Ma'at was balance. Ma'at was harmony. Ma'at was truth. Ma'at guided the orderly flow of the seasons and the dance of the stars, bound all things together in a perfect, cosmic unity: heaven and earth, human and beast, living and dead.
Ma'at was what Qebhet served, and ma'at was what she was, as the embalmer who brought order and calm to the decay and confusion of death, as the celestial serpent whose sinuous trail above echoed the Great River below.
Without ma'at, isfet ran rampant. Chaos, violence, disharmony, imbalance. The walls fell and the boundaries blurred and the whole turned against itself.
Isfet blazed a fire through Qebhet's veins. It rippled beneath her skin, and where it touched, it left its mark. Along her jaw: the dull sheen of blue-black scales, puckered and inflamed where they met the skin. Along her right forearm, sharp white pinfeathers forcing their way up through hair follicles. And her left shoulder—
She'd curled herself in on the wound instinctively, obscuring it from Hecate's view. But as the hand brushed her skin, and the voice brushed her mind, she flinched awake, hissing, and in her scramble backwards revealed the cracked, blackened skin crusting around the four claw-punctures.