She didn't know when the darkness came again, but she slipped into it so easily that it seemed as if it had always been there. Though her body was still, her mind wandered. Blurred faces passed by. The beaten path beneath her feet was familiar, but all the same strange to her, much like the air. She hadn't been born where she was meant to be — she lived by the Nile, but she was a daughter of Maghreb, something her mother never allowed her to forget. It was different, she was different. Pariah. The word meant so much and so little. Had her mother been correct? Was umm right to think that her way was the best way? Still the faces held no shape, even as the sounds came forward. Singing, speaking. A dialect of Arabic, similar to her Egyptian tongue but special in its own way. It was what her mother spoke, imparted on her from birth. Even though she knew it, she could not understand.
The words of the men who buzzed about her did not go unnoticed, though English was almost entirely unknown — in her dreamlike state, detached from the reality of the world, she did not recognize the voices as real. The touch of another's fingers, the pressure of something against her chest, all were gone so fast that she wondered if she imagined them. She was sick. She knew that. How sick, though? She'd seen illness, but nothing truly serious, and never death from disease. Could she die? Would the Gods of her adopted home give her peace if her soul left her, when she knew her mother's Allah would not?
Yes, she believed they would.
A sense of peace overcame the woman, her senses returning to her for a final time. As green eyes opened, she took in the sight of a room — when did she enter a room? And where had the golden man disappeared to? The room was empty until another appeared, a significantly smaller shape with much less color. Her eyes focused, finding themselves wide once more as she settled them on his face — the hooked black markings beneath the eyes had been seen before by the young woman, amongst the other paintings of the deified creatures in Cairo. She had always found it strange that the Sky god's true eyes were nothing like the symbol used to represent him. But Horus was a bird, and this man who returned was clearly something else, but perhaps the bird had learned to change itself as well. After all, he was a God.
Left uneasy by the markings that brought back memories of the life she'd left behind, she remained silent as her treatment began.
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