Author's Preface

Dsr. Egyptian for Red, it has been her name for longer than even she can remember. Raised to be the bride of a God who should not exist, she was stolen away and inducted into a dark and twisted world of political machinations and perverted sexuality. But He was the God, and she was wife, and so she served humbly and faithfully.

Until one too many murders were committed in His name, one too many hurts delivered from His knives and smiles, one too many drops of blood spilled. He has spent her whole unnaturally long life hurting her. Now she's going to hurt Him back.

Dsr seduces and enlists the aid of Ramses II, and together they seek out those who would see the God destroyed and his tyrannical worship forgotten: the Seth. Together Dsr, the Seth, and Ramses succeed in sealing the Osiris's body in a stone sarcophagus at the bottom of the sea. For the first time in her life, Dsr is free to live life as she chooses, to seek the joy she has been denied.

But even with the God dead, His legend lives on. Over the course of four haunting millennia, her travels become a desperate journey to eradicate Him from the memory, a pilgrimage that takes her from the snowiest peaks of human habitation to the strange and valleys of the East. And with every road she travels, more myths spring up in her footsteps - myths of the red headed outsider who comes from far away and causes mischief or wisdom among the local pantheon. She is Nephtys, Loki, Kitsune, Tam Lin, and yet none.

The twenty first century finds Dsr doing her best to blend in, the last of a race that nobody believes in any more, the forgotten source of legends and monsters, and content to remain that way. But something old is awakening, something that will shatter her tight-fisted attempts at normality. Something that wants Dsr - and revenge.

For somewhere on the bottom of the Dead Sea, a group of archaeologists is about unseal the casket that has kept the God imprisoned for four thousand years...