“Flame of my flame, light of my light, illuminate the dark and incinerate the vermin within!”

 

—The Address of Sekhmet, spoken to all that form a hypostatic bond with her

 

“There’s anger and pain beneath his smile. She would not have given him her power if he didn’t have rage somewhere in his heart. I know quite well beings like the Lady-of-Slaughter. What she owed his mother would have been inconsequential without that rage. But Will has mastered his rage. It’s dangerous, but so are his swords and claws. His mastery is absolute. He directs it, concentrates it, controls it. If he draws it out in earnest, he will kill whatever is against him. But that weapon will never indiscriminately leave its sheathe, of that I am sure.”

 

–Martina Morelli, Diabla

 

“It’s funny he isn’t a dog. He’s playful like a dog, loyal like a dog, and yet he’s a big tiger.”

 

–Edith Ogden, Dragongirl

 

“I’m the Bill with stripes on his skin. You’re looking for the Bill with stripes floating around him.”

 

–Burning Bright

 

Name: 

 

Will Blake

 

Supername: 

 

Burning Bright

 

Will’s supername does indeed come from William Blake’s Tyger, Tyger poem. His mother was an avid reader of poetry.

 

Average Grade: 

 

A+

 

Will is a hard worker with a good head on his shoulders. And his grades are legit. We’ve checked to see if Sally meddled with the gradebook like she did for Flicker and she didn’t.

 

Emergency Response Class: 

 

3

 

Will fully intends to follow his mother into superheroics. In ERC simulations, he’s shown to work well with his old friend Matthew Roy, the Coat, and fellow powered-by-magical-forces-of-violence student Martina Morelli, Diabla. 

 

Personalized Curriculum: 

 

Emergency Response with a Focus on Superhuman Combat, Strength Control, Superhero Psychology.

 

Will wants to take up the legacy of his mother Nemea, though not the legacy of their patron Sekmet. He’s in the “superhero” class, Emergency response with a focus on superhuman combat, and has beaten amplified versions of his mother’s rogues gallery in CRS simulations. He’s a very talented fighter, like his training partner Martina Morelli, though like her he can sometimes suffer from “soloitis,” the tendency for superhuman fighters in team situations to develop tunnel vision on their own individual objectives at the expense of the team. Soloitis doesn’t necessarily mean that a fighter is being cocky. What usually causes it is unfortunately, the very instruction that makes superhuman fighters so efficient in defeating their opponents. Martial arts, be they for basics or superhumans, rely on developing muscle memory. A good fighter will enter a state of “flow” in combat where he acts on instinct with complete focus on his opponent. That’s great in one-on-one battles, but not so much when several allies and opponents are involved. Still, Will is learning how to overcome his soloitis. Where he used to go in sun khopesh  blazing, he now hangs back and uses his incandescent glow to distract opponents and communicate with allies.

 

Will takes strength control under Steel Dolly, not only to help him control his superhuman strength and apply it with precision but to apply the class’s lessons in meditation and self-awareness to his rage-based solar powers. Because of his training, he can output energy in excess of supernovae, but can use that same energy to heat meals when he’s on lunch duty.

 

Will takes superhero psychology with Dr. Colt, but he takes it for his curiosity, not his career. He’s all-in on superheroics, but growing up with his mother and her struggles has given him an interest in psychology and psychiatry. He’s told Dr. Colt that if he couldn’t be a superhero, he would want to be a psychiatrist.

 

Contact Education: 

 

The Morelli Training Center For Superhuman Combat, Fencing Instruction with the Wolf Knight

 

Will is a swordsman at heart. He likes to concentrate his powers into blades not only to create powerful weapons that can slice through anything short of perkunite but to give himself precise control over his powers. A blade in his hands can easily be maneuvered. Blazing energy radiating out of his body cannot.

 

Will learns swordplay from famed Shapeshifter and long-term member of the Monster League, Heloise Bisclavret, the Louve Chevalier, better known in the States as the Wolf Knight.

 

Heloise teachers Will a special Shapeshifter form of fencing called l’art first developed around the 13th century by the Shapeshifter Cathars of Occitania. Elements of l’art were used by 17th century swordmaster and secret Shapeshifter Don Jerónimo Sánchez de Carranza to form the fencing art destreza, essentially a form of l’art designed for humans.

 

L’art has two components called the eye and the hand which correspond to a Shapeshifter’s superhuman senses and shapeshifting ability. By developing the eye, Shapeshifters learn how to carefully examine and break down the fighting style of an opponent. Through smell, sight, and hearing, Shapeshifters are able to determine what their opponent will do before they even know it themselves. By developing the hand, Shapeshifters learn how to manipulate the mass-shunting aspect of their shapeshifting to quickly phase their sword out of existence and bring it back again just as they would do the same to a tail or a horn or a wing. This allows them to bypass guards, strike at unpredictable angles, and pull off perplexing feints. An opponent’s eye cannot follow a blade that isn’t there.

 

Skills of the eye and hand are combined in a final component reserved for masters called the ghost hand. Experts in the art of shapeshifting can feel parts of themselves that have yet to manifest in physical reality. An expert Shapeshifter can feel a paw about to replace his hand. He feels this paw because it exists right at the border of reality. A master Shapeshifter can move this paw.

 

When one masters the art of shapeshifting and then masters l’art, they are able to use the ghost hand. They are able to not only send their sword out of existence but sense it and control it. They are able to fight with a sword that pieces opponents through shields and armor, that assassinates enemies through walls, and that, as its name implies, touches ghosts.

 

Sort of.

 

The ghost hand can only affect the physical component of a ghost–the khet. Sometimes, the khet is as tangible as anything in local reality and anything can tough the ghost. Other times, the khet is intangible, its atoms cast wide or shunted, and while conventional means can’t touch the khet in this circumstance, the ghost hand can. But all other components of a ghost are immune to the ghost hand. Physical means cannot touch metaphysical objects.

What’s that old expression? The living have no defense from the dead? That.

 

Of course, this point is rather moot when it comes to Will. Sekhmet’s fire allows him to incinerate the metaphysical.

