The presence presses against your incorporeality, pushing against the chinks in the unreal façade. Pushing, wriggling, invading.
You scream.
It rushes into your mouth, choking your voice, clenching around your throat as it pushes down into you, coiling in your gut, making a home in the cavity of life. Ponderous, it hunkers deep within as the darkness outside banishes into blinding light.
Where is your shadow, little one?
You cannot see, but that hasn't changed-in the dark, you were just as blind. The light is there all around you, heat rolling off in waves, trying to banish the cold.
But the cold is in you, leeching off the heat in your depths.
Where is your shadow?
I don't know, you sob, but a tendril deep within snatches them, hoards them.
A voice not yours leaks out instead: You've banished it with your light.
Insolent! A shadow needs light.
A shadow thrives in the dark. Be gone, light! You are nothing to me.
Rage.
Crying again, your voice rising up into nothing as the beings fight. Only you are the recipient of the blows.
Too much, too hard.
The pit in your stomach is ravenous.
It does not want the light. It sinks it claws deep within you, anchoring itself.
It will only emerge if the light drags it out, ripping you apart.
You do not want the light.
Better the devil you know than the one you don't.
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Adam reared back as though flung off you. Staggering back, he tripped against the couch behind him, crashed to the floor. Gasps filled the room as he convulsed, trembling as though gripped by seizures.
You slumped in the chair, boneless.
Panic surged through Steven, making his thoughts riot, freezing him with immobility. Marc fronted in an attempt to shield Steven from the panic, but their strange equilibrium only infused him with the same concern and distress as he looked at your supine form. Sweat ringed the collar of your shirt, your armpits, even beneath your breasts.
"What happened?" Marc demanded, shouting at Adam as he pressed fingers to your throat, checking your pulse. It beat frantically beneath his touch, strong and as panicked as his.
"She resisted," Adam panted, struggling to sit upright. Spasms still rocked his frame.
"What happened? What does that mean?"
Adam paused, head tilted slightly as he looked past Marc's shoulder at the shaft of sunlight pouring through the glass. "There is a...parasite."
"What?"
"It can only be a god."
"A god?" Steven asked, gaping at him. "What god is a parasite?"
"None from our pantheon."
"Wait, hold on. There are other gods outside the Egyptian ones?"
"The world is full of them," Adam muttered, shaking his head. "But I haven't seen anything like this."
Steven's mind raced with the possibilities of this revelation. In the sunlight, you looked peaceful again, your face serene but for the sweat and a faint crease between your eyebrows. You had so strongly resisted the idea of gods that it seemed unlikely you harbored one yourself.
But wouldn't that be what it wanted as a parasite? To convince you otherwise?
Steven swallowed thickly, fear constricting his throat. "Is...is she an avatar?"
"If she is, she isn't willing." Adam pushed himself to his feet, brushed off his suit. When he directed his attention back to Steven, his expression was somber, the kind that made Steven's stomach sink.
"Ra couldn't do anything?"
"No."
"But he's the king of the gods! Surely he can do something, yeah?"
"King of the Egyptian gods," Adam corrected.
Despair flooded Steven's bones. "What are we supposed to do?"
"I don't know."
"Do you know anything?" Marc demanded, taking over.
