Sethnakht left the garrison two days later, promising, in the same flat, unreadable tone as everything else the general said, to be in touch. Khaemwaset spent most of those two days trying to decide whether that was a threat or something closer to a promise, and not managing to land firmly on either.
It was Meret who finally gave him something else to think about.
She came to him on the evening after Sethnakht rode out, holding a small wooden box he didn’t recognize, her expression somewhere between guilty and determined.
"My prince. There’s something I should have given you a long time ago."
He set aside the grain scroll he’d been pretending to study and gave her his full attention. In three weeks, Meret had never once looked at him quite like this.
"It belonged to your mother," she said, setting the box carefully on the low table between them. "I was supposed to burn it, after she died. Overseer Bakenkhonsu’s predecessor gave the order himself, said it was to spare you the grief of her things. I couldn’t do it. I hid it instead, and I’ve been too afraid to give it to you, because I didn’t know what was in it, and I didn’t know what would happen if the wrong person found out I’d kept it."
Khaemwaset stared at the box for a long moment before reaching for it. His hands, he noticed distantly, were steadier than he expected.
Someone ordered her belongings destroyed. That detail alone reorganized everything he thought he understood about his mother’s death, the same way a single misplaced artifact could rewrite an entire excavation’s timeline if you let yourself actually look at it instead of forcing it to fit the story you’d already decided on.
Inside the box: a handful of small items that meant nothing to him yet, a broken bit of jewelry, a lock of dark hair tied with faded thread, and, folded small enough to fit in a closed fist, a single scrap of papyrus covered in cramped, hurried handwriting that didn’t match the careful, formal script of official correspondence at all.
New quest available. The Mother’s Secret. A hidden letter has surfaced. Its contents may reveal the truth behind a death long buried as accident.
He unfolded it carefully. The ink had faded, but not so badly that the words were lost.
If you are reading this, something has gone wrong, and I am out of time to explain it properly. Know this. I did not fall ill on my own. I have suspected for months that someone in the palace wanted me silenced, though I could never prove who or why, only that it began after I discovered something in the temple accounts I was never meant to see. I have hidden the proof where I hope it will be safe until Khaemwaset is old enough, or brave enough, to look for it. Ask the old scribe Nakhti at the temple of Osiris, if he still lives. Tell him the falcon remembers. He will know what that means. Protect our son. I am sorry I could not protect him myself.
Khaemwaset read it three times before he trusted himself to look up.
Something in the temple accounts. Not court gossip, not a rival wife’s jealousy, not any of the vague, unprovable political dangers his borrowed memory had always assumed lay behind his mother’s quiet, convenient death. Something specific. Something with a name attached, a scribe, a temple, a phrase meant to be a key rather than a riddle.
New skill unlocked. Inherited Resolve. Passive. Increased Ma’at generation from actions taken in pursuit of justice for a wronged family member.
"My prince," Meret said quietly, watching his face. "What does it say?"
He hesitated only a moment before deciding, with a certainty that surprised him, that this was one secret he wasn’t willing to carry entirely alone. Not this one.
"She didn’t die of a fever," he said. "She found something. Something in the temple records that someone wanted badly enough to bury, along with her."
Meret’s hand went to her mouth. "The temple of Osiris. That’s where they sent her ashes, my prince. I always thought that was simply tradition."
"Maybe it was." Khaemwaset folded the letter carefully back along its original creases, the way he would have handled a fragile document in his old life, aware suddenly of just how much this single scrap of papyrus was worth, and how easily it could be lost or destroyed if he wasn’t careful with it now. "Or maybe someone wanted her close enough to the evidence that they could keep watching it. I don’t know yet. But there’s a scribe. Nakhti. If he’s still alive, he knows what the falcon remembers means."
The falcon. Horus, his borrowed memory supplied immediately, though even that felt like an incomplete answer, more a symbol than an explanation. Kingship. Vengeance. The eye that saw what others couldn’t. He filed it away next to everything else, uncertain yet how the pieces connected, certain only that they did.
Quest updated. The Mother’s Secret. A name and a location have been identified. The scribe Nakhti, temple of Osiris, capital city of Waset. Investigation cannot proceed further from the garrison.
He read the notification twice, and felt the shape of his situation shift under him for the second time that day.
Everything he’d built here, the careful grain-tally cover, the slowly earned trust of a garrison that had spent eight years writing him off, the fragile, dangerous, not-quite-friendship with a general sharp enough to actually see him, all of it had been built around one central assumption. That staying hidden meant staying here, in this small, forgotten corner of the desert where no one important was watching closely enough to notice what he really was.
The truth about his mother, the only real answer to the question that had quietly driven every decision he’d made since waking up in this body, was in Waset. In the capital. In the exact place every letter, every royal command, every piece of political instinct he’d developed in three weeks had been telling him to avoid at all costs.
"My prince." Meret’s voice again, careful now, reading something in his silence. "You’re thinking about going to the capital."
"I’m thinking," Khaemwaset said slowly, "that staying safely forgotten out here was never actually going to answer the only question that’s mattered to me since the day I woke up in this bed poisoned and half dead." He looked at the letter again, at his mother’s cramped, urgent handwriting, written, he understood now, in what she must have known were some of her final hours. "She left this for me on purpose. She wanted me to go looking, eventually. I think eventually just became now."
Outside, the evening horn sounded across the garrison, the same ordinary, unremarkable sound it always was, and Khaemwaset found himself thinking, not for the first time, that the whole world he’d been dropped into seemed to run on small sounds that meant something was quietly, irreversibly shifting just beneath the surface.
New quest available. Crossing the Threshold. Prepare to leave the garrison and travel to Waset. The road to the capital is far more dangerous than the road to the well.
He closed his hand around the small, fragile scrap of papyrus that was the closest thing he had left to his mother’s voice, and understood, with a certainty that settled somewhere deep and unshakeable beneath the fear, that whatever waited for him in that city, he wasn’t going to spend the rest of this borrowed life hiding from it.