The Two Brothers: Part One
One of the first things said about the younger brother, Bata, snatched up my attention: "he was imbued with the spirit of a god." To be fair, this could be interpreted and played out in a story several different ways, which is part of what draws me to it. If I ended up using it as the core of a story, though, I think I would wind up writing about someone stuck as a god's vessel.
The Two Brothers: Part Two
From this section, I ended up coming around to the situation with Bata's soul. He explains to his wife that he wouldn't be able to rescue her from a sea spirit, because his soul is concealed somewhere else and he would be weak against the sea. "If another should find my soul," he warns, "I must needs fight for it." I like the idea of someone separated from his soul and dealing with the effects of that, plus having to guard it and wanting to reclaim it at the same time. My first thought is of a Beauty and the Beast type situation, where the Beast had the rose hidden away and had to protect it and try to nurture it, though I'd have to see how the story would actually play out.
The Two Brothers: Part Three
In this story, I was interested in Anpu's quest to find and restore his brother's soul, but I think it would've been more compelling if the brothers had been searching for it together. If I were to create a story around that, it would focus around the protagonist and his/her sibling, cousin, or best friend, who's soulless and effectively heartless till they find that person's soul. It would be a fun way to look at their dynamic, what's changed and what remains the same, and I figure the soulless person could easily get into some kind of trouble that the main character has to find a way out of.
The Two Brothers: Part Four
This time around, I was intrigued by the way that Bata was constantly reincarnating himself through other objects each time his ex-wife tried to kill him—from bull to trees, tree to baby, always Bata and always returning to Bata. I feel like a monster or just an adversary with this ability would make a pretty good antagonist, so I would set my story around that kind of conflict, with that character's nemesis as my protagonist.
The Book of Thoth: Part One
Even though it was a small, throwaway line, I was drawn to the priest's promise that the main character could someday understand what "the creeping things of earth are saying." A story about monsters and sages and the creeping things of earth leaking into the world somewhere would be fun, though it might not necessarily be suited for a story this short. So the other bit that interested me was the promise of the ability to use the book to always be able to return to the world in his original form, even from that meant coming back from "the world of ghosts." If I were to write something inspired by that, it would probably be a piece about a protagonist whose best friend/next door neighbor's family just paid to have their oldest son dredged back from the dead. The only trouble would be that he either didn't come back quite right, that somebody pretending to be him came back in his place, or that his passage back also cracked open a window that all sorts of other nastiness is now taking advantage of—and the main character and her best friend (and the brother, if it's that last option) have to find a way to right it or at least deal with it.
The Book of Thoth: Part Two
Initially, the first thing I was drawn to in this story were the men that worked for the protagonist and the priest—made of magic and made to do magic. Someone with that kind of relationship to magic would be interesting to write about, I think, plus I wonder exactly how much of a person they might or might not actually be.
But as it turned out, this ended up being probably my favorite story of the unit; I loved the protagonist's panache with magic and the things he could get it to do, and most of all, his trick at the end, where he wrote down the magic spells from the book on a sheet of papyrus, washed beer over it so the ink bled right off again, and proceeded to drink the beer—all so that he could have knowledge of the magic spells inside him, a trick all the great magicians use. Little details like that make me feel like a story about a magician with his style and similar methods could be fun to write about, probably from the perspective of someone just getting to know him or work with him.
The Book of Thoth: Part Three
In this story, I loved the idea that Nefer-ka-ptah was able to use the spells from the book to grant his son and wife the power to speak after they died—they were still very much dead, and needed to be buried and laid to rest, but were still able to talk to him after their deaths about how they'd died and that Thoth wasn't through with him yet. I would either write a story about someone with the ability to temporarily made the dead talk again, and goes around from town to town freelancing (until complications arise—occupational hazard), or someone being "haunted" by a dead friend or relative who is very much and very unpleasantly a corpse now, but still insists on sticking around with the protagonist.
The Tale of King Rhampsinitus
In this story a father is hired to help build a high-security stone chamber for the king to keep his treasures in, and the father makes sure to lay one of the stones of the chamber in such a way that it can be removed from the outside, granting access into the place. When he's old and about to die, he tells his sons about what he's done, so they can go in and steal some of the king's treasure for themselves. This sounds like the makings of a fun inside job story to me, and I'd love to do something like that with it, focusing on two or three siblings in a different type of setting who work together to rob something and fulfill their dad's legacy in the process.
Bibliography: Egyptian Myth and Legend by Donald Mackenzie. Source: Mythology and Folklore UN-Textbook.
Image Credit: "Cursive hieroglyphs from the Papyrus of Ani." Source: Wikimedia Commons.
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