For Round 2 of the Yu-Gi-Oh Fanfiction Contest. The pairing is Mizushipping (Priest Seto x Kisara). WARNING: Ryou/BEWD, Priest Seto/BEWD, selfish!Kisara, and vicious!BEWD. Don't like, don't read.

There's some slight deviation from canon in that Mahaad doesn't go after Bakura until after Priest Seto discovers Kisara and the scene where Kisara dies is edited somewhat.

Notes: In Ancient Egyptian, senet means sister and sen means brother. Aser is Osiris, god of the underworld; Meskhenet is the goddess of fate, who breathed the ka into everyone at birth; Shai is the god of destiny. Ankh-Tawy was the name for Memphis used during the Middle Kingdom.

Disclaimer: I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh.

Dissolution

He found her sprawled on the ground at the feet of an angry mob, pale, pale, skin splattered with the dark red of blood and tattered clothes just barely clinging to her flesh. Her head was facing away from him, but he could see so clearly the unnatural white color of her hair, although it had been powdered the brown of the streets from dust kicked up by passing feet. It was remarkable, really, how no soldiers had yet come to break up the crowd—Kemet had to be falling apart, Seth thought, that common civilians would turn upon a complete stranger and unleash all their fear, their fury, and their confusion in a hundred fatal blows.

"She is the White Dragon!" a man cried, and those who could hear him roared in agreement. "She has killed my family—she has burned my village to the ground—she is evil incarnate," he accused as the tumult silenced for his words, spluttering in his fury, his eyes dark and livid. "Look at her; she has been cursed by the gods and touched by the Lord Aser Himself, and she will bring death upon us all!"

The resounding calls of the mob were cut off abruptly as Seth shoved his way into its center, saying nothing because his mere presence, the glitter of his golden jewelry and the headdress that represented his role of High Priest, was enough to silence them all. The sudden simultaneous intake of breath as everyone present stared gave him the opportunity to make his point—and none could say that High Priest Seth, right hand of the Pharaoh, did not seize each and every chance that came his way.

"Take them," his voice commanded, resounding through the stilled marketplace, and the soldiers that had accompanied him rushed to obey in one deadly wave, seizing all the people in the street and wrestling them into submission. Seth could see Karim and Shada standing silently in the shadows, and the latter raised a single eyebrow at his actions before sighing and standing to help drag the confused pedestrians back to the palace.

Seth was soon left alone with the woman on the ground, the surrounding area completely deserted after the news that the Pharaoh's priests were capturing random passerby had spread, and he simply looked at her for a while—at the way scarlet-stained spots of fabric stuck to her skin, at her slender fingers that twitched even in unconsciousness, and finally at the delicately perfect features of her face.

She was not a native of his country; that was certain. Nor was she from the hot cities of Nubia far down the Nile, or even the wandering tribes that lived in the south. Perhaps she did not speak his tongue and had escaped from the slave-ships of the lands far across the sea; perhaps she was an apparition, a mirage brought on by the setting desert sun, and he would wake up soon in his chamber and remember that the Thief King had never existed either.

But then her eyes fluttered open as if sensing a foreign gaze upon them, and she gave a cracked cry of alarm when she saw him kneeling next to her. "Who are you?" she whispered, her entire body stiff with trepidation, and Seth didn't answer at first—he couldn't answer, transfixed as he was by her eyes.

Dear gods, they were blue.

Blue as the sky, wide and frightened, they stared into his with the wild terror of someone backed into a corner, drinking in every detail of his features and holding the world in their depths. Seth thought for a moment that as the terrible silence dragged on, as the woman's eyes remained unblinking and heartbreakingly hopeless, that he could see a flash of white, a fading memory of a proud dragon standing sentinel in the sky as he fled in search of a second life.

Do you see us, boy? Do you see? We have our Prince of the crimson eyes, his advisor of the amethyst, Karim of the green, Shada of the night-gray, Aishisu of the blue, and Mahad of the brown. (His were violet once, before he sealed his gift away—but that is another story.) Look, Seth, for you are not alone. We have been chosen by the gods, we High Priests of Kemet, and Their touch is visible even in our faces. You were born poor, with eyes the color of the sky, and now you are here.

