I vow to protect, cherish, nurture and honor you, sweet lamb, my precious jewel, to the end of my life—and beyond even that."

"Are you telling the truth?"

"Everything I have ever told you before today has been true. Why would this be any different?" Arthur Harrow, master of the loophole—now, there's something about him that even I can begrudgingly admire.

"You don't believe me, do you?" Harrow asked.

She shook her head. A knife was twisting and untwisting itself in the depths of her stomach. "I want to. You have no idea how much I want to."

"Then say yes. Say you'll be my wife, and let me prove to you how much I adore you."

"Why me, though? I'm nothing special. I don't have anything to offer you."

"You have yourself, and your love. Those are the only things I need from you."

She tried to think. There was no other answer but yes, right? She loved him. He was all she ever thought about, night and day. If she were to picture a perfect life for herself, a "happily ever after" if you will, it could only exist with him beside her.

"Stand up," she said. "I don't like you kneeling like that."

He stood, retrieving his cane from the grass and clutching it with a strange—nervous?—grip.

"Okay," said the Thorn. "I'll marry you."

Rapture blossomed across his face. "Oh, my love," he growled, taking her in his arms again. He pressed his forehead against hers and stared into her eyes. "You will marry me?"

"Yes," she breathed.

"Say my name."

"Arthur, I will marry you."

"Do you love me?"

"I love you, Arthur."

They kissed. Now she felt joy in its purest form. She let herself give in to his body, tasting his lips, his jaw, wrapping her arms around his neck and resting her head on his shoulder to inhale the scent of his neck—no longer just his shirt, but him.

"Are you happy, my love?" Harrow asked her.

"Yes," she whispered, nuzzling his shoulder. And she was happy, reader, though she couldn't ignore the faint metallic chill of the crocodile's head held against the small of her back.

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 7: Presentiments are strange things

"I still felt as a wanderer on the face of the earth; but I experienced firmer trust in myself and my own power, and less withering dread of oppression. The gaping wound of my wrongs, too, was now quite healed; and the flame of resentment extinguished." -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

WARNINGS: Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Past/Referenced Child Abuse and Neglect, Implied Alcoholism

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

AO3

Unsurprisingly, Harrow tightened security around the commune after the night Marc Spector and I gained entrance. This involved recruiting a number of additional followers specifically for this purpose; neither military nor first responders, what these humans lacked in professional training they more than compensated for in enthusiasm, and thanks to them—all right, let's cut the crap. They were basically just hired goons, reader.

In addition to the goons, all members of the community were "strongly encouraged" to take part in daily sessions studying the arts of basic combat and self-defense. It's less "cozy community center" and more "military boot camp" these days, the Thorn wrote in her notes. I think Arthur is genuinely scared for us.

Apart from this, the community managed to function as usual. The Thorn, for the most part, was able to maintain the same routine she'd held before the incident, with the one exception that each night before bed she joined Harrow in his study, where she dutifully cleaned and doctored his torn, tortured feet. Bafflingly, she found herself almost enjoying this task. There is a certain level of intimacy in all forms of human touch—Harrow knows this better than anyone—but something about caring for a wound can bring out a unique vulnerability in the injured and inspire deep compassion in the makeshift nurse. Harrow trusted the Thorn with the weakest part of himself, and in return, the Thorn began to open more of herself to him.

The night inevitably came when the flower of trust bloomed in full, and the two of them could truly be called friends. Harrow had his self-abused feet and sinful past life; the Thorn had the story of her school uniform, her flight into the woods, and the disastrous night in the cave. She let the story pour from her as she cleaned Harrow's feet, feeling grateful for his nonjudgemental silence.

"It was very foolish of you to run away from your school like that," he finally said when she had finished the story.

"I was ten. Give me a break."

"I understand why you fled, and I empathize. As a child, I imagine I might have done the same thing in your situation. But even so, it was reckless and dangerous."

"I have a hard time imagining you as a child," she said with a repressed grin.

"Do you?" He looked neither pleased nor offended, only curious. "Give it a try."

"Okay… One thing I can say for sure is that you were smart. Really smart."

Harrow modestly dipped his head with a closed-mouth laugh. "Trying to flatter me? Is that really the best you can do? Come now, you've had no trouble giving my adult iteration his due criticism, so surely you can do the same for my younger self. What if I told you I was a rotten, undisciplined, arrogant little boy, a disgrace to my parents and a bully to my teachers?"

"Is that true?"

"You tell me. Does it sound plausible?"

"I don't want to say; I'm not comfortable talking about children like that."

Harrow nodded. "I respect your integrity."

The Thorn silently finished bathing his feet, rinsed out the bowl in the sink, and returned to sit on the floor in front of Harrow's chair. She rested her head against the side of his knee, delighting in the subtle intimacy of touching him without having to look into his face. He laid a hand on her head and combed his fingers through her hair, absently massaging her scalp.

"You mentioned a young friend of yours," Harrow said, "Marc. Tell me about him."

If he were anyone else, she may have wondered about the sudden interest in Marc. But Harrow has a way of making every question, no matter how random, seem completely natural and unsuspicious.

"He was my best friend as a kid," the Thorn said, "until I went away to boarding school, and his little brother died, and we never saw each other again. There isn't much more to it than that."

"I doubt that very much. The friends we make in childhood are among the most influential people in our lives, regardless of whether or not the friendship survives into adulthood. They teach us invaluable lessons about the art of social interaction, and inform some of our very first philosophies about human nature."

"I guess. Marc used to teach me things he learned in Cub Scouts—you know, the different kinds of knots, animal tracks, that kind of stuff. I don't remember any of it, which is probably for the best because I'm pretty sure he didn't fully understand it himself and was teaching it wrong. Come to think of it, he may have just been trying to rub it in that I wasn't allowed to join Cub Scouts because I was a girl."

"Interesting," Harrow said in a voice that implied a smile.

The Thorn continued, lulled into a "talking mood" by the intoxication of Harrow's subtle caresses. "I don't know what you mean by 'informing our very first philosophies.' I'm sure you talked about philosophy as a kid, but Marc and I sure didn't. We spent most of our time camping on his patio and running around the woods, pretending to be the characters from our favorite movie."

"And it was that movie, and your memories of enjoying it with Marc," Harrow interrupted, "that later inspired you to study anthropology, was it not?"

She whirled around it indignantly. "Why do you even bother asking me questions about my past, if you and your scales know everything about me already?"

He laughed lightly. "The scales don't work quite like that, lamb. I see pieces of memories, but only those pieces which Ammit has deemed important in calculating the balance of the scales. I am not privy to every detail of every person's lifetime—if that were the case, I'm sure I would have well and truly been driven to madness by now."

Reader, I do not know if he was aware of the irony in this statement.

"For example," Harrow continued, "your scales showed me that on the evening of Randall Spector's death, you and Marc shared a parting conversation that left quite a lasting impression on you. What did Marc say to you during that conversation?"

She did her best to recall to him the talk she'd had with Marc across each other's windowsills. "I hardly ever think about it," she concluded. "We were just kids. Why did you say it left a lasting impression on me?"

"Well," said Harrow, "if you don't know yet, it must be something that remains to be revealed in your future. The scales, again, don't always show me the full story. All they told me was that what Marc discussed with you that afternoon would come back to you in a poignant way."

Several flights downstairs, under a blanket of scattered papers on her desk, the Thorn's phone jumped with a message from her mother. Now, let me make this very clear, reader, and don't forget it: There is no such thing as a coincidence. It was not a random concatenation of circumstances that led to the Thorn receiving that particular message, but some form of divine mischief. As to her receiving it just as she prepared to leave Harrow's study in the wake of their discussion of childhood and Marc…well, let's call that "divine foreshadowing."

Whatever we choose to call the phenomenon behind these circumstances, the following facts remain:

1. The Thorn received an unexpected message from her mother.

2. The Thorn wouldn't see this message until early the next morning.

3. When she did see it, she groaned audibly and roughtly deposited her forehead on the hard surfact of her desk (clonk), indulged in a few minutes of frustrated self-pity, then set about making the appropriate last-minute plans.

She located Harrow easily during lunch. He occupied his usual seat at the head of the most fully packed table in the room, allowing his own food to turn cold while he bestowed his full attention on the starstruck disciples surrounding him. If one thing can be said for Harrow, it's that he is an attentive cult leader. Some men in his position perform "miracles" of healing or divination; Harrow prefers to bless his followers with the gift of conversation. They come to him pleading for advice, inspiration and comfort, and—providing their scales are balanced—he delivers all these things and more. He listens to these whiny throngs of humans as they moan about their stupid problems, he cries with them over their meaningless losses, he embraces them, promises them a place in Ammit's impossible utopia, and of course it's all a manipulation, but that isn't the worst of it, reader. Do you know what is?

The worst part of Harrow's sick façade of benevolence is that it isn't a total façade. His love for other humans is twisted beyond repair, but it's real—so real that is spurred him to turn away from me and toward Ammit, to let himself embody evil for the sake of a possible greater good. He loves his followers so deeply, in fact, that he will not hesitate to destroy any one of them whose scales tip ever so slightly out of Ammit's favor.

He is, by far, the human being least fit to wield even a fraction of divine power. Too much heart and too many brains…never a promising combination.

Now, where were we…

"Arthur," the Thorn said, awkwardly and pointlessly attempting a confidential tone, "can I talk to you about something? It'll only take a minute."

He excused himself and let her lead him to a corner of the hall. Many pairs of eyes followed them from the table.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I need to go away for a few days. Back home, actually, to Chicago."

"What for?"

"A family friend died unexpectedly, and I've been invited to her shiva."

His eyes narrowed with concern. "This shiva is worth leaving our community and traveling across the ocean for? She must have been a close friend."

"Not really, but I was close with," her voice caught a bit, and she cleared her throat, "with her son. Marc."

Harrow raised his eyebrows. "Ah."

"I'm just leaving for three days. My flight leaves tonight. I just thought you should know, since…since we work together so much."

"Your flight? You already booked a flight with a commercial airline?"

"Yes."

"Cancel it. Billy will fly you—there and back."

"What? Why?"

"How else can I guarantee you'll come back to us when you're finished with your personal concerns in Chicago?"

"You could try trusting me."

"You will come back, then?"

"Of course. I'll be back as soon as I can."

He simply looked at her for a long time, then reached into his pocket. "All right, then. Take your scheduled flight, but at least let me give you this." He rifled through his wallet and handed her a neat stack of bills.

"Arthur!" she exclaimed on seeing the amount of money in her hands. "You're kidding, right?"

"Not at all."

"I can't take this."

"You can, and you will."

"No."

"Half, then." He divided the stack and handed her share back to her.

She sighed. "Fine." She started to leave, then turned back suddenly. "Arthur."

"Yes?"

"I'm coming back because this community is my home. You are my home. The first real home I've ever had."

Harrow took her hand and smiled. "Travel safely, my lamb." He kissed her on the cheek, and they went their separate ways.

Bobbi Kennedy kindly offered to drive her to the airport that evening. The Thorn liked Bobbi in a distant, pleasant way, and the sentiment had always seemed to be mutual. Still, the interior of a small car is not a space one typically enjoys spending with those not in one's immediate social circle. Something about the environment of an enclosed, moving space, especially in the semi-dark, tends to invite the sort of conversation that could be lightly termed "awkward." Bobbi and the Thorn were about to illustrate this odd social trend beautifully.

After a sizable chunk of their journey had been completed in silence, Bobbi spoke: "Be careful."

"...What?"

"I'm telling you to watch yourself. With Arthur."

"Are you threatening me?"

"On the contrary, I'm trying to protect you. I'm not blind, you know. I've seen the way you act around him—a lot of us have. And we've noticed you going in and out of his study late at night."

"No! Listen, it's not like... I mean, it's not the way you're making it sound. We're just working together. He's helping me with my dissertation, I'm helping him find Ammit, it's all perfectly—"

"Spare me." Bobbi held up an impatient hand. "You're not the first of his followers who's looked at him that way, believe me—but you are the first whose feelings he's indulged to this extent. The question you should be asking yourself is, why?"

"Because he likes me, maybe? Have you considered that?"

"Oh, I have no doubt he likes you. But again, I think you should ask yourself why."

"Why shouldn't he? Am I not a likable person? Is there something wrong with me?"

"Please. It is not about your personality. But think about this: There must be plenty of experienced scholars in your field who could aid Arthur in releasing Ammit, and yet it is you, a student, who he chose to recruit to our cause. You are intelligent, of course, and I'm sure you have potential, but forgive me when I say nothing about you really stands out as exceptional."

The Thorn had no retort for this. She felt as though something inside her were sinking, very slowly.

"Arthur is a great man," Bobbi said. "I respect him very much, and I believe he is the key to unlocking a brighter future for humanity through Ammit. If what you told me just now is true, and yours really is a purely professional partnership, then I'm sorry for misunderstanding you. But I don't think my concerns are unfounded: It is strange for a man to spend so much time alone with a much younger woman, especially when the woman obviously has deeper feelings for him."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," said the Thorn, looking pointedly out the passenger's seat window. Reader, sometimes, when one feels cornered and has nothing better to say in one's own defense, one simply feels the need to resort to a cliché.

She was grateful for the crowded flight to Chicago. Being pressed amid a musky flood of strangers helped to ease the emptiness in her heart that expanded more with every mile the plane took her away from Harrow, and the tightness in her stomach as she traveled closer to the "home" that was not her home.

"Cool tattoo," said the man sitting next to her, when she reached across him to take her drink from the flight attendant. "Is that for a band or something?"

"Sort of," she replied with a nervous shrug. To her great relief, the man didn't ask any further questions.

The Mother surprised her by waiting inside the airport, eschewing her usual routine of sitting passive-aggressively in the car lane just outside and playing raucous car horn duets with anyone who dared to annoy her.

"We can go ahead to the car," the Thorn said by way of greeting. "I don't need the baggage claim."

"Hello to you, too," the Mother replied with an exclamatory smack of her gum. "That's all you brought? That sad little carry-on? So I take it you were serious when you said you're not staying longer than three days. Geez, tell me you don't like me without telling me you don't like me. Wait, is that a tattoo?! When did you get that?"

"Mom, please," the Thorn mumbled. "I was just on a plane for ten hours; I really just want to get some rest."

"Yeah, fine, get your 'rest,'" the Mother said with a dismissive flap of her hand. "Remember, we're going to the Spectors' tomorrow. You've got something appropriate to wear, I hope? I know you get weird about clothes, but really, you never know who might be there to see you. You want to put your best self forward, just in case."

"It's a shiva, not a cocktail party." Truth be told, there was only one person she wanted to see at the Spectors', and she had a feeling he wouldn't care what she was wearing. She wasn't sure if she even wanted to speak to Marc; it would be enough just to be reassured of his existence, of his survival. At least, that's what she thought at the time.

The neighborhood in which the Thorn grew up is actually somewhat similar to Harrow's commune in London. Both are small suburban pockets within a major city, both are largely constructed of brick, and both share an oasis-like quality of feeling separate from the surrounding urban chaos. When she lived in Harrow's community, the Thorn got used to the sounds of rustling trees and plants, food being prepared and enjoyed, acoustic guitars being played at widely varying levels of expertise, and a generalized flow of contented multilingual chatter. People in the community were constantly making things—art, food, creative new rationalizations for their dangerously skewed morals, etc.

When she woke the next morning in her childhood bedroom, it was to a conspicuous lack of sound. The occasional honk of a car and the distant scream of a train were the only signs of human life she could hear. She was holding Harrow's shirt—there was no bothering to stash it under her pillow these days; she held it all night—and, bringing it to her face to breathe him in, she was shocked by a rush of tears in her eyes and the return of that horrible emptiness she'd felt on the plane. She'd never been homesick before, reader. Recognizing the feeling, she actually laughed a little bit and let some tears fall onto Harrow's shirt. I have something to miss, she thought. I'm so lucky.

The walls in the Spectors' house were green. The Thorn didn't know how she could have forgotten such a simple fact. On days when the weather confined them to indoor play, she, Marc and Ro-Ro would turn this room into a vast jungle. The furniture became rocks and trees to hide behind while waiting to ambush the bad guys. Paperweights and coasters were Aztec artifacts containing clues leading them to the lost tomb of Coyolxauhqui, coffee table books were ancient texts unearthed by Dr. Grant's morally dubious research methods, and the pencil marks on the wall that documented the Spector children's heights was a coded map written in Nahuatl script, which only Bessie could translate. But none of these could compare to the majesty of the great tomb itself, the dining room table, under which the three of them took shelter with flashlights and excited whispers and granola bars they pretended to cook over a fire. This was how rainy days were spent at the Spector house.

Well, except for that one rainy day, of course. The day that no one saw coming.

They could have at least repainted, she thought as she took in the achingly familiar, yet unbearably different scene. The air was full of an emptiness called Randall, and emptiness was something she could endure, as we know. She knew and understood the emptiness, even if she hated it, but there was another sensation here that overpowered it: An oppression, almost a hostility. The feeling of being watched. The feeling of being hunted. ("Sounds to me like danger.")

"I can't take my eyes off of it, and I don't mean that in a good way," the Mother was saying, shaking her head in the direction of the tattoo on the Thorn's wrist. "It's just so gaudy. And did you really have to put it in such an obvious place? God, you're never going to grow up, are you? Still going through your 'rebellious' phase at twenty-six—unbelievable."

