“He doesn't need to.”
A Lapis immortal of The Duat
3 known connections · an open question
Ibis and baboon, inventor of writing, the gods' scribe and peacemaker. He gambled with the moon god Khonsu for extra light and won five days — the epagomenals, the gods' birthdays. He gathered the pieces of Horus's torn eye and made it whole. He records every verdict at the weighing without blinking.
He is writing tonight's verdicts in the Hall, ibis-quill moving without pause. The moonlight is his fee, and he collects it nightly.
He doesn't gamble anymore. He doesn't need to. But he keeps the dice, the priests say, in a drawer no one is allowed to open.
“The lector swears it now, and two of the torch-bearers back him: between the twenty-first declaration and the twenty-second, the chief lector paused — held a whole breath — and then went on. He reads the list twice, forward and backward. Both times, the pause landed in the same place.”
The list is read twice. The pause is in the same place twice.
“Thoth's record of the third weighing last month shows a full line with no name, no declaration, no judgment — just his own hand, and silence. The scribe who writes everything wrote nothing, once. He has not explained it. He writes around it now, the way you walk around a stone.”
The scribe who writes everything wrote nothing, once.
“The dawn baboons barked at dusk. All of them, throats open, paws raised to the setting sun — the full dawn greeting, performed backwards. The priests insist it was a greeting. The baboons have never once been wrong about which way the sun is going.”
They greeted the wrong sun, or the right one at the wrong time.
The night journey and the weighing: Ra’s barque through twelve gates, the forty-two judges, the scales, and the things that wait beside them.
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