I've missed out the foreword here 'cause its not really needed for the plot (like the hobbits bit in lotr), but to sum up, the ancient Gods of Greece, Egypt and Scandinavia are real and their religions are still around. The book is four books in one volume - the temporary title being Myrth - and the first book is made up of a series of interviews with a man called Aled "Tempest" Lecter. Hoping to get it published and wanted to get some (at least near-)professional criticism before I tried. This be Chapter One of Book One. Enjoy. Or don't. Comment either way.

1.1

Taken on 12/03/1968

Sothna on Life in Egypt

Excuse me, is this quite necessary? I mean, I’ve just got this job, I don’t see why you need to know about my past – oh, ok, when you put it that way, you sort of do. Ok, fine. Where do I start?

Up until a week or so ago, I lived in Cairo. That’s in Egypt, you should – oh, fair enough, I suppose it is fairly well-known. I was quite rich, I guess; my uncle is the High Priest of Amun-Ra, you see. What do you mean, stop trying to condense everything? What are you, a psychiatrist or something? … Oh, you are? Is that what this… oh, only honorary, ok. So stretch everything out. OK.

Well, basically, the whole family have been gifted by the gods. I don’t mean like, you know, the whole Magic Arts school stuff, gods forbid. I mean, I suppose they are kind of like that, except they don’t die so much. More like demi-gods, I guess, like… magicians with one particular talent that don’t need training or, um, death. Anyway, ever since about a millennium and a half ago, I don’t know the exact times, the Hoth-Horus family have sort of had gifts. Powers, even. You can understand it, I suppose, the gods want their supporters to get the highest protection they can have, who wouldn’t? My dad, Shǎgumol, can turn invisible, whereas my – what’s so funny?

Oh yeah, maybe I should have warned you, another apparently hereditary thing is that all my family seem to have increasingly laughable names. I don’t understand it – I think it was a family tradition that started about a millennium ago, and everyone’s too bitter about their own names to do anything about it. Me, Sothna, that’s mild – I think Shǎgumol speaks for itself, and then there’s my big brothers Zeezor, Sîgar, Chardonnaie (we call him Chard) and Kahtnipp. If they're not bad enough, I have cousins called Dodo, Suhntann, Tchruffwls, Douggtihts, and even one called Chumley. Chumley, for Gods' sake.

But yeah, that’s going off-topic from the my-family-have-powers train of thought. Dad’s the guy who turns invisible, Zeezor (the oldest brother) can let solid objects (like walls) pass through him, Sîgar can make plants grow and move trees around, Chard can do a bit of weather control, my twin brothers Aha and Hemme (non-identical) can manipulate fire and water respectively, and Kahtnipp, the youngest apart from me, can read and tweak minds. And yes, that does make me the seventh, and as it happens, yes, my father is also the seventh son of his own dad. Seventh son of a seventh son – that makes me pretty special, right?

Wrong. I don’t know how it works out. Maybe it cancels out if I’m a Hoth-Horus and a seventh-of-a-seventh at the same time, I don’t know. But I have no godsdamn powers at all. It’s embarrassing. I’m fifteen – most of my relatives have risen to the peak of their powers’ capability by now. I, the chosen one, however – forced to go through a life of supernatural impotency. I’ve had a life of people looking disappointed at me. And of course, my brothers did nothing but make fun of me. Zeezor would walk through me, Chard would make it windy wherever I went, Aha would set fire to my clothes to give Hemme good target practice – I was safe nowhere I went.

And of course, the lack of powers wasn’t the only family trait I failed at. My family are tall, athletic, powerful, and know everything about the Egyptian religion. I’m short, plump, powerless, and can’t remember anything unless it’s practically hammered into my head.

The said hammering was the job of one of our menservants, Manuel. Just graduated from CMS priest school when he was given me to train, he was narcissistic, unbearably sarcastic, and constantly paid more attention to his girlfriends than me. I learnt barely anything under his care, really I didn’t.

Come to think of it, my life’s been pretty bad all around. Which is probably why I ended up here – a bit of respect, after all. Sorry, I think I’m babbling; I’m only really supposed to be talking about why I ended up here, aren’t I? Well, you’ve been given enough information, I guess. Here goes. From the start.

