The Book of the Dead by Gail Carriger, Will Hill, Jesse Bullington, Paul Cornell, Maria Dahvana Headley, Molly Tanzer

then what recourse have mortals to complain?
    If we cheat death – and can it be cheating, if we are following in His footsteps? – it’s not by dodging death, but by returning on our own terms. Everyone returns – provided, of course, their hearts pass judgement – but most become lost when they do. The spark is gone, and with it the mind, the shadow, and the name are lost, scattered on the wind. The soul returns in new flesh, and cannot know itself, or recognise any other thing.
    If you’re properly prepared, the ka – the spark – and the soul are brought back together. And it’s like a key in a lock, or one of those wooden puzzles they sell at gift shops around Christmas: bring those two parts together, and it all comes together. You’re reborn in your own flesh, born an adult, with your own mind and your own name and your own shadow. It’s just like waking up after a long sleep. We do it every human lifetime, with all the uncertainty that entails. Sometimes I have thirty years, sometimes near on a hundred, usually somewhere in between.
    And death is... How to explain it, to someone who isn’t one of us? For a time, all the parts of you are separated. The soul presents the heart to be weighed, while the mind sleeps, and the ka... waits. Regains strength. No part of you can wholly understand what’s happening, without the other parts, and when you come together again, you can’t properly remember. It’s like a dream. You know you stood before Him, and His sister-wife; you know you were judged by His brother. But you can’t remember what He said.
    We’ve come together, those of us who are still around – a couple of hundred, I suppose; we’re scattered, and can’t always be reached – and talked about bringing back the practice, teaching people how to have eternity. Some of us say the knowledge should not be kept in our hands, and it would be Maat to spread truth and wisdom, while some way that the gods allowed our culture to be destroyed for a reason, and that it is Maat to respect their will. In the end, we always agree that it would be too dangerous to draw attention to ourselves.
    And so I’ve met Christians, and Moslems, and Jews, and Buddhists, and people of all sorts of faiths, everywhere I travel, and I have been moved by their conviction, and impressed by their wisdom, and it breaks my heart to walk away from them knowing that they are, ultimately, doomed. Nothing but voices, whispering in the dust. But it’s not my place to do anything about it, and I’m not sure I could change anything if I tried.
    Not that it would help her. I lost her more than a thousand years ago.
    What’s written on the sheet in my breast pocket isn’t her name. It’s the name she knows, but it’s not hers. She’s used so many – Adrienne, Njèza, Elizabeth, Mawar, I forget them all – but her name, her real name, is Phoebe.
    I met her in Greece, years after the homeland was lost. It would have been the fifth century, I suppose? I was already thousands of years old.
    She was a farmer’s daughter, but she’d come to Athens to be a sculptor’s model. Even then, she’d had a fierce love for art, and she’s always, every lifetime, been an artist, or worked with artists. She’s a sculptress herself, usually, although she’s also been a painter, and a composer, and other things besides. But her passion is to shape things.
    It’s much the same for me, I suppose. I was an architect, building tombs and temples in Abdju, in my first lifetime, which was why I was afforded the right to a tomb; and I’ve always been an architect, or an engineer – a builder, sometimes, if that’s the only opportunity open to me. But I remember all my lives. I do it because this is who I am, what I know. She always seems to find her art again from scratch, one lifetime to the next. It’s as though her soul remembers, even when her mind is gone.
    She always seems to find me, too.
    It took me a while to notice. I suppose I just