"Men," Qebhet agreed, her voice tinged with sadness, "and power. And fear." She joined Hecate on the couch, wrapping both hands around the mug and breathed in the wafting steam. The black racer raised its head curiously and inched down her wrist, drawn to the radiating warmth. "The dying is always bad, but the killing..."
When Duat had released her, long months after the fire, she had emerged gasping and shaking from the Mississippi River in a new-made body that was mottled with burn scars, the violence and hatred of that night still branded into her flesh. It had taken three moults to erase those marks, and many years before she could walk into a crowded room without her lungs tightening in panic. For a long time after that terror-filled night, she'd done her best to make herself small and insignificant before the eyes of others, like a sand boa shrinking beneath the desert rocks, afraid of what their attention might bring.