"I am Seth," he said in reply, and the spell was broken.

"Kisara," she murmured before her lids slipped shut once more.

"There is a war going on," Mahad snapped, standing firmly in the doorway of Kisara's room.

"I am well aware of that," Seth said, his voice even.

"You cannot bring in a girl from the streets who has been accused of murdering entire villages. You cannot do this and expect that everyone will trust you when you say that she is innocent, that she will not wake up in the night and kill the Pharaoh on whim! For all we know she is a hired assassin, sent by the Thief King to destroy us all; for all we know she is the Thief King's Ra-damned sister!" Mahad took a deep breath and continued more calmly, "I am captain of the Pharaoh's guard, and I have an apprentice who will likely take up the Ring if I die in battle. I cannot put them at risk for one of your obsessions, Seth, though Ra knows you have little enough."

"Kisara is important," Seth said, folding his arms and giving the other priest one of his famous glares that could make the servants, even ones who had been in the palace since Akhenamkhanen's rule, cower and move out of his way. "She has power in her; I can sense it, Mahad. She will be valuable if we keep her on our side and not throw her out like peasant scum to the streets, where the Thief King could recruit her for real!"

Mahad sighed in exasperation. "And how do you know that the supposed 'power' she possesses is not already in Bakura's grasp? We cannot trust her, Seth, and I thought you would know better. Are you not the one who always berates us for being careless?"

"Trust me," Seth said, and forced the next word from his mouth. "Please."

Mahad studied him for a long moment before relenting and allowing Seth to step past him. "If you are sure."

"You need not fight for me, priest."

Seth started and blinked at Kisara, whose eyes had opened at his arrival. The blood and dust on her body washed off by the palace servants, clothed in simple dress with her wounds bandaged neatly, she looked less broken than she had when he had first seen her, but still frail and tiny on the bedsheets that were as pale as her skin. "And you need not undermine yourself," he replied softly, automatically, still musing over Mahad's newfound paranoia about security. It came with war, he supposed (having never seen one)—the fear that a single wrong move, a single thing overlooked, could lead to defeat.

Kisara's mouth trembled, her eyebrows pulling together in worry, and her voice itself (her pronunciation melodic and different, not the way Kemet-born citizens spoke) fluttered uncertainly as she said, "I-I am sorry, I do n-not understand—"

Seth stared at her as he realized two things.

He had spoken in High Egyptian, the dialect of the nobles, the dialect that he had attempted to embrace instead of the slang of his childhood days.

Kisara was a peasant, a girl from some foreign land, who understood nothing but the language of the commoners.

"I apologize," he said after a long moment with the flat-vowel inflection that he had not used since he was a boy who knew nothing of Shadow Games and ka creatures, since that innocent time when Zorc had never been. He remembered briefly carefree days playing in the sun before the bandits had taken his hometown, and despite the war that raged around him, despite the shouts in the halls and the ring of steel on steel, Seth allowed himself to smile.

Perhaps he could make peace with his past, and it tasted like freedom on his tongue.

Kisara saw, and she smiled back.

The man struggled wild-eyed in the arms of the impassive guards, head whipping around frantically as he searched the room for an escape route. "You can't kill me!" he gasped, chest heaving with exertion, a bloody blade on the ground at his feet. "You can't—I know—I know your High Priest's apprentice, Pharaoh!"

Everyone's gaze flickered over to Seth, whose expression visibly hardened. "I do not know who this man is," he said coldly, speaking very pointedly in High Egyptian.

"Well, maybe not you yourself, but your mother!" the man babbled insistently, stumbling over the perfectly phrased accenting of words in the dialect Seth had used and eventually reverting to the speech of the streets once more. "Your mother was my father's friend, you see—"

Seth stiffened further. "My mother is dead."

"Stop acting so high and mighty, Seth!" the man said with familiar exasperation that made Aishisu wince and Karim exchange shocked looks with Shada. "Once born a kid of the alleys and villages, you can never put on some fancy mask and pretend that you've grown up with these people!" He waved an arm at the surrounding priests. "Would you abandon the ones you once considered your extended family to sit around in a palace and rip innocent souls out of bodies? You destroyed my brother's life when you supposedly 'purged him of evil' and sent him back to us with no more knowledge of survival than a baby! Is that what you want, Seth? Is that who you've become?"