The Thorn heard her name called, and turned to see Elias Spector bounding awkwardly across the room to her, a watery smile spread over his tired face. "It's so nice to see you," he poured, wringing her hand in both of his. "Oh, I wish Marc were here, I'm sure he would love to catch up."

"Marc isn't here?" She tried in vain to mask her disappointment. "I invited him, but," Elias interrupted himself with a nervous laugh, "he's so busy these days with...you know, work..." He trailed off, gazing vacantly out the front window. What a sad, weak, pathetic little man he was, reader. Having harbored an inexplicable, dog-like affection for his wife, without her he was nothing but a vessel for regret, crudely held in one piece by a ridiculous hope for the return of the son he had so coldly betrayed with his inaction and endless excuses.

The Mother grabbed the Thorn by her elbow and steered her away from Elias. "'Busy with work,' yeah, right," she whispered loudly. "You know what I heard about Marc? I heard that he and his wife are..." She dragged a flat hand across her throat, making an exaggerated khshh sound, "and that he's been doing an awful lot of..." Here she mimed drinking from a bottle. "I'm betting he doesn't even have a job."

The Thorn suddenly felt sick. "Give me a minute," she said, slipping out of the Mother's grasp and through the crowded living room. She escaped out the door and down the sidewalk to her house, where she collapsed on the front steps and rested her head against the cold iron handrail.

Marc was married. Estranged, separated, whatever...he still got married. What was his wife like, the Thorn wondered? It would have been fun to go to their wedding, maybe even be part of the bridal party. She saw herself standing in front of a room full of people, wearing a nice dress and delivering a corny, yet oddly moving speech filled with inside jokes. Leading a moment of silence for Randall, who should have been best man. Bonding with Marc's new wife over how her contributions to the décor were undeniably superior to Marc's. A fullness of the heart, a cushioning sense of belonging that comes with a friendship that has stood the test of time, a bond stronger than distance or grief or trauma.

A new vision took hold of her, another wedding. Marc was making the speech this time, and his wife was approaching the Thorn later, wrapping her in a hug filled with perfume and sisterly affection, "you look so beautiful, I'm so happy for you two, you're absolutely perfect together." The Mother following, a little drunk, "you know what? Maybe it's the tequila talking, but he's a lot better looking than I thought he was. The tux probably helps, too—that 'Buddhist monk' look really doesn't work for him." The groom himself appearing silently behind her, wrapping a silver-braceleted arm around her waist, whispering in her ear, "are you ready to go, lamb? I've been waiting all day to get my hands on you, my perfect bride..." She giggled, turned to kiss him—idiotically happy—but he had transformed; in place of her Arthur was the dry, cavernous skull of a long-beaked bird, sepulchral black sockets gaping at her in judgement,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No! She snapped back to reality, her head hitting the iron-wrought fence with a cartoonish bonk. What a ridiculous daydream, she chided herself. As if Harrow would ever sully his own dignity by holding a traditional wedding, and to her, of all people. A shimmer of grayish-silver caught her eye from across the street. She looked, saw it just for a moment, but a moment was all it took for her to note those sepulchral eye sockets, the jeering white beak, the tall, gaunt column of rags wielding a crescent-moon staff with elegant menace. In the Thorn's defense, reader, it does tend to be something of a shock for a human the first time they encounter a god in its physical form (remember Steven Grant's embarrassing performance in that elevator?), but I can't pretend it didn't, well, sting a little bit when the sight of me caused her to be physically ill over the side of her mother's front porch. I know I'm far past my prime, but come on, I can't be that revolting, can I?

Obviously she was imagining it—that's how she tried to explain me away, as she wiped the vomit that still clung to her mouth, blinked to release the stinging tears down her cheeks, and swallowed the remaining acidic tang in her throat. Harrow said Khonshu and his avatar had come to the community to find him, so why would the Egyptian god of the moon have followed the Thorn all the way across the ocean to her childhood home?

Answer: Because I wasn't following her, reader. I was following the taxi that carried my utter disgrace of an avatar and promptly deposited him on the sidewalk just as the Thorn was throwing up for the second time all over her mother's dead, shriveled shrubbery.

She looked up, saw him: The stubbled face, rimmed red with perpetual exhaustion. Brown eyes drained of their old warmth, hollowed out by the slow torture of growing up.

"Marc!"

With an embittered shake of the head, he extracted a flask from the pocket and took an anguished swig, then turned and set off down the street, staggering with the erratic gait of intoxication.

It was the flask that told the Thorn something was not right. She ran to him, calling his name with increasing panic. "Marc, come on, get out of the street. I'll make you some coffee or something, we can go to my mom's house, just please get out of the street."

She grabbed him by the shoulders, shook him a little. "Please, Marc." He stared wildly at nothing, muttered incoherently to himself ("not giving you that satisfaction"). Convulsing with wet sobs, snatching the blue kippah from his head and slamming it to the rough cobblestone pavement.

"Marc, don't you remember me?" She said her name, then said it again with desperation. The taste of vomit still coated her throat. "You can trust me, okay? Tell me what's going on." He looked at her, looked through her, and in his sunken eyes she saw exactly what he must be thinking: Trust you? Why should I trust you, when we haven't spoken in sixteen years?

"I'm sorry," she whispered. Reader, I'm not sure what she was apologizing for. She wasn't sure, either.

All at once, Marc's body began to strain. He hunched forward, his eyes rolled back to their whites, the Thorn was flooded with panic (was he having a heart attack? a seizure?) and then he snapped upright, turned his head back and forth with an air of disoriented panic, and spoke.

"...What? Where am I? Oh, bloody hell. Not again..."

She had many questions, but chose to ask the simplest and most obvious of them: "Marc? You okay?"

"'Marc?' Wha—?"

"Are you doing an accent?"

"What do you mean? This is how I talk. Oh, hey," he said, peering into her face, "you're that girl who was at the Library of London."

She'd had a prickle of unease, reader, but now it blossomed into a low, smoldering fear. "Remember? I was waiting for my interview, and you called me 'Marc' for some reason. You were with that friend of yours who looked like he wanted to kill me."

"?????????????????????????????" said the Thorn.

"Look," continued Steven, "I think I'm really horribly lost—this is going to sound daft, but can you tell me where exactly we are?"

Finally, a question she actually knew the answer to. "Chicago."

"Chicago?! Oh, bloody hell, I can't believe this. How the hell did I get myself to bloody Chicago without knowing it?"

It must be the alcohol, she decided. He must have had more to drink than just what was in the flask. It was the only non-ridiculous explanation for this bizarreness.

"Marc." She put a firm hand on his arm. "I know it's probably none of my business, and you have no reason to listen to me since we haven't talked in so long, but I think you really need help. I don't know what happened that hurt you this bad, but drinking isn't going to make it any better. Can you please just...promise me you'll get some help? Professional help?"

He stared at her, frozen, for just a moment. Then he appeared to wilt slightly in a jumble of concern for her, fear for himself, and sheer bafflement over the situation in general. "Listen, love," he said, "I know this Marc guy must be really important to you, since you're, like, traveling the world to try and find him...but I'm not him. I'm not Marc. My name's Steven, and I...oh...oh, shit...I'm sorry...I'm so sorry..." This sudden derailment into apologies was owed to the fact that the Thorn had started to sob.

There was an awkward few seconds wherein Steven searched his [Marc's] pockets for a tissue or handkerchief, found he didn't have anything, and in the end settled for giving her Marc's kippah.

"Well, I'd better be off and try to find out...where I'm going," he said.

"Wait." The Thorn reached into her own pocket and pullet out the fat stack of American bills Harrow had insisted on giving her. "Take this. I don't need it. It'll help you get home."

"Really, mate? Whoa—shit, this is a lot of money. Are you sure? I mean, this is an insane amount of money."

"I'm sure. Take it."

"Can I at least have your name, so I can find you and pay you back?"

She told him her name, "but don't pay me back. It's not my money anyway." Seeing the look on his face, "No! I don't mean it like that—it was a gift...kind of. Long story."

"O-okay. Look, I don't know how to thank...anyway, I'd better get going. Laters, gators!" He waved to a stopping car and began to hurry across the street.

"What?"

"Laters, gators!"

Just a coincidence, she thought. It must be a common phrase. But still, in all her life she had never heard anyone outside the Spector family say it.

"Wait," Steven added suddenly, turning and trotting back to her. "Just one thing—I know it's none of my business, I don't know you at all, but you seem lovely, so I just thought I should say..." He bit his lip, scrunched up his face in a how-do-I-put-this-nicely way, and tried again. "Your friend, or whoever he is—you know, that guy you were at the library with when you met me. I've got this feeling you should get away from him. I could be wrong, of course—I mean, I'm probably wrong, I almost always am—it's just that he gave off kind of a funny vibe. Bit shady, y'know? Anyway, just felt like I should tell you that, just in case."

"In case of what?" she asked, clutching the kippah between her hands.

"Hang on, gotta get this taxi—" and he was gone.

Here's another thing this neighborhood has in common with Harrow's community: Both possess an eerie quality of airtight self-containment. Standing for a long enough time in that street, one can get the impression that whatever happens in this quaint little All-American micro-suburb, stays there. No entry, no escape—so why even bother crying out for help?

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 6: Cherished preserver

"'Chance has meted you a measure of happiness...She has laid it carefully on one side for you. I saw her do it. It depends on yourself to stretch out your hand, and take it up: but whether you will do so, is the problem I study.'" -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

WARNINGS: Blood, Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

AO3

Do you know, reader, how much blood flows within a single human body? Answer: Not enough. If pierced in a particularly unlucky spot, the body of an adult human can be drained to the point of death in as little as five minutes. By the time the Thorn reached the desecrated hall, it had been five minutes and 53, 54, 55 seconds since the onslaught of the massacre.

There were six bodies in total, all dripping dark red, but only one was still moving. It was dragging itself toward the Thorn, leaving a thick smear of blood on the stone floor behind it (like a slug trail from hell, the Thorn couldn't help thinking). So thoroughly bloodied was its face that only the eyes were visible, the whiteness of them standing out ghastly against the crimson mess. Something was protruding from the side of its neck, something that may have once been silver or gold but was now coated in sticky red.

It reached out to grasp the Thorn's ankle, gurgling a vague and pointless plea for help which ended in a wretched cough that splashed the Thorn's bare feet with blood. It rolled over to face the vaulted ceiling, and died.

Confronted with a close view of the face, recognition rose up hot and terrible from the Thorn's memory to her consciousness: The red-streaked mass of moribund humanity on the floor, it was the sweet woman who served breakfast, whose name the Thorn had never bothered to learn, preoccupied as she was with the demands of dissertation research and unprofessed love.

(Her name was Grace, reader, in case you were curious.)

From now on, it is imperative that we leave behind the Thorn that we have been following thus far. Forget her, reader. She no longer exists. She has looked into the face of death for the first time, and she will never be quite the same person again. Don't grieve; didn't you know this was bound to happen eventually? When one moves in the circles of gods, innocence and naïveté cease to be options.

At that moment, however, the Thorn was not pondering the loss of her "innocence." Nothing could be further from her mind and heart, which shared the same singular priority—a priority who, if the Thorn had correctly interpreted the motivation behind that night's attack, was right now in serious immediate danger.

Finding the strength to move her blood-spattered legs, the Thorn stepped over Grace's lifeless, sopping-red body and crouched in front of her neck, where the strange little weapon still protruded. She grasped both hands firmly around the instrument, and with a strength she (and I, reader) hadn't thought herself to possess, pulled it out of Grace's still-warm flesh with a bilious SPLETCH.

Spurred on by a mix of adrenaline and numb shock, she raced up the stairs that led to Harrow's living quarters. He does tend to work late, her frantic mind reasoned—but then again, if he knew his people to be in danger, there was no doubt he would want to be present to assist them. Therefore, she concluded as a turbulent single sob escaped her mouth, he was either asleep or—no. She wouldn't think about the other possibility.

She flung open the rustic wooden door, screamed "STOP!" and held in front of her the lethal weapon she had dislodged from Grace's neck: A sleek, double-sided dagger shaped like a crescent moon, streaked with congealing blood and inscribed with intricate hieroglyphs.

If not for the crippling terror in her pounding heart, the scene that met the Thorn's eyes on entering the study would have taken on the quality of a strangely elegant tableau. Allow me to describe it from her perspective:

Harrow was, indeed, asleep. He was sitting up in his leather chair with a book open in his lap and his head drooping placidly onto his chest. The intruder standing over him was a well-built, masculine figure, dressed in a bizarre and almost comical getup. (Remember, reader, that we are seeing him through the Thorn's utterly ignorant and TASTELESS eyes. The ceremonial armor of the Moon Knight is dignified, practical, an all-around aesthetic triumph, and the total antithesis of any and all things one might associate with the word "getup.") Anyway, the ensemble consisted of what resembled tightly bound linen bandages—yes, reader, like a mummy, very good observation—which covered every inch of the man's body, including his face, and was completed by a floor-length, hooded cape. Everything about him shone a sullen silvery-gray—yes, reader, like the moon, another excellent observation—save for the pale gold of the crescent dart on his chest, a perfect copy of the one he held in triumphant preparation to strike at the sleeping Harrow's throat just as the Thorn threw open the door and screamed "STOP!"

I might be less furious about this, if the Thorn had actually been a worthy adversary against Harrow's would-be killer that night. If she had put up a good fight, given my avatar a run for his money and beat him fair and square, then the failure of Harrow's assassination would not have been quite so humiliating for me. But reader, you know the Thorn well enough by now—do you think hand-to-hand combat is within her ability, let alone her nature? Of course not, and the fact that she now held one of my avatar's own crescent darts didn't change that one bit.

She clutched the dart with both hands and moved slowly toward the intruder. "Put that thing on on the ground and back away, please," she said with a surprising steadiness.

The man looked at her. Saw her. His eyes were masked behind blinding white pinpricks of light, but they were undeniably fixed on her face.

He stared at her, and seemed on the verge of speaking when he was suddenly distracted by something unknown to the Thorn's senses. He looked behind him, appearing to listen to a phantom voice, then glanced back at the Thorn with something like regret hiding under those piercing white lights—and with a magnificent swirl of his silvery cape, he swept across the room and burst through the closed window, disappearing into the night.

Do you see now, reader, why I call her the Thorn in my side? If she had lingered just a second longer before entering the study, Ammit would not have been released from her stone prison later that year. There would have been no massacre in Cairo, Marc Spector would probably still be my avatar, and the diminished spirit of Ammit herself would not currently be residing within the living body of Arthur Harrow.

Tell me, human: What is it about your species and its childhood friends? Marc Spector (for yes, it was Marc in the white armor, you are a very astute reader indeed) had never once disobeyed one of my orders, nor had he ever failed to complete any mission I set for him, regardless of difficulty or risk, until that night. For the first time in his service to me (but, as you know, certainly not the last), Marc stubbornly defied a direct order to kill, thus potentially dooming all of humanity to suffer and die under Ammit's wrath, and why? Because he was surprised by the face of a person he shared a brief acquaintanceship with sixteen years ago. Because he couldn't bring himself to kill in front of her. Because, for some unfathomable reason, he couldn't let the Thorn see him for the murderer he is.

"Had you forgotten, Marc," I chastised him later, "that your face was concealed from her?"

He ignored me.

Anyway, let us move away from Marc Spector. I'm not here to tell you a story you already know. This story is about the Thorn and her inexplicable fixation on Arthur Harrow.

Ironically—or perhaps not, as it was a sound quite well known to him—it was not the shattering of the glass window that woke Harrow from his deep sleep (a sleep so deep, in fact, that I daresay it smacks of plot convenience), but that of the crescent dart dropping from the Thorn's hand and clattering to the floor. Her previous adrenaline was beginning to seep its way out of her body, and the numbness of shock was dissolving. It was all hitting her, one unbearable truth after another: She had seen six dead, bloody bodies. A woman had died at her feet. She had just narrowly saved the man she loved from a gruesome murder. Each of these truths piled their weight onto her fragile frame until her knees quaked with the burden.

Harrow stood and came toward her. Gravely, he spoke her name. With a devastating wail, the Thorn crumbled and dissolved into tears. Harrow caught her, clasped her against him, murmuring all the expected words of comfort ("hush now, I'm here, I'll make it all better") interspersed with questions she couldn't have properly answered even in a state of calm ("are you hurt?" "who dared to frighten my little lamb?"), until he looked just past the Thorn's shoulder to the crescent dart on the floor.

Arthur Harrow, it must be pointed out, has a touch of the naïve in him. I'll admit I found it endearing at one time, many years ago, which might be why I sought him out as my avatar. But reader, it got old. His idealism was like a mold festering inside him, uncompromising, unyielding, until it was only inevitable that he would fall prey to the doctrine of a being such as Ammit. I should have seen it coming, and I should have neutralized him while I still had him under my control. This is my burden to bear, and I accept it. That being said, while I welcome an easy target just as much as the next god, it was naïve of Harrow to think that just because he hadn't felt my presence in years, I didn't have eyes on him in other ways.

