Where Light Dwells

by Diamonde

Stryfe had not possessed any solid expectations of the afterlife. His childhood teachings had included the beliefs of many cultures - Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Christian and Muslim to name a few - but none had ever been presented as something he should believe in. They had not been selected because his teachers believed in them but because they had been the religions of empires. There had been many religions in the empire he'd been told he was the heir to, but Apocalypse had looked down on them all and told the young Stryfe that such things were weakness.

Yet Apocalypse never denied the existence of Gods and in Stryfe's lifetime he had seen things which would shake the doubt of all except the most determined atheist. So somewhere he had thought that there must be something, although he'd never decided what it might be.

As he released Cable's mind and let himself fall into darkness, he hoped for oblivion, to escape the judgement lovingly described in so many religions and simply stay in darkness and silence, unknowing and untouched. But even as he fell and the pain and exhaustion began to fade he started to regret. To regret so many things left undone, unfinished or uncontested. To regret that he would never see his enemies die or even ever know what became of them.

The blackness closed around him, tight and cold, and he didn't know if he was falling anymore. There was no air to rush past, no feeling of gravity, no sound and nothing to see to judge his movement or lack thereof by. He couldn't see himself either, but that was no surprise. He was a disembodied mind after all.

Why should there be anything else when even he wasn't really there?

Nothing. Maybe they'd bypassed the judging as a waste of time and sent him straight to hell. Everyone knew he was guilty, after all. He just hadn't expected Hell to be so cold.

*Frustrating, isn't it?* There was no breath, no voice uttered the words. They were simply there. And Stryfe knew they hadn't come from him. *To be thrown aside as unnecessary, demonized and banished. Soon they will not even say your name, they will destroy all that remains of you until you are nothing but an idea of darkness.*

_Yes. Yes!_ Stryfe enjoyed the flash of anger, a moment of heat in the ice. _But I'm dead, there isn't much I can do about it._

*Death can be cheated, as you well know. When you cast your mind and soul out of your dying body you changed, left your self between life and death. Both can be reached, although death is much easier for you now.*

_So where am I now? And who are you?_ Stryfe hadn't lived and succeeded for as long as he had by taking everything strange disembodied voices said at face value. More the opposite, if anything.

*You are nowhere. You are in the moment of death where life stops but the fate of your soul is undecided. I am... holding you in that moment.* There was nothing to convey the vicious amusement, but it was there. *As for who I am... guess.*

And suddenly where the had been nothing, there was something. Pale sand under Stryfe's feet and stretching away forever in every direction, gleaming slightly in the light of thousands of unfamiliar stars. He was himself again, whole and wrapped in his own silver armour, which was also perfect and complete except for the helmet. It did nothing to keep out the chill.

The cold didn't seem to be bothering the other man standing on the sand. He was bare-chested except for an elaborate necklace of gems and gold that were bleached of colour by the light. The belt around the top of the knee-length, pleated skirt was equally elaborate, twinkling against the dark cloth. Stryfe frowned. The clothing, the jewelry, the white crown were all distinctly Egyptian. But the man himself was pale, paler than Stryfe, and the hair that curled from under the crown was almost certainly red.

"You know my name," the man said his voice like soft thunder. "You know my story. It isn't hard..." He smiled a predator's smile and the desert felt too still. There should be wind, whipping up the sand into a storm. Sand and thunder and storm... and the white crown of Upper Egypt, worn like a defiance and a claim.

Stryfe stared into the dark eyes and saw his own life as a flickering light in the hand of a God. "Set."(1)

"For a moment there I wondered if you weren't quite as smart as you claim to be." The god of desert and storm looked amused.

"Possibly smarter."

"Confidence is a virtue. Overestimating one's abilities is not, but for now I will call it confidence."

"Thank you," Stryfe said dryly.

"You're welcome." Set looked at him for a moment, thoughtful. "So, chaos-bringer... what do you want?"

Stryfe returned the calculating gaze with a raised eyebrow to underline his skepticism. "What can you do for me?"

"That was rhetorical, little one, not the question you should be trying to answer." Set smiled again, as cold as the landscape around him. "You should be wondering... what can you do for me? Pray that there is something, because if there isn't then I will simply release you to continue on your way. Are you that sure of where you will end up?"

"I don't believe in anything, why should I go anywhere?"

"Why not? Whether you believe in them or not, there are many people who believe in _you_. You are something of prize, and since you don't have a specific belief they will fight for the opportunity to control your eternity. Tooth and claw and talon and flame." Set reached out too fast for Stryfe to react and grabbed him by the chin, forcing his head up to meet the god's eyes. Until that moment they had seemed the same height, but Stryfe found himself looking up like a naughty child. "With your pain and hate and anger and self-loathing... it would be no work for them to torture you and the returns would be very high. And so quick. It can take years to fully break a strong mind, but yours has been broken before and the cracks have never mended. On earth you are strong, Stryfe, but off it you are easy prey."