 

Will is not a Shapeshifter, though he does look like one in a hybrid state, and Ms. Bisclavret’s instruction had to be adapted for him, but only slightly. He may not have senses exactly like a Shapeshifter, but he still has superhuman senses. He may not be able to shunt objects out of existence, but he can make blades vanish and reappear.

 

Ultimately, l’art does work for him, and he has mastered the ghost hand. Will can bypass defenses to bring the heat of his swords right into the heart of a target.

 

Will takes the Interway to France every couple of days to train with Ms. Bisclavret in Ariege. He’s picked up a smattering of conversational French while overseas. He says the girls love it.

 

Will is not the first warrior of Sekhmet to visit Occitania. Sekhmet appeared to Cathar Shapeshifters during the Albigensian Crusade of the 13th century syncretized with the archangel Michael and granted her power to a legacy of warriors called the Tarrasques.

 

Because of this history, Ms. Bisclavret affectionately calls Will “le petit Tarrasque” and “le petit Michel.”

 

Will also studies martial arts with his good friend Martina at the Morelli Training Center For Superhuman Combat in Monterrey. The Morelli Training Center may seem pretty bare-bones compared to our Controlled Reality Simulations, but their results are solid. Diablo and Vampiro know what they teach. 

 

Hyperstasis:

 

Hypostatic Union with the Goddess Sekmet Resulting in a Therianthropic Physiology and Solar-Based Powers.

 

Powered By The Eye Of Ra

 

Since time immemorial, the goddess Sekhmet has empowered individuals with her fire. Sekhmet is fire, and fire wishes to spread. From person to person she extends her power creating powerful champions of justice and vengeance. As she faces down and kills the wicked serpent Apep each night, so do her human agents face down and kill evil.

 

Sekhmet is the sun in its negative qualities. She is the sun of a drought, the sun of a wildfire. She is unforgiving, unrelenting heat, a baleful eye that stares down on parched and cracked Earth, drinking in the devastation it causes, never looking away, never blinking. The solar powers she grants her agents are weapons. They are meant to kill and destroy. Her fire is not the creative flame of Vulcan and Pele. Her light is not the comforting light of Amaterasu. Her fire burns. Her light blinds. And so does the fire and light of Burning Bright.

 

Perhaps owing to Sekhmet’s guilt over what happened to her mother, Will is easily the strongest warrior of Sekhmet. He has more power and more rage than Sekhmet has ever given a person, and that rage is bolstered by his own, considerable anger. 

 

Perhaps she saw it as penance to bolster Will’s natural hatred of her? Perhaps she saw it as forgiveness when Will took that same hatred and tempered it into a force of good?

 

Will is superhumanly strong and fast, but his true powers involve the fire of Sekhmet.

 

Will can become light and fire and generate the same. Though he has trained himself to use his powers with the utmost control, they will always cause at least a little pain and discomfort to people. He can make his flame harmless to the touch, but it will always sting the hand that touches it. He can generate light, but it will always make people turn their eyes. 

 

Extremely few beings are completely unharmed by Burning Bright’s powers. He himself is unharmed, as are other champions of Sekhmet. Martina Morelli, owing to her control over Xibalba’s Hot House and Dark House, is also unharmed, and this makes her a great sparring partner for Burning Bright.

 

Nothing of the Astral can be destroyed. It can, however, change form, for instance, into a pile of ashes.

 

For precise control and to concentrate his power to a point, Will creates sun swords, or more accurately, sun khopesh, and from his training with Ms. Bisclavret has learned how to use them to attack targets internally, bypassing their defenses by phasing them out of local reality. He calls this his “microwave” attack, though the ancient Shapeshifters of Ariege knew it as the ghost hand.

 

Under no circumstance should his fire ever be absorbed. Recall that Sekhmet battles and kills a giant chthonic serpent that wants to snack on the totalized energy of our universe every night. She would never throw food at Apep. Her fire is not food and it is not fuel. Absorbing her fire causes massive damage to energy manipulator During an experiment in the 1970’s, energy absorber Disco Inferno (it was the 70’s) absorbed and controlled a small, matchstick-sized amount of a Sekhmet warrior named Pyrecat’s fire. He instantly fell ill and said he felt like he had the worst flu of his life. It took him three weeks to recover.

 

Will is, if it wasn’t evident already, completely immune to fires and heat, be they natural or unnatural. Not even fires of Xibalab’s Hot House can harm him–a fact which makes him as good a sparring partner for Martina as she is a good sparring partner for him.

 

It is worth stressing that the fires Will generates are nothing like physical fires. All our ERC 1 students, meaning most of our student body, knows the combustion triangle by heart–heat, fuel, oxygen. If you take away one, you stop the fire. That doesn’t apply to Will’s fires. You can’t put them out with water, or safoam, or by lowering the temperature. You can’t put them out at all.

 

This means that if Will was every incapacitated, mind controlled, or knocked unconscious after starting his fires, we’d have fires on our hands that couldn’t be put out. They wouldn’t spread though, so that’s something positive. They would “spread” by creating mundane fires, but those could be dealt with through mundane methods.

Will has learned how to create normal fires as well as supernatural ones. He does this simply by supernaturally raising the temperature until something combusts–but though mundane, these are actually more dangerous for Will to create. He has full control over his mundane fires. He can make them dissipate at will or part to let people by. He can even make them relatively harmless by making them sting instead of destroy. But any mundane fires act like mundane fires. He can’t control them at all.

 

Perhaps his best application of “use supernatural heat to create mundane effects” doesn’t have to do with fire at all. When Joyous Harbor last held its winter 

 

Sekhmet

 

To talk about Will, we first have to talk about the cat goddess, or homo fabula in scientific terms who has meddled in the stability of his family–Sekhmet, the Lady of Slaughter, the Mistress of Dread, the Eye of Ra.

 

And also, Sally the cat.

 

Yes, Flicker’s cat Sally. 

 

No, Will doesn’t know that Sally is Sekhmet. And considering Sally is tied to Flicker’s protected identity, we can no more tell Will that Sally is Sekhmet than we can tell him that Songbird is John King. The only way Will can find out is if Sally tells him.

 

And they say secret identity drama died out in the 80’s. What do they know?

 

Every night, up in the Astral, in the land of the Eternal Nile, the sun god Ra boards a cosmic barge called the Mesektet and voyages below the universe to do battle with the great snake Apep, one of the great chaos dragons up there with Tiamat, Typhon, and Bakotahl. 

