The next vision was separated from the ones that had come before it by tens of thousands of flashes, causing Percy to think that a long time had elapsed on Amenthes between the two memories.
Once Nephthys decided to stop skimming through her past to allow another event to unfold properly, Percy found himself inside another temple. Judging from the hemispherical shape of the hall, he guessed that it was a different building from the one where the wedding had taken place, and it didn’t take him long to understand its purpose.
There were only five people present in this memory, though only four drew breath. Nephthys looked physically unchanged, while her husband appeared to have aged, but only slightly. Percy could tell due to the faint wrinkles that had only formed by the corners of the man’s eyes. He was still a White, which suggested that he was probably a Yellow-born rather than a Green-born like his wife.
The only other woman was old and hunched, despite the Blue core burning inside her sternum, making Percy fear that she would collapse at any moment. Recognizing her took a few seconds, as the centuries had eroded her resemblance to her parents. If it hadn’t been for the unique eye colour that she shared with her father, Percy might have struggled to connect her to the six-year-old girl from the previous vision. The fact that her pink irises had lost their joyful lustre certainly hadn’t helped.
A much younger-looking man with a Violet core was standing by her side. Percy was sure that he hadn’t seen him before, though the man also resembled the other members of the family greatly. He clearly couldn’t be the older brother that Percy had seen kicking the strange-shaped ball with the other children in the previous memory, since the Orange-born boy would have aged just as poorly as his sister.
‘He must be the one that Nephthys was pregnant with,’ he concluded. ‘At least one of her children was a Yellow-born…’
The Amenthei were standing close to one another, dressed in formal attires once again, though distinctly different from the garments that Nephthys and her husband had donned on their wedding day. The red silk embroidered with golden patterns had been replaced with a deep blue fabric decorated with silver images that matched the sombre atmosphere in the room.
The small family were looking at a body lying on a stone table, tears streaming down their cheeks as the occasional sob broke the oppressive silence. The deceased was a wrinkled man that Percy didn’t have as much trouble identifying – even with his eyes closed. The corpse’s face was paler than that of the living, but serene.
‘Why is it only them here?’ Micky wondered. ‘Did Nephthys not have any grandchildren or great-grandchildren?’
‘I suppose we can ask her when she calms down,’ Percy said, not wanting to disturb the reincarnated goddess as she relived what had clearly been one of her most heart-breaking memories.
The vision lingered on for a couple of minutes before Nephthys decided to move on. This time, she flashed through the next set of memories much faster and for far longer. Percy didn’t know if she was doing it because they were less important or as a way to deal with her sorrow.
Regardless of his familiar’s reasons, Percy felt that they spent hours speeding through her past before she paused again.
The next memory took place in a hall lined with hundreds of stone beds, though the people resting on them appeared to be merely asleep. A few workers of various grades were tilting the slumbering people’s heads up to feed them various glowing potions or help them chew pieces of solid food, clearly trying desperately to wake them up or at least keep them from starving.
Even those who were currently awake looked drowsy. Their drooping eyelids, the dark bags beneath their eyes, and their frequent yawns betrayed their exhaustion. Every now and then, somebody collapsed on the stone floor, forcing others to carry them to one of the empty beds.
Nephthys and a handful of what Percy assumed to be her most trusted aides were standing on a slightly elevated platform at one end of the room, observing their subjects with grim expressions.
By the corners of his borrowed eyes, Percy recognized two of the people in the small group again. They were both White-cored males of an advanced age, though one was clearly much closer to the end of his lifespan than the other.
‘It’s a lesser spring and her husband was already a White before their children were born, so her son should still have five or six thousand years left,’ Percy calculated.
As for the deity’s daughter, she was obviously nowhere to be seen.
“I will dive into the dark ocean again,” Nephthys informed her aides with a sigh.
The older man grabbed her wrist to stop her. Despite his high grade, his hand was shaking, suggesting that there wasn’t much strength left in his withering body. Even so, he refused to let go of his wife, though it was his son who spoke.
“Mother… please don’t. At the rate the Slumber is growing, I fear that it won’t be long before it can threaten even you.”
“What else am I supposed to do, Anubis?” the goddess asked while gently prying her husband’s weak grasp off her arm. “My magic has stopped working on our people centuries ago, so I can’t even help anyone stay awake anymore. I don’t know if slaughtering the Slumber’s manifestations is slowing down its growth, but it’s the only thing I can still do.”
Her family and subordinates clearly wanted to protest, though nobody seemed to have any good arguments.