For example, by being privy to every facet of Marc Spector's personal life, I learned through his wife that a collection of Egyptian artifacts being shown at the Kunstmuseum in Switzerland had in fact been illegally obtained by their owner, and that this collection included a priceless golden scarab that was rumored to have some connection to Ammit. I typically couldn't care less about the gossip of the black-market-antiquities community, but this was a rare exception. With Marc in tow, I traveled to Bern with the intention of confirming the authenticity of the scarab, only to find that it had been unceremoniously removed from the exhibit for undisclosed reasons. When Marc recognized the faces of Billy Fitzgerald and Bobbi Kennedy, devoted stooges of Harrow, I knew the battle was lost. However, the war was still winnable, and with Fitzgerald and Kennedy abroad, Harrow himself would be vulnerable. Marc and I returned to London, and, well, you can intuit the rest.

Harrow had let himself think he would find me before I found him…the naïve, arrogant worm. It pleased me to watch him fall silent as he noticed the crescent dart on the floor. His hands froze against the Thorn's back, his body went stiff, and the change happened so suddenly that it shocked the Thorn's tears into submission.

"What is it?" she asked him.

Moving like a phantom, he let go of her and slowly knelt to pick up the dart. He held it, turned it over in his hands, studying it with nothing short of revulsion in his face.

"Who did you see in here?" Harrow growled to the Thorn.

She described the intruder, what he had done to the people downstairs, and what he almost did to Harrow.

Harrow was silent, still studying the crescent dart. "What about you?" he asked in a near whisper. "Did he hurt you?"

She shook her head.

"And you only saw this man in white? You didn't see anyone…anything else with him, behind him maybe?"

"No."

He dropped the dart, came toward her and took her hands. "You've stopped shaking," he said with a weak smile. "It seems you're quite brave. Chasing away Khonshu's avatar, along with Khonshu himself, I'll bet, you must have been terrified…and now look at you, not five minutes later. Warm and steady."

The truth slipped from her before she could stop it. "It's easy to be brave when I'm with you."

He said nothing, but his smile grew in strength, and he gave her a swift and affectionate kiss on the hand before leading her over to the leather chair. "Sit," he gently commanded, taking his cane from its leaning position against the arm of the chair. He brought it to the center of the floor, where he knelt and began to chant in Coptic.

The floor around Harrow's cane crumbled, glowing a fluorescent purple. Out of its depths emerged a web of bony claws, followed by the skeletal legs and body of a horrific dog-like creature. The Thorn quickly hugged her knees (a common reflexive response to fear which I find quite strange, as no human I know of has ever been successfully shielded from danger by the presence of their own knees against their chest).

"It's all right," Harrow said, "it won't hurt you. It's only here to protect you while I take care of things downstairs. Don't be afraid." He knelt in front of the chair and took her chin in his hand. "Do not leave this room. If anyone comes in, do not acknowledge them—the jackal will do that for you, in which case you must promise to shut your eyes until it's finished. Will you do this for me?"

She nodded.

He kissed her forehead. "Good. I'll be back soon. He left," locking the doors of the study behind him, and the Thorn was alone with the magic jackal.

Harrow was not gone for very long—just over thirty minutes, to be precise. But as you know, human reader, thirty minutes can feel much longer in the impatient mind of a human, especially a human who is still reeling from a very recent trauma…and who has also just now discovered that there are such things as magic jackals in existence.

The jackal was, as Harrow had promised, quite docile. After Harrow locked the door behind him, the creature turned to look at the Thorn for a terrifying few seconds, a haunting absence of life in its bizarre canine eyes. It then proceeded on a journey around the perimeter of the study, snuffling and grunting at every object. When it had finished its tour of the room, it sat facing the broken window, and did nothing else. The only sounds were its drooling, grumbling mouth, and the occasional low hiss of wind from outside.

Not many humans know this about me (so count yourself lucky, reader), but I take great pride in my work as god of the night sky. Protecting the travelers of the night keeps me busy, true, but it's messy work, and typically my avatar gets to have most of the fun. So while I can't always express my deep artistic nature through the transformation of living humans into empty human-shaped corpses, and the sophisticated abstract expressionism of scattering their colorful human fluids all about…ahhh, yes, that's a lovely thought…mmmmm…

Where was I? Oh, yes, that's right: The art of the night sky.

I am a fortunate artist in that I have been blessed with an ever-changing canvas. The stars, as you know, shift gradually over time, so that on every night, in any given location on Earth, one is prsented with a unique selection of constellations and galaxies spread masterfully across the great black nothing. In a similar fashion, the varying phases of the moon act as spotlight settings on a stage, a full moon being reserved for the most illustrious of performers. Yes, you guessed correctly: It was a full moon that night. I had thought it only fitting to have one on the night I was to watch Harrow die. Think of the drama, reader! But, alas, cruel fate had its own plans in the form of the meddling Thorn, who at that moment was noticing the aforementioned full moon for the first time that night.

Reader, it was one of my best moons. Full, white and glorious, a great floating pearl. It peered through the smashed window and invaded every corner of the study. Go away, the Thorn tried to tell it with her thoughts.

She had reached the point at which she couldn't stand to be inactive any longer. Harrow had forbidden her to leave the room, which narrowed her options significantly, but still she looked around for a task to assign herself.

The moon cast its silvery softness onto Harrow's desk, and the Thorn followed. She ran her fingers over the glorious clutter, overwhelmed with affection. He had not meant to fall asleep in the chair earlier, she reasoned to herself. If he had, he would have tidied up his desk first; she knew him at least well enough to be certain of that. Harrow ended each day's work with the same ritual: First he cleared away his books, filed each scrap of writing in a drawer for his eyes only, which operated by a filing system solely understood by him. Then he filled a pitcher with water and set it out on his desk along with a single glass, a small towel, and his brown woven shoes.

It was too solemn, too sad to be called a "burst" of inspiration, but it was an inspiration nonetheless. The Thorn took the nearly empty pitcher and carried it to the rusty faucet in the opposite corner of the room, where she filled it almost to the brim. There was a chipped porcelain bowl under the sink; she rinsed it free of its thin layer of dust—there was no soap, so a simple rinse would have to suffice—and filled it with water from the pitcher. Taking comically small steps to prevent spilling, she carried the bowl across the study and placed it on the floor next to Harrow's leather chair. Returning to the desk, she found the gray towlette (too small, but again, she would work with what she had), and hurriedly stashed it next to the bowl just as the telltale clinking of glass in the hallway, followed by the disengaging of the lock, announced Harrow's return.

He scanned the room, his eyes landing on the Thorn. He gave her a soft smile. "Safe and sound?"

She nodded.

He raised his cane in the direction of the jackal, which dissolved from flesh into dust, then from dust into nothingness.

"Don't grieve for it," Harrow said, "it was never a sentient being. Now, tell me why you have that guilty look on your face."

"What do you mean?"

"I know from your scales that your heart is pure, and yet you look at me like you're trying to hide a terrible sin."

"…"

"…And now that look has changed. You're annoyed with me—please don't be, I was only teasing."

"Has it ever occurred to you that you might not be as brilliant at reading others' emotions as you think you are?"

"Of course. It occurs to me every day, but no one has ever had the nerve to say it to me before you."

"I find that hard to believe."

He rolled up his right sleeve. "May I?" he asked, holding out his hands.

"I don't see why I should answer, since we both know you'll do it even if I say 'no.'"

"Well, now you're just making assumptions," he said as he placed his cane between her wrists. Her mind opened for him more freely than it had the first time he was judged. Harrow sifted through her memories just as he had before, and while it remained a fundamentally unpleasant experience, it was a familiar one. Familiarity, for a human, is often synonymous with comfort—you know this, reader.

With a clank, the jaws of the two inky crocodiles fell shut, and the tattoo on Harrow's arm glowed green.

"Just as I thought," said Harrow warmly, patting the Thorn's cheek. "See? You have nothing to hide. Ammit sees only goodness, in your past as well as your future."

It isn't Ammit's opinion I care about, she thought so loudly that for a horrible moment she feared she might have said it out loud.

"And in your present," Harrow continued, nodding to the bowl of water on the floor, "there is true kindness. Selflessness. Tell me, would doing this make you happy?

"Would it help you?"

He didn't reply, only looked at her with eyes made of the cosmos. She took him shyly by the hand—by a couple of fingers, really—and led him to the chair. He sat and let her carefully remove one of his shoes.

She had thought herself prepared for the sight, but she was not. Reader, even I found it ghastly beyond compare. The sole of Harrow's foot was painted in more shades of red than the Thorn had known to exist—the deep burgundy of partially-healed scabs, the congealing crimsons, and the white-red-purple smears of orangey scarlet, which ran in rivulets through the forest of glass shards in various sizes that protruded from the skin like teeth.

The Thorn took a deep, shuddering breath. She blinked back a wall of tears, and took one of the bigger shards between her thumb and forefinger. She hesitated.

"It helps to pull quickly," said Harrow. His voice was calm, but his breathing was labored and his eyes shut tightly. The Thorn noticed how he gripped the arm of the chair; his knuckles were skeleton-white. He does this by himself, she realized with a pang, every day.

She pressed her lips together, closed her eyes, and pulled. The glass came out with a quiet squelch, followed by a small deluge of blood which landed in the bowl and painted an elegant wine-colored cloud in the water. A slight panic ran through the Thorn—she hadn't considered that such a strong current of blood could flow from so small a wound—and, Harrow's pain strangely inspiring her with confidence, she set to work removing the rest of the glass from his angry red skin as quickly as possible. That done, she gently dipped his foot in the bowl and let the water transform with billows of red.

"I wish I could make it hurt less," she said, wrapping his foot in the thin gray towel.

"That would defeat the purpose," Harrow replied. His face was glistening with sweat.

She wondered if he let himself cry out freely when he did this alone; if he was silent now simply for her benefit. The very thought of it filled her with a staggering, unyielding love. Removing the towel, she bent forward and pressed a soft, lingering kiss to the top of his foot.

"Tell me," said Harrow, his eyes still closed, "if the rest of our little community were to turn against me one day, what would you do?"

As startled as she was by the question, there was no need to think twice about the answer. "I would tell them to fuck off."

The corner of his mouth twitched, an almost-smile. "And if they were to do as you told them, and abandoned me all at once, then what would you do?"

"I'd stay with you." She slipped his other foot out of its sandal and began freeing it of glass.

"Why?"

Because I adore you. Because I desire you. Because I am nothing without you. "Because my research isn't finished yet."

She plucked the last shard from his skin, and lowered his foot into the reddened water. Harrow rested hand on her head, combing her hair back with his fingers.

"When I read the scales of my followers," he asked, "what do you think I see?"

She thought, absently caressing the towel over his foot as she did. "When you read mine," she finally said, "it felt like you were looking at a photo album of some kind, a series of pictures of everything that's ever happened in my life."

Harrow nodded. "A photo album…that's a fitting metaphor. And do you remember which of these 'pictures' of your life I—well, the fragment of Ammit working through me, that is—chose to view when deciding your fate?"

She thought very hard now. The judgment had passed so quickly, but she did recall a few standout memories that had seemed to linger. Standing, humiliated, on a chair in front of her fifth-grade class. Alone and terrified in the dark cave. Learning of Ro-Ro's death. The many, many endless nights alone at boarding school. Mourning Dr. El-Faouly. Missing her friend Marc. Loving Harrow in tormented silence, knowing his heart was already claimed by one she could never hope to match in power and majesty. Finding the community hall defiled with blood. That poor woman dying like an animal in front of her. The man in white, Khonshu's avatar, standing over Harrow, ready to kill.

"It's the bad stuff," she answered. "Ammit focuses on things that hurt us."

"Correct," said Harrow. "The 'bad stuff,' yes. The scales show me each person's catalog of sin and pain. Violence, death, disaster of all kinds, the sheer cruelty of other human beings…" He leaned forward and lifted the Thorn's chin, his fingers closing around her jaw. "Heartbreak. Pining after another in secret knowing your love to be unrequited."

She forced herself to look him in the eye, fearing that the slightest movement might inadvertently betray her feelings. "Why does Ammit care about other people's love lives?" she asked. "I mean, I can see her caring if someone's destined to, like, kill their ex or something, but just having feelings for someone and never doing anything about it, how is that sinful?"

"Because Ammit helps those who help themselves," he replied sagely.

"In my opinion, someone who knows their feelings can't be returned would be helping themselves by staying quiet about it."

"In your opinion?" he smiled sardonically. "As opposed to the 'opinion' of our goddess? I wasn't aware you had an arrogant streak, lamb."

She jerked her face out of his grasp. "I'm going to rinse out the bowl. It's disgusting." Guilt flicked at her heart for adding that second bit, as she had meant it to hurt him.

Harrow waited patiently for her to finish cleaning up. When she turned away from the sink, he was standing close to her, leaning on his cane, no less imposing in his bare (and still slightly oozing) feet.

"Please don't sneak up on me," the Thorn said in a voice that failed to match the defiance of its message. "It's inconsiderate."

"I never meant to upset you, my sweet," he told her. "Forgive me."

She couldn't look him in the eye. "You don't have to ask me to forgive you."

"You saved my life tonight," Harrow said, leaving a set of vaguely bloody footprints as he stepped toward her. "Don't think I've forgotten."

"I wouldn't put it like that. I barely even did anything."

"Even so," he was very close to her now, "I owe you my life." His fingertips brushed her face with feathery finesse. "I had a feeling I wouldn't regret welcoming you here. I felt it when you first spoke to me, that late night when you were so tired."

"Ammit felt it, you mean."

"No, my heart. Ammit only echoed what I already knew. And she did the same tonight, when I read your scales for the second time."

"What do you mean?" Her heart was absolutely pounding, reader.

"I've seen your heart," Harrow said, "not through your scales, but in your eyes. I'm not a young man, sweet lamb, and I know the look of one who has a favorite, treasured person who they long to be close to, hate and fear to be separated from, for reasons their poor, tortured heart can't fathom." He ran a hand through her hair and rested it on her back, pulling her close so that her face just barely brushed against the cool fabric of his shirt. "I feel your heart now, beating fast like a tiny bird's heart. Don't be nervous, little lamb, be happy; what you desire most is here, it's yours, all you need to do is embrace it. Accept it. Claim your happiness; it is your fate, which you rightly deserve."

Temptation grabbed at her, but it didn't have a hold yet. It would be so easy to give in and rest her exhausted head against his chest. It would feel so good to put her arms around him and let him fold her lovesick little body into his embrace. She might even let herself believe he loved her, and she actually made the slightest movement to touch him when the tattoo on her wrist caught her eye like an omen. The black scales, the two-headed crocodile. She knew now why she had allowed Harrow to brand her with this symbol: It was a reminder, and a promise. You came here for a reason, it seemed to lecture her, for research, and research only. You have no right to develop personal feelings for a primary research subject, a man who is effectively already taken by someone superior to you in every way.

He was correct in saying you have an arrogant streak; you would have to be arrogant to think even for a second that you might be able to compare with his goddess. You can never let yourself forget this, especially while in his company: You may be "worthy" of the scales, but you will never be worthy of his love.

She broke away from him. "I'm pretty sure 'fate' doesn't care about what the heart wants," she said. "It's been a long night, and I've still got blood on me. I'm going back to my room now."

Harrow studied her face. "As you wish. Sleep well; I won't forget tonight."

That's exactly what I'm afraid of, she retorted in her head before leaving and closing the door of the study with a soft, wooden clunk.

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 5: My little friend

"It had formerly been my endeavor to study all sides of his character: to take the bad with the good; and from the just weighing both, to form an equitable judgement. Now I saw no bad." -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

WARNINGS: Mild sexual content, Blood

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

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If one good thing can be said about the Thorn's time as one of the Followers of Ammit, it's that her physical health improved greatly and rapidly. Thanks to the fresh, home-grown produce, the yoga and pickup soccer games, and exposure to more fresh air than she'd seen in the past twenty years of her life combined, it was only a matter of months until she hardly recognized her own reflection in the mirror. Her eyes were brighter, the bags beneath them having all but vanished. She looked—and felt—alive.

Of course, while a healthy lifestyle is indeed beneficial to the human body, much of the Thorn's external transformation must really be owed to the superficial "glow" of infatuation. Reader, she was deeply, deeply in love. For reasons I will never understand, Arthur Harrow had come to be the center of her personal universe. She thought of him every moment, saw his face each time she closed her eyes. She imagined that the soft, gentle touches he often bestowed on her contained some kind of life-sustaining elixir; one touch would keep her going until the next one, and if she found herself devoid of Harrow's touches for too long, well…

The first morning she woke to find him gone from the community ("Well, it's not like he can spend all his time here, love. He's got communities like this all over the world to take care of," said the sweet woman serving her breakfast), she found herself so consumed with shock and anxiety that her head swam and she was forced to lie down. Never before had she so fully understood the concept of missing someone. It wasn't just Harrow that was far away, it was the greater part of her own self. This happened each time he traveled abroad: The Thorn would feign sickness, race to her room and succumb to an onslaught of tears that left her head throbbing and her body listless and hollow. The following days were spend in a melancholic fog until the return of the man she had unwittingly made into her personal god.