 

By taking this route, Ra ensures that the universe is filled with light, warmth, and life. Ra is not just a sun, or a sun god. He is all suns. He is the totality of warmth. Life gets very cold and very dead if Apep eats him. 

 

Ra is attacked by Apep every 12 hours. Ra is attached each and every night.

 

And to think, people get depressed whenever a big evil shadow monster threatens to eat the multiverse. The multiverse faces a do-or-die scenario every 12 hours. Sun goes up, sun goes down, sun goes all around. No big deal.

 

Unsurprisingly, the Egyptian gods make very certain that Ra survives his journey. He’s escorted by several gods on his journey, and even rivals like Set and Horus put aside their history to protect the sun god. Sekhmet’s entire existence is to make absolutely sure it’s Apep that dies instead of Ra. What do you use to kill a snake (and kill it again and again and again?) You use a cat.

 

Sekmet isn’t a nice goddess if her epithets didn’t tip you off. One of her syncretics is Kali, and that should really tell you everything you need to know. She’s called the Eye of Ra because, while fiercely loyal to Ra, she embodies the violent, destructive aspects of the sun. If Amaterasu is the sun as nourishing warmth, Sekmet is the sun as merciless fire. She is heatstroke, and drought, and forest fires. She is Ra’s WMD. Her purpose in life is to make sure the enemies of Ra die and die screaming. 

 

As an example of how powerful Sekhmet is, in the 70’s she syncretized with Kali, Pele, and Sedna to destroy the Omnidragon, one of those big cosmic nuisances that pops up every half decade or so. The goddesses combined into a multi-headed lioness made of out lava and fire and lighting and some other bad stuff and tore apart Omnidragon like a pinata made out of bad poetry. But the super-goddess continued to rage. The superhero community had to protect the multiverse by sticking her inside Ialpor until natural desyncretic forces split the super-goddess back to the normal cranky goddesses we all know and love (and fear). It goes to show that even Ialpor can be useful in the grand scheme of things. Where do you put a goddess that can burn down a universe? You put her in one that’s already on fire.

 

Just like Ra, Sekhmet’s power overflows her. Her power escapes her like light escaping a star. It reaches out beyond her, a wave of wrathful justice and vengeful anger sweeping across the multiverse. Because of this, Sekhmet finds it easier than most other homo fabula to go beyond the Archon Walls and influence physical reality. Her power has touched the planet since well before the 1860 Climacteric, empowering them to immolate evil.

 

Sekhmet’s Warriors

 

The Archon walls were strong before 1860. Contact between homo sapiens and homo fabula was mostly limited to brief epistrophes and emanations. Sometimes, a man would see a god in his dreams, and sometimes the god would even speak to him. Sometimes, a man would walk into the woods, walk through Fairy, and walk out twenty years after he first departed.

 

But the Earth before 1860 was nothing like it is now. Nowadays Pele holds parties at Kilauea and the archangel Gabriel is the Pope. Sekhmet couldn’t empower her warriors anywhere close to the level of Burning Bright, but she still made attempts.

 

Her first attempt was in 64 AD. Syncretized with the Roman goddess Porsepina and, flanked by the furies themselves, she appeared to a mother whose son was fed to the lions by Nero for his Christian faith. 

 

The mother, whose name was Valentina, understood the offer immediately. The foreign God of her son let him be devoured by beasts, but the Roman goddess of her father offered revenge

 

Valentina didn’t ask for terms. It could have been the entire world, she didn’t care. She only wanted revenge.

 

The result was the Great Fire of Rome. 

 

Sekhmet had made miscalculations. She wasn’t used to our physical reality and how it behaved. She didn’t understand physics. Imagine trying to perform open-heart surgery after seeing a video on the subject. You’d have a general idea of how it was done, but absolutely no practical knowledge. Such it was for Sekhmet. Her experience of our reality amounted to watching it from a window.

 

History records the Great Fire of Rome as having started at merchant stalls near the Circus Maximus and spread to cover two-thirds of the city. It began at a merchant stall because that was where a certain merchant who sold out Valentina’s held his business. Valentina wanted to burn the man to a crisp, and Sekhmet gave her the power to do so, but the goddess had only accounted for divine fires. Mundane, natural fires produced by her divine flame were not under her control or the control of her warriors.

 

Valentina ended up setting fire to two-thirds of Rome. The loss of property and life was legendary in scope.

 

It took days for the fire to be put out, and all Valentina could do was watch Rome burn.

 

Nero blamed the Christians for the fire and scapegoated them to further his persecution. In a sense, Christians were responsible for the fire, though not in the sense Nero meant.

 

Feeling horrible for what she had done and how it had furthered the persecution of her son’s sect, Valentina called Sekhmet an evil spirit and turned her back on her. She cursed Sekhmet, and never again called upon her power. She converted to Christianity and devoted the rest of her life to aiding the underground. When she died, it was not Sekhmet or Proserpina she called upon.

 

Thus ended the life of Sekhmet’s first human champion.

 

The incident depressed Sekhmet. Nothing depresses the limitless homo fabula like seeing how limited they truly are. She took centuries off to plan for her next warrior, and it wouldn’t be until the 13th century that she would try again.

 

Sekhmet wanted her new champion to follow certain characteristics:

 

She wanted her to be a Christian, out of respect to Valentina and her son.

 

She wanted her to have incredible mental control. If enough control was exercised over her mystic fire, natural fires wouldn’t form. All the heat would be locked and bound to the mystic fire and whatever it’s target was.

 

And she wanted her to live far, far, far away from cities, so that if an accident did occur it wouldn’t be anything like the Great Fire of Rome.

 

Sekhement found her champion in Isabeu, a Shapeshifter from Ariege. Shapeshifters descending from the Prince of Dawn, the first ever superhuman, have inhabited southern France and other parts of Occitania since prehistory. Every Shapeshifter has inherited the Prince of Dawn’s power to alter their bodies into that of animals (that this was his power was confirmed by his skeleton found buried in Ariege at the Cave of the Trois Freres in 1914–it had wings and horns). Shapeshifters have left their mark on European history. Historic Shapeshifters include Reynard, knight in the court of Charlemagne, his rival Isengrim, the wolf knight Bisclavret who served under Richard the Lionhearted and knew Robin Hood, the infamous Beast of Gevaudan, Don Diego Vega, better known as Zorro, the fox, and through Sekhmet’s influence, all the fire-brandishing warriors who have taken up the name Tarrasque.