"I do not understand what this man is saying," Seth said finally, his voice sharp and clear, cutting through the silence in the room like a knife through bread. "He does not speak my language; he has no place in my past." When he looked up, his expression was terrible, dangerous and as icy as a night with no moon, and the man flinched back as he realized that there was to be no sparing of victims that day.

Seth's eyes were cold, cold blue. "May I carry out the soul trial?"

Mahad faced the Thief King in the crypt where the mage had sealed away the majority of his power so many years ago, and everyone except Aishisu was shocked when he lost. Mana walked through the palace like a puppet on cut strings, her once-lively eyes dead to the world; she hid in empty rooms during the day to avoid contact with others and sometimes fell asleep there during the night. She did not speak, and all were too busy to do anything but let her be.

So it shocked Seth when he arrived in Kisara's room to find Mana curled up in the chair by her bed, silent tears running down her cheeks as the white-haired girl did nothing but watch in sympathy, one pale hand resting on Mana's arm. At Seth's entrance, she stood, head bowed, and walked out with not so much as a protest.

It alarmed him to see Mana so subdued, and so he did not call after her as he usually would have, a reprimand for disturbing Kisara. "Why was she here?" he asked instead.

Kisara lifted herself up on her elbows and assumed a sitting position, resting her back against the wall. "She needed the company of one who would understand and not advise."

"And do you understand her?"

She shrugged, the dress too large on her slender shoulders. "I understand enough. I know what Mahad was like, if less intimately than her, and I can mourn him by her side. I know what it is to feel as if you have lost everything in the world, everything that made life worth living. But mostly, I know what it is to know your entire life has been tied to duty, and duty alone."

"You have no obligation to any of us here," Seth protested.

She shook her head, long white tresses slipping against her skin. "Not to the others, perhaps, but to you." Her face was calm, serene. "The gods have told me."

Kisara stumbled into the oasis on weakened feet, her mouth parched, her stomach painfully empty, and her entire body feeling like a lead weight that she had been forced to drag to sanctuary. She fell to her knees by the water, drinking with desperation, not caring that she was, for all she knew, trespassing on the private property of the beautiful temple that the oasis belonged to.

"I do not like her, senet," a boy's voice said in front of her, and Kisara looked up, the water still dripping clear and cool from her chin, to see a child no more than eight years old standing before her, eyes wide and body trembling in a thin white robe. The golden light of the setting sun illuminated his face, and she saw pale, pale hair—ghostly and almost translucent, not opaque and healthy and silvery like hers—and the strangest purple eyes, eerie and dark. At the sight of him, Kisara felt the hunger already inside her escalate frighteningly, almost as if it was not hers at all—and she could have sworn that she heard a quiet purr by her ear, like the satisfied sound a cat made when it had found its prey.

"Hush, hush, Ryou," the girl behind him murmured, wrapping thin tanned arms gently around the boy's body. She was barely taller, and although her hair was black like the eyes of the jackals, Kisara could tell that she and the boy were siblings; that much was evident in the way they stood straight and unassuming, in the way their mysterious purple gazes gleamed in Ra's fading rays. "We shall frighten her, sen, though she does not yet know who we are."

"But I can see her death," the boy—Ryou—whimpered, pressing closer into his sister's grip. "She will leave and take me with her, senet—"

His sister stiffened slightly before composing herself and saying soothingly, "No, she will not, so you have no need for worry; I will keep you here and keep you safe... What is your name, stranger?" she called to Kisara, abrupt, her tone careful and flat.

"Your—your eyes—" was all Kisara could force out of her mouth, her voice nothing but a thin thread of sound piercing the night. Her very ka seemed to reach out toward the boy, hungering and curious and waiting—

The girl drew herself up proudly, a hint of defensive arrogance in those strange dusky depths. "And what have you to say about them, stranger, when yours are no better? They say that ours were blue, too, before we wept tears of blood in our cradles and dyed them the violet of the darkening skies. We are touched by the gods, my brother and I, and he shall have nothing to do with the likes of you if he fears that you will kill him in his sleep."

