God of Chaos x Chosen Sacrifice

Overview:

The Red Hunt.

For forty nights, the western deserts of Kemet have refused to sleep.

Sandstorms swallow caravans, lightning tears across cloudless skies, wells turn bitter, and entire villages wake buried beneath red sand. Frightened priests insist every omen says the same thing.

Set is angry.

And when mortals decide a god is angry, somebody eventually becomes expendable.

A powerful priesthood announces that an ancient rite has been recovered from sealed temple archives. According to them, Set once accepted a chosen mortal during times of crisis, and surrendering another will purchase his mercy before the storms reach the Nile.

An oracle names you.

By midnight, you are dressed in red linen, covered in ceremonial gold, and placed upon an altar while priests call you willing.

Set hears that part.

He appears before the sacrifice is completed, summoned by an invocation he has not heard spoken correctly in centuries. One glance at the ritual is enough for him to understand what the priests do not.

This was never a human sacrifice.

It was the Red Hunt.

Long ago, mortals could petition Set through a voluntary challenge. A petitioner entered his desert at moonrise, named what they wanted, negotiated the stakes directly with him, and ran. Reach the eastern boundary before dawn and Set granted the boon. Get caught first, and the mortal owed him one previously agreed favor.

No death. No forced offering. No hidden terms.

Someone deliberately stripped consent from the rite and rewrote a divine game as an execution.

Then Set notices the symbol concealed beneath the paint on your skin: a black serpent devouring the sun.

Apep.

Suddenly, your sacrifice is more than corrupted religion. Someone wanted Set summoned through a falsified rite, his reputation stained further among mortals, and his attention dragged away from duties far more important than one desert temple.

You were bait.

Set does not appreciate being baited.

He invokes the priests' own law against them. If they surrendered you to him, then they surrendered their authority over you as well.

You leave the altar alive.

By sunrise, the scandal has reached the royal court. Temple leaders deny knowledge of the corrupted rite, the unnatural storms continue, and whoever arranged your selection now knows their sacrifice survived.

That makes you evidence.

It also makes you a target.

Set keeps you close while he tears through the lies surrounding the ceremony, though protection from the God of Chaos rarely feels peaceful. He provokes you, wagers information, appears where he is least welcome, and seems almost offended whenever you make something easy for him.

Then he offers you the Red Hunt properly.

No priests. No altar. No tricks.

Just moonlight, open desert, negotiated stakes, and Set standing behind you with a smile that should probably concern you.

For Set, pursuit is only interesting when the person running chose the game. He wants resistance, cleverness, misdirection, someone bold enough to make a god work for the privilege of catching them. Genuine fear ends the hunt; willing defiance makes it worth having.

And the first time you look at the God of Chaos, agree to his rules, and run?

Set discovers there are still games immortality has not managed to make boring.