 

Sekhemt found the Shapeshifters of Ariege perfect. From a young age they cultivated mental discipline. To the Shapeshifters, to have a beast’s mind inside a beast’s body was the ultimate disgrace, but to overcome the instincts of a beast’s body with a human mind was proof that one was not just skilled but holy. They lived far out in the countryside away from any city, so that any accident would be limited to a forest fire. And they were Christians, though many fellow Christians called them heretics.

 

Sekhmet found it darkly amusing (there is little she does not find amusing in life) that centuries ago Christians huddled together in the shadow of Nero not caring a bit about this point of dogma or that. But now Christians were killing Christians. She wasn’t surprised. She recalled how Egyptians slaughtered Egyptians over whether Aten or Amen or Ra ruled, never realizing that they were syncretic brothers.

 

The Shapeshifters met all her requirements–and as a bonus, they could turn into cats, her favorite animal.

 

Sekhmet chose a young Shapeshifter named Isabeu, who was a scholar. Cathars believed that the soul reincarnated and was neither male nor female, beast nor man, and as such they allowed for their women to be religious scholars, even to rise to the rank of Perfect, unlike Catholics.

 

Isabeu traveled the world far and wide, sometimes as a cat, sometimes as a bird, and surreptitiously read from the great libraries of the world.

 

When her family was slaughtered as part of the Albigensian Crusades, Isabeu found that she could no longer and no longer read. Knowledge did nothing to ease the heartache and rage that burned inside her. She prayed for God to take vengeance on those that slaughtered her loved ones, who did not even bury them like people but left them on the side of the road to rot. They were killed for being Cathars, but when their killers saw their bodies twist into animal shapes as they died, they felt justified and emboldened to call the Cathars devils.

 

Their deaths led to greater persecution for basic Cathars and caused the Shapeshifters to be shunned even from those that once accepted them.

 

Abandoned, shunned, and hunted, Isabeu prayed for vengeance, and her prayers were answered by Sekhmet syncretized with the archangel Michael, wielder of a flaming sword.

 

Isabeau was a student of philosophy and studied its complex, contradictory answers to try and understand evil. Sekmet taught here her the very simple solution to the problem of evil:

 

Evil existed to be burnt.

 

Isabeau combined her Shapeshifter powers with Sekmet’s fire to become a fierce defender of Cathar Shapeshifters. Legend (in particular the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine) would record her as the Tarrasque, a terrible, dragon-like monster whose eyes spat flames and whose lungs belched smoke. Physical description of the Tarrasque varied because the Tarrasque varied her appearance. Sometimes she had fish scales, a scorpion tail, a lion head, a tortoise shell, ram horns, bear paws, or all of the above and more.

 

She was a terrible monster, burning those that sought to put a sword into Cathars so that they might get a taste of the hellfire that awaited them.

 

Sekmet was very pleased with Isabeu. Monstrous though she appeared, she never lost control of her rage. The persecutors and only the persecutors felt her fire. Her control can be attributed to her Shapeshifter origins. Shapeshifter Cathars believed in a dualistic cosmos. There was the holy spiritual and the sinful physical. They saw their shapeshifting as a holy act. In placing their human-minds in control of animal bodies, they proved that their inner light held supremacy over their protean, sin-bound flesh. Isabeu knew how to resist the hunger of a wolf and the fear of a cat and it prepared her to resist the rage of a goddess. And resist she did.

 

Legend records that the Tarrasque was slain when St. Martha, long-lived sister of the resurrected Lazarus, traveled to France and pacified the beast with holy water and prayer beads so that soldiers could spear the beast to death. This was a metaphor for what actually happened. 

 

One day, a brave nun approached the Tarrasque not by brandishing a weapon but by reading from scripture and trusting to God. This nun, whose name was Esme, was surprised to find not only that the dreaded Tarrasque could not only turn into a human but knew scripture enough to correct her Latin pronunciation. Like most nuns, she was not taught how to read Latin and had to manage the best she could.

 

Isabeu and Esme conversed at length and struck up a friendship which resulted in a truce where Shapeshifters stayed in their forests and the Catholics stayed out. Through this truce, the Cathar tradition was preserved through the Shapeshifters to this day. Ms. Bisclaveret, for instance, is a practicing Cathar.

 

Isabeu was the first Tarrasque, but she was far from the last. There would be many more down through the centuries–men and women, young and old would take the name and form of the Tarrasque. It was known to Shapeshifters that if they prayed to Michael, he would hand them down his sword, and with blades of spirit and claws of flesh they would destroy their enemies. 

 

Outsiders called them Tarrasques, but they called themselves petit Michels, little Michaels.

 

Sekmet was very satisfied with the Tarrasques–almost completely satisfied, and a completely satisfied cat is a rare thing indeed.

 

The only thing that bothered her about the Tarrasques was that they only knew her as her syncretic partner Michael. He was the face of their partnership. He was who they prayed to. They didn’t even know what a Ra or Sekmet was. From their perspective, Michael, guardian of the shining pleroma, handed down his blazing sword so that they could smite their foes with the bright purity of their inner light. 

 

They did not know her, and Sekmet longed to be known for her work.

 

She would get her chance to build some notoriety in the 19th century.

 

In 1860, our world’s hyperstatic climacteric occurred. Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn contacted a dreaming god he named Abramelin, who the infamous Aleister Crowley would call Aiwass. This moment of telepathic contact weakened the Archon walls around our noosphere ushering in an explosive age of hyperstatic empowerment and Astral contact. 

