When we got to a place that seemed safe to camp, my brother got me off the gifted stallion. We seemed to be near a little village miles away from Rome, though one could still see the fires in the mid-morning sky and smell the smoke of the burning city. He'd noticed my pallor and my tight expression from effort not to grimace every time the horse took a step. He made a fire, and left me beside it to go into town.

I must have fallen asleep after I laid down beside the fire an hour after he left, because I woke to him shaking me, and a concerned expression on his darker face. He looked so like our father in so many ways that I slapped him away before my sleep fogged mind could remember that my father had been dead for well over a thousand years now. I sat up, with difficulty, and apologized. He'd brought back supplies that were already unloaded form his horse; food, bandages, clothes for me rather than the tattered red cloak and rope holding it to my wounded body, herb's to soak the bandages in that would help with healing. I might heal faster than a human, but it seemed only wounds that would cause instantaneous death warranted instant healing from the Gods.

With my time in Rome, I didn't want male hands within a hundred paces of me, not even helping ones, and when my brother came over after boiling water and putting the herbs in it, followed by bandages, to untie the rope holding his cloak in place and I knocked him over. I knew he was just trying to help, but with everything that I had been through in the last hundred-fifty years, I just could not willingly let anyone near me. He tried again, saying he needed to see so he could help, and I fought him, to the point he had to pin me down while I still struggled. He was stronger than I was currently because of my wounded state leaving me weaker than I had been the night before.

My brother pinned my legs with his and forced my arms up with one hand, making me yell with pain as it stretched out the gash in my abdomen. I was too weak to use any abilities to get him off me, and it hurt too much to struggle, so my brother untied the rope, that he only then noticed was slashed and darker in the area around the hole. He opened the cloak and the hand that gripped my wrists lessened its grip before letting go entirely, getting up off me as well.

Stretching me out hurt so badly I could barely breathe, but my brother was much gentler at seeing how serious I was injured. I hadn't even thought it was as bad as it really was. I hadn't looked at it, hadn't been able to take the time, intent on getting as far away as I could as quickly as I could. I stayed on my back, unable to sit up at the moment, and my brother went to the piles of supplies he'd brought back from the village and came back to me with needle and thread and a bottle of honey. For anyone who doesn't know, in those days, we used honey for wound treatment.

My brother threaded the needle, but got up again and came back with both a waterskin as well as a bottle of drink. He sat down beside me again and pulled away the dirty, tattered cloak I'd been using for clothing since the night before. I was still bleeding, though it wasn't abundantly, more like a slow oozing than anything else, what with the riding keeping the wound from closing.

I laid still as I could, and didn't once look at what he was doing. That was worse than looking at the giant gash in my abdomen, seeing him fixing it as he was. I could feel him making the small stitches and pulling my flesh back together again, though at some point I lost consciousness, because the next thing I knew, he was done with it, and was shaking me and softly calling my name. He had stitched me up fully and wrapped my abdomen in the fresh bandages and I could tell he'd put honey and herbs on it after he had stitched the wound shut.

My brother was trying to wake me, not only to check on me, but to help me into clothes as well. He got me sat up, and I was likely whiter than a sheet the pain was so terrible. I wondered why other wounds had healed almost instantly while this one was not. Was it because it wasn't life threatening? It made no sense to me in the least. I knew nothing about what I was then, even after almost two thousand years of being alive.

Once I'd been helped into the clothes my brother had brought, he handed me an entire loaf of honeyed bread that had been fresh when he'd bought it. He went to stoke up the fire for cooking and I leaned back against a saddle while he did, and picked at the bread until he brought me over some of the hot food for me to eat.

* * *

It took weeks for my wound to heal, during which I stayed with my brother, who helped when he could about keeping bandages clean and checking his stitch work. I healed quicker than a human ever could, but still much slower than I had with the death blows I had received so many times at the hands of now dead Romans. News of the burning of Rome spread as quickly as the fire I'd set, and I found out that the fires had burned for six days. But it wasn't truth that was being told. Who would believe that a single, weak non human female could have brought the capital of the greatest empire in the world to its knees? No one. Romans who had survived were saying that either the current emperor Nero, others said it was the Christians who had set the fires. And with how many Legionnaires had died, and the extent of the destruction, it was the easiest thing to believe. So my revenge was covered up.

The good thing, was that it had been so long since my capture that no one could tell that I was someone of interest. I could go into towns again. I no longer had to hide myself in the wilds, though I had to hide what I was in order to stay safe. I no longer had to bath in the frigid waters or sleep on the ground. I hadn't slept in a bed for almost six hundred years, and once I was settled comfortably in a room at an inn in a random town, settled in comfort for the first time in ages and by myself, I cried.

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The loss of my brother, whom I had been supposed to protect, my sister I hadn't heard from who hated me, my cousins were gone who knew where, the theft of my blind son, the abuse of the Roman general I had killed. Numbness crept over me after a while. I can't say that it was just a lack of emotion, but I can't say that I could feel anything either. My brother brought food up from the common room downstairs, but he mostly let me alone. He seemed to know that I needed it. He was the same as me after all. I'd made him an Ancient after he had come back from battle dying.

* * *

That night, I was sitting in the window of my room at the inn, and dosing as best I could. I still hadn't gotten used to sleeping in a bed again. It was too soft, and I found I couldn't sleep. So I slept in the windows or on the floor.

