As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;  
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells  
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's  
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;  
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:  
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;  
Selves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,  
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came. 
 
* 
 
 
Sometime at the beginning of their second month in Egypt, Illyria goes alone to the temple of Abu Simbel. She does not ask for, or invite, company, in fact expressly forbids it, and counters all questioning with the simple answer 'For myself.'. 
 
She is not altogether dissembling. Though she loves Xander in a new, and wholly mortal, fashion, this is something she must do alone. She walks in a dream world in Cairo, buoyed up by incense and prayers, taking the adulation into herself as she breathes in the heavy perfumed smoke. But Abu Simbel, built after her banishment to the Deeper Well, is something more. 
 
She knows that she will find no prayers there, no consecration - that time is past, the time of murmuring devotion and scattered flowers, the time of belief, yet it is a bridge between her old world and her new, the relics of belief younger than her and older than the times she is beginning, slowly, to comprehend. 
 
She has never considered her size before. Even by the Sphinx, under the vast stars of the desert sky, she has never felt herself to be small. Perhaps because the dark has always been among her thrones, and light among her weapons, and she lives more now among the dusk and quiet of the hours that follow sunset, than anything else. 
 
But it is after midday when she arrives, firmly ensconced in her human shell, her head covered in a fine white wrap.. She drifts among tourists, and among the pillars, touches monoliths with the fragile fingers of humanity, and sees their paleness against the weathered stone. 
 
But the rest, she can hear. Dwarfing her, almost annihilating her consciousness, she hears the old prayers, the old murmurings. 
 
Illyria knows, more than any historian, more than even Spike, that the old gods were real. The Pharaohs she remembers walked the earth as she does now, demi-gods, transmuted and transformed, and they too drank in worship like wine, dizzied and drunk on it, drugged by faith. 
 
She had expected that. 
 
But Abu Simbel was built for love, the love of the Pharaoh's ka for his chosen bride, the most beautiful woman in the world. No-one will know, now, whether she was. They will only know of the love, of the temple of Hathor, of the grief and grief and grief of a trapped god for his lost beloved. 
 
Illyria leans against one of the pillars, and breathes in afternoon heat, searing dust, scorching, painful, long-ago emotion, hears the whisper of robes and the faint murmurings of priests, tastes the coolness of lotus-water on her lips. 
 
She refuses to lose Xander as Rameses lost Nefertari. She will challenge the laws of magic and love and faith and time, break through the doors to every dimension closed to her with armored feet, raise her armies once more and fight the underworld. 
 
She is the all-powerful, she is Illyria, and she can love. She will hold her fortess firm, as the Pharaoh could not, and she will leave no memorial but herself. She, too, has her ka, and it is sealed within her, closed away into strength. She will not leave it behind for another to follow her and misuse, for there will be nothing for her to follow unless Xander should die, and that is the one thing she knows she will not permit. 
 
She comes back to Cairo, and carries her new stillness, her new conviction, with her. 
 
She steps out into broad daylight, onto the balcony, in her own guise, and ignores protests of care. 
 
She is the God-King. And she loves. And with her acceptance of herself comes the expectation that they will learn to do the same. 
 
In time, they do. 
 
* 
 
This is who I am, for myself I came.