Let's check in on our favorite deathly Fate back in B.C....

P.S. For the role of the Egyptian tomb robber - whose name we will learn in this scene ;) - I envision Jensen Ackles with a super intense tan, hair dyed several shades darker, and the same glorious golden-green eyes that he has in real life. The sepia-tone gif posted with this scene is meant to give you all some sense of the (freaking gorgeous!!) image of him in my head, hehe ;)

______________

Scene 6: The Fire

2020 B.C.

Even if some part of her might've hesitated to return to a house in which the hostess had smashed a searing hot saucepan into her head when last she'd visited... that little part of her, the voice of reason or whatever, was as good as dead. Ever since the moment she'd laid eyes on that one man's goddamned face again. There was no way in hell she was venturing elsewhere on the morrow, if this next morning would bring any chance of seeing him - or maybe even feeling, touching, tasting, everything...

She blinked as she woke, in the same humble hut in this little village of Egyptian exiles on the outskirts of Nubia, where she had been knocked unconscious some hours ago. Noted that she was lying on some very sorry excuse for a bed - so hard and coarse that it was barely any different from the earthen floor below. Quite a far cry from the sumptuous bed in which she'd woken up on her first night on earth, she remembered. The almighty pharaoh's. Right now, though, she could not possibly have cared less about linens and pillows.

For the next thing she saw when she blinked once again was a vision of beautifully bare skin, a dark bronze that glowed like salvation and glistened like sin, every ridge and bulge of rippling muscle underneath, the body just as strong and just as striking as the soul she knew it sheathed. She knew because, on her last visit to the Cave, even the sight of his simple grey thread had looked sexy.

He was across the room, his back to her as he started a fire in the hearth, all the while stirring fires far fiercer in her heart. His flawless form was mostly naked, save for some stupidly situated piece of shıt - a loincloth, or whatever humans liked to call it. The placement of it was insanely inconvenient. Who'd ever invented this?

Before she could think any further about it, he turned his head, and she was dead - the worst and the best, the deathliest and most alive kind of dead. Even more so as he presently finished tending to the fire, stood up and crossed the small room toward the bed.

He stared down at her, lusciously full lips parted in something between a ferocious snarl and a flirtatious smirk. "The beast awakens."

With an equally flirtatious bat of her lashes, she tilted her head. "Beast?" she repeated, remembering then how he felt about her. How could she have ever forgotten. In the pharaoh's court, where he had blamed her for the death of his brother, his raging hatred toward her had been exciting. "Oh, right. You still blame me for what happened that night."

When he squatted beside her now, the loincloth almost shifted in just the right way, with that motion... Almost. So much so that it must have been on purpose, some sadistic twist of his - so cruel, so close...

"I blame you for being a bitch," he declared.

She forced herself to look up from his torturously covered crotch to his face, both of their dark green gazes ablaze. "First beast, now bitch - such high praise. Coming from a man who doesn't even know me."

His snarling smirk broke into a snicker, matched in his eyes with a provocative flicker. "Oh, I know all I need to, about you. Atria."

Her soul burst into flame, when he uttered her name. She figured that he must've heard it said by someone in the pharaoh's court, on that bloody night - so his knowledge of it didn't really come as a surprise. But his utterance of it was... sigh. He had said it just right. As if this name, the mortal name she had spontaneously chosen for herself one day, was the only name she'd ever had in her immortal life. And as if the name were made for him to say, to scream, to whisper every night...

"Well," Atria murmured as she shifted up onto an elbow, bringing her face closer to his in doing so, "if you blame me for this, if you hate me with every damn bone in your body-" that fυcking perfect body, she added in her mind, silently, "-then why didn't you kill me in my sleep? Would've been easy."

"Too easy. Something tells me we both like it hard," he devilishly teased, smoldering stare the darkest green. "But even if I didn't kill you in your sleep, you've got no clue what other things I might've done to you."

Gods, just the thought of it brought her to climax. She struggled to keep cool enough to come up with the words to tease him back. "Oh, if your cοck were half as big as your talk, there's no way I would've slept through that."

"Who said anything about my cοck?"