This night, in my light, fitful sleep, it wasn't the usual visions of fire or reliving the torture of the last two centuries, but odd, foggy visions of an island I'd never been to before, and a temple on the island. Inside the temple that I wandered through was a tall, too tall to be human, man with brown hair and golden eyes. He smiled at me, and when he spoke I knew his voice as the very same one who had spoken to me the day of my capture.

'You have a job to do child. Come to Pilak. To my mother's temple. We will find you there.'

I had to ask someone in the morning where exactly I was, as I hadn't been paying attention to where we had been going for the last several weeks. My brother had been taking me out of Rome and headed North, so I continued that route to get out of the peninsula to head East towards what was my land of birth and hadn't seen in almost five hundred years.

It took me months, and it was odd being able to go into towns again. I still had to steal food and clothes, but it was more effective to steal coin so that I could buy what I needed. I was hearing news of Rome still, and how the city was trying to rebuild with the empire, but I also knew that the 'empire' would never be the same after what I'd done.

I was a calm person, though I still had trouble sleeping, and was still having the visions of Pilak, though now they seemed to just be reminders of what I was supposed to be doing now. I would wake calm, and it was better than the night terrors I had of my son being stolen and the torture and use I went through. I headed east through Europe, and through part of Asia, and took a ship across and back into Egypt.

Nothing was the same. Romans were everywhere now. I was relieved to find that the religion had survived, it was busier than I remembered though. Once in Egypt I took my stallion and headed south toward Pilak in the Upper Kingdom that I had helped to acquire before the Romans had taken over. Towns were more frequent and busier than the last time that I had seen these places. I had no reason to rush, but I didn't simply sight see either. I stayed in inns to keep care for the horse and for the quiet and niceness of being able to have a real meal myself rather than simple bread and cheese on the road.

People saw me, dressed as I did, with my red hair and pale skin, and I got stopped often by Romans demanding my identity. I would lie and talk my way out of who I was. And by the time I got to southern Egypt I was hearing rumors of myself at the inns told of some foreign dignitary, even royalty. And the description of me was so accurate that I began to get recognized. I no longer had to steal money to pay for the inn or for my food or for my horse, it was simply given.

Having people of my homeland treat me as I had originally been treated once my father had let me out of the archives was refreshing, but I didn't expect it, nor did I expect it to last. And I think things were given to me because of my face. One day when I had bathed from hot water that had been brought to me, I looked in a mirror and saw that I had a perpetually dark, murderous, wary look in my expression, and a hunted look in my eyes. I looked like a caged and abused animal. I was too thin, though I had gained weight and strength since my escape from Rome and I could only imagine what I had looked like to my brother.

I continued south toward the temple island of Pilak, which would be known in modern times as Philae as the Greeks called it. It was the time of year when the Nile was high, before the dry season when the drying river would expose the silt that grew the crops. I stopped in the town closest, and decided to wait until night when there wouldn't be anyone but the priests there at the temple, so I got myself a meal at an inn and put my horse into a stable for the night.

After the city around the temple grew quiet, I got up and left my room in the inn and headed silently through the mostly empty streets towards the river. There was no way for me to have taken my horse across, and I would have to swim it and hope crocodiles were sleeping and not hunting this time of day. I had known people in the past who had made that mistake and lost their lives.

The river was still, not even a boat gliding on the water. I could just see the temple on the island in the middle of the river, torches burning and lighting everything, but it was going to be a long swim. I waded into the water up to my waist, keeping my eyes out for anything moving in the water. I bent my knees and pushed forward so that there would be no splash, but to just begin to glide my way into the deeper waters.

I kept an eye out for anything, especially when I stopped moving to tread water and take a rest. It was a long way to the island. Now and then I caught sight of something moving lazily in the water, ripples that weren't my own, but they always moved away when I stopped and simply floated where I was.

I finally got within several yards of the shore when I stopped the last time. There was just fifty more feet to go. I stopped to tread water and catch my breath, looking around as I have been to make sure that I was safe. There was a huge movement in the water, and I stopped moving, floating in place, and I hoped it was just another crocodile and that it hadn't noticed me. But what happened was very, very different and should have been impossible to happen. I saw what looked like an odd triangle come up out of the water, and then another, quite a bit of distance away. Both were moving in sync, and both were coming towards me.

There had never been an instance of a shark in the Nile, not this far away from the sea. And here I was, nearly to the shore of my destination, and suddenly there was one, immense in size, coming towards me and gaining speed. I shot into movement, trying to make it to shore, but fish swim much faster than people do, and this one was bigger than any I had ever heard of. It rose up as it got to me, and I planted one foot on each lip as it tried to get my legs in its mouth, and it pushed me through the water, though my feet did catch on stray teeth and I came all too close to losing the bottom half of my body to this beast's mission of a meal. Luckily for me, he was pushing me toward the shore, and I hit the bottom as it rose up to make the shallows at the shore of the island. The enormous shark flipped me up and out of the water entirely and beached itself with me just out of reach while it thrashed and flopped it's way backwards to try and get back into the river.

I was shaking all over and couldn't move from where I was while the shark tore up the sand and made noise while I lay just out of reach. The beast somehow managed to get itself back into the river before it drowned, and silence fell so that all I could hear was the river lapping at the shore. I could hear whispers that didn't seem to come from any one place, and I could feel the power this place held. After so many months of travel and near death experiences, I had finally made it to the temple island of Pilak.