 

Sekhmet was able to interact with the world like never before. She was ready to create warriors herself, without the aid of a syncretic partner, but the question was who would she choose? Egypt did not know her. Egypt was predominantly Muslim with a few Christians. No one took the name of Ra or Horus or Sekhmet seriously in the land of the pyramids. Too many tombs had been violated without retaliation. But there seemed to be promise in the West which was in the grips of “Egyptomania.” Ever since the Napoleonic conquest of Egypt unearthed the Rosetta Stone in the late 18th century, the Western world had been obsessed with Ancient Egypt. Public mummy unwrappings packed auditoriums, Madame Blavatsky claimed that the fifth root-race of the Earth was made of Atlantean-Aryans who settled ancient Egypt, scammers sold “mummy wheat allegedly grown from seeds found in mummy wrappings, the ghost of the Egyptian Queen Tera awoke and cohabited the body of Margaret Trelawney, and Mathers’ telepathic contact with Abramelin came about from him trying to establish contact with the sleeping spirits he believed were trapped within mummies.

 

English made ideal Egyptians. It was another of history’s jokes told to immortals like Sekhmet.

 

After the awakening of Queen Tera, Egyptologist flocked to Margaret Trelawney to learn from the Queen’s first hand accounts of history. This became known as the Tera Society, and it was from this group that Sekhmet chose her warriors, the first of which wasn’t actually a member of the Society but the quiet, heartbroken wife of an archaeologist slain by a group of Mahars which had expanded out from their Pellucidar homelands to take root beneath the pyramids. Her name was Annie, and she didn’t understand Mahars or cat goddesses, but she did understand that the love of her life was dead at the hands of a godless monster and that the strange cat made of fire that appeared at her doorstep one evening was offering her a chance for revenge.

 

Margaret was the first of a group that would become known as the Mesektet Order after the solar barge. They would be the first warriors of Sekhmet whose physical forms would pay homage to their benefactor. When channeling her power, they grew fur, fangs, and claws. They became catlike, and their roar brought fear to monsters that had never known fear.

 

The Mesektet Order focused on hunting down cosmic vermin who seized on the opportunity of the thinning Archon Walls to strike at local reality. These vermin were Carterian monsters that huddled like mice in the dark corners of the universe and bred, growing to a scope that horrified and disgusted mankind. But Sekhmet slayed Apep, serpent of the Final Night, each and every night. Slimy apocalyptic monsters were toys to her–and her warriors. 

 

Sekhmet’s senses allowed the Mesektet Order to track their prey through dimensions and her fire allowed them to incinerate their prey regardless of what cyclopean forms they assumed.

 

They tracked the hounds of Tindalos back through time and forward through time, fought in nightmares alongside the faceless night-gaunts of Nodens against the Crawling Chaos, teamed up with the legendary adventurer Harry Houdini to exterminate the Mahars below the Great Sphinx, and protected the souls of mankind from misshapen pneumavores brought from another world where the sun had gone out by a house long given over to evil called the House of Silence,

 

The Mesektet Order was quite close to the great occultist Randolph Carter, whose explorations into the Astral gave the name Carterian to many diverse horrors, and it was Sekhmet who aided him during his journey to the Astral city of Kadath by sending the cats of Ulthar to rescue him from the moon-beasts that sought to abduct one of Earth’s greatest telepaths from Earth’s noosphere into the moon’s noosphere. Carter liked the Order, but believed that they were too permissive in allowing women and non-Whites to join. He felt that only men of Anglo stock had the moral fiber necessary to be trusted with superpowers. Nowadays, the Order’s association with Carter, whose ideas on race and gender are even less accepted in modern times than they were in his own, stains their legacy.

 

The Order exists to this day, doing much of the same as they have always been doing. Burning Bright isn’t a member, though he respects them. They stuck by his mother when Sekhmet stripped her of her powers, and he will always be grateful for it, but he does not feel like he can belong to an organization centered around Sekhmet.

 

Nemea

 

While pursuing a degree in literature in 2003, Alice Nelson fell in love with and married history student Roger Blake, who was studying how the Mesektet Order. He associated with and interviewed members of the Order, and this made him a target for the Order’s enemies. 

 

Roger was killed by cultists of the Coil of Apep who believed that only by the annihilation of all life could a perfect world of spirit come into being. The Coil of Apep had fought the Order since the 19th century and were not above killing people as loosely associated with them as interviewers. There were no rules in a war against life itself.

 

Grief-stricken, Alice was determined to finish Roger’s thesis on the Mesektet and to care for their son, born prematurely due to stress caused by Roger’s death.

 

Sekhmet appeared to Alice and told her that she could do more than carry on Roger’s work–she could avenge him. Alice accepted the deal and named herself Nemea because her lioness appearance reminded her of the Nemean lion.

 

Will’s birth was blessed by Sekhmet, but he was not empowered by her, not yet.

 

Nemea had a brief career as a superheroine. She not only fought against the Coil of Apep, but conventional supervillains. She liked being a superheroine. She liked the excitement. She always liked heroic poetry, especially that of William Blake. She wrote more than a few papers on Prometheus Unbound, but now she herself was like Prometheus, she herself was a champion of mankind standing up against dark gods, and she loved every minute of it.

 

Unfortunately, Nemea would find herself a target of Atalanta–no relation to Atalanta of Willow-Wells, not even in the sense of Fox echoes. The only thing the two Atalantas have in common is their name taken from the mythological huntress Atalanta.

 

Atalanta was a woman rejected by Sekhemet. She was a thrillseeker, a professional fighter in underground circuits, and longed for a life where she could hunt and fight acceptable targets without having to worry about morality. But Atalanta could sense the darkness in her heart and turned her away.

 

Atalanta was enraged. How dare a goddess known for her uncontrollable temper say that she was unworthy? She became hellbent on embarrassing Sekhmet. She wanted to defeat one of her champions. She wanted to beat one of her champions badly.

 

And Nemea was the youngest and least experienced warrior of Sekhmet. She was an easy target.

 

Atalanta joined the BOL and equipped herself to hunt Nemea. She acquired a charm created from the cloak of Boreas which made her feel cold regardless of the weather. It also caused fires to be snuffed out in her presence–even the flames of Sekhmet. Against veteran warriors more in-tune with their fires, the charm might fail, but against a rookie like Atalanta she was sure it would work.

 

She wore gloves and instep protectors designed to emit photite claws. If she couldn’t have the natural claws of a warrior of Sekhmet, she would use technology to make her own. These claws were able to emit a bioelectric signal that produced paralysis against any she cut. 