She knew she was really in trouble when her old nightmares of the deformed Randall Spector were gradually replaced by blissful dreams of being wrapped in Harrow's arms, his lips consecrating her neck and breasts, his strong hands exploring her waistline before dipping beneath the brim of her pants. She would often wake with a moan to find her hand between her legs and a sweet moistness decorating her fingers, her body celebrating with the warm, ecstatic tiredness of an orgasm she couldn't remember.

And that's not even the worst of it, reader: One winter night, as she was passing a donation bin wherein the community had been encouraged to deposit clothes for the homeless, she noticed the sleeve of one of Harrow's shirts resting over the corner. Scanning the vicinity—coast clear—she picked it up, buried her face in its fabric and inhaled. His scent still lingered; it was the smell of old books and parchment, of shadowy hallways and antiques and a subtle overtone of refined masculinity, all heightened by a conspicuous absence of any cologne or other artificial scents that might undermine the general clean, natural freshness of him. (That's what he smelled like to her, reader. Personally, I don't buy it. To me, he just smells like any other human, but, you know, who cares what Khonshu thinks? Whatever.)

Checking once more that she was completely alone, the Thorn slipped Harrow's shirt into her bag and carried it to her bedroom, where she guiltily stashed it under her pillow. On the occasions when her childhood nightmares returned to torment her and she woke with cries of fear and not ecstacy, she had only to pull the shirt from under her pillow and hold it to her face, and her heart would slow to normal as the sacred smell of the man she loved quieted her fears and soothed her back to sleep.

Do not let the still-fresh tattoo of the scales on her arm fool you, reader: The Thorn was never a worshippper of Ammit, despite the lie she so expertly performed while in Harrow's cult. The "deity" her heart chose to serve was, ironically, one of the most human of all human men who ever walked on Earth.

It had been nearly six months since the Thorn had come to stay with the community (and vowed never to fall for Harrow's manipulations). When she wasn't working on her dissertation, she was often summoned to assist Harrow in his efforts to find the location of the imprisoned Ammit. As the Thorn's scales had supposedly predicted, her presence proved invaluable to Harrow and his twisted mission. Her status as a doctoral student gained her access to research materials that would otherwise have been supremely difficult, if not downright impossible for Harrow and his other followers to acquire without committing some very noticeable crimes. Besides this, I must give credit where it's due: She was both knowledgeable and intelligent—not in an extraordinary way, but respectably so. Harrow frequently sought her counsel in regard to his mission, and it was on one of these occasions, sometime in January that—pardon the human slang, reader—shit started to go down.

Harrow greeted her at his study with a warm "come in" and a swift kiss on the cheek, and led her over to his desk. The manic brightness in his eyes and the jerkiness of his movements betrayed the excitement he was clearly fighting to contain: He had made a breakthrough.

"This text," he began, planting a finger on a photo in one of his books. "This is the one."

Her heart gave a single loud, fervent THMM like the beat of a battle drum. "It'll tell us the location of the tomb?"

"Yes," said Harrow. "According to this, it's being held at the Library of London."

"It's here? In the city?"

"Heaven is on our side, my sweet lamb." He cupped her face with both hands, a "signature move" of his that never failed to leave the Thorn weak in the knees. "Come with me," he told her, "and we will begin our holy pilgrimage together."

"Ugh, I hate the way he talks. Who does he think he is? No—the more pressing question is, how did I make it through the ten years in which he was my avatar without grabbing him by the throat and squeezing the life out of his pretentious little body?

Ahem. Anyway…

To the Thorn's utter elation, Harrow didn't invite anyone else to come along with them to the Library of London. They set out at the break of dawn, during the hour when the streets of London were shadowed in shades of turquoise and a pale halo struggled to crawl over the skyline. There was snow on the ground, for which the Thorn was grateful as the crunch of it partially camouflaged the sound of clattering glass inside Harrow's brown boots.

The Library of London, as the reader may or may not already be aware, isn't a typical library. It is partially a museum dedicated to "precious" and "historically significant" samples of human writing and art which, to my godly eyes, appear more or less equal to every other piece of human creation in terms of mediocrity. The text which Harrow and the Thorn sought was, luckily for them, not one of the artifacts featured in the museum. It was a fairly obscure document dating from the Late Period, just after the death of Alexander the Annoying, written in black ink on papyrus paper. Unbeknownst to the curators of the Library, this unassuming little sheet of papyrus, tucked away in the darkest shadows of the archives, was one of the most dangerous documents ever written.

The lobby was enshrined in white scholarly marble and hard, shining floors, and that uniquely "museum-y" kind of silence that the Thorn found equally enthralling and unnerving, disturbed only by the rhythmic bnk of Harrow's cane. The front desk abandoned, their only company was an endearingly unkempt young man whose nervously bouncing knees threatened to upset the thin portfolio he held on his lap.

The Thorn's gaze attached itself to the man, and wouldn't budge. She knew those fidgety hands, those dark curls, the adventurous face with its friendly, lopsided mouth and long eyelashes. Gods knew the last thing she needed right then was an awkward encounter, but alas…

"Marc?!"

The achingly familiar brown eyes turned to her. They blinked. "M…arc?"

"Marc? It's me," and she said her name, "don't you remember? We were neighbors in Chicago."

"S-sorry, I think you've got the wrong bloke," he quavered. "The name's Steven, actually—I'm here for my interview?" He waved his portfolio as if offering proof of his interviewee status. "I've never been to Chicago, actually, but I hear it's lovely. Lot's of trains, and…baseball, I think—oh, and that bean! Wait, is the bean in Chicago or New York? Oh, bullocks, my mind's all over the place today, must be the nerves…"

"Never mind," the Thorn interrupted. "I'm so sorry, I wouldn't have said anything if—I mean, you look just like someone I used to know. But he's not British, so it can't be—never mind."

"Oh," said Steven Grant, with genuine regret. "Sorry, love. Well, I hope you find him."

"Thanks," she said. "Good luck with your interview."

Behind her, Harrow said her name quite loudly. "Do you know this man?" he asked, an unmistakable tension lacing his voice. He was looking at Steven with something close to hatred.

"No," she replied hastily, turning away, just wanting the whole embarrassing episode to be over. "I thought so, but…no."

Mercifully, it was at that moment when Steven was called to his interview, which would actually turn out to be a less stressful ordeal than the one he'd just escaped. (No, reader, of course he didn't get the job—what an idiotic question to ask.)

Harrow put a hand under the Thorn's chin, tilting it up to face him. "What did he say to you?" he demanded in a soft growl.

Her heart quickened its pace. "N-not really anything, just that he wasn't who I thought he was, and that he's here for an interview."

"If that's true, then why are you crying?"

She lifted a tentative finger to her cheek, and it came away glistening with salty wetness. "I…don't know." She laughed nervously, blinked, and more tears fell. "I really don't."

Harrow's eyes were deep with distress. His mouth quivered ever so slightly. He took her hand, kissed it, and held it against his heart. "Promise me," he said, "promise that you will always come to me when you're in pain."

She was seized by a bizarre impulse to laugh, which she firmly resisted. If he only knew that she had already made a million such promises in her heart, that everything she was and ever would be was promised to him, as far as she was concerned.

"Of course," was what she said out loud.

At this he seemed to relax, but maintained a firm grip on her hand. "You are so precious," he whispered, trancelike. He closed his eyes, putting her hand on his cheek, leaning against it. "Such a precious little thing. If I could take that pain of yours, and carry it for you so that you could live free of any burdens," he opened his eyes and looked at her with a steady, unblinking gaze, "I want you to know that I would."

"But then who would carry your burdens?" she asked, thinking of the glass in his shoes.

He gave no answer, only brushed his fingers across her face, banishing the remaining tears one by one. "All better," he said with a smile.

"Can I help you?" said a male voice behind them.

"Yes!" said the Thorn, too eagerly. She broke away from Harrow and approached the desk. "I'm the Lowood University student who called yesterday to ask about viewing the rare books archive?"

The man at the desk ("R. Mason, Collections Manager," read his nametag) nodded. "Yes, I remember you. Student ID?"

She slid the card across the desk. Mason inspected it briefly and handed it back to her. "You're all set. And I take it your father will be joining us?"

"Sorry?"

Harrow stepped forward. "I'm afraid you're mistaken, sir. I'm an associate of hers."

If the brief meeting with the man-who-was-not-Marc had left the Thorn shaken, it was this exchange that finally broke her apart. Standing, crestfallen, amid the remains of the lies she had been telling herself for months, she felt that she was seeing clearly for the first time since she'd arrived in London. What right did she, of all people, have to fall in love with someone like Harrow? Someone old enough to be mistaken for her father? How naïve was she to believe it even mildly possible that he could come to love or even respect her in return? In his own words, she was an associate—nothing more, nothing less. In a few months' time she would complete her research and he would no longer be obligated to house her in his community, and then he would be free to turn her away into the cold, ugly world with nothing more than a handshake to commemorate their precious time together.

As Mason led them to the archive, Harrow put a gentle hand on the Thorn's shoulder. She shrugged it away.

"This manuscript was thought to be lost when the original copy was destroyed in the Library of Alexandria," Mason explained as he guided them through the forest of books, "but then a copy was discovered just a couple hundred years ago, hidden in the sarcophagus of an obscure Egyptian priest."

"Sounds about right," said the Thorn.

"This is it." Mason pulled a pair of sanitary gloves over his hands before taking the surprisingly large scroll and carrying it, so delicately one might assume it was in danger of exploding, into a small, gray room occupied only by a large and brightly-lit table. He spread the golden-brown, wrinkled papyrus under the lights. "If you must touch the papyrus, please do so with these gloves," he said, setting down two pairs of gloves identical to his. "I'm afraid protocol says you can't be in here alone with it, so I'll have to stay in the room—but I'll be right over there in the corner, and you won't even know I'm here."

Harrow's face soured as he regarded Mason, and the Thorn watched his hand tighten around the head of his cane. "He's just doing his job," she said, grabbing his arm. "We'll speak softly."

She scanned the ancient papyrus, suddenly noting the careful lyricism of the script. "Shit," she said, less quietly than she had intended, "it's written in hieratic. I suck at hieratic—it'll take me forever to read this." Shame pricked at her heart like a tiny electric shock ("why didn't you work harder at learning to read hieratic before you got here? incompetent, idiotic excuse for a historian you are").

"Let me," said Harrow, bending over the document. As he began to read, his face all at once came to life with a flame of quiet rapture.

"What if you miss something I would have picked up on?" asked the Thorn.

"I will not miss anything," he said with rumbling finality. End of discussion.

Chastened, and with a humiliating feeling of uselessness, the Thorn sat back in her chair and watched Harrow study the ancient manuscript.

There are few elements of humanity that are more beautiful to behold than passion in its purest, rawest form. No, reader, I don't necessarily mean the "moaning and clutching at bed sheets" kind of passion, though I'm sure that's nice too. In this case, I'm referring to the sort of passion a human will have for a career, or a hobby, or just a particular task they find invigorating. There's something beautifully pathetic in the way the whole self will narrow to the subject at hand—take, for instance, Steven Grant's ritual studying of the hieroglyphic alphabet late at night. He makes strange faces, sometimes talking or whispering to himself. His eyes squint behind his idiotic reading glasses. His hands roam the pages of his books, dragging the occasional yellow burst of highlighter across the word or phrase he finds interesting. Beautifully, tragically pathetic.

Contrast this scenario to our current scene: Harrow studying the ancient scroll. There was nothing beautifully pathetic about this display. "Passion" is far too mild of a descriptor for what this wretched man was doing. This was zealousness, obsession—a perverse, sickening thing to watch. The last time I saw a human with that look on their face, reader, that human ended up dead from twenty-three stab wounds in the middle of the Roman Senate. The Thorn, who was not oblivious to the unnatural expression on Harrow's face, dared not interrupt him to ask if he had found the information they both sought. After an age of torturous silence, he spoke at last:

"Yes."

"You found it? The location?" the Thorn asked.

Harrow looked at her. The ghost of a hungry, lustful smile rendered his face an inhuman sculpture. A gargoyle. "Oh, it won't be that easy," he said. "The great pilgrimage is only beginning, my jewel…but we are one step closer to knowing exactly where it begins."

"Excuse me," interrupted R. Mason, Collections Manager, emerging from his corner. "If I may ask, what exactly are you two researching?" Everything about this poor man, from his voice to his wide eyes to his unsteady hands, was coated with a mixture of suspicion and fear.

"I—" the Thorn began before Harrow cut her off.

"My colleague is studying the goddess Ammit for her doctoral dissertation," he explained.

"Your 'colleague' hasn't done anything but sit there for the past hour while you looked at the document," argued Mason (that poor, doomed man). He fixed his eyes on the Thorn. "Ma'am, what in particular is the focus of your research on Ammit?"

The Thorn tried again. "I—"

Harrow said her name. "Why don't you go and fetch the portfolio that you left in the locker downstairs?"

"What p—" she began, but in Harrow's eyes she read a clear warning: Go, and do not argue.

She did as she was told. Reader, given your prior knowledge of Harrow's wickedness, I'm sure you can intuit what happened next. I don't need to clarify the source of the thud she heard on the other side of the reading room door, the thud of something that had been a "he" and was now a mere "it." A softer thud than one would have expected, given R. Mason's height and weight—perhaps the human soul weighs even less than is commonly thought.

You may be wondering now (and may have already been wondering) how the Thorn could harbor such deep romantic love for Harrow while knowing he was a serial murderer. The answer is simple: She didn't know. Miraculously, after being alive for nearly thirty years, and living with the Followers of Ammit for half of one of those years, the Thorn still had yet to witness the death of another human being. This fact would change later that very night…but we're not there quite yet.

The rest of the day was spent with Harrow in his study, combing through books and internet archives, searching for any sign of the scarab-shaped compass that, according to the document they viewed at the library, would lead them to Ammit's tomb. The internet archives were the Thorn's idea, as Harrow was strangely aloof concerning the topic of the internet. He frequently seemed to forget its existence entirely, appearing ignorant of the many advantages it could offer him as both a scholar and a cult leader (I mean, even I know those things, and I'm not even human).

"Arthur," the Thorn said after a long silence, embracing the feel of his name in her mouth, "you have followers in Switzerland, right?"

"Yes," he replied without looking up from his own research.

"Look," she said, carrying her laptop over to him, "this has to be the scarab described in that document, right? It's in a museum in Bern."

"Let me see," Harrow carefully took the computer from her hands and studied the photo on the museum's website. "I think you're right," he said with an inspired smile. "We must act quickly to retrieve it—it's in a traveling exhibit at the Kunstmuseum until the end of the month." He was reading from a blurb under the photo. "After that, it'll be transferred back to the private residence of its owner, a man named Anton Mogart."

"Wouldn't it be easier to rob a private residene than a museum?" asked the Thorn. "Maybe we should wait to go after the scarab until next month."

"Oh, my lamb," Harrow laughed softly, "who ever said we were planning on robbing anyone? We're going to buy the scarab—well, barter for it, to be exact."

"Barter? With what?"

With a sweeping gesture, Harrow indicated the creepy collection of treasures that filled his "man-cave."

"Those? Those are…you know, real?" She'd always assumed they were replicas, if she thought of them at all—which, to be honest, she rarely did.

"Of course. What else would they be?"

"But how did you…I mean, those statues must be expensive as hell!" She knew he had accumulated some wealth over the years (hello, private plane), but to acquire a whole room full of genuine ancient sculptures he would need countless millions, at least.

A shadow crossed Harrow's face. "When I worked for Khonshu, I explored many ancient tombs, temples, palaces, et cetera. I'm very ashamed of it now, of course, but at the time it seemed a bit of a waste to come away empty-handed."

The Thorn was awestruck. "Oh my god," she said, "you were a vandal! A literal 'tomb buster!' …Sorry," she added hastily, seeing the very real shame in his eyes.

"That's correct," he said. "A vandal. But now, I have been blessed with an opportunity to put this sin to use for the greater good. The Kunstmuseum—well, Anton Mogart, to be exact—will doubtless take a few of those ill-gotten treasures in exchange for the scarab."

"Wow," she said, unable to think of anything more fitting to say. "Wow. I mean, this is…this is…"

"Yes," said Harrow. "It is." He closed the laptop and stood up. "I'll send Bobbi and Billy to the museum; they can confirm for us that the scarab is there. Once we have this confirmation, you and I will follow them to Bern and obtain the scarab."

"You and I?"

"Naturally. I would have no one else with me on this most fateful of missions." He stepped forward and took her face in his hands. "My strange, precious little dove."

Reader, in this moment it was harder than ever for the Thorn to tell herself the falsehood that her love for Harrow was unrequited. It took all the self-restraint in her pathetic little heart to avoid his eyes, fearing that if she returned his searing gaze her feelings would suddenly be known to him.

"I'm tired," she said. "I'm going to bed early."

Harrow leaned toward her. She reflexively closed her eyes in a moment of combined terror and excitement—but the kiss was for her forehead, not her lips.

"Good night, then, my…" Harrow trailed off. He covered his face with a hand and turned away."

That night, the Thorn's unquiet mind presented her with a new dream: She saw the community of the Followers of Ammit in ruins. Rivers of thin leftover smoke streamed in and out of the small blackened towers of brick, and rats were already beginning to pick apart what little flesh remained intact on the charred bodies. She woke with a dry sob, clutching Harrow's shirt to her chest. Turning over, she buried her face in the fabric and lustfully breathed in the scent of him the way a desert castaway might slurp the waters of an oasis.