Two weeks ago; last day of February, I think. Normal morning; got woken up by Zeezor poking his arm through my head. I get a chill through me, open my eyes blearily, grimace at the sight of my brother’s rock-hard abs looking down on me, and fall out of bed awkwardly, twisting my arm in the process. Like I said, normal morning. And yes, my brother’s chest is a sight I wake up to whenever he pushes his arm through me, because when he goes through anything, “Ducking” he calls it (Gods know why), anything attached to that part of his body must also pass through him, clothing in particular. Or so he claims; personally I think it’s an excuse to get his chest out around girls.

‘Wake up, shortarse,’ he told me, cheerfully. ‘Breakfast’s been waiting for you for half an hour.’

I groaned and tried to get back onto the bed. Eventually, I managed to get dressed, as little effort as it took me. Egypt’s a warm country, as I expect you know, so I rarely wore much, and today being a Tuesday most of my clothes were still severely burnt. For this day, I had nothing but a pair of brown shorts; enough to keep some decency, but uncomfortably puppyfat-revealing.

I got up and walked downstairs. That’s one thing I had to like about my life; I’ve always lived in a really big house and had a room to myself. Anything built for the Hoth-Horus family is built to have a lot of residents; my family breed like rabbits.

So I get to the dining room, which is actually outside. Like I said, Egypt is warm; we’re out most mornings. Aha and Hemme are playing chess by the road with pieces made of ice and charcoal, just to show off their powers. Chard is sunbathing, as well as making a little rainbow absent-mindedly. Sîgar is nowhere to be seen, so he’s probably at his part-time work down the garden center. Kahtnipp is leaning against the house, cut off from everyone else, his veil tight over his mouth and nose. It’s weird – he’s only a year older than me and we’ve lived together all my life, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him without a veil over his mouth. He probably thinks it makes it look mysterious when you can’t figure out whether he’s talking or rearranging your thoughts to make you think his way. Personally, it just makes me feel queasy.

I sat down and took a bite from a slice of toast. I picked up a glass of water; the water jumped out into my face. I bit my lip and counted to ten before eating again. Hemme’s far too immature for his age – he’s twenty, for Horus’s sake.

Ok, you get the picture, my brothers bully me. I know I’m supposed to stretch everything out, but can I dumb down on some of that before the bit that actually matters? Thanks a bunch. Ok, so I’ve just had breakfast, I’m dripping wet, and my father comes in. He nods to Zeezor.

‘?’ He asks, in Ancient Egyptian of course. Something like that, anyway, my Hieroglyphs tend to be really inaccurate. That’s another one of my flaws – I’ve never understood a word of the Ancient stuff, though I’d never dare tell dad that. Kahtnipp, in a rare moment of kindness, kindly uses his power to project little words onto the bottom of my field of vision, translating the following conversation privately into Atlantean in my head;

‘Going hunting for us this morning?’

‘We’ve got to eat, haven’t we?’

‘Good lad. I’ve heard there’s been a sighting of a manticore up near the road to Asia – kill it, and the city can feast.’

‘I’ll try – it’ll boost publicity, too. Maybe Sothna should come along, too.’

It took me a few moments to notice they were looking at me. ‘Yeah,’ I said, uncertainly. Then, realising that this was a chance to gather just a little bit more respect from my brothers, ‘Yeah! I’d like to come.’

So that’s how I ended up walking through the Sahara at eight in the morning, trying to keep up with my much faster brother as I planned out different scenarios in my head. In my first, Zeezor would give up looking for the Manticore – a beast with a human head, a lion’s torso and a dragon’s tail that showers venomous spikes at its victims – and go home with the lowly deer that he had caught, until I, covered in blood, walk home triumphant with the beast’s human head held high, telling the gory tale of the battle to my family, to be remembered throughout eternity as a kind of modern-day Perseus. Or, Zeezor would find it and battle it intensely for hours, before finally, as the manticore suddenly looked like it was going to win, I would run out of nowhere, pick up one of its projectiles, plunge the spike into its heart and save the day.

Any way I looked at it, I would come up as a hero. Not that any of these would have happened anyway, even if he hadn’t called Zeezor from the hunt and called him back to Cairo. That didn’t stop me from being really pissed off when the blunt end of some idiot’s spear suddenly hit me randomly on the back of the head, knocking me unconscious for the next two hours and thus completely incapable of witnessing what happened next.

Just my luck, huh?