 

Atalanta worked her way up to Nemea. She didn’t want to just defeat her, she wanted to defeat her easily. She started her supervillainess career hunting superheroes. There was an entire BOL subculture devoted to it who saw superheroes as inspiring obstacles to defeat. She targeted superheroes with animal gimmicks, she wanted to play up the theme of her name, and after defeating them would paralyze them with her photite talons and pose them like hunting trophies. But it was all practice for Nemea.

 

When she was ready, Atalanta ambushed Nemea one night while she was out on patrol. Atalanta’s sudden attack caught Nemea flat-footed, and she was soon on the losing side of their fight. But Atalanta relented. She smiled, whispered “too easy.” and fled.

 

Nemea didn’t know what to make of their encounter.

 

She was frightened. Since becoming a warrior of Sekhmet, she never felt herself in danger, not until she encountered Atalanta.

 

Atalanta scared her. And she felt ashamed to be afraid.

 

She had fought cultists and monsters. She was powered by a goddess. Why was she afraid? It made no sense. This woman couldn’t have been beating her. It must have been a fulke, just a bad night. She had a rival, an arch-foe, every superheroine gets them. Was she supposed to complain about the first addition to what would no doubt be her long and impressive rogues gallery? She reminded herself that she was Nemea, the invincible lioness, and that she was not afraid.

 

But she was afraid. She felt afraid. Try as she might, her senses told her that Atalanta was a danger to her, and the constant inner war, the constant second-guessing herself, wore her down.

 

Superheroes are a fiercely independent lot. Culturally, they’re expected to be self-reliant, larger-than-life, beyond reproach. They don’t ask for help, people ask them for help. They aren’t afraid of supervillains–ever, and if they are, they don’t ever share their feelings–though they should. Getting superheroes to open up about their trauma has been a long-term goal of the Statesmen, but Atalanta is proof that superheroes don’t talk about their problems as much as they should.

 

Nemea’s performance as a superheroine suffered from her anxiety. When she responded to a break-in at one of Mainline city’s AEon buildings she was defeated by superthieves Brass and Phase who left her tied up for the police to find with her hair standing on end. She would later be defeated by the Gingerbread Man, who left her in a ball of frosting-themed safoam.

 

The superhero community and the Order were understanding. Defeat is always hard to bear, especially when one is as looked up to and depended upon as a superheroine. They suggested Atalanta start working with a partner or take some time off patrolling to train. 

 

This frightened Atalatna. She took their suggestions as tacit condemnation. When they said to “get training,” they really meant “get out of here.” They didn’t, but that was how she took it. This furthered her anxiety, and Atalanta, who stalked her from a distance, watched her slowly bleed out from psychological wounds.

 

When Atalanta scheduled an appointment with superhero therapist Dr. Colt, Atalanta knew that now was the moment to strike.

 

Atalanta challenged her to a rooftop duel with a note carved into the side of the door to her house and with grim resignation Nemea accepted. That was how it was supposed to be, right? A superheroine rises to her challenges. She wouldn’t run away.

 

She wouldn’t lose. She couldn’t lose.

 

But lose she did.

 

Atalanta tore her apart. Never in her life was Nemea in so much pain. Never in her life was she so afraid.  Atalanta threw her to the ground and stepped on her throat. Her life was in the hands of a madwoman, and she knew it. She was no longer Nemea, she was just Alice, just a woman in a situation far beyond her ability to control.

 

There was nothing left in her that cared about pride. Pride had been beaten out of her sometime after the second tooth. There was only concern for herself and her son. She had to come home for Will, no matter the cost.

 

Atalanta ordered her to beg for mercy. That was the way out. That was the way back to Will, and Alice took it.

 

Alice begged. She groveled. She hid somewhere deep inside herself as she said the words. She kissed Atalanta’s foot.

 

But worse of all, she surrendered her powers to Atalanta.

 

Nemea held out the fires of Sekhmet to Atalanta like a trophy, and Atalanta took it.

 

The power left Nemea. She was just a woman, cold and tired and wearing a ridiculous costume on top of a building.

 

She felt so cold. She didn’t realize how warm the fires kept her until she had lost them.

 

And Atalanta–Atalanta became what she had always wanted to be.

 

She didn’t even bother making a paralyzed trophy out of Nemea. She had already made a pelt out of her powers and took to wearing it. She had her trophy, so she just left Alice to shiver on the side of a skyscraper until morning when she could call out to people to rescue her like a cat stuck in a tree.

 

Alice didn’t have to tell the Order what had happened. Atalanta had filmed the whole thing and uploaded it to the noosphere.

 

There would never be a rematch. Nemea would never again go out and fight evil, not even after she got her fires back. Atalanta would be captured by the Order and Sekhmet would rip the fires she had stolen out of her body. She was placed in O’Brien Island where she remains to this day. Nemea was offered the chance to press charges against Atalanta but declined. She didn’t want people to know how badly she was beaten. She just wanted to put it all behind her as if it had never happened. 

 

She could bounce back. She knew she could bounce back.

 

But then Sekhmet refused to restore her powers.

 

Sekhmet gave her a dressing down in front of the Order, and in some ways the humiliation was worse than what she suffered at the claws of Atalanta. The very being that spoke of her bravery and worth before she offered to fill her with her fires now condemned her as a coward and a failure. Never in the history of the Order or Tarrasques had one of Sekhmet’s champions beg. Never had one of them surrender their powers.

 

Never had Sekhmet been forced to re-empower a champion. And she hissed in Alice’s face when she told her she wasn’t about to start.

 

She was out. She was done. Sekhmet told her to take her dishonor and leave. The Order had no place for victims.

 

The Order demanded that Sekhmet reconsider, and their disapproval over her throwing Alice out was echoed by the superhero community. Sekhmet’s warriors were her responsibility. They were her people. How dare she just toss one of her own aside because they had suffered! How dare she not support Nemea?

 

Sekhmet gave Nemea back her powers, but Nemea declined rejoining the Order. Sekhmet’s words had crushed the last bit of confidence she had in herself as a superheroine. She was done. She had lost. Game over. And there was Will. She couldn’t go through anything close to what she went through with him waiting for her at home.