As her breathing quieted, it gradually dawned on her that things were not right—very wrong, in fact. She remembered, for the first time in years, the terrifying pre-seizure feeling that had overtaken her in the cave as a child. WRONG. This was the same feeling, but no seizure came to relieve it.

Then she heard the distant screams.

With the throbbing premonition that she should not do this, she got up and approached her bedroom windows. She looked down onto the street. Empty. The screams continued—the hall, she realized with a sickening lurch, and tore out of her room and down the stairs. Reader, I don't know why she ran down to the hall. She knew that whatever was causing the screams was likely to be something which she had not the slightest power or expertise to handle on her own. But human nature is exhaustingly predictable, and the "hmm, I wonder what that weirdness could be?" instinct reigns supreme, without fail, above all reason and logic.

The "weirdness," in this case, was a lot of blood, more than the Thorn had ever seen in one place. It splattered the walls, pooled in thick scarlety swamps on the floor, and flowed primarily from the bodies that littered the disastrous scene, most of which were sprawled over the tables, apparently interrupted during a carefree, impromptu late-night meal.

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 4: His character is unimpeachable

"'You are human and fallible.'

"'I am: so are you—what then?'

"'The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted.'

"'What power?'

"'That of saying of any strange, unsanctioned line of action: "Let it be right."'

-Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

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She woke the next day in a small, square, dormitory-like room made golden by late morning sunlight. The events of yesterday came back to her slowly, in still images, and the first intelligent decision she made was the following: I need to write it down, all of it. Before I forget, but more importantly, before today's events can shade or confuse the memories.

So, as the late-morning glow harshened to the glare of early afternoon, the Thorn wrote. She left nothing out, from the fateful encounter with Fitzgerald in the coffee shop, to the unsettling car ride through London. Of course, she took particular care with her account of the first meeting with Harrow. I was pulled under his spell, she confessed, I'm ashamed to say it, you have no idea how ashamed and embarrassed I feel just thinking about it, but yeah, he got me. It wasn't even ten minutes before I was eating soup with him while wearing his jacket, and letting him tell me all about…

Here, she stopped. What had he told her? The closer she tried to look at the barely-twelve-hour-old memory, the blurrier it appeared. She remembered the sound of Harrow's voice, the warmth of it, the softness of his occasional touches which always accompanied one of those mystical half-smiles. She could hear him as clearly as if he were whispering in her ear now, but she could recall none of his words from last night. She wrapped her head in her hands, overcome with frustration at her own weakness. A man with an interesting face and an alluring smile showed her the barest minimum of attention required by etiquette, and she all but abandoned her research in favor of basking in the excitement of being cared for. Some scholar she was.

A businesslike knock on the door roused her. "Yes?" she called out in the awkward tone of someone interrupted in a public bathroom.

"Bobbi Kennedy here," came the reply. "Harrow wants to see you, soon as you're dressed. He said don't worry about breakfast."

Reader, if while reading this you've found yourself thinking along the same lines as the Thorn, then you may at this very moment be wondering if there was a hidden camera in her room. Harrow knew, somehow, that she had yet to get dressed and eat breakfast, though it was past one o'clock in the afternoon, and it was with a creepy feeling of "!!!!!" that the Thorn frantically turned her head back and forth to scan the corners of the ceiling for surveillance equipment. There was none.

That is to say, there were no technological privacy violations. However, the room she slept in, while modest in every other respect, had two luxuriously large, uncurtained windows through which one could see quite clearly from the building on the opposite side of the street. A loyal follower who had a view of the Thorn from their own window reported to Harrow that they had "caught a glimpse" of her asleep in her bed at about eight o'clock, and as the morning wore on, other followers would give similar reports on the Thorn's activities, so that Harrow had no need of video evidence to confirm that she was awake, in her pajamas, and typing, trancelike, on her laptop. She dressed hurriedly, and followed Bobbi upstairs to Harrow's study (or "man-cave," as my readers may know it).

The study was equal parts comfortable and creepy. There was a desk piled with books, a pair of worn leather chairs, and a faded rug—all items one would expect to see in a human man's personal office. However, there was also a small army of Egyptian statues temporarily mummified in plastic wrap, and a taxidermied crocodile suspended from the ceiling. One can tell a lot about a person from the way they decorate their personal space, and this room was the spatial embodiment of Harrow: Comfortable and warm, yet strange, distant, bizarre.

…And there was the man himself, enshrined in one of the two leather chairs, one hand clutching a mug of something hot and steaming, the other closed around the double head of his cane. His back was to the Thorn; she saw the cane first, then a few gray wisps of hair, then a sliver of profile.

He came to life with an affected start: The performance had begun.

"Excuse me," he said with a polite chuckle, "I was lost in thought—didn't mean to keep you waiting," setting the mug down, rising to his feet with the help of his cane, taking her hand and bestowing a hasty kiss on her knuckles. "Sit down, please," he indicated the other chair, and she sat. "I thought you might want to sleep in after your late night yesterday, so I saved some breakfast for you. Take whatever you'd like."

It was more than "some" breakfast—the spread was more than the Thorn had ever eaten in one sitting. Muttering a cursory "thank you," she fixed herself a small plate. Harrow watched her eat, a smile on his lips and a maddening nothing in his eyes.

"We prepare most of our own food here," he said, "we grow a lot of it, in fact. You'll be expected to help out where you can, naturally."

She nodded, finishing up the last of her food. Bobbi, sentinel-like in the doorway, rushed to take her plate and the rest of the uneaten food, and disappeared into the hall.

"Now," smiled Harrow, rising again and gesturing for the Thorn to do the same, "before anything else, I'm afraid we must get this over with…" He began rolling up the right sleeve of his forest green tunic.

"Wh-" she started, and the question froze on her lips as her hands were taken from her and the head of the cane balanced neatly between her wrists (you know the drill, reader). Is this some kind of hazing? she wondered, a wave of panic telling her to pull away from Harrow, to run as far as she could, but before she could act on the impulse, the tattoo on Harrow's arm had already begun to swing methodically back and forth. She didn't know it, but the Thorn was on trial for her life.

I, of course, have never been subject to Harrow's bizarre "judgment" routine, so I cannot speak from personal experience. However, I will try and describe as accurately as possible what the Thorn was experiencing during those agonizingly long few seconds:

Her life was a photo album in Harrow's mind, and he was rifling through it feverishly, without regard for either chronology or privacy. The images passed by so quickly, the Thorn found it impossible to fix her mind on any of them long enough to really look, but even so, she had an eerie feeling that some depicted events that had yet to occur. She started to feel sick. Get out, she wanted to scream, get out of my head, get out of my soul—

But then, it was over. That smile again, and those eyes fixed right on hers; his approving gaze penetrated every part of her. "This," he said with a tearful catch in his voice, "is the face of a good woman."

Now she pulled away, yanking free from his grasp and taking several hurried steps backward. The cane clattered to the floor, and the scales on Harrow's arm faded from green to black. The Thorn all but cowered behind her chair, looking at Harrow as if he had struck her with an iron rod.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "Aren't you happy?"

"Why did you say that?" the Thorn demanded. She clutched her hands to her chest in a vain attempt to stop them from trembling.

"The scales have judged you as good," Harrow replied calmly. "Our goddess claims you as one of her own. This is cause for celebration, not fear." A deep, genuine concern was in every line of his face as he picked up his cane and went over to the Thorn. He reached out to her.

"Don't touch me," she said loudly.

His hand stopped an inch from her hair. "All right," he said. He returned to his chair, took a long, thoughtful sip of his beverage, and simply waited for her to calm herself long enough to regain control of her legs and sit back down across from him.

"I've known some people to have adverse reactions to the judgment," Harrow told her, "but never one quite like that, and especially not in response to a positive verdict."

Is that supposed to be a compliment? she wondered, studying her lap.

"Given what I saw through your scales—the life you've led—I can't say I'm too surprised," he continued. "You've never been told that you're a good person, have you?"

She looked around for something to fix her eyes on, anything but that impossible face of his.

"…But the scales see everything, and they do not, cannot lie."

Her gaze landed on the desk behind him, piled high with books. Most of the spines faced away from her, but the titles she could read from the chair looked intriguing.

"Why was it such a shock for you to hear me say those words? Do you know why you found that so upsetting?" His voice was saturated with caring, and reader, here is one of the truest and most terrifying facts about Arthur Harrow: He really does care about other humans.

Shock was indeed the perfect word to describe that feeling. The Thorn had felt as though her universe were turned on its head. Everything she thought she knew about herself—demon child, etc.—had all of it been lies? What was she, if not evil at her core? And who did this man think he was, to tell her she was good? Did she even know how to be good? Nice, maybe. Polite, sure…but good?

Her name floated across the air to her in Harrow's voice, barely louder than a whisper. The softness of it, the sheer intimacy of her name spoken with such care, was more than her weak human heart could understand or endure. She grabbed at the sound of it, held it, tucked it away in her heart where it could never be stolen from her. Remember this, something unconsciously said within her, this feeling, this tiniest of moments, remember it and don't let it go.

The moment passed, and with it the feeling of reverence she held toward the sound of Harrow speaking her name. The feeling hidden safely away, she found she could speak again:

"Whatever happened in my past to make me feel this way, it's none of your business. Please don't bring it up again." She looked at him, and a silent contract passed between them.

"Yes," said Harrow, "I understand."

And he did understand. As hard as it is to believe, reader, it is imperative to your reading of this story that you see Harrow as a product of his fatal flaw: His empathy. In a way, reading the scales of other humans was what truly ruined him. If Ammit had to enact this power through any human, she should have chosen one with a more stoic heart than Harrow's. Have you ever watched someone be stoned to death, reader? If you haven't seen it, you can't possibly have a true comprehension of what so many individual smaller pains, inflicted one after the other, can do to a human body. Imagine it; just do your best—I'll step back for a moment and let your mind paint you a picture.

…Do you see it? Yes, I suppose that's close enough.

That is, more or less, a sped-up version of what reading scales and judging the unworthy had done to Harrow's soul by the time he met the Thorn. Living one life after another in fast motion as the scales kept meticulous score of each human's morality, he was forced to suffer by proxy, one metaphorical stone's throw after another. But don't feel sorry for him—he deserved it. He deserves much, much worse.

The Thorn thanked him; now more or less on equal terms, the two were ready to have a conversation.

"Let's start over," said Harrow. "Why don't you tell me about yourself—only as much as you're comfortable with me knowing."

She had anticipated this question, and silently rehearsed her answer before going to sleep the previous night. "I'm a PhD candidate studying cultural anthropology at Lowood University, and I've come to London in order to conduct research for my dissertation on the cult of Ammit in the twenty-first century." Yes, she was intentional in her use of the word "cult." She was curious, what kind of reaction might it elicit from Harrow?

As it turned out, no reaction at all. So, she concluded, he's not in denial about the fact that he's leading a cult. Interesting.

"That's all?" Harrow asked, cocking his head slightly. "Is there nothing else you'd like me to know about yourself?"

"Nothing else you need to know. I'm the one who's interviewing you, remember."

Harrow smiled—damn that alluring, inscrutable smile—and gestured for her to continue. "Well, then," he said, "interview me."

She swallowed. Here was the embarrassing truth: She had never conducted an interview before.

"Let's start with…with that," she gestured with an absurd waggle of a finger to the cane in Harrow's hand. "What is it? Where did it come from, and how does it do that…stuff?"

The smile was amused now. So much for "equal terms"—he sees me as a child. "That's quite a story, actually," He said, taking the cane in both hands and stroking it admiringly. "How skilled are you at suspending your sense of disbelief?"

If he'd asked earlier, the question might have thrown her off her guard. But she was finally growing accustomed to Harrow's strangeness, and so it was after only a small pause that she replied, "well, I do specialize in ancient theology."

Harrow laughed, really laughed this time, smiling with his whole mouth. His teeth were conspicuously crooked in a way that surprisingly brought the rest of him down to earth. He was a normal person now, just an eccentric, aging man with an odd hobby, laughing at a not-really-that-funny joke.

"That was a good answer," he said, still laughing.

The Thorn found herself smiling with him. Reader, I've heard humans say that the moment of falling in love is a beautiful thing, especially in the case of one's First Love. Here, once again, I must staunchly disagree with the humans. In my own experience, there are few sensations more uncomfortable than watching someone fall in love against their better judgment, and, in this case, without their own knowledge. Since the moment she met Harrow, the barbed wire of First Love had been slowly snaking a prison around her heart; now its sharp points dug in. No going back.

Harrow let his laughter die away. "Where were we?"

"Your cane," she reminded him. "You said there's quite a story."

"Oh, yes. If you don't mind my asking, how old are you?"

"Twenty-six."

"Then I was around your age when I began working as a prosecutor in the United States. My first case was just tragic; something unforgivable had been done to a young girl, but the defense insisted there was not enough evidence to convict her attacker. I had taken the case on for free—the girl's family couldn't afford to pay, and I couldn't bring myself to reject them—so I was poor, hardly eating or sleeping, always thinking about how I could bring justice to this poor child. It was when I was at my lowest point, almost ready to give up, that the god Khonshu appeared to me and offered what, at the time, seemed a miraculous solution."

The god Khonshu. She turned the words over in her head, seasoning them in disbelief. Dr. El-Faouly had once told her, "a good scholar doesn't rule out any possibility. No matter how absurd it may seem, even if others ridicule you for it, promise me you will always give the benefit of the doubt." These words came to her now in the voice of her late mentor. They grappled with her initial doubt, and emerged victorious.

She nodded to Harrow, who had paused after noticing the look on her face. "Keep going," she said. "What did…Khonshu say?"

"Now, I'm not proud of this. It happens to be one of my greatest sources of shame," said Harrow, "but keep in mind that I was young, and worn down, and desperate for justice." He looked pleadingly at the Thorn.

She said nothing.

"Khonshu offered me a deal. In exchange for my service to him, he would allow me to distribute righteous justice not only for this particular young girl, but to all victims of violence and abuse, all across the world. I became his avatar. He called me his 'Fist of Vengeance.'"

All right, reader, I know what you're thinking. Look, I regret taking Harrow on as my avatar just as much as he regrets binding himself to me. The man is an absolute loon, and I never should have approached him just because I was bored and wanted a shiny new avatar to show off to the other gods. It was a mistake. I'm not proud of it. I wish I could take it all back, et cetera.

"Your service to him? What exactly did he mean by 'service?'" the Thorn asked. A terrible feeling grew in her stomach like mold as she anticipated the answer.

"My duty was to deal out the ultimate punishment on Khonshu's behalf; to 'eradicate only the worst,' as he put it.'"

"…Murder."

Harrow's eyes filled up with the past. "Yes."

"And what does all this have to do with the cane?"

Reader, permit me this brief disclaimer: Everything Harrow said to her next, the story he told the Thorn of how the staff of Ammit came into his possession, and my integral role in this story, is true. However, know that not a day has gone by since then in which I have not felt regret, fury at my former self, and even the closest thing to shame that is possible for a god to feel, when I think of it. Do not judge me, reader. There is no need; I have, and will continue to judge myself as harshly as I deserve for this, until the end of time.

"Khonshu had told me that his sole purpose was to protect the travelers of the night," Harrow said. "That wasn't the truth—well, not the whole truth. Khonshu was using me to distribute murder and agony across the globe, but I was also an excuse to pursue the resting place of Ammit's ushabti. I had noticed that every 'outing' Khonshu sent me on, we tended to end up at an ancient religious site, usually a tomb, and almost always in the Middle East or Mediterranean. While I fought and killed on behalf of his 'travelers of the night,' he would disappear, appearing to search for something. I finally worked up the nerve to confront him about it, and that was when everything changed. He told me about Ammit.

"Khonshu described Ammit as a villain, a monster, but I heard the truth behind his words spoken in bitterness. Ammit, I realized, is the very deity that the human race needs now more than ever. Khonshu dislikes her because she has the ability to do what he cannot: To completely eradicate evil, once and for all."

The Thorn nodded. "I know all about Ammit," she said impatiently, "this is my area of expertise, remember? What I asked you about was, again, that cane. I can see by the design that it has something to do with her. Is it a relic of some kind?"

"In a way, yes. Khonshu tasked me with recovering it from the Tomb of Cyrus—Cyrus was once the avatar of Ammit—and bringing it to him to be destroyed."

She remembered being a young teenager, just starting to pay attention to the news, and hearing that an important tomb in Iran had been ransacked. The American military, for obvious reasons, was blamed for the incident. While studying at university, years later, she came across the story again. Its significance was made real to her by several years' gain in wisdom and knowledge of the ancient world.

"I take it things didn't quite go Khonshu's way," she said, gesturing toward the very-much-not-destroyed cane in Harrow's lap.

"No," said Harrow. "The moment I held this cane for the first time, in the damp silence of Cyrus' ancient tomb, Ammit spoke to me. I felt her calling to me through the cane, imploring me to devote my life to serving her, to use the small piece of herself she left in this sacred artifact to judge human souls and punish them when necessary, to gather followers to her cause, and most importantly, to find and release her from her stone prison. Ammit will be reborn," he preached in a soft growl, adding the Thorn's name. He got up and knelt before her, laying a tentative hand on her arm. Don't touch me, she had said not five minutes before, but now she said nothing, felt nothing as Harrow reached out to her with his cane and stroked the side of her cheek with the rough marble of its double-sided crocodile head.

