Takes place right after this thread, shortly before the blood moon raid!
Looking for Sapair but others around camp are free to notice Hotep and approach or post cameos!!

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Skill - Heartbroken 1/5

Hotep could not leave the body behind.

It must be cleaned. Purified. Buried. He could not leave Yuèshí in limbo, without rites, after all that had happened. Hotep decided at some point during his failure to save the emissary that it did not matter if the man with a strange name was a charlatan.

No, because the beast which killed him looked nothing like an agent of godly wrath. It was not Set. It was not one of Sekhmet's wanderers. No Presence had reached out to him as with Phoenix when they searched the swamps. Hotep remembered only the divine warning of malevolence lurking in the fog, and wished now he had heeded it.

But then, Yuèshí still would have died. At least now, maybe, he could be given peace in the afterlife. A chance to make things right with Osiris and Khonsu.

Neck straining from carrying the body over squelching mud and rotting trees, Hotep's eyes teared from stinging poison still sour across his face. It burned in his lungs. When he stopped to rest, he coughed and tasted bile.

Perhaps the rot was in him, too, the thought listlessly.

But finally... finally he saw the edge of camp. And it occurred to him that sending all Satriya into a panic before a plan to address this savagery was made, may be unwise. So he tucked Yuèshí's body against a great stump, grimacing at the trail of mud and blood and tattered autumn leaves leading into the dark behind them.

Of himself, he could do little. So sesh wandered into camp on unsteady legs soaked to the elbow in cold mud. Blood caked his face and chest as if he were a gorged lion fresh feasted on buffalo. Red eyes were sore with the irritation of the curse, and though he stifled the coughs, he still grunted with subdued discomfort.

He had a very particular destination in mind. When he called out, his voice sounded hoarse. Foreign. Jodai!

When the cry’s pitch had sunk into silence, jodai took his tread out across the field and grit back upset at seeing Satriya’s physician in such desperate straits. There was no short delay as he strode to the man’s side and forced a soldier’s mien, searching for the origin of blood.
“Where are you wounded?” He hadn’t learned to heal on the front line. He knew only the means to delay death for a time, and it was death he smelled now, a pre-dawn breeze bearing the stench of rot to where they waited. A simmering gaze dropped over Setemhotep's bloodshot eyes.
“Who’s done this?”

Skill - Heartbroken 2/5

Who?

What.

I— It is not mine. Lip curling, Hotep struggled to meet the copper stare of Sapair. Dulled gold glances pitched left and right, fixed on waving grasses, wind-tousled leaves, before they finally connected.

He'd been brave when the beast attacked. Steadfast in the effort to spare Yuèshí death. Unrelenting in the struggle to come back with body in tow.

And now — now it all felt spent.

Breath shallow and fast, Hotep started to speak, but coughed again like one dying himself of lung-rot. It left the world spinning in its wake.

Finally he wrested back control, and grit out, A demon - came from the smoke. It summoned burning darkness to smother Khonsu and... Dry swallow, it tasted sour. Killed a man before my eyes. A bite like a serpent, the rot spread — faster than any mortal venom. I tried to save him — he...

He screamed as he died.

Sesh dropped his head in defeat, I brought his body. For the Hemet. I cannot stand before Pharaoh so unclean, but Sapair! Desperate gaze lifted against the weight of all which had transpired, You must warn them! The dreams are true, some great force of Apep lurks which is bent on our destruction. I have seen it.

Hysteria. The ravings of a traumatized man. Here, he would pause briefly to catch his breath, before hurrying on with the next of the wild auguries.
It was the fog. It was the mist, and the dimness of night which lit the imagination— even one spirit so intrepid as Setemhotep.
“Your head is aflame, sesh,” one paw braced the gilt neck while the other bid the bloody man to stand. “You’ve endured enough for one night. Go to Sitamun. Leave the corpse to me and I will take it to the hemet.”
No, Pharaoh would not hear of these ill omens, lest they abduct his imagination in the same way.

still laughing at Sapair's reply its been two days LMAO

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Skill - Heartbroken 3/5

If he had desired relief, or even believed that sensation within his grasp, perhaps he would have accepted Sapair's words. Had Hotep not seen men mutilated in war, savaged by hippopotamus, bloated from drowning, rotten from plague — had he not been a physician! A Priest in the highest courts of the River! Then perhaps his wounded and weary mind could have let the Jodai brush all away without protest, none-the-wiser.

