Week 6 Story: Hathor and Ra

 A Tale of a Misunderstood Goddess 

Ra had summoned her again. She knew what that meant, but she did not want to admit it to herself. Someone must have angered the vindictive old god again. The petty old man only ever summoned her when he needed the Other. Hathor hated the Other. 

Ever since she had been created from Ra's words, the Other had been there, lurking on the fringes of her life like a maleficent shadow. She and the Other were opposites: Hathor was meant to be gentle goddess who cared and nurtured, the Other was nothing like that. The Other was harsh, brutal, and bloody.

As she walked into the throne room, she was surprised to find all of the gods were there; something that had not happened since the day Set killed Osiris. Isis stood in the corner, likely scheming something; Horus perched protectively behind Ra; Hapi was bubbling around the edges of the room; the other gods interspersed throughout. 

Once she had entered and bowed before the throne of the god she hated, Ra spake and told her that he needed the Other, just as she suspected. He told her how mankind had disrespected him and needed to be wiped out, to a man. Hathor stood up in shock, never before had Ra asked something so ghastly from the Other. The Other was used to doing the dirty work for Ra, but that usually entailed only razing a city of men or hunting down a wayward god; never before something like this.

She tried to protest, but Ra was still king of the gods and was in total control of his throne room. Hathor tried to suppress the Other, but when Ra bade her she always readily obeyed. She felt the transformation begin as the same intense pain she had always experienced when the Other took over. She felt her muscles tightening and strengthening, her petite hands morphing into clawed instruments of brutality, her teeth into curved fangs only suited for one purpose: to kill.

The next few days turned into a bloody blur as Hathor tried to block out what the Other was doing while in control. However, try as she might, Hathor could not block it all out. The seas of men's blood and the cries of their anguish were all-pervasive, even as Hathor secluded herself further and further down in her own body. She vaguely recalled Ra trying to speak to her, but she was so beside herself that she could not make out what he was saying. She just continued letting the Other pilot her body.

Hathor suspected she had let the Other be in control for several days before she sensed the Other weakening. She then fully came back into control of her body and was horrified by the sight around her. The dead were everywhere and she was coated in so much blood. Tears welled up in Hathor's eyes as the visions of dying faces flooded through her. She turned to Ra, who was standing over her menacingly.

He said that she had lost control and that she was too dangerous to be left in her current form. Hathor could not believe the injustice of this. She was an unwilling tool of an oppressive god and now was being punished for doing her horrible job. She had never wanted to be what she was, what the Other was; now she was being told that the things she had been forced to do were her fault. 

Caught up in despair for the bloodshed and the pain she had caused, she just allowed herself to sink back in deeper into her self. She was already so far gone that, by the time Ra's magic started to work on her, there was hardly any Hathor left to change.

Author's Note

In the original story, Hathor was to tool of Ra to wreak havoc on mankind and punish them for disobedience. However, the original tale is told form Ra's perspective and I wanted to show how Hathor felt. She killed many men and grew uncontrollable in her bloodlust, and was punished by Ra at the end of the original tale for going too far by transforming her into the Heavenly Cow, a beast Ra would ride to the heavens form Earth.Hathor has many disparate roles as goddess, many of them antithetical; as such, I saw an opportunity to create a Jekyll and Hyde version of the story with the good-natured Hathor and the Other Hathor which was the vindicator of the gods. I also made Hathor intensely torn with her roles, eventually driving her into a depression so profound she allowed the transformation into the Heavenly Cow to happen. The tale came out much darker than I predicted, but thank you for reading!

Image Source: Piqsels

Story Source: David Mackenzie