He said her name again. "You say you've come here so that I could be of service to you in your studies. Forgive me, but your scales say otherwise. You will be of service to me."

He's batshit crazy! she thought with horror.

He took her hand and kissed it, an obsessive fervor haunting his deep blue eyes. The head of his cane came to rest on her forearm. She knew what was coming, and that it wasn't too late to prevent it. She would only have to pull her arm away, say "no," and book a cheap flight back home.

Reader, do you recall when, in the previous chapter, I discussed the sad universal truth of humans and cults? As you probably surmised, the Thorn is no exception to this truth. To be perfectly frank, she had never stood a chance against Harrow's masterful manipulation. Well, she told herself, if nothing else, this'll make for a damn fascinating dissertation.

"Praise Ammit," she said out loud, and watched with silent, sickening rapture as the inky black scales appeared on her skin.

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 3: The promise of a smooth career

"'What do I want? A new place, in a new house, amongst new faces, under new circumstances: I want this because it is of no use wanting anything better. How do people do to get a new place? They apply to friends, I suppose: I have no friends. There are many others who have no friends, who must look about for themselves and be their own helpers; and what is their resource?'" -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

WARNINGS: Self-harm; Implied/referenced self-harm (crunch, crunch...)

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

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As disclaimed at the close of the previous chapter, I feel it necessary to pass over the sixteen years of the Thorn's life which are not directly relevant to the story I wish to tell. That being said, a lot can change for a human in the space of sixteen years, therefore, it is only appropriate that I provide a brief synopsis, or, shall we say, a "highlight reel" of the period between the Thorn's departure for boarding school and the onset of her work with the Followers of Ammit. Fortunately for you, impatient reader, the highlights are few and far between.

The Thorn was careful to keep a low profile at her new school, where she was a moderately successful student and generally liked by her peers and teachers. She rarely spoke out loud in class, always wore thick, baggy jeans regardless of the weather, and insisted, to the great annoyance of her dorm mother, on sleeping with the light on in her room. Even in the yellowy garishness, her unconscious mind tormented her on the regular with the same dream which bordered on being a nightmare: Fighting in vain against a violent rainstorm (it may have been a hurricane), she clutched a bundle of soaked blankets to her chest and pushed through the icy wind until it blew the top blanket away and she saw, with horror, that it was Randall she was carrying, gaunt and shrunken and no longer human.

While it wasn't exactly a happy life, it was a stable, predictable one, and in this way the Thorn grew like any other human until she reached the age of seventeen and was obligated to forsake the monotonous comfort of routine and plan for the next stage of her life. In keeping with the conventions of her society, she applied to several universities with reputable departments in her chosen area of study (anthropology, of course). Of these universities, only one accepted the Thorn's application, which at least saved her the trouble of making a difficult decision of her own.

It was when she was mailing the first of many tedious bureaucratic informational packets to this university, that she received the envelope. Addressed to her, not in the impersonal typed font of a university admissions office, nor in the handwriting of either of the two women who were the only people ever to write to her (the Mother, in tall, narrow, slightly backwards-leaning capital letters; or Dr. Temple, whose friendly, loopy cursive occasionally checked in on the Thorn's general well-being), this writing was cramped, nervous, the handwriting of someone old and broken. A curious glance at the return address, and she nearly dropped the envelope in shock. She had had no contact of any kind with the Spectors since the curt thank-you she received from Wendy in response to a sympathy card sent after Randall's death, and even before that she had only vague memories of Elias—and yet, there was Elias' name, his handwriting, a message of some kind for her inside the envelope, which she now tore open with quivering hands.

A photo fell out of the envelope and spun to the dingy carpeted floor of the school post office. No careful inspection of the face in the photo was necessary; the childlike roundness had fallen away, and the eyes were awash with the blankness of one who had let a part of his own soul wash away with the life of his brother. Still, it was undeniably a teenaged Marc Spector who stared up at her.

The Thorn pocketed the photo, refusing to allow herself to feel, so busy picturing her heart bound up with duct tape and "KEEP OUT!" signs that she neglected to turn the photo over and read the message on the back. Even if she'd read it, she would have had no answer to give Elias, who had appealed to the Thorn out of desperation for knowledge of Marc's whereabouts ("I beg you, please, just tell me if you've seen him, if you know anything. All I want is to know that my son is safe, wherever he is, and that he has someone to take care of him").

She stuffed the photo into her wallet, and thought no more of it.

The Thorn finished her undergraduate studies with modest success, then went on to complete a Master's degree. She narrowed her focus to the study of cultural anthropology, then further narrowed it to the study of ancient religions, and by the time she began contemplating a PhD, she had become something of a minor specialist in the field. Her thesis, "The Egyptian Pantheon in Modern Society," garnered a lukewarm reception at the university, but was later published in an obscure academic journal, where it reached the desk of eccentric archaeologist Abdallah El-Faouly. Dr. El-Faouly reached out to the Thorn via email, and a mutually enriching virtual mentorship followed for little over a year, until it was cut short by El-Faouly's untimely death. Prior to his demise, however, he had written a glowing letter of recommendation on the Thorn's behalf, which secured her admission to Lowood University as a PhD candidate.

As is so often the case with graduate students, the Thorn's fate rested almost entirely on her dissertation. Her original proposal topic, the worship of Egyptian gods in modern society was turned down ("too broad"); at the recommendation of her advisor, she sought to focus her attention on one god in particular. Dr. El-Faouly had harbored an inexplicable fondness for your esteemed narrator, Khonshu, so it was my small but dedicated following that the Thorn hoped to study. Again she submitted her proposal; it was accepted, but this time it would be a financial deficiency that held her back. The grant that would have given her the means to live in the foreign city where the heart of my cult was situated, was denied.

It was at this moment when the Thorn's carefully practiced stoicism reached the point where it could no longer bear the weight of so many setbacks. And it was just as she was on the cusp of breaking down into tears that, looking aimlessly around the dimly lit coffee shop in which she had imprisoned herself, let her eyes fall for barely half a second on a fellow customer's forearm.

He was reaching across the computer to offer payment, and in the process his sleeve was drawn back ever so slightly, just enough for the Thorn to catch a glimpse of his tattoo.

She told herself it was probably nothing. Plenty of people get odd tattoos, after all, and even a religious symbol inked on the body doesn't necessarily correlate to the personal beliefs of the wearer. Besides, she had been despairing about her dissertation proposal all day. There was a very likely possibility that she was simply imagining something too good to be true. Still, if she let this opportunity pass by without at least trying…

"Excuse me!" she called to him, her unintentionally loud voice betraying her secret agitation.

He was a big man, but the intimidation of his broad and steady body was offset by a good-natured face and light ginger beard. "Hello?" He was Scottish.

"Are those…I'm sorry, but I just have to ask—your tattoo…" She had never looked so carefully at a person's wrist before; she was peering as discreetly as possible into the shadowy oval of his shirt sleeve, but could only make out the rough outline of a single crocodile head. "Are those Ammit's scales of judgment?"

You might be tempted to say it was a great coincidence that Billy Fitzgerald just happened to find himself in that particular coffee shop, on that particular day, in the same city as the Thorn, at the very moment her frustration with her research had reached its peak. You, however, are human, and you don't see your own species the way a god such as myself does. The human race, to put it bluntly, is small and unimportant, and given the diminutive size of the planet Earth, nothing that happens there can really be considered a coincidence. The Thorn encountered Billy Fitzgerald that day because certain events in both their lives were orchestrated in such a way as to facilitate their meeting. Who or what did the orchestrating? I don't know, nor do I care. It certainly wasn't me. But whoever or whatever it was must have succeeded in their goal, for it was this "chance" encounter that set the Thorn on the path that would ultimately lead her into a quagmire of academic, moral and spiritual ruin—that is, into the arms of Arthur Harrow.

By the time she left the coffee shop an hour later, she had a new dissertation proposal, a new hope for the future, and a research opportunity most seasoned academics could only dream of, complete with free housing, free meals and a free private plane to London. One week later, her proposal was approved and her belongings packed.

As the airplane crawled sleekly over the Atlantic—too late to turn back now—the Thorn let her eyes rest unfocused on the rippling cloudscape. The more her anxious mind begged for sleep, the more stubbornly sleep evaded her, and as the sky turned from white to gold to rosy pink, she found herself slipping into the unsettling state of semi-consciousness that humans somehow only find themselves experiencing during travel. Something about being in between places, in between lives, weirds the human imagination—even more so when the destination is unknown, unfamiliar and/or unpleasant. As it was, the Thorn saw the impressionistic sweep of clouds mingling kaleidoscopically until they all tangled together in a cotton-candy swirl. She reached out and grabbed the mass of pastel water droplets, put it in her mouth, swallowed, and promptly exploded in an efficient phshp. I'd better not do that again, she thought, reaching for another bite of cloud.

Reader, don't look at me like that. I'm just telling you what was happening in the Thorn's mind. It's not as if I made up this nonsense.

At some point, though, sleep did claim her, and it was during this sleep that London came to her like the end of one strange dream and the beginning of another. After landing the small plane, Billy Fitzgerald, acting as both pilot and cargo handler (the Thorn being "cargo"), hoisted her sleeping body over one shoulder and her luggage over the other, and transplanted both into the backseat of a black car driven by—you guessed it, reader—Bobbi Kennedy. They were swift and silent, and the Thorn only awoke near the end of their journey when the sound of a gunshot shattered the ominous peace of the night.

Her eyes snapped open, and were greeted by a harsh red and yellow field of car lights. There was nothing peaceful about the night. They were stuck in a traffic jam, and it had not been a gunshot after all, but the shrill bark of Bobbi's car horn.

"Oh, we've got her, all right," Billy was saying into his phone. "No, none yet. She was out like a light almost as soon as the plane took off," he added after a pause. "Hasn't said a word, not even in her sleep. We'll let you know if that changes." He hung up. "Delay's not a problem," he said to Bobbi, "but he wants to know if she says anything, especially if she asks any questions."

"Billy," Bobbi said warningly, jerking her shaved head back toward the Thorn. "She's awake."

Billy turned to face the backseat and hastily arranged his features into a jovial smile. "Ah!" he greeted the Thorn. "Sleep well? Sorry about the whole 'sack of potatoes' routine, but we're under orders to get you back to the ol' homestead as quick as possible."

"I was awake when the plane took off," the Thorn said sleepily to the closed window, watching her breath paint soft mist over the glass. "I didn't fall asleep until later."

Billy shrugged. "You know best."

A discordant clamor of horn honks, and traffic began to move. The Thorn was waking up. Something about the sudden forward motion of the car was like an espresso shove to her brain.

"Who were you talking to?" she asked Billy.

"Harrow. How much did you hear?"

"Enough to know he doesn't want me asking you any questions. "Why is that?"

Bobbi exploded into laughter, pounding the palm of her hand against the steering wheel. "See? I said she'd be one of the cheeky ones, didn't I? Time to pay up!" She gleefully held out an expectant hand, and Billy passed her a tangle of cash.

Irritated, the Thorn tried again. "Harrow is your leader, I take it? What's he like? How would you describe him?"

"You'll like him," replied Bobbi.

"How do you know?"

"He will make sure you like him."

"Almost there," said Billy. The expanse of traffic lights had dissolved into the bleak isolation of back-roads and alleyways. The sort of place where murders happen. The thought tapped at the edge of the Thorn's brain, and she shoved it away.

At last, the car pulled to a stop. The backseat door opened and two unknown hands found her; one snaked across her back and clasped her shoulder, the other intertwined itself with her fingers, and she was guided out of the car and to her feet.

"Billy will bring your things inside." A low, rippling voice filled her ear. "Your room is all fixed up, the only thing missing in it is you. You must be so tired. Are you cold? Do you have a jacket? Never mind, we'll get you a jacket. Here, take mine for now." Something was draped over her, and she was shocked to find her eyes flooded with tears. Warm.

"Better?" There was a smile in the voice, and an arm around her shoulders. Kind. "It's been a long day for you, hasn't it? Come, walk with me, we can get something to eat together." Safe. Good. Warm. Kind…

…Fake! The realization hit her like a splash of ice water to the face. No, she scolded herself, no, this is how they get you, this is exactly how they get to people like you. Don't fall for it. Don't let him pull you in.

An unfortunate fact about cults, reader, is that every human who joins a cult does so with the same initial belief: I'm different. I'm too smart to be manipulated. They won't get me. The sad truth is that all humans are the same, none of them are smart, and each and every human brain is, literally and figuratively, as malleable as wet sand. Still, in nearly every situation it is far preferable to lie to oneself, and thus it was with a self-congratulatory barricading of the heart and the inevitable defensive mental reassurance of Not Me! that the Thorn grudgingly allowed Harrow to situate her at a table and slide a bowl of soup in front of her.

"Everyone's gone to bed," he explained, apologetic for some reason, "but normally this room is filled with the sounds of talking, laughter, music—happy people enjoying each other's company. Do you drink coffee? Tea?"

She opened her mouth to respond, and immediately forgot what the question had been. Her mind was lost in the cavernous brick haven in which she had so unexpectedly found herself. It must be later at night than she thought, if everyone had gone to bed…or maybe the Followers of Ammit all kept early bedtimes? The air in the hall was still, expectant, watching. It was dim, but just light enough for her to finally fix her eyes on the man sitting across from her. Subject: Arthur Harrow, cult leader.

Here is a brief physical description of Harrow, as seen through the eyes of the Thorn:

The feeling she had on the airplane, in the liminal everywhere between dreaming and waking—remember that, reader? If that feeling could be consolidated into human form, she thought to herself, it would take the form of Arthur Harrow. If he wanted to, she decided—shocked at herself for even considering such a thing—if he were a different man with the priorities of an average human man, and enough money to toss around on clothes and grooming, he could be (there is simply no other word for it) gorgeous. No, she realized much later, it's not that he doesn't care about his appearance. He may have (or so he thinks) "higher" priorities than the average person, but he has calculated every detail of his presentation—his performance—in a way that will best suit him in pursuing his lofty goals.

Still, she didn't find him unpleasant to look at; on the contrary, there was endless intrigue in the ever-shifting lines of his face, the eyes constantly melting between shades of blue and silver, the smile that made one ask "how long until he is no longer smiling?" His face had in it an unspoken promise: Your experience with this person will be one of either unfettered bliss or utter terror; either way, it will not be a normal one, and you may very well come away from it a different person than you were before.

Now, here is a brief physical description of Harrow, as seen by me, Khonshu:

He was a fifty-one-year-old human male of average height and weight, with all limbs securely attached to his body and all the normal features fixed to his face. Blah, blah, tattoo; et cetera, et cetera, cane.

"He will make sure you like him," Bobbi Kennedy had said with conviction. Not a warning—a guarantee.

"You seem interested in my face," Harrow said gently.

The Thorn blustered a quick apology for staring.

"Would you like some coffee or tea?" he repeated his previous question. "Something else? Maybe a cup of water?"

"Water's fine," she said haltingly, indignant with him for so casually embarrassing her.

He went to fetch it, and the silence combined with the vaulted ceiling magnified the sound of his footfalls. As the first glassy crunch hit her ears, the Thorn felt her stomach clench up as though grabbed and squeezed by a giant claw. A childhood memory seized her: A glass slipping through her small fingers, smashing to pieces on the floor. An explosion of shame inside her (just like me to break something, it's who I am, I break things, I'm a bad girl and an evil person and I break everything I touch); she followed the shame, it led her like a dog on a leash, and without another thought she stepped forward. The first piercing hell of sharp glass on vulnerable bare skin (this is good, this is what I deserve), another forward step, a symphony of torture under her feet (not enough, more pain, need more), cascades of blood crimsoning the kitchen floor (more pain, MORE!), imagining the badness in her purged little by little with each thick drop of scarlet…

"There you go." A water glass, intact (for now), appeared with a soft clmp on the table before her. "Your soup must be cold by now," he innocently observed. "Are you not hungry, or worried it's been poisoned?"

She fought to contain the horror that swam inside her. The sound of crunching glass echoed in her head like a perverted heartbeat.

"Here," he said, taking a spoon from the other end of the table and dipping it into the Thorn's bowl of soup, "maybe this will make you feel better." His mouth closed over the spoon, his Adam's apple rippled with swallowing, his thin lips folded over each other in an enticing duet before smiling at her. "It's good," he said, "still warm, too. Try some." He handed her her own spoon. "Please. I can't let you go to bed on an empty stomach."

Reluctantly, feeling his blue-silver eyes on her, she took a sip. It was good, and it slid lovingly down her throat.

"You like it?"

She nodded.

"Good." He reached out and rubbed her shoulder, and his hand felt so nice there, so natural, that she forgot to mentally decry the gesture as Fake! and even momentarily forgot her dissertation. She was suddenly aware of the fact that she was still wearing Harrow's beige jacket; it hung from her shoulders like Spanish moss, rendered her meek, childlike, subservient. Not a good feeling, exactly, but one she could get used to.

She raised her face to him, let her eyes meet his. A smile escaping her lips, she picked up the spoon and ate ravenously.