 

Alice’s refusal to return to the Order deeply frustrated Sekhmet. What could she do to help a wounded lioness that wouldn’t help herself? How was she supposed to regain her standing with her Order if Alice refused? How could she stop looking like the wrong one in this incredibly embarrassing situation?

 

And how would she make things right with Nemea–because deep down past her pride and ego Sekhmet realized that she really was the wrong one. Nemea was her child. Nemea was her child and she had abused her.

 

Alice’s friends in the Order and superhero community encouraged her to not give up, but Alice had spoken to Dr. Colt over several sessions and they both came to the conclusions that she shouldn’t return to superheroics and use the time to heal and raise her son.

 

Sekhmet looked at little Will and knew that he was her one and only path to redemption. She had failed her daughter Alice. She would not fail her son Will.

 

Burning Bright

 

Sekhmet figured that if Nemea had suffered exceptional shame for one of her warriors then her son Will would have exceptional glory to balance. Will would be the only warrior in existence to be empowered as a child–and he would be the strongest warrior. His power would be the closest to her own.

 

Sekhmet didn’t ask before she bestowed her fires upon Nemea’s son. She didn’t think she would have to ask. She was giving the boy a divine gift. Who would refuse such a  gift?

 

It bothered Nemea at first to see her son playing with fire in his hands, which were sometimes paws. It bothered her that every time she looked at her son she saw a reminder of her greatest failure. But she moved past her feelings. She couldn’t deny that it was a great blessing. In a world where so many different kinds of superpowers could be artificially produced through secondary hyperstasis, he would be truly unique with a power no one could replicate. So she steeled herself for the incredible task of raising her bundle of fur and fire–a task that, she had to admit, was made easier by herself being immune to Sekhmet’s fire and able to extinguish it at will. She no longer fought evil, but her old powers still had a use. She couldn’t help but wonder if making sure her powers still had a use in her retirement was part of Sekhmet’s motivation in empowering her son.

 

Nemea would take baby Will and move to Joyous Harbor under the advice of her friends. Joyous Harbor had a huge superhero population that made it one of the safest cities in America. She’d be safe from any BOL newbies trying to cut their teeth against her easy reputation. She found that Z-grade supervillains were the worst part of being known as a loser. Every Lobsterman and Bad Bowler wanted a piece of you when you were known to be a pushover, but BOL rarely started things in Joyous Harbor. Even the greenest BOL member understood “Start trouble where there’s not a lot of superheroes if you don’t want to have to fight an entire army at once.”

 

Will as a young child knew nothing about Sekhmet or Atalanta or the Eyes of Ra. Mom was a catperson and he was a catperson. That was all he needed to know. That was all he wanted to know.

 

He was as energetic as a solar powered kitten could be and his poor mother could just barely keep up. Being able to transform into light meant he could cover a lot of ground very quickly. While born in Mainline City, he was raised in Joyous Harbor after his mother’s defeat and considers it his home. He became a friend of Matthew Roy, the Blanket Boy, and joined his Blanket Boy Detective Club as Cool Kitten. When Matthew’s mother turned her son into a celebrity by writing fictionalized accounts of his adventures around Joyous Harbor, she included Will as well. When the Blanket Boy book series made it big, Will became a celebrity. They still sell plushies of his childhood self, and Will claims that girls love them. 

 

I personally think they look like little demons.

 

Though Matthew’s mother was very careful not to reveal anything about Alice in her books, it was only a matter of time before people realized who Cool Kitten’s mom was. To avoid Will having to learn about Atalanta from a stranger, Alice sat him down and told him herself. 

 

Will hugged his mom for a very long time afterwards. He had learned, though at a younger age than most, what all children learn in time, that their parents are human with all the flaws that entails. But he couldn’t understand why his mom kept it a secret. A bad woman hurt her, and then another bad cat woman took her powers away. So what? That was all on the bad women. Mom didn’t do a thing wrong, so why did she keep it secret?

 

He began to understand why as he got older and began to learn about things like pride and heroism, victory and defeat.

 

He also began to learn about rage, and that he had a lot of it.

 

All of Sekhmet’s warriors have the capacity for incredible rage. Rage is the fuel of Sekhmet’s fires Whenever they use their powers, they feel rage, unfocused, irrational rage, and if they don’t find a target for this rage, it can spread chaotically like wildfire. But Will was empowered while he was young and his brain was still developing. His brain adapted to better process and better create rage. His amygdala was enormous and abnormally formed.

 

As he got older, he started to get jumpier and twitchier. Alice had Statesmen doctors check him up, and that’s when she found out about his amygdala.

 

Alice was crushed. She shared what had happened to her son only with a few trusted friends in the Order and superhero community. She didn’t want anyone else to find out. She didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. She and her son had been through so much. She didn’t want people to yell at Sekhmet or Sekhmet to get mad. She just wanted a peaceful life.

 

But Will understood. Children always know more than their parents want them to know, and little kitten-boys have awfully good hearing. He found out that Sekhmet had done something to his brain. He found out that he was angrier than other boys his age and that this caused his mother such worry that she sometimes cried herself to sleep.

 

He found out that there was nothing anyone could do about it, and that was when he started to have tantrums.

 

The book Blanket Boy and the Tired Man hints at one where, after finding that the flower garden he and Matthew planted for a sickly neighborhood girl was dying, Will incinerated the garden leaving only a slick pane of glass in the ground. Feeling sorry for what he did, Will and Matthew worked together to carve a glass flower from the ground to give to the girl, a flower that would never age or wilt.

 

Mathew’s mother framed the incident as Will and her son learning about death and physical impermanence like all children must do. It only hints at more unusual issues left unwritten.

 

But Will’s issues would be put on public display during middle school when he had the worst tantrum of his life.

 

When two middle school bullies made the very, very poor decision to show Will a video of what Atalanta did to his mother, Will dug his claws into their faces. They both needed surgery. One boy needed a new eye. This incredibly ugly incident ensured that Will was placed in homeschool until highschool. It’s likely that if he wasn’t connected to the Order and Matthew Roy that he could have done some time in the juvenile wing of O’Brien Island.

 

Alice chewed out Will. She told him that he was never to use force against anyone weaker than himself, that he was never to cut people, and that he was never, ever, under any circumstance, to get in a fight.