Nephthys flew out of the hall, revealing a scene that Percy could only describe as hellish. The once-sunny sky had been replaced by a veil of dark clouds as black rain constantly pelted the deity’s slender frame. The vast desert that Percy had seen in the previous memories was now hidden beneath a dark sea that stretched as far as the eye could see, with twisted shapes occasionally and briefly breaking the surface.
The building that the goddess had exited from had apparently been built upon a tall mountain, keeping it just out of the ocean’s sinister grasp. The towns and cities that Percy had spotted earlier were probably long gone.
Nephthys shrouded herself in mind mana – probably to illuminate her immediate surroundings, since the only source of light left on the surface of Amenthes appeared to be the glowing runes that had been drawn in the interior of the building. Without hesitation, the goddess dove into the dark water, at which point the memory ended.
The next vision came relatively soon, which wasn’t surprising. It was clear that Amenthes had already been on the verge of collapse, so it couldn’t have lasted much longer anyway.
Percy found himself inside the same hall that stood at the peak of the mountain, though Nephthys was the only one still awake, and there were half as many people sleeping on the beds. Even the goddess felt unnaturally tired, though she could probably hold on for a while longer.
That said, she didn’t seem to have any intention of trying to survive by herself.
Walking up to her sleeping subjects one by one, the deity gently placed her hand on their foreheads, emitting a soft red glow that appeared to draw something out of the mortals. Percy followed this feeling as it travelled through her arms and disappeared somewhere inside her torso. He couldn’t tell how exactly it worked, but he did know what she was doing – she was storing her subjects’ minds inside her internal world, trying to buy them some extra time.
Percy silently watched as Nephthys extracted hundreds of sleeping minds, even recognizing a couple of people. When the goddess got to a certain Green, Percy was reminded of his former host. Percy had never actually talked to Rasef, as the poor man had been asleep during his entire time in the Sanctuary. Percy technically hadn’t even seen the Green’s face from the outside, but he felt that the body’s proportions were somewhat familiar.
When the deity reached her most powerful subjects, Percy noticed that her husband was missing, having probably succumbed to his old age before the infestation got to him. However, her last surviving child – Anubis – was still alive. He was one of only eight surviving Whites that the Amenthei goddess presumably stored near the top of her magical pyramid, along with three demigods.
After extracting every remaining mortal, the goddess picked a random empty bed to lie on, closing her eyes and causing her own thoughts to slow down. Percy felt like he was about to be sucked into some sort of deep sleep alongside her, though that was when the sequence of visions ended, returning him and his familiar back to their cavern on Remior.
The Ruby Princess’ compound eyes weren’t capable of shedding tears, though Percy didn’t miss the pit that had formed in his familiar’s soul. He wanted to console Nephthys, though he wasn’t sure what to say to a grieving mother who’d lived over a thousand times longer than him.
The former deity broke the silence first, her internal voice cracking with bitterness. ‘What sort of mother forgets her own family?!’
‘You didn’t forget them,’ Percy said. ‘Your shrunken wisp and newborn brain had a limited capacity, so you were forced to prioritize the memories related to your role as a leader. Even so, you kept everything safe, and remembered the rest as soon as you could.’
Before his familiar had a chance to reply, Percy shared another memory with her – this time one of his own. In that memory, he was inside the crimson avatar of an Amenthei man, standing inside the depths of a crumbling pyramid. He was watching Nephthys from the outside as she desperately tried to control the cracks spreading on the walls and minimize the damage on the hieroglyphs, her features tensing whenever a section became illegible.
Percy was pretty sure that his familiar had never forgotten that particular scene, since her meeting with him was precisely among the key memories that she should have opted to retain after her reincarnation to better understand her situation. Still, he felt like he had to show her how fiercely she had fought to preserve every little detail about her past.
Reframing how her memory loss had come to be appeared to have achieved the desired effect, as the deep sorrow permeating her soul dulled slightly. Nephthys remained quiet for a few minutes, probably considering everything that she had just learned about her people and her family. Eventually, some of her sadness gave way to determination.
‘Percy… I have a presumptuous request,’ she said before pausing. ‘I know how busy you are with extending your lifespan and dealing with the problems on Remior, so I really don’t like the idea of dumping my own issues on you… but…’
Percy smiled internally, already guessing what the reincarnated deity was trying to say. ‘You want to start experimenting with the gem on your forehead?’
The wasp nodded. ‘I don’t know if there’s any way to recover the minds of my people, yet I would like to at least try. I… want to see my son again.’
‘Of course,’ Percy replied without a moment of hesitation. This project was long overdue anyway. ‘We start today.’