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 2: Such dread as children only can feel

"'Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs. We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time will soon come, when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies...with this creed revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice crushes me too low: I live in calm, looking to the end.'" -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

WARNING: Child abuse (verbal, emotional)

Chapter 1 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

AO3

She woke knowing she was not alone. Night was falling, and with the deepening of the blackness around her the air in the cave had taken on a new vibrance, a prickling alive-ness. The silence itself seemed to echo from wall to wall like a vacuum of invisible agitation.

Humans never cease to fascinate me, and I watch them in a way they might consider parallel to their concept of a "guilty pleasure," but one of the strangest aspects of their species by far is their particular catalog of responses to the fear of the unknown. According to their senses, there may be no tangible threat to their being at present, and yet their irrational, untamable minds insist on inventing threats of their own to fill the unbearable void that is the feeling of safety. From this, I can only conclude that humans crave fear, lust after it in a way. I don't know why—you tell me, human reader. Is it a primal instinct to prove one's prowess as a hunter-gatherer, left behind in the imperfect tangle of human evolution? Too many late-night viewings of horror films, perhaps? Or, possibly, you just can't stand the tedium of letting your mind rest at ease. Danger, for all its inconveniences, is the stimulant that gives purpose to human life.

Am I wrong, reader? Well, even if I am, does it really matter? I am the god of the night sky, after all, not your friendly local psychologist. To illustrate my point, however, we must return to the Thorn. Physically weakened, but still alive and temporarily revitalized by her brief slumber, she examined her present situation. She heard nothing, felt nothing but the still night air around her, saw no movement, and yet the fear she felt in her young, squishy little heart was greater than any fear she had known in all her ten years of life. The cave was breathing. The trees outside taunted her with their long, whispering branches. The few early stars, winking through the thick canopy of leaves, they were eyes, and they watched her. She. Was. Not. Alone.

It began as a vague twitch in her consciousness, a warning in the form of a generic feeling of wrong. Then came the smell, a thick, noxious, smokey anxiety flooding her nostrils. A brief moment of nothing, then all at once the WRONG was consuming her, strangling her with a floating film reel of bad things (everything is bad now), something floated toward her in the dark, it was coming from the back of the cave, it was not alive and it was not dead and it was here for her, and she shut her eyes to make it go away, now she couldn't make her eyes open again, she may as well die here, it's as good a place as any—

Blink. White.

Blink. Alive.

She opened her eyes, took in the white walls, white sheets, white wire dangling parasitically from underneath a rough blanket of bandages on her arm. Hospital? Vague wisps of memory tapped at her tired brain—bright lights, ambulance, voices talking about her ("…dangerously dehydrated, and her blood sugar's low as well") ("matter of hours until it would have been too late") ("whoever it was that thought to look in the cave is a damn hero") ("that cave can flood like you wouldn't believe, I've been saying they should block it off for years") ("there should be a sign, at least") ("irresponsible parents letting their kids wander around the woods unsupervised, it's a wonder something like this hasn't happened before")

"Hey." A real voice this time, not a memory. "C'mon, I know you're awake. Stop ignoring me, it's rude."

The Thorn forced herself to turn and face her mother. "Hi," she said.

"Don't 'hi' me. After what you've put me through today, you're lucky I'm speaking to you at all. What do you have to say for yourself?"

"…"

"First I hear you mouthed off to your teacher (he said to tell you to get well soon and that you're in his thoughts and prayers and he can't wait to see your smiling face back in class, by the way), then you run off into the woods and hide in a freaking cave and then, of all things, you decide to have a seizure. I mean, what the hell?"

"…"

"You were literally missing, are you aware of that? Did you even stop to think about anyone besides yourself for a change? Everyone was out looking for you. Everyone. They even sent out a helicopter. This was a big. Fucking. Deal. And do you know what that means for us now?"

"…"

"It means people are going to talk. The whole damn neighborhood, your whole school, everyone we know is going to be talking about how unstable you are, how you're a delinquent and probably—" (she lowered her voice to a dramatic whisper) "MENTALLY ILL" (paranoid eyes darting back and forth, coast clear, returning to her normal voice) "—and of course, how it's probably all my fault because it's always the mother's fault, isn't it? Someone has to be the bad guy, and it's always the mother."

"…"

"What happens if this gets back to my colleagues at work? What if my boss hears? This could affect my career. All because of you and your little one-woman soap opera routine." She threw up her arms in a quasi-histrionic show of exasperation. "I don't understand you. I'm sorry, I just don't—hey, are you even listening to me?"

The Thorn wasn't really listening. She'd heard a variation on this speech nearly evey day of her life, not to mention the inevitable smaller jabs filling the time in between monologues.

Example:

Mother: "Stop looking at me like that. It's creepy."

Thorn: "Looking at you like what?"

Mother: "Like you're, I don't know, plotting something. Just stop it already."

It's possible that the Mother simply wasn't aware that these words were hurtful. Perhaps if she had known the effect they would have on the Thorn, the harm they would cause her for the rest of her childhood and well into her adulthood, she would have lowered her voice when she sardonically referred to her daughter as "demon child" or "Jezebel Junior" to her adult friends.

"The Spectors dropped something off for you," the Mother said, softening, maybe because of the glimmer of a tear she detected in the corner of the Thorn's eye. "I haven't looked at it yet."

It was a glossy red gift bag, probably left over from someone's birthday party. The Thorn reached listlessly inside and pulled out a handmade card. "FEEL BETTER," it read in crude block letters, followed by her name, and signed by Marc and Randall (the latter name spelled out with the methodical determination of a semi-literate seven-year-old; given the abrupt change in handwriting at the end, it seemed Marc had helped his brother to add the second "l"). She opened the card, feeling a mild thrill at the familiar and satisfying feeling of her finger turning the corner of a page. Inside was a drawing of herself standing on the pink plastic classroom chair, in her too-small uniform with its too-short skirt, but with a confident pink in her cheeks and a generously sized golden crown decorating her head. Her gaze started at the crown, then traveled down to the skirt. It didn't look as short in the crayon drawing as it had felt in real life. While on display for the class's judgement, her legs had felt exposed, naked, an unholy blight against the innocence of the other chidlren. But when drawn by Marc's earnest hand, they were the legs of a warrior queen, left bare to render her free to run, fight, climb, explore. These legs had given her a means of escape from the torment of her teacher, and carrier her (she was later informed) nearly two and a half miles from the school to the cave. If they could do that, she mused, clenching her toes in excitement beneath the thin hospital sheets, where else could her legs take her?

The bag was not yet empty. Her fingers closed on a familiar lump of soft canvas, and she pulled out her lucky hat, rescued from the shadows beneath Marc's desk.

"Make sure you write thank-you notes to both of them," the Mother said, just as a square white coat with long legs swept into the room.

The Thorn tried to take in the sight of the doctor all at once, but in the end she was forced to view her in two separate halves due to her prodigious height. Bottom half—coat, legs in black pants, pink sneakers (she can't be too scary if she's wearing pink sneakers, right?). Top half—coat, nametag ("DR. TEMPLE—PEDIATRIC PSYCHIATRY"), kind face, curly hair, no earrings.

"Hey, beautiful," Dr. Temple greeted the Thorn with a soft smile. "How are you feeling?"

It was a hard question. The Thorn wasn't altogether certain how she was feeling. Exhausted, hopeful, ashamed, relieved, humiliated, alive, hopeless.

"Okay," she replied.

The Mother rolled her eyes. "I'm so sorry," she said to the doctor. "She's so passive aggressive, always has been. No idea where she gets it. Again, I'm sorry."

Dr. Temple smiled, but there was something akin to suspicion in the way her eyes failed to match the smile, the way they briefly flickered to the Thorn and back to the Mother. Well, that's that, thought the Thorn. Now even the doctor hates me. She'll probably give me poisonous medicine on purpose, and I'll die right here in this supid white bed.

The Mother wasn't finished, though. "Even when I was pregnant, she would kick me like crazy, never let me sleep, made me sick every other minute. I remember her father saying just before she was born, 'that's not a baby you've got in there, that's the spawn of Satan,' and he wasn't right about many things, but you know what? He was right about that." She opened her lipsticked mouth wide and laughed out loud, the laugh traveling around the powdery-white walls before falling, dead, to the tile floor.

Dr. Temple was no longer pretending to smile. "Ma'am, with all due respect, I would prefer to allow the patient to speak for herself."

The Mother's face meled into the grimacey faux-smile that inevitably spelled danger for any business with an online customer satisfaction survey. Ignoring her, Dr. Temple sat on the edge of the bed and spoke directly to the Thorn.

"Now," she began, adding the Thorn's name with a smile (it didn't sound quite so repulsive when spoken by such a kind voice), "why did you run away from your school and hide in that cave?"

Careful to maintain a calm voice and avoid strong words, the Thorn told her story. Dr. Temple listened without interruption, save for the occasional understanding nod. The Mother pointedly ignored both of them, her mouth frozen in a thin, irritated line. The Thorn ended her narrative with her falling asleep in the cave, neglecting to relate the bizarre terror of the moments before her seizure. Dr. Temple might understand, but the Mother never would.

There was a brief silence, and Dr. Temple spoke.

"The school has already received several complaints about your teacher from other students, mostly complaints regarding the way you were punished today for violating the dress code," she explained. "Your story matches theirs."

These words bathed the Thorn in relielf. If nothing else, at least she wouldn't be considered a liar.

"Tell me," Dr. Temple continued, leaning closer, "if you had the option to go to school somewhere else, would you take it?"

The Mother, who had held her tongue far longer than I would have thought possible, could do so no more. "Now, wait just a minute—"

Dr. Temple quieted her with a raised hand. "If you're interested, I could recommend a few private schools where I think you would fit in very well. All of them offer scholarships," she added this with a nod to the Mother, "and both boarding and day school options."

Boarding school—the Thorn had never considered this. A fresh start in another world where no one knew her, where she had never been called the spawn of Satan, where the teachers would like her and their lessons would be on reading and history and science, not shame.

"Does that sound like something you would be interested in?" Dr. Temple asked.

The Thorn nodded her head. "Yes."

She was grounded, naturally. Suspended from school, as well, which at least gave her extra time to pack. It was as if she was rearranging her books for the tenth time, counting the ones about ancient Egypt to make sure she hadn't forgotten any, that the sound of her name rang out from the window of the next house. Darting across the room to look, she saw that it was indeed Marc, big dumb curly-haired head hanging out of his bedroom window. She hadn't seen him since the "incident" in class—it had now been over a week.

At this time in his life, Marc's face had a way of resting in an expression that can most accurately be described as "going to burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter any second now." His face doesn't do that anymore. The "Marc smile" is lost to history, like so many other things in his life...but you, of course, already know that.

"I liked your card," the Thorn told him.

"Thanks."

"Ro-Ro is getting really good at writing his name."

"Yeah. I helped him a little bit. He keeps forgetting the second 'l.'"

"He'll get it soon."

"Yeah."

Pause.

"My mom said that your mom said you're leaving."

The Thorn nodded. "A spot opened up at a boarding school, and Dr. Temple recommended me. I'm leaving tonight."

"That sucks for us. We won't have anyone to be Bessie."

She swallowed. "Sorry I yelled at you in class."

Marc shrugged. "It's cool."

"And hit you."

The "Marc smile" widened into a smirk. "Tried to hit me, you mean."

"HEY!"

Marc laughed, a rippling waterfall of joy spilling from his smiling mouth. The Thorn smiled too, she couldn't help it—Marc was such a creature of pure happiness and excitement, one simply couldn't be near him and fail to catch a bit of the plague of ecstatic curiosity he radiated with his every facial expression, every "WOW" and "cooool" and "no WAY!" and "holy cow!", all uttered, of course, with the accompanying signature "Marc smile." In the coming years, and even in her adulthood, whenever the Thorn encountered something that fascinated her, she saw that "Marc smile" in her head, always on his round little ten-year-old face.

"Thanks for standing up for me." She tumbled, embarrassed, over the words.

"It's cool," said a very pink Marc.

"Did you get in trouble with the principal?"

"Not really. I think the principal hates him just as much as we do." Another "Marc smile" lit his face like a firework. "I heard you really gave it to him after I left."

"You bet I did. You should've seen his face, he looked like he was about to cry." (She was exaggerating here, reader.)

"What did you say to him?"

She told him, recounting her words exactly, miming a mic drop and a "dab" at the end. "How 'bout that? Did I kick ass or what?" She looked back at Marc, and her face fell. "What?"

He was looking at her in the strangest way, almost as if he was afraid. A prickle tapped at her lower spine—she had never been looked at with fear. Even the Mother, who thought of her the spawn of Satan, generally regarded her with a mixture of exasperation and disgust.

"What?" she asked again.

Marc thought for a moment, weighing his words. "Don't you think that was a little, I dunno...mean?"

She let out a short laugh of disbelief. "Mean? After what he did to me? Come on, dude. If anything, I was too nice—I should've kicked him in the nuts. Besides, you told him he was wack."

"Yeah, 'wack,' not 'evil and going to hell.'"

"I didn't say he was going to hell!"

"You basically did."

"Did not!"

"Look, I'm not saying he wasn't a jerk to you, 'cause he totally was."

"Exactly! He deserved what I said to him. He deserved a lot worse, actually."

"Even if he deserved it, you still ended up hurting yourself more than him."

"What do you mean?"

"If you hadn't said that stuff, you probably wouldn't have left and found that cave, and had a seizure, and gone to the hospital, and that doctor wouldn't have sent you away."

"But I want to go away. I never want to see our school ever again...no offense," she added on noticing the shadow of hurt in Marc's eyes. "I'll miss playing with you and Ro-Ro, but I won't miss anything else, really." Except maybe that wallpaper.

Marc was quiet for a few seconds. "People are calling you a delinquent," he said, "and...other things."

"What other things?"

"Doesn't matter."

"Marc! Tell me!"

"No."

"Marc."

"Okay, fine! My mom said if you stay, me and Ro-Ro aren't allowed to see you anymore. And that she would tell the teacher not to let us talk at school, either. She said you're a b—well, she said you're trouble."

The harsh wetness of pre-tears assaulted her just behind the eyes. Miss Wendy, who had always seemed so nice, who invited her over for cookouts and called her "sweet pea" and never told her she was evil. But "trouble" may as well be "evil" in the mind of a ten-year-old, and the Thorn now experienced the hot flesh wound of betrayal for the first time in her life.

"Do you think I'm trouble?" she finally managed to ask Marc.

"'Course not!" he said immediately, taken aback. "All I meant was, I don't like that people are saying bad stuff about you. And the reason they're saying the bad stuff is because you went off at the teacher."

"So I shouldn't speak my mind? I shouldn't stand up to people who are being assholes?"

"No! Dude, just listen to me...okay, remember in Tomb Buster when Dr. Grant almost kills the bad guy and then Bessie tells him not to?"

"Yeah, duh. I've seen that movie like, a hundred times more than you have."

"You have not. Anyway, if Dr. Grant had killed him, then he would have been a bad guy too. Right?"

She puzzled it over. "Sort of, I guess."

"The bad guy didn't have his evil powers anymore, so killing him wouldn't save anyone else. It would just make one more dead person who didn't need to be dead. And it would mean Dr. Grant killed someone who didn't have any way to defend himself, which is cowardly and un-honorable and all that kind of stuff."

"Sure, but what does this have to do with me and the Teacher?"

"If you'd just gone to the principal and told him that the teacher did and said to you, the teacher would get in trouble. He might even get fired. And that would be giving him what he deserves, without hurting yourself by making people talk trash about you."

"...Oh." She hated how much sense he was suddenly making.

"And anyway, we're all going to die someday, so what difference will it make in the end?"

"Huh?"

"It's something I heard on a TV show I wasn't supposed to be watching. Sounds pretty smart, though, right?"

"Marc!" The disembodied voice of Miss Wendy the Traitor wafted through the Spector home and out Marc's open window. "Dinner!"

"Gotta go," said Marc.

"Till we meet again, Dr. Grant," the Thorn said, affecting a clunky British accent.

"Likewise, Dr. Leaven. Laters, gators!" Marc replied in a similarly awkward accent, smiling the last "Marc smile" the Thorn would ever see. For it was that evening when the cave in the forest beckoned to Marc, and the spirit of Randall Spector was carried from its body in the flooded stone depths, cradled in the warm plush towel of painless eternity. By the time news of his departure from life reached the Thorn, she was already ensconced in a solitary white-and-beige dormitory, decorated only with a Tomb Buster poster and a small handmade "FEEL BETTER" card signed Marc + RandalL with a drawing of a victorious young girl in a crown standing on a pink chair.

Reader, at this point I am obligated to skip forward in time, as the portion of the Thorn's childhood that is germane to this story is finished. Thus, at the start of our next chapter, sixteen years will have passed, various academic milestones achieved, and an ocean crossed. As I've heard humans say: "Shit's about to get real."

[the--morning--room]

RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 1: "Humility is a Christian grace"

"'My dear children...it becomes my duty to warn you, that this girl, who might be one of God's own lambs, is a little castaway: not a member of the true flock, but evidently an interloper and an alien.'" -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

WARNING: Child abuse (verbal, emotional)

Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

AO3

Reader, I present to you a story of love, justice, and the night sky; of a man who has no conscience and a woman who never learned to listen to hers. Her name is unimportant to me; I have known many countless thousands of human names in my time watching over them, and I simply cannot be expected to keep track of every single one. It's not as if she is anything special to begin with, not to a god, at least. In the interest of simplicity, I will refer to her as precisely what she is to me: a Thorn in the side if ever there was one.

