Treya
“So, you’re learning how to be a healer?”
Treya wiped a bead of sweat off of her forehead. In front of her was a massive bonfire. The residents of the Brooklyn house were outside on the patio, playing games and watching fireworks across the river. Treya was managing the aforementioned massive bonfire, keeping it burning high while also protecting all the flammable things near it, like the many young children.
Sam, the girl from the hospital, sat nearby watching. She nodded at Treya’s question, continuing to monitor Treya. Carter had had reservations about allowing the bonfire, but had agreed under the condition that Sam watched to make sure it stayed safe. (Sadie had come up with the idea, so he was bound to say yes eventually.)
“Yeah. I’ve been training for a little over a year now.” A loud crackling firework drew Sam’s attention for a moment.
“Do you train to fight, too? Or no?” When Treya was at the House forever ago, healers had been strictly noncombatants. It was thought that violence would taint their sacred gifts.
“I do. I don’t think a healing ability is much use if I don’t have something to back it up with.” Treya respected that. She remembered vividly that of all the magicians who went on missions, the healers were the least likely to return.
Treya stretched her arms over her head, rolling her shoulders. Sam frowned and walked over to Treya.
“What?” Treya raised a brow as Sam placed her fingers on Treya’s wrists. “What is it?”
“Just checking your pulse.” Sam shook her head in astonishment. “I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“It’s not elevated. If anything, it’s on the low end.” Her foot tapped away at the ground, a familiar tick to Treya. “It’s been hours. You should be running out of steam.”
Treya snorted. “I don’t know when you’ll all start to believe me, but I’ll say again that I don’t tend to do ‘should.’ I’ve done much harder than tend a fire for a few hours, I promise.”
Treya considered the fire, letting it die down a bit as a couple of kids ran a bit too close to it
“Like what?” Sam kept her eyes on Treya’s. “What have you done that’s harder than keeping a bonfire running for hours with no fuel?”
Treya looked out over the river. “Well…they’re not great things.” At Sam’s look of confusion, Treya sighed. “Fire is one of the most destructive forces. It’s much harder to rein it in than it is to let it go.”
“That’s very similar to healing magic.” Sam offered, her voice soft.
“How so?”
“You said the hardest thing about fire is control? That’s also the first thing you learn about healing.” Sam traced a pattern on Treya’s forearm. A glowing pattern like a stalk of leaves lingered there for a few seconds before it faded. “You have to be controlled, otherwise the magic that’s healing can become too much. It starts to drain you.”
Treya thought that that description applied pretty well to her fire too. She thought about the feeling of losing control, the time she’d felt it most powerfully. She could remember the draining feeling, the fear that she would pour all of her soul into the blaze and have none left for her body.
“Treya, the fire!” Treya blinked out of her daze, snapping back her magic and dulling the fire, which had spiked dangerously.
“Sorry!” Treya gasped. Her hands were shaking.
Sam checked her pulse again, and this time laughed softly. “Ok, fire girl. You need to take a break.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not. Let the fire burn on its own. There’s wood there to keep it going while you take a break.”
Treya opened her mouth but a sharp look from Sam had her closing it again. The moment she let the fire burn on its own she felt exhaustion hit her. She stumbled over to a couch and flopped down, leaning her head back. She was warm to her core.
“Like I said, control.”
Treya bristled. “I was in control. I just… I got lost for a moment.”
“Lost in what?”
“Memories,” she mumbled.
The fire blazed on for a few more hours. Treya offered to incense it back to its height, but Sam wouldn’t allow it. So they sat there, exchanging easy conversation and watching the fire die down to embers. The other initiates trickled inside slowly until it was just the two of them left. Treya didn’t want to leave. She hadn’t been able to sleep these last few nights – she’d spent so long in dark silence, she didn’t feel the need to waste her time going there on purpose. Besides, it made her panicky.
“So can you tell me more about your connection to Set?”
Treya shrugged. “I had a...troubled childhood. I moved around a lot. Something about that...” As she spoke, she realized what an understatement that was. Her memories of Camp Half-blood were mostly about her two friends there. Their names...Alexis and Castiel. Treya’s stomach dropped as she realised that she’d almost forgotten their names. She’d had other friends, of course, but none as important as them. They’d gone through so much together.
And then the day had come. The important adults had called an emergency meeting. They’d sat in front of Treya and Castiel and Alexis and decided to separate them. Alexis had gotten to stay. Treya and Castiel had been shipped off to new worlds, full of different rules and strange people who had treated them like prize cattle or volatile weapons instead of the frightened children they were.
Treya realised she’d stopped in the middle of a sentence. She decided that emotional flashbacks would have to wait. “I guess it really screwed with me. One day I was out tracking some demon when I stumbled upon him. I knew it then, and so did he. I swore to learn the Path of Set. But of course, the House wasn’t on board with that idea. So I practised in secret as much as I could, until I was discovered. You know where that led.”
Sam shook her head in amusement. “You seriously decided to follow the path of the gods despite the fact that nobody had ever done it successfully? And chose the most dangerous patron god?”
“I didn’t choose it,” Treya scoffed. “It’s what I was supposed to do.”
“Hmmm.” Sam leaned her head back, closing her eyes. “How do you know that?”
Treya considered how to answer that. “Nothing else has ever felt so right.”
Silence. Treya glanced over to find Sam asleep. She stood with a sigh, walking over to a pile of blankets. She grabbed two, throwing one over Sam. Then she curled up on the couch under her own blanket.
