I have been to the Duat. More than once, and not always voluntarily. The Egyptian underworld is the most efficiently organised afterlife I have ever had the misfortune to be processed through — and I have walked a great many — which is either deeply impressive or deeply disturbing depending on your feelings about paperwork.
Anubis weighed your soul against a feather. Let that settle for a moment. One feather. Everything you did, everyone you harmed, every truth you bent — weighed against one feather. The Egyptians didn't build their afterlife on mercy or damnation. They built it on calibration. On the quiet certainty that the scales don't lie, that everything eventually gets measured, and that the measurement is final.
Ra is the oldest power in this fragment. There is something in his light that predates the deal, predates the Landlords' arrangement, possibly predates the Landlords themselves. I have never asked him about it directly. There are questions I don't ask — not because I don't want the answers, but because some answers rearrange the furniture of your understanding permanently.
What makes the Egyptians dangerous is that they don't believe in endings. Osiris died. They rebuilt him from pieces. Horus was blinded. He grew a new eye. Nothing you do to them stays done. Play against them assuming every card you remove is permanently gone, and you will lose in ways that humiliate you specifically.
Their dead return. Their destroyed cards remember themselves. Their AFTERLIFE mechanic is not a flavour concept — it is a direct reflection of a theology that has been outlasting its own collapse for three thousand years. They have been buried, conquered, forgotten, and excavated.
They are still here.
I have watched Ammit eat souls. She has terrible table manners. I mention this as a neutral observation.