"I did," Atria stated, and as she dropped her eyes to the prize, she definitely saw something stirring beneath that damn fabric. Holy shıt.

He shifted the slightest bit - very much on purpose, which was wickedly sadistic - so that if the prize was further stirring, swelling, anything, she could no longer see it. Slid his scrumptious-looking tongue in a slow sweep along the inside of his lip. "Such a hungry little bitch. And you know it, don't you? Like to eat men up, spit them out when you're through?"

"Not always, no. Sometimes I swallow."

The tense, torrid silence that followed was almost as thick as his-

And that was when his saucepan-wielding mother decided to pop up at the doorstep. "Akhel, did you start up the fire like I told you to?"

One glance around the room made it clear to her that he had indeed started the fire, and that he was now adding fuel to another.

"Yes," he answered anyway.

She blinked. "Well, put it out. I won't be making supper till... later."

The old woman then promptly excused herself, with a huff of disgust at what she had just witnessed - though nothing was yet going on, the animal urges and heat in the air had been quite strong. So she had probably lost her appetite for the rest of the night.

In any event, Atria now knew his name. Akhel. She savored the sound in her mind. She knew it was a name she would never forget, for the rest of her life.

Which was an immortal eternity. Just her luck that the fυcking fire of her loins was a mere mortal - though his godly gorgeousness belied that tragic fact - such that her time beside him, every second with him that she hoped to spend, was doomed to meet an end.

At the thought, in an impulse to hold onto him forever, her hand lifted as if of its own will to clutch one of his arms in a warm, close caress.

She was fairly certain that the impact of the sudden contact, the first touch of his skin against her own, was enough to detonate entire galaxies, but even if the sky was falling all around them now, she wouldn't care and probably wouldn't even know.

"So tell me, Akhel-" Atria purred, tasting his name on her hungering tongue, loving the way it lingered, hoping it would ever afterward, "-how did you evade your punishment, escape from the almighty pharaoh's chains? I'd love to hear how hard these big, strong muscles struggled to break free."

The arousal in his deep voice, rich and gravelly, matched the rising heat and tension in his body. "And I'd love to hear how this tight grip of yours got you onto the throne of a queen. Tell me - how many scepters did you have to stroke? Swallow? Just how far did you go?"

Her hand wandered downward, of its own accord. "Wouldn't you like to know."

"Wouldn't you like to show me."

Oh, gods, would she.

But just as her fingers brushed the hem of that damned cloth at his hip, he stood up and went to put out the fire, as his mother had bidden him.

And even once the fire was extinguished, he stayed at that distance. Answered her questions, explained how he'd escaped from the palace, from Egypt. The pharaoh Mentuhotep had been flabbergasted, after Atria's order to do the tomb robber the honor of a noble death. Since she had disappeared after her passionate little speech in the courtroom and then was nowhere to be found - which had put the poor enamored king in quite a panic - he had planned for the convict to be temporarily confined, while he sought out the queen to further consult as to what she desired. On the way to the dungeons, Akhel had overpowered the guards sent to escort him; Mentuhotep had made the mistake of assigning only four, rather than five or ten or more. Akhel's experience as a tomb robber had given him a great deal of practice in navigating secret passageways, so he had easily escaped from the palace thereafter, finally making his way back to Nubia to reunite with his mother. The only family he had left, after the death of his brother.

Once he had finished explaining all of this, he turned to question Atria. "So what unearthly breed of creature are you - demon? Goddess? Death itself?"

All of the above, she thought to herself, though of course she wouldn't say as much. She shrugged. "Just like you said, I'm nothing but a bitch."

He smirked. "Animal, then. I knew you weren't human."

"And you? What do you claim to be?"

Akhel crossed the room to squat down beside her again, this time bringing his face, his lips, closer to hers, ever so slowly. Each second of it was an entire eternity. Every second with him would always be heaven and hell, life and death, the best and worst. "Me? I'm the hound who's going to haunt you, hunt you down, for as long as you walk this damned earth."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

... Any thoughts about Akhel? About their chemistry in comparison to its modern-day parallel? ;)

Next scene, we'll check in with Cloe in modern-day Greece...

** And if you liked this one, please don't forget to vote! :) **