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!