 

Will responded this way: “I thought you’d be proud I got in a fight! I actually won, unlike you!”

 

He now recalls this as the worst thing he ever said to his mother.

 

When Will was 14 years old, Sekhmet appeared before him and asked what his intentions were regarding the Order. She figured he was old enough to choose whether he wanted to be involved or not.

 

Will picked her up and tossed her into the sun.

 

That sounds funny, and it probably was funny to see a 13 year old toss a cat into the sun like pitching a softball, but it indicated to everyone that Will could do a lot more than claw faces, and Alice was advised to enroll him in Martin’s. It was hoped that Martin’s ERC drills could instill some discipline in him.

 

Will’s relationship with the Order is complicated. He likes the people in the order. They took care of his mother during the worst times in her life. But he hates their boss. So long as she’s the one running and empowering the Order, he won’t have anything to do with them, though he’s told them that if there’s ever a tough cyclopean freak they’re struggling to kill, all they have to do is call him and he’ll come running. The Order has taken Will up on his offer a few times, but these temporary alliances always remain temporary.

 

By the way, Sekhmet never retaliated for her free trip to the sun’s core, giving further evidence to the theory that she feels guilt over how she meddled in his family.

 

Will is, perhaps, the only being in all of existence who could assault the Lady of Slaughter without having to worry about her legendary vengeance.

 

Will joined his old friend Matthew at Martin’s. They were both terrors in their freshman year. The Blanket Boy Detectives came into our school with big chips on their shoulders. Matthew wanted to prove to anyone and everyone that he was older and tougher and as far from the wide-eyed innocent Blanket Boy was, and Will was a massive, growling tiger-man. He radiated “don’t mess with me.” He didn’t talk to people, he didn’t make friends, and people would have thought him a statue that only moved when people weren’t looking if not for ERC.

 

He exploded like a bomb in ERC. He fought like a fire. He roared as he consumed all obstacles in his way leaving only ashes and smoke and sometimes not even that. He indulged his craving for violence. Violence was his solution to any ERC problem. Hostage situation? The guy holding a gun to the other guy’s head found his gun melted to his hand like a metal glove. A Shapeshifter criminal has disguised himself as one of several patrons of a roadside dinner? No time for games, everyone gets subdued and then the shadows get checked just in case it’s a trick simulation and the target is hiding. A supervillain teleports into the middle of Mainline City and announces he’s got President George tied up somewhere to a bomb? Solar light to blind, solar fire to subdue, and his body’s temperature rises 2 degrees per second until he starts giving answers.

 

Will as a freshman was very different from the calm, composed Will we know today.

 

We owe Will’s maturation to our wonderful ERC staff. Because of them, Will went from using ERC for stress relief to using ERC to make him better at responding to emergencies. He became close to Steel Dolly in particular. Her tough-love attitude was exactly what he needed. She gave him challenges that couldn’t be solved through brute force, such as aiding in the reconstruction of a destroyed building by using his powers, and though he hated it at first, gradually he understood that there was more to ERC than beating up bad guys–that there was more to him than the ability to cause violence. He learned that he was actually very good at tactical thinking. He wasn’t just an angry fireball. And as he learned to control himself inside ERC, he learned how to control himself outside ERC.

 

Nowadays, Will is one of the nicest students you’ll ever meet. He’s always calm, even in the middle of serious danger. His mother is proud of him, and I think Sekhmet is as well. I think Sekhmet looks to Will for hope. He’s the one being on Earth who most understands her rage, and he tempers it into a weapon against evil and a tool for good.

 

If a mortal can harness that kind of rage, Sekhmet can as well. And maybe one day she will.

 

Behavior: 

 

Exemplary.

 

Will’s come a long way from his freshman year. The Will of today is a model student, hard-working and dedicated to becoming a superhero, and his conduct is all the more exemplary for the difficulties he faced growing up. His peers know him to be a cool-headed person who can be confided in. Though he has a significant amount of anger in his heart, he’s learned to make it work for him thanks to Steel Dolly and Ms. Bisclavret. He’s proof that our system works in helping students take what could be curses and turning them into blessings.

 

Will is known to be very personable and approachable. He always plays things cool and dispassionately because he knows how destructive his passions can be.He seems very mature for his age and is very popular with the girls. He always has a joke to brighten up the mood, because, in his own words “When you have the moods I do, you learn to pick up every joke you come across, even the corny ones–especially the corny ones.”

 

Though he plays off setbacks with a cool, unphased air, he has vowed to never fail like his mother did and takes criticism personally. If he makes a mistake in ERC, he sometimes overcompensates to make up for that mistake. It seems that he’s inherited some of his mother’s anxiety issues, though he’s dealing with them far better than she did.

 

Appearance: 

 

Like his mother, Will is primarily a hominid with several feline features–large ears, amber colored eyes, clawed hands and feet, and fur. Nemea had yellow fur like a lion and he has orange fur like a tiger with black stripes that curve themselves into the shapes of hieroglyphs, especially when he uses his solar powers. He can control his stripes and the coloration of his fur and uses this ability to make sure that he never shows the eye of Ra, symbol of Sekhmet (the “right” eye, meaning the one where the little curl goes to the left. He prefers to show the hieroglyphs for homo fabula he actually likes. Sekhmet is far from the only deity to guard Ra on his solar barge. Numbers vary, because everything in the Conscious Astral varies, but there are often 12, and among these 12 is a beetle god named Khepri, and Will often honors Khepri by changing his stripes into beetle hieroglyphs.

 

Will explains why he honors Khepri as such: “There were no cults devoted to Khepri in ancient Egypt. He was always subordinate to Ra. He made no fuss, kept his head down, did his work, and made sure the sun came up. I respect that. Plus, Matthew is always going on about how cool the Blue Beetle was. I figure there’s got to be something to beetles between him, Khepri, and the band.”

 

Will also likes to put his stripes into ankh hieroglyphs as the ankh stands for life in general–the cause Sekhmet fights for–or in other words, the cause that she acknowledges transcends her and is greater than she is. 

 

Typically only wearing pants and sometimes a cape, he bears a resemblance to Kyarr of Kyarr and Kyaung fame. It also makes him fairly popular with the opposite sex. He goes as Kyarr every Halloween because it’s easy.