But one who knew the Mysteries grew accustomed to doubt from those who did not. Who perhaps never would.

And one who had been raised at court must know that what went unsaid mattered more than willing word.

Sapair confirmed nothing of Pharaoh's need for involvement.

Your head is aflame. As the words settled like silt, Hotep divined the truth in them.

It is not. Sesh hoarsed, inhaling through the exhausted tremor to stare hard into Sapair's eyes. Tired, faded with grief, and still defiant in some perfunct rejection of mortal limitation. His lip tugged, entreating, It is cold as this Northern wind, Jodai.

When I walked the Red Land alone, that was aflame. Hotep could not mistake anything for madness, having felt the grasping claws of it so intimately.

I am not at liberty to be easily shaken in the work that has been appointed to me, which I have served in, dutifully, for many years, beneath three Pharaohs. I am fearful for good reason. You must heed me.

As Priest he might have once commanded it. As sesh, he had only the power of persuasion at his disposal.

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I was on the fence about how he'd respond to this, so rolled with disadvantage for Hotep. But he actually rolled really well so, sorry Sapair, stubborn Priest time lmao

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I love him so much

Jodai bit back instinct in a jaw’s heavy flex— the captain’s urge to drag Setemhotep bodily into the confines of Satriya. He was not a man of the gods, he was not a priest. He did not pray for his lovers, nor his sons and daughters in Nubia. He knelt closer to the man who recieved them and spent his breath into the dark pointed ears.
“You would have me shake Pharaoh from his sleep to spread panic through his camps and I refuse it. You know how quickly fear becomes a frenzy. If what you claim to have witnessed is true, Apep will still be lying in wait come dawn.” His arm went around the sesh, hauling the man swiftly upright, checking once more for wounds. Death and mire clung as thick as oil to the length of his legs.
“The hemet will examine the body. She will determine the cause of this death, and at first light, you will bring every shard of the account before Pharaoh.” His half-measure. The only one Sapair intended to give.
“Go now,” he urged and in the same breath called for @Pheonix Rising.

Skill - Apostle 4/5

Words whispered flattened Hotep's ears, and for all he had been through, he summoned new horror at Sapair's godlessness. Teeth bared in open-mouthed gape at the uninvited touch, but sesh swallowed back any snarl.

Determine the cause of Yuèshí's death! As if Hotep had not witnessed it! Abetted in it! To be so summarily disregarded stung like the rot in his lungs. What good was being burdened with omens and prophecy, if none would hear them? In the grim warning of the Jodai's impatience, the man sounded very like Akhenaten.

So, the next courtly lesson was demanded — to not waste speech on hardened hearts.

Surely Khaemwaset would take seriously the warning. There were subtle ways of relaying it! Pharaoh need not spread terror, but he could hardly defend Satriya against what he did not know. And Phoenix — she would understand. Hotep could take solace in the ethics of the hemet, who spoke with Osiris.

Sapair's opinion need not matter past the morning.

You are a man of war, Jodai. If you believe expecting Apep to wait 'till dawn sound strategy, then no doubt, the Serpent of Chaos will oblige you. Hotep replied, bowing his head with practiced respect in the dismissal.

The hour was late, but even a Hemet would heed the call of the chief to Pharoah's guard. It was with easy steps does she make way, then catering on smell of blood and at the moment Setemhotep is brought into her sights, covered in blood, does the priestess finally bring herself to rush into the scene.

Though it is the Jodai which calls her, long legs carry her past the girth that which was Sapair and closely into the bubble of the Sesh. What has happened!? She flutters all around him, sniffing and prodding to feel for his wounds until she is face to face, searching his eyes. What happened Setemhotep??