All of this is for her. Not for his glory but for hers. What’s a god without worship? Another one of those curiosities of antiquity, all but forgotten. Even the ancients were too frightened of their own inevitable judgment to pay her homage. If the last two hundred years of human history have taught anything, it is the cruel necessity of an impartial judge. Under Khonshu he had learned only what it was to be an executioner.

Men and women of old were right to fear her. You’d have to be foolish not to. Ammit is severe in her beauty; when she moves there’s the sound of a hundred thousand beads all clattering, malachite and obsidian against scales, and the clink of her jewelry. Beneath the fine web that sheaths her body, there show the swell of her breasts and belly, the rolling smoothness of her powerful legs. Her teeth are long and shining, nostrils flaring softly with each breath, and her eyes are molten gold.

They’re going to make the whole world into a home for her faithful — a world without war, an ordered world. After two thousand years this place is to be her seat.

There’s nothing incorporeal about her now — her limbs pressed against him are more than flesh and bone, but they are very real. Ammit’s weight against his lap is an anchor to him — the strength of her limbs, the molten heat of her flesh. Her tail pins him in place, wrapping around him like a lover’s arm. The tresses of her hair fall over him, perfumed with wormwood and myrrh, and the gold rings strike his cheek.

My avatar. My high priest. You have done well.

High priest of Ammit, She who Devours the Dead. Her first priest. Her hand tangles in his hair as it comes to rest against his neck — Ammit can span his throat without even spreading her fingers, and the long talons stroke and scratch. Once he would have sought this out. He’d have found someone to hurt him, to drown out the discontent in his heart with pain. That was before he had ever known her. The heel of her hand presses at the hollow of his throat — he swallows convulsively, lips parting, and casts his eyes up to her face.

Arthur Harrow has sinned against men. He has wrought evil. He has caused pain. He has committed murder. Only Ammit herself can make him pure.

The goddess uses him for her own joy and he is only too willing — Harrow sobs breathlessly under her, stricken with his own unworthiness, and she draws tight strokes of pleasure out of him with the vise of her cunt.

There can be no other choice than to pour himself out in her. Once she’s done what she’s desired of him, her fingers find the tracks of his semen there in the wet delta of her thighs, mingling with her own desire; her thumb smudges across his lips and he tastes Nile sediment.