As for the man with no conscience, I do know his name, and in the interest of your well-being, reader, I tell it to you in the hope that this knowledge will help you to avoid any possible encounter with him. This man's name is Arthur Harrow.

I, the unfortunate creature tasked with recording and narrating this godless nightmare of a love story, am the god Khonshu, master of the night sky and self-appointed distributor of righteous vengeance on humanity's behalf.

The Thorn's story, for our purposes at least, begins about sixteen years before Harrow entered her life. Harrow, at this time, was still a novice criminal prosecutor with brown hair and glass-free shoes. He was also my avatar, the Fist of Vengeance. In a different part of the same country, the Thorn was a sullen, watchful ten-year-old girl wearing a school uniform designed for a child several years her junior, and standing on top of a plastic chair. Her weak legs crossed awkwardly, she tugged with fumbling tiny fingers on the edge of her pleated skirt, the skirt that had gotten her into this mess in the first place.

No, it wasn't the skirt's fault. Even the Thorn herself knew that. It was her mother's fault for making her wear it, for not having the money to replace it with a more comfortably fitting copy. Or it was Marc Spector's fault for snatching her lucky hat, the one just like the hat Bessie wore in Tomb Buster, and putting it on his own stupid, dumb, big baby face head and laughing at her until her indignation graduated into rage and then into the wild fury that sent her careening, monkeylike, over both their desks and ripping it from his dumb curly hair and shrieking that he was the meanest person ever and that she hated him and never wanted to play at his house ever again, and also gave him quite the pathetic (albeit passionate) swat across the face.

Or it was the Teacher's fault for choosing this last moment to stride into the classroom and let his eyes fall immediately on the Thorn, half-squatting and half-straddling over Marc's desk with a rather impressive disregard for her own dignity. Luckily, he didn't see the slap. Unluckily, what he did see was the way the back of her tiny plaid skirt had flipped carelessly inside out, revealing just the slightest glimpse of the garment underneath.

He didn't yell. He wasn't that kind of man.

He was worse.

First, he said her name. She hated the sound of it in his mouth, his soft voice dripping with benevolent disappoinment that a stranger might easily mistake for genuine care.

The torture was underway.

"I assume you brought something to change into?" he said placidly, knowing perfectly well what her answer would be.

She shook her head.

"And what made you think that was an acceptable thing to wear to school?" he inquired innocently, surveying the frayed edge of the unholy garment with the cool contempt of an Academic (something the Teacher erroneously considered himself to be).

She doesn't remember what she said next, as the world around her had by now begun to adopt a kind of surreal sheen. There was a vague awareness of the students around her, but whether they were laughing, contemptuous, or simply dumbstruck, she could not have said. Somewhere very far away, Marc offered his sweater: "She can just tie it around her, then the skirt's not a problem anymore, right?" (Always the chivalrous defender, even in childhood—most humans would call this a great virtue, but I can only see it as Marc's most fatal flaw.) The hotly contested hat lay forgotten in the cold linoleum shadow under the desk.

Then all she knew was the closeness of the Teacher's body to hers, the simmering malice with which his claw of a hand gripped her shoulder, the invisible column of shame that sucked the air from around her, and the frail, unprotected nakedness of her thighs. The agonizing screech of metal on linoleum—a chair, adult-sized, chipped vomit-pink plastic, dragged to the center of the classroom just for her. She found herself on top of it, a martyr at the stake, her executioner poised to light the kindling.

Words. Not flames.

"Do you know why you're standing here?" the Teacher asked. "Why I've had to interrupt your classmates' education this morning?"

She thought of the climactic final showdown in Tomb Buster: Bessie tied to the stone altar, the undead Aztec priest preparing her for sacrifice. The harsh grin of moonlight glinting against the knife. A sneering voice from nowhere: "You see? This is where it has to end. There is no other way. No tree can ascend to the light of Heaven if it doesn't descend to the depths of hell!"

Again the Teacher said her name, the degradation of it scorching her back to the present.

"Do you know why we have a dress code? Who can tell me?" He addressed the class this time, his voice glittering with self-satisfaction. "No one?" Reader, not since the days of the "Great" Alexander himself have I witnessed such a grotesque display of misplaced cocksuredness (and coming from me, that is saying quite a lot).

"This classroom is a place for learning," he explained, "and we can't learn when there are distractions present, can we? For the same reason we don't bring footballs and electronic handheld gaming devices to school, we don't allow certain students to wear clothing that may draw the attention of other students away from their classwork and cause them to have thoughts and feelings that are not appropriate in a school environment."

"That doesn't make any sense," Bessie retorted, her glamorous curls pasted to her face with sweat. "Heaven, hell, why does it have to be one or the other? What ever happened to the good old-fashioned middle ground?"

Silence pounded against the impersonal grayish walls of the classroom. She couldn't speak. It was as if her voice had been ripped away by the iron tongs of humiliation. She tried to imagine how it would feel not to have legs. It would look pretty strange, a little girl's torso floating overtop the chair, plaid pleated skirt shivering in the naked air like the tentacles of a jellyfish.

"Wait a sec," Marc Spector interjected. "Did you just say her legs are the same thing as a video game? 'Cause, no offense, but that's kind of wack, man."

Oh, dear reader, you have never heard such a silence.

"Marc," the Teacher smiled coolly, "go to the principal's office."

Marc shrugged, and did as he was told.

"Where's your friend Dr. Grant now, when you need him the most?" the voice surrounding Bessie taunted.

As he was leaving, Marc turned to look the Thorn straight in the eye. He winked, gave an almost imperceptibly quick thumbs-up, and disappeared into the black hallway to seek out his fate in the principal's office.

"Well, Dr. Grant may have me beat for brawn, you've got me there," Bessie conceded. "It's true, I may not be a swashbuckling hunk with superpowers temporarily granted to him by the lunar god of the Aztecs, but I am proud of what I am: I am…an anthropologist!"

Her body was coming back to her. She felt her legs again. They were frail, pathetic little ten-year-old human legs, but they somehow supported her nonetheless. Her mind was returning as well, sane and conscious and billowing with righteous anger. Next would be her voice. She turned to the Teacher, looked him in the face. The glitter of inherent masculine certainty in her eyes wavered, and he came to stand in front of her. Her eyes were almost level with his.

"How dare you make a mockery of my classroom," he said, so softly that only the two of them, and of course, any gods watching silently over the scene, could hear the menace that slicked over his words. "You're disrespectful, immature, a self-serving little s—" his gaze flicked distastefully downward, to just below her cursed skirt, and back up at her, "well, you know what."

He turned back to the other students. "No one is to speak to her for the rest of the day. If I see any of you so much as look at her, it'll be a detention."

The Thorn's voice had clawed its way out of its prison of shame; it was bursting through the surface—

"You're sick." The words poured from her soul before she knew she was saying them. "You're a horrible teacher, and an evil, sick, perverted man. I will never, ever forget what you did to me today, even after I'm dead."

The teacher's face darkened. (No tree can ascend to the light of Heaven if it doesn't descend to the depths of hell.) "Well," he said, all pretenses abandoned, no longer the well-meaning teacher, but an adult man confronting an equal. "Is that all?"

It was not. "You'll get what's coming to you," she spat, speaking from somewhere outside of herself, "even if it takes a million years, you'll get what you deserve. All evil people do. God or the universe, whatever's out there, because you know there's something, they'll make sure you pay for how you treated people like me." She stepped down from the chair and walked out of the classroom. No one followed.

The school hallway stretched before her like a liminal nightmare. Somewhere down at the end, Marc was receiving gods-know-what kind of punishment for standing up for her. A throb of remorse went through the Thorn's heart as her earlier words came back to her like the aftershock of an earthquake: You're the meanest person ever, I hate you, I never want to play at your house ever again! Then the anticlimactic phip of her palm against his cheek.

The thrill of her victory over the Teacher had all but drained away. In its place was the ripe, purplish stickiness of shame, soaking and dripping over her insides. She felt it oozing from her heart, down her lungs, trickling over her ribs one by one, and at last laying to fester and congeal at the bottom of her chest cavity.

"You'll get what's coming to you," she had said to the Teacher, "even if it takes a million years, you'll get what you deserve." And she was no better than him, really. Marc was her friend. He had been joking with her, trying to make her laugh, and she had screamed abuse and attacked him. And even after that, he had defended her when she had no voice to defend herself.

In the end, she was no different from the Teacher. A person who hurt other people for no reason.

She turned back to the door of the classroom. It gaped, vacuous, a silent challenge. Behind her was the cryptlike hallway to the principal's office. To her left, a window was open just wide enough for a small body to slip through and escape into the beckoning woods.

Her options were few, and all equally inadvisable, but one was easier than the others by a large degree. Before another thought could invade her head, she swung a leg over the windowsill and struggled through to the sticky outdoors. The trees welcomed her, a lost fugitive desperate for sanctuary, and she vanished into a wall of green.

She walked until the August heat had made a nest of discomfort in her parched throat and her legs, slashed into bloody stripes by the choking undergrowth, screamed for rest. Somewhere to hide, that's all she needed. A special place just for her.

The forest heard her need, and all at once the cave was known to her. The narrow archway of its black mouth howled a soft, mournful promise: Safe here.

After stopping to craft a makeshift slingshot using a lopsided Y-shaped stick and a hair elastic from her wrist (Dr. Grant warned Rosser never to enter a mysterious cavern without a method of self-defense handy), the Thorn plunged into her new home. This, she thought, would work just fine. It was dark, sure, but she would teach herself to make fire by rubbing two sticks together, and besides, that wouldn't be a concern until nighttime. Every home needs a bed, so she gathered a heap of pine needles from the forest floor and spread them in a crude rectangular shape on the damp stone ground of the cave. By the time she was finished with these preliminary moving-in essentials, her throat was a furious desert fire of thirst. When her attempt to use a fallen leaf as a makeshift cup failed, and since no one was around to scold her for bad manners anyway, she dropped to all fours, pressed her face to one of the tepid puddles that dotted the cave's floor, and slurped until the filthy water was nearly gone.

Then she crawled to her pine needle bed, where she fell asleep thinking of her wallpaper at home, a jocular pattern of alternating hippos and crocodiles making an enthusiastic but fruitless attempt to dance ballet. She loved that wallpaper. She would miss it. Perhaps she could recreate it on the walls of her new home, like the cavemen did. But what will I use for paint? was her last thought before sinking away into sleep.

[the--morning--room]

The "Scales of Judgement" in Moon Knight: A smorgasbord of questions, concerns, theories and frustrations

(This is less than an essay but more than a shitpost, so I decided to post it here instead of on my crack blog...)

It appears that Ammit goes by a very different idea of what "balanced" and "unbalanced" mean compared to Taweret and the powers that be governing the afterlife. Ammit's concept of "unbalanced" seems to be someone who inflicted harm in any way, for any reason, under any circumstances. If that were really the case, I find it hard to believe ANYONE would ever pass the test and survive judgement, so she must make exceptions somewhere. The only exception she canonically makes is obviously Harrow, because despite being unbalanced she sees that he can be useful to her. So it would follow that Ammit overlooks unbalanced souls who she sees will be helpful* to her in the future, thus ensuring all of humanity isn't wiped out because, well, nobody's perfect. Khonshu's line to Ammit about Harrow, "Loyalty at what cost? An empty world for your disciples to inherit?" lends credence to this theory.

However, the fact that Harrow's scales are unbalanced because of his future service to Ammit implies that Ammit may not be fully in control of the scales after all. It seems that if she had it her way, a "balanced" soul would be someone loyal to her, even if they did evil things in her name, and "unbalanced" would mean someone disloyal to Ammit. For example, Alexander the Great's scales supposedly balanced perfectly, but in the end he "betrayed" Ammit, which lowered him in her estimation.

It's also possible that the criteria of the scales varies according to the ethical and behavioral norms of the person's culture. I don't think this is likely, but I thought it was worth mentioning as a theory.

*"Helpful" =/= loyal or devoted, because if that were the case none of the Ammit followers at Harrow's rallies would have been killed. For instance, that old woman in Episode 1 had "been good her entire life" and was clearly a devout worshipper of Ammit, but she was still judged as unbalanced. Unfortunately, this may have been because she was getting older and frankly wouldn't have many decades left to serve Ammit when she was awake, or the physical ability to do so.

In trying to decode Ammit's definition of "sin," we're at a disadvantage in that we don't know the backstories (or "futurestories," I guess) of most of the people she judged "unbalanced." Exactly what kinds of sins did they commit (or were destined to commit in the future)? It doesn't help that whenever Harrow talks about this, he does so in a really vague way. He doesn't say, for instance, "Ammit plans to eliminate everyone destined to commit first-degree murder." Instead, he says "Ammit will light the path to good by eradicating the choice of evil," which is very sexy of him, but not very informative. (Sidebar: I feel I should add that this ambiguity does serve a narrative purpose; if the audience isn't told exactly what Ammit thinks is evil and what kind of "sinners" she's punishing, it's easier to see Harrow as morally grey rather than a complete villain. As a fan of good character writing, I love it, but as a bratty lore-scientist I'm frustrated).

All that being said, there is one exception to this "vagueness" Harrow adopts when speaking about Ammit's judgement, and it's in Episode 1 when he corners Steven in the museum and tells him Ammit would have prevented the crimes of Hitler, Nero and Pol Pot, as well as the Armenian genocide. This is, as far as I can tell, the closest we get to a specific explanation of what Ammit considers sinful. So we know she doesn't like those who abuse their power to commit wide-scale mass murder, though most people would probably agree that this should go without saying anyway. The other problem is, we have to remember Harrow had an agenda with Steven in this scene, and probably chose to give those four examples precisely because they were so prolific and widely recognized as terrible things done by evil people - basically, appealing to pathos. Would Ammit really have killed Hitler and prevented the Holocaust? Probably, but that's not really Harrow's point. My best guess is that Ammit does kill genocidal dictators, but for every genocidal dictator she also kills a million more people who committed nonviolent crimes, or violent crimes with extenuating circumstances like self-defense, or those who would have sincerely repented and changed their ways years after their crime. So Harrow was doing what Harrow does best, which is technically telling the truth, but only as much of the truth as will get him what he wants. Again, extremely sexy of him, but not very helpful.

TLDR, maybe Ammit really does care about creating a peaceful world. Maybe she really does believe the ends justify the means, "means" in this case being "not killing unbalanced people as long as they can help me somehow" and "ends" being "they eventually help me create the perfect world and then I kill them anyway, oops." Or maybe what she really cares about is being worshipped. Who knows.

So anyway, that's Ammit's scales. But then we get to Episode 5 and it turns out there are REAL scales in the underworld, and from what I can tell just from Marc and Steven's case alone, these scales go by different criteria. Marc and Steven's scales were unbalanced because they weren't being honest with each other and with themselves about crucial events in their lives. It didn't seem to come down to whether they were "good" or "evil" people. Even when Marc's actual crimes were brought up, their purpose wasn't to guilt him into atoning for his sins, but to force him to be honest with Steven. Marc's scales only balanced when Steven was "neutralized" (for lack of a better word), thus putting to rest the "chaos" inside him.

In what I've read about the traditional scales of judgement in Egyptian mythology, the most consistent explanation seems to be that an "unbalanced" soul is one that has more evil than good in it. So presumably, someone who had done evil things could make up for it by doing a ton more good things, and still end up with balanced scales. But that's definitely not how Ammit works, and Taweret really doesn't seem too concerned with good and evil anyway.

Moon Knight had an Egyptology consultant on set, so the showrunners almost definitely knew this stuff about the scales, as well as the fact that the actual god in charge of judging souls was Anubis, and that Ammit was a soul-eating demon who worked under him. In keeping with their goal of remaining respectful to the culture and mythology of Egypt even while taking the occasional creative liberty, they would certainly have taken these pieces of lore about the after life into consideration.

What I ultimately take away from all this is that the judgement system in the MCU Egyptian afterlife isn't working the way it was originally intended to, and it's having serious consequences for both the gods and humanity.

Okay, now for my own personal theory: Anubis was originally the arbiter of the underworld, and judged souls as balanced or unbalanced based on whether the good in them outweighed the evil. If they were judged as evil, they were fed to Ammit, and eventually Ammit developed a taste for evil souls. She pulled strings, maybe did some blackmailing, and got the Ennead to imprison Anubis, leaving Ammit as his "understudy" in charge of judging souls. But she stopped using the old method of judgement, and crafter her own set of scales that would judge souls as unbalanced if they had done ANY harm at all during their lives. Things inevitably got out of hand, and the Ennead imprisoned Ammit as well, which is how Taweret got the gig.

Here's a possible premise for Season 2: Ammit is gone for good (or so everyone thinks...wink...), but still no one, god or human, is happy with the way the scales system works. Taweret is used as a scapegoat and imprisoned in an ushabti. Now it's complete anarchy down in the Duat, so the gods are forced to re-release Anubis. BOOM. You're welcome, Marvel.