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“What?” I asked Set as he leaned against the counter while I prepared to do the dishes, “When someone calls you a bastard?” And the look he levels at me tells me that that was the part of the conversation he had a problem with. I just giggled when I simply tell him, “Well, sometimes you are.”
“Do you even love me?” he pouts.
“I have my doubts,” I tell him giving Thoth a wink as I get back to the conversation I was having. “So perception. Reality is nothing but perception, and it doesn’t matter whose perception. I could be mine, yours, the freaking bug on the window, but to that conscious being, it is reality. Now, what happens when our reality shifts and we come to terms with things that we may not want to have to come to terms with. Well, sometimes it makes us sad. Add,” I tell Thoth and Set as I stop the water from filling in the sink and look out the window, “I’m allowed to be sad. Reality and perception are not always in agreement, and, sometimes, we are forced to face reality as outside our perception; and that doesn’t mean anything other than what it is.”
“Why?” Set asks from my other side forcing me to rotate my head in order to give him a confused look.
“Why?” I repeat and watch him nod. “Why?” I whisper more to myself in amazement than to either of the gods around me as I ponder this question. “Remember how you thought that sending a drought was a good idea? You perceived that if you conquered it, it was yours? However, the reality was that it was the worst PR in the history of history."
“I know not which you speak,” he tells me, breaking eye contact to look straight ahead but I can see the sides of his mouth twitching.
“Oh, so it wasn’t you who sent the deserts into the fertile Nile Valley to cataclysmically end the Old Kingdom with a massive drought and dump Egypt into the First Intermediate Period? Did you really think that was going to win you any favors there Set?” I start to giggle hysterically as I continue to taunt him, “The crumbling of everything that Egypt held dear with a fucking famine? How did you ever think that was a good idea? I mean, seriously, oh god of the red sands, how did you one day wake up,” and I don’t know how he is understanding me through the laughter as I ask, “and say to yourself, I’m going to take over all the land held dear by my brother by turning wet seasons away from the Nile and sending the sands to evict the greenery.” He is still standing there as if he has no idea what I’m talking about, so I ask him, “Really, you have no idea. It was another god of sand maybe?”
“Must’ve been,” he tells me, and I can hear the laughter in his words as the smile dances on his face.
“You territorial...” I start laughing again, “You wouldn’t let another god near your domain if Ra himself ordered it, and you call yourself a strategist. You know this is the whole premise of killing your brother and losing your favor to Horus.”
He gives me that look that started this conversation, the one that says I dare you to repeat that, when he tells me, “You’re lucky I love you.”
Just another conversation with a god.