"I seek no quarrel," Kisara said desperately, feeling hope slip away from her grasping fingers. "Please, take me in and feed me and let me stay the night, and I swear as the gods are my witness that I will leave the next day without doing any harm."

"Don't you see it, senet?" Ryou whispered confidentially, pale hands (too slender for a child, with none of the chubbiness infancy brought) reaching out toward the woman on the ground before him. "Can you not see the dragon that slumbers within her, doomed to serve a man who holds her heart and her eyes—"

"Hush," the girl insisted, rocking her brother slightly to quiet him. "You must not speak of that, Ryou, unless one asks for it; Meskhenet did not give you such Sight for you to waste it on ones who have no wish to hear Her word."

"But I am afraid, senet," Ryou said softly, eyes hazy and disoriented. "The dragon needs energy to live, for it must protect Kemet—you see her fate, do you not? Does Shai not speak warning in your ear?—and it has none as of yet. It needs the gods' blood, and there are none to offer it up save myself."

"No," the girl said almost viciously, arms tightening around him. "No, I will not let her take you away, damn all that Shai and Meskhenet and Ma'at may do to me for that."

"But this is for Kemet," Ryou protested innocently, deep purple eyes blinking up at his sister. "And has Shai not told you that I will die young?" He wriggled his way out of the girl's grip and walked, fearless, up to Kisara, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder. The dragon's growl in her soul softened, faded, and the boy's eyes closed as hers followed—

And the next thing Kisara knew, she was on her arms and knees, hair falling around her face in a curtain of silver as the girl's horrified scream resounded in the night.

"What have you done?"

Kisara's head jerked up to behold the girl cradling Ryou's limp body in her arms, his face sharp and elfin and so very dead. But there was new power thrumming through her body, and suddenly she didn't feel quite so tired or quite so hungry; she felt as if she could run the hundreds of miles to the capitol of the two lands without pause. "I do not..."

"You have killed him," the girl cried, "and he was one who was loved by the gods, one who would pass through the Hall of the Two Truths with Ma'at's favor in his hand—"

"Who are you?" Kisara whispered, horrified yet entranced.

The girl drew herself up with a sort of childish dignity. "I am Amane, Voice of Shai, Beloved of Ma'at, and you have killed my brother." Her mouth trembled as if holding back tears, but her voice was steady when she continued. "He walked with half his soul in Heaven, and the gods spoke through his lips and saw through his eyes. You have killed the one who was their channel and their vessel in this Realm, and he died to save you!" Her words were a whiplash, meant to hurt, and Kisara instinctively flinched back. "You are undeserving of his sacrifice; do not think I cannot see the evil in your soul. I have the eyes of Ma'at and Ryou had those of Meskhenet, and together we saw your fate."

"What happened then?" Seth asked, absorbed in the tale.

Kisara paused for a long moment. "Nothing. Then I left."

"You will journey to Ankh-Tawy and meet a man with your eyes. You are bound to him, from now on until your death, and there will be death indeed that lies in wait if you leave his side, and death too in your path should you choose to stay. Your duty ties you to him with ropes of blood and bone, and it will be your decision whether you shall follow the destiny set down for you by Meskhenet when she breathed into you your ka, or if you would rather throw his life away in favor of yours."

Kisara stood mute with shock as Amane continued, standing straight in the newly made night with her pale dress almost glowing in the darkness. "I shall not speak of hate," she murmured, her strange purple eyes conflicted, the pain evident in her voice. "I shall not speak anything but the truth; I shall not damn you to Am'mit's teeth with the gift that Ma'at has given me.

"Go, Kisara; go with the weight of my brother's death on your heart and your killing dragon in your soul, and the jackals shall feed well on your miserable carcass."

Seth placed himself in front of her, facing down the two-faced demon that his mentor (his father?) had become. "What do you mean?"