"So you're trying to beat the rush and lay a claim before I'm fully dead?" Stryfe asked sarcastically, futilely willing himself to pull away from the burning grip.

Set blinked innocently. "Do I look like the god of the dead to you?"

"No," Stryfe answered promptly, thankful he knew enough of ancient Egyptian religion that it was true. Otherwise the torturing would certainly have started early.(2)

"Good." Set let go, suddenly no longer seeming so tall. "My interest is not in your afterlife, Stryfe. I am not laying any claim to your soul's eternity. I am merely offering you a trade."

"Why?"

"Because I can give you what you want," Set said confidentially, suddenly only inches away without ever having moved, "and you can make this part of my almost-eternal existence that bit more satisfying."

"What do I want?" Stryfe asked, taking a step back. "Tell me. What is it that you think you can give me?"

"We have much in common, Stryfe. We both have our 'brothers' and have been defined by everyone else solely as the jealous persecutor of Onnophris(3), who is martyred by our hate. I have felt that hate, I know it intimately, and I see it in you. So I know what you want. You want to rip your life back from those who have usurped it, get your revenge for how they have belittled and slandered you. So I am offering you what you need for that mission, for little more than the joy of assisting someone in such a _worthy_ goal. Life. This is a one-time offer, if you go any further you will be out of my reach but from this moment I can. Restored at... forty, maybe? Whole, unscarred, healthy..."

"And in your debt, obviously. What sort of satisfaction could I help you with, Set? What's the 'little more'?" But Stryfe couldn't disguise his interest any more than Set could hide the hate and anger that was so like Stryfe's but on a much larger scale.

"Nothing that you would not have done or tried to do anyway. In fact, I can help you a little. There will simply be another dimension to it now." He shrugged casually with one shoulder. "And, of course, you give me a connection to the 'mortal' world. It's been a long time since I had any worshippers to give me that, which has been rather restricting."

"I don't worship anyone."

Set laughed. "You wouldn't need to, not in the way you're thinking. I'm something of a force of chaos myself, I don't need that tediously structured ritual or subservient prayer. Not when there's only one of you, at least. Just believe - which I doubt you could stop yourself from doing now - and think of me occasionally."

"I can do that, possibly. Only if you stop dodging the question and tell me what you want me to do, though."

"I want you to kill a self-important, short-sighted blasphemer and give him something close enough to a proper Egyptian burial. That way anything that remains of his life force, his soul and his mind are under our... jurisdiction might be the word."

Stryfe swallowed, despite knowing that he didn't really have a throat. "Apocalypse."

Set smiled again, this time in a way that made the others seem positively sweet. "Precisely."

"You're right, I would try anyway. As many times as it took. But why does his death matter to you?"

"The people who raised En Sabah Nur in the days of the Old Kingdom were desert-dwellers on the northern edge of Upper Egypt who were not ruled by the pharaohs. Upper and Lower Egypt had only recently been united and they fought against the followers of the Falcon God who had overthrown me. Heru-ur as he was then, before the Herus were confused(4) and he became associated with my much-despised nephew..." Set frowned, as if remembering was difficult. Or complicated. Given the fluid natures and interrelationships of the Egyptian pantheon, the latter could well be the case. "They did not fight for my sake, of course. I didn't really need it then, Heru-ur and I were equals. The two lords of Egypt, the darkness and the light struggling eternal while Asar died every year with the harvest, a god of death welcomed only by the old and the sick... Happier days. But they were people of my land and my desert and despite their resistance of the man who ruled in my name and their quaint ideas about life, they were mine. And Apocalypse is the last."

Stryfe took a deep breath. Here was someone who knew the time and place of Apocalypse's birth, his origins... and probably even more. Perhaps he should be nicer to the God of Darkness. "Apocalypse was a worshipper of yours?"

"No." Set's expression, on a human, might have been described as 'mildly miffed'. On a God it was much more disturbing. "If he had been I would no doubt like him better. He hadn't allied himself with any god in particular, although he was a desert creature, until Aset appeared to him and he began listening to one of her more revoltingly devout followers. She didn't convert him, drove him away in fact... but he still believed, in a fashion. He just deliberately cast us aside, and after he survived certain death after certain death and never aged he began to get a very inflated sense of his own importance."

"Interesting." Stryfe meant it about more than the view on Apocalypse's mentality, Set's temper was barely under control and the darkness around him was moving in angry swirls. "When I was a child he would say that he was the master of all mutants and humans, that worshipping gods was weakness because the only absolute power in their lives was him."

Set snarled, a horribly inhuman sound. "And for that he is outcast and blasphemer! He thinks himself MY better?" What had been a hint of distant thunder when Set spoke was suddenly a roar that would probably have deafened Stryfe had he still had ears, but the words were still clear. "He thinks that he can ever leave me behind? He was mine as a child and mine he remains! He thinks stolen mortal longevity makes him a god, he will learn what a god is! He is no more immortal than I am, but I am Darkness and eternal, I live after death as a God and he becomes another soul to clutter Hell. There is little difference between mutant and human, Stryfe, not from where I stand. I will make him see that before I release him to the bastard Anpu(5)."