**
A roar woke Treya. She jumped off the couch, blinking at the bright sunlight. Sam startled awake beside her, tumbling off the couch.
“What the hell was that?!” Sam squinted in the light, looking around for the source of the sound.
“No idea,” Treya spun around, searching the patio and the riverbank below. There was no sign of any monster. Another roar sounded, and Sam gasped.
“The roof!” She jumped up, reaching into the Duat and pulling out her staff. “Get help!”
A shadowy beast appeared at the edge of the roof, its figure surrounded by a tornado of red sand. It growled and jumped down to stand between them and the entrance to the house.
Sam twirled her staff, muttering the words to a spell.
Suddenly Treya recognised the monster.
“No!” She knocked the staff out of Sam’s hand, then put her arm out to stand between her and the demon.
“Treya, what are you doing? That’s a demon, it’ll destroy the House!”
“It’s the Set animal! I know him,” Treya stepped toward the demon. It tapped its feet, like a child waiting for a turn on a swing.
Slowly, Treya stepped toward the animal. It blinked and stopped bouncing, as if it was giving permission. She took it as such and moved until she was standing right in front of the beast.
Treya reached a hand out to the beast’s head. It brushed against her palm, and she felt her ba leave her body.
Treya had never liked how her spirit travelled. The ba was one of the five parts of a person’s soul, what Treya called the flighty one. They liked to take off from their bodies and impart pieces of deadly wisdom. (At least, hers did. She’d never really considered that maybe others didn’t have this problem.) Also, it looked like Treya’s head on top of a human-sized turkey. All in all, not one of her favorite ways to travel the Duat.
She was whisked away from the patio of Brooklyn House and found herself in the headquarters for the Per Ankh. She floated through the massive underground cavern into the Hall of Ages, with its alluring tapestries and ever-expanding carpet. She looked at the familiar images of Ancient Egypt, then the Greeks, the Romans, and some she didn’t recognise. There were images of people in planes, of bombs bigger than any Treya had ever seen. There was one moving image where a plane crashed into two identical towers. Floating down the hallway reminded Treya just how much she’d missed.
Then she reached the throne of the pharaoh. An older man with dark skin sat on the top step. His hair was tied back in a bundle of ruby-studded braids, and he wore a cream-colored suit over a red shirt. He didn’t seem to be aware of Treya’s ba, and he was enthralled by a scroll he held in his hand.
Treya wanted to pause and find out what the scroll was, but a tugging in her gut told her that this was not what she was here for. So she left the new Chief Lector where he sat and followed the sensation to the chamber where the Chief Lector held emergency councils.
She’d only been here once. It was exactly as she remembered; the walls painted a dark grey, with a long stone table down the center. The walls were covered in trophies and objects of power, reminders of Egypt of old. There was a long tapestry behind the chair at the end of the table depicting a battle between Apophis and Ra, shimmering with golden threads.
Treya’s eyes snagged on something in the tapestry. There was a strange way the curls of shadow met the shining light of the Sun god. They all seemed connected save for a few little tendrils that were neither light nor dark. Treya unfocused her eyes and tried to grasp what they were trying to draw. After a few moments of headache, she saw it.
Storm.
The hieroglyph she’d first summoned when she came to the first nome for training. The hieroglyph that had always floated around Iskandar when she was near.
Could it be…? Treya reached out for the wall, but before she could reach it she was blasted back to her body. She gasped as the weight of what she’d seen fell over her. She fell to her knees in front of the Set animal, her hands shaking.
It leaned its head down as if it was bowing to her. Then it exploded into a pile of red sand. Treya ran her hand through it, thinking. If Set really was in the First nome, who had trapped him there? More importantly, why was her hieroglyphic signature on that tapestry? Come to think of it, what was a tapestry like that doing in the war chamber? Egyptians weren’t big on weaving.
She was shaken out of her memories as Sam came running up beside her.
“What the hell-? Here,” she helped Treya stand. “Now, what was that?”
“What was what? It had a message for me, that’s all.” Treya turned to face Sam. “What time is it?”
Sam stared at her. “I’m sorry, no. That’s not a good enough explanation. What exactly did you just do.”
Breathe. It’s not her fault. All Treya wanted to do was get to the First Nome and find this clue. But she had to leave on good terms. The last thing she needed was the House of Life hunting her down again.
“It’s the Set animal. He sent it. It…showed me something. Somewhere I need to go. I think it’s a clue to where Set is.” Treya subconsciously rubbed her wrists, where those ribbons had so often been wrapped. “I need to set him free, like he did for me.”
Sam hesitated. Treya braced herself for a fight, but after a moment Sam sighed.
“Where is this clue?”
“The First Nome, somewhere in the Hall of Ages.”
“Alright.” She picked her staff up and deposited it into the Duat, then checked her watch for the time. “Next portal is in three minutes. There’s a sphinx on top of the roof you can use. I’ll tell Sadie and Carter, and we’ll meet you there. The new Chief Lector is their uncle, so try not to piss him off too much.”
Three minutes wasn’t long. Treya was glad to see a staircase on the outside of the building.
“Thank you,” she said, turning to run toward the roof.
“Trey?”
She stopped at the use of that nickname. She hadn’t heard it in a long time.
“...yeah?”
Sam was smiling. “Good luck.”
Treya winked and climbed the stairs two at a time to the roof.