Akhenaten spread his arms, his black cloak flying out to an invisible breeze. "You know of the girl's ka creature, my son! Harness its power, and you will be able to defeat the Gods Themselves; you will be crowned ultimate ruler of all of Kemet, and the throne will be yours!"

Seth's eyes were icy, spitting the blue fire that Kisara had seen more and more often in them as the war had progressed, and his voice was scathing as he spoke. "And what makes you think that I want the throne, Akhenaten? You should know, if you really have watched me as closely as you claim, if you are really my father, that I have no desire to usurp Atem. He has ruled fairly and well, and he is willing to give himself up for the sake of his country if need be! He has my respect, and so do my dead comrades—and they would be horrified if they were to know the extent of what you have done."

"You are a fool, my son," Akhenaten growled, his voice echoing down through the empty palace halls. "I have sacrificed so much, all for you so you could become Pharaoh. You will not forsake your birthright when I know that you have wanted it for yourself more than once! You will not undo all the laboring I went through to make this possible."

Seth shook his head, and Kisara did not miss the gentleness with which he pushed her further back, further away from the old, mad priest. She saw the way his hand grasped for the Sennen Rod hidden in the pocket of his robes, and she tried to place it in his palm.

But when her fingers met the smooth, warm gold, she froze in place.

A strange feeling coursed through her, awakened the dragon that she could feel sleeping in her soul, and it wanted Seth—not the hungry, dangerous desire that had emanated from it when she had met Ryou, but a different sort of desire entirely. The dragon yearned to be near Seth, to meld into his soul and join him in the most intimate way possible, to be a part of him and never leave him again. Kisara gasped as she felt herself almost instinctively lurch forward, and she fell against Seth's back and wrapped her arms around him, holding on as if he was a pillar anchoring her to the ground The dragon whispered to her to let go, to release her life and dissolve into the priest like dye into water, and Kisara almost did.

But ever so slightly stronger than that urge, ever prevalent in her mind throughout the past few years, was another voice.

"—and death in your path should you choose to stay—"

I don't want to die!

So she jerked back, falling against the ground as the dragon murmured its disappointment in her ears, but she could barely hear it over the pounding of her heart.

Seth turned around, eyes of such blue, blue clarity snapping immediately to her face. "Kisara—!"

She looked over his shoulder and saw the wicked grin that had plastered itself across the mouth of Priest Akhenaten, and she knew with terrible certainty what would happen next. This was a father who had been driven mad with jealousy and longing, who would sell his soul to a demon for his son, who would then kill that son if the boy disobeyed.

Kisara saw the monster's right hand rise up; she saw the black orb of dark magic form in there, crackling and snapping its power like the lightning of the storms that had struck in her homeland, and she saw his arm reach back to throw it in all its deadly fury at Seth. She saw all this distantly, as if watching the life of someone else, and she remembered the words of Amane, the prophetess child whose brother she had unknowingly sucked the life force from.

"—it will be your decision whether you shall follow the destiny set down for you by Meskhenet when she breathed into you your ka—"

The dragon cried out in her soul, telling her to move, to save Seth and give up herself, but Kisara was frozen, because she did not want to die.

"—or if you would rather throw his life away in favor of yours—"

The dragon screamed at her; it ached for Seth, to be one with Seth, to be his companion and his friend for all of eternity, and above her his eyes widened in alarm when he read the horror in hers, his mouth still parted as he spoke her name. But it was that look, the resigned acceptance in his face (because he knew, she could tell—he knew that he was going to die) that made her change her mind.

So she yanked him down to the side by the front of his robes and took the blow meant for him, and she managed the slightest smile before the blackness engulfed her and there was no more to see—because the dragon murmured its contentment, and the dragon was her.

"Go, Kisara... and the jackals shall feed well on your miserable carcass."

End

I had originally planned another scene after this one in which Priest Seto fights Atem because he was angry about Kisara's death (i.e., the famous Giant Rock scene that was never actually shown), but I eventually decided that it would be better to end it with Amane's line.

And about the High Egyptian thing, I reason that Kisara's a foreigner, and any language is bound to have slang that differs greatly from the proper phrasing and is hard to understand.

Reviews are greatly loved, as well as feedback from all you other contestants. :]