Stryfe paused. "Yes, I can see how that would make you angry..."

"But you think I am 'taking it too personally'." Set glared. "You may not have heard it, but he has called himself a God and used my name as a curse in the same breath. There was a reason they destroyed almost every image of me or mention of my name." He smiled coldly. "I am a selfish and vengeful God and I tend to answer when invoked."

"And?"

"He irks me. You I like. I'm a God, pique is enough."

"I understand." Stryfe looked around and laughed quietly to himself, then waved a hand at the endless flat sand around them. "Well? We're in the desert, tempt me. Show me what I can have. Make me want it."

"Humans. So attached to your stories." Set took a deep breath and the thunder faded completely back to its original distant pitch. "Then go ahead. Look behind you."

Stryfe was going to turn of his own accord, but before he could the entire false landscape spun under his feet and colour exploded in front of him.

He was expecting to see what he wanted. Apocalypse dead, Cable at his mercy, himself with power and control restored.

All he saw was dawn. Dawn from his little hideaway in Austria, the place that was probably the closest thing he had to a home. The sun broke over the horizon, turning the snow to brilliant gold. Red streaked across the sky, the sun seemed almost close enough to touch and although it was blinding he couldn't seem to look away.

He couldn't feel the sun's warmth, though. The only heat he could feel was the slow-burning fire from behind him, Set's heat pressing into his body even though they weren't touching. It was almost scarily intimate. But he wasn't about to mention that, if he did Set might take the dawn away...

Stryfe swallowed. "What happened to offering me the world?"

"I can't give you the world," Set replied softly, humour colouring his voice. "I can't defeat your enemies for you, nor would I if I could. I am showing you what I can and will give, what happens after that is up to you."

"That's unusually... simple."

"Isn't it? Yes or no, boy."

Stryfe looked at the golden sunrise and wanted to feel the heat of it like he'd never wanted anything before. "Yes."

"Done." The word was a crack of thunder that hurled him into swirling, painful darkness but he felt himself fall and hit the sand.

Sand. Real sand against his cheek, that stirred with his breath. Breath. He was breathing.

Stryfe sat up and looked around, trying to figure out where he was. Not his mountains and his sunrise. He was still in the desert, but he could see water glittering to one side and the lumpy shapes of possibly-buildings beyond that. There were even lights, the steady glow of electric lights, and the stars were back as they should be. Stryfe studied the constellations for a few minutes, trying to figure out where he was. Apparently equatorial.

Suddenly suspicious, he looked at the water. A river. "Three guesses what it is," he muttered to himself, going down the hill a foot or so above the ground so that he didn't trip in the darkness. He was over the river and closing on the village when the sun rose, golden rays striking the stone walls of a ruined temple. He stared at it, then gritted his teeth. "Kom Ombo? I know it's your birthplace but we were looking at MY home, not yours!" There was no answer, but Stryfe threw a parting shot at the retreating darkness. "You do realize that it's twenty-five miles to Aswan from here, don't you?!"

Sighing, Stryfe set off towards the buildings. He was going to need to buy something that wasn't armour before the sun got any higher and some food to satisfy his utterly empty stomach, then... well, it would probably be faster to fly to Aswan.

EPILOGUE

The false reality with its imaginary air had faded to darkness as Set's attention left it. Nevertheless a voice intruded itself on his meditative attempt to recoup the power he'd just expended. "Very cunning. But an expensive risk, was it not?"

"No." Set composed himself and turned his attention to the bright presence that had appeared in his little piece of Nowhere. Never appear weak before an enemy.

"Not expensive? To push a mortal soul back into the world, give it a new body and bind it to you at the same time as you confuse it so that it doesn't even remember why it shouldn't let people like you behind it?" The voice mused, but not at all to itself. "I always did wonder about that phrase 'get thee behind me, Satan', personally I prefer to keep people like that where I can see them. Which is was why I was watching you. Note the subtle insult there."

"It was expensive. But it is not a risk."

The other presence laughed. "Set, you of all people should know that with humans there is always a risk. They have to do what you want of their own free will, and sometimes they do things that nobody wants."

"And I say that I know enough of this human to have little risk. Feel free to oppose me, we will see who wins."

"Of course I will. You knew that it would be impossible to avoid me after taking that one."

"I did." Set smiled inside his own thoughts. "But if we ever stopped fighting, brother mine, the world might end."

"True. And with humans again. Just like old times."

The vernacular proved Set's suspicions. He wasn't the only one who'd been keeping a very close eye on humans in recent years. And probably not the only one watching a certain few, either. He gathered himself to leave and replied in kind. "May the best God win."

-=Continued in other stories=-

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