The first thing they forget is the wetness. Not the water itself, but the feeling of it. The slickness on the skin, the way it fills the mouth, the simple, profound relief of it. I am Tefnut. I am moisture. I am the slick on the inside of your skull, the sweat on your lover’s back, the tears you cry when you realize you are utterly, irrevocably alone. And they were forgetting me.

My brother-husband, Shu, he of the empty air and dry winds, had been whispering to them. He told them strength was in bone-dry stillness, in the unyielding sun, in the hard-packed earth where nothing soft could grow. He called it purity. I called it a slow, suffocating death.

I felt it first in the reeds. They didn’t sway with my liquid grace anymore; they stood brittle, like sharpened spears. Then the mud along the Nile began to crack, not into a mosaic of life-giving puddles, but into a dead, crazed porcelain. The laughter of the bathing women became thin, reedy. Their skin lost its luster, turning to parchment.

I tried to remind them. I sent a morning dew, so delicate, so perfect, a gossamer blanket on the lotus leaves. They cursed it for making the sand stick to their feet. I gifted them a humid, clinging night, heavy with the scent of jasmine and fertility. They shuttered their windows and complained of the damp.

So I stopped reminding them. I decided to show them.

My withdrawal was not a storm. It was a silence. A profound, absolute absence. The air itself became a desiccating sponge. It drank the moisture from their lips, from their eyes, from the very marrow of their bones. I watched a mother lick her child’s cracked lips with a tongue that was just as dry, a useless, pink slug.

The animals went first. The ibises fell from the sky, their light bones hollowed out by thirst. The crocodiles, those ancient, smug beasts, lay motionless in the shrinking river, their armored hides caked with mud, their eyes clouded. They looked like fossils. They were fossils of the living.

The priests of Ra, with their sun-scorched brains, chanted their prayers to the sky. They begged for light, for heat, for the merciless, burning eye of their master. They got it. The sun became a white-hot hammer, beating the world into a dust. They didn’t understand. You cannot have the fire without the sweat. The light without the tear. They were learning.

I found Shu standing on a dune, his arms outstretched, basking in the glorious aridity he had created. He was a skeleton wrapped in dry leather.

“Behold, sister,” he rasped, his voice like stones grinding. “Purity. Strength. Nothing soft to weaken us.”

I walked toward him, my form wavering. I was no longer the graceful woman of dew and rain. I was a shimmering mirage of heat, a being of absolute thirst. The sand sizzled where my feet should have been.

“You call this strength?” I whispered, and my voice was the sound of dust settling in a tomb. “This is brittleness. This is the end.”

I reached out and touched his chest. He didn’t flinch. He was too dry for fear. Under my fingers, his skin didn’t burn. It powdered. It flaked away like old paint, revealing the yellowed bone beneath. He looked down, a flicker of something—surprise?—in his desiccated eyes.

“Without me,” I said, pressing my hand deeper into his chest, “there is no life. And without life, your strength is just the weight of a dead thing.”

His body crumbled. Not with a scream, but with a sigh. A soft, dry exhalation of dust. The wind, my wind, caught his remains and scattered them across the kingdom he had tried to sterilize.

I stood alone in the silent, baking world. The people were husks, their prayers long since silenced. The land was a plate of cracked clay. I had won. I had proven my point. I was the necessary dampness, the tears of the world, the mother of all life.

And I was utterly, suffocatingly alone.

There was no one left to drink me. No one left to feel me. My existence, which depended on the cycle of giving and receiving, of evaporating and returning, had broken. I was the ocean with no shore, the rain with no earth.

I began to feel it myself. The thirst. A thirst so profound it was a new kind of god. A hunger for my own absence. I looked at my hands and saw they were beginning to haze, to lose their substance, to turn into the very dryness I had unleashed.

I am Tefnut. I am moisture. And I am so, so thirsty. I open my mouth to scream, but only a cloud of fine, hot dust comes out. And the world is silent, save for the sound of one god turning into a desert.