Zaya wakes up dead.

The realization comes slowly, like sand settling after a storm. There is no breath in her lungs, no pulse beneath her skin, and yet she is aware. Thinking. Remembering.

She remembers how it began, long before the escape.

For a year, she had belonged to Urshu, Set’s chief architect. A domestic slave in his household, taken when Set rose to power and remade the world in his image. A year of silence, of watching, of learning the rhythms of a man who built temples for a god who no longer believed in mercy. She was invisible to him in the way servants often are, present but unseen.

That is how she got the blueprints.

Not stolen in some reckless act, but memorised piece by piece. Every corridor. Every hidden passage. Every weakness in the walls of Set’s treasury. She was never a thief. She was a survivor who learned the shape of her cage well enough to slip through its bars.

The Eye of Horus had been the only thing worth risking everything for.

She remembers it now, heavy in her hands as she ran through the darkened halls of the treasury. The alarms. The shouting. And then Urshu stepping from the shadows, bow already drawn. There had been no hesitation. No mercy. Just the sharp whistle of an arrow cutting through the air before everything went black.

Death, it turns out, is not the end.

The Underworld is vast and merciless, reshaped under Set’s cruel new rule. Here, judgment is no longer a measure of the soul, but of wealth. Gold buys passage into paradise. Without it, the dead are stripped of even the promise of peace, condemned instead to an eternity of servitude, their souls bound in chains that never break.

Zaya stands among the countless others awaiting judgment, empty handed and already doomed.

Then something shifts.

The world tilts. The noise fades. Darkness folds in on itself, swallowing everything whole.

Her eyes close.

And when they open again

Air slams into her lungs.

She chokes on it, gasping, her body lurching as life returns all at once, violent and overwhelming. Stone presses cold beneath her back. The air is stale, thick with dust and age. Not the Underworld.

Not dead.

Zaya drags in another breath, trembling, disoriented, her gaze snapping upward

and locking onto a figure standing over her.

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