Funeral procession for Phoenix Rising </3
It's assumed at least those tagged are present/performed the duties requested of them, but if I need to edit anything lemme know!! <33

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Hotep gave himself to ritual, for it was his sole comfort. Phoenix's body was prepared for her departure to the West. Senmut was of great help in the toil. And Khaemwaset was committed to learning — for he who had passed through Duat, never yet had he been required to oversee the committing of another's form to that place.

At dawn her body, wrapped in long strands of flax that had been dried and twisted together, was carried upon Nakhtmin's back. He walked slowly, high stepping, unsmiling. Trailing behind, fellahin carried offerings of food and finery to accompany the priestess into Osiris's company.

Hem-netjer had asked Sitamun and El'Zeath to take on the visages of Nephthys and Isis, those chiefest deities of mourners. Let the gods move and see through their servants, how Satriya ached with loss. Let their weeping be made holy!

Westward. Up to the stone cliffs, where Phoenix's ba might rest in shade and peace.

And not alone. Khaemwaset had asked that his children lay beside her. And so Hotep at last had learned where their bodies were laid — without rites, without ritual. For Pharaoh this was proper. Stillborns took no life-giving breath, and whether they lived at all might be challenged.

But Hotep prepared their embalmings, as well. He was possessed of a virulent certainty, that this was why he had not been able to call them back. Lain properly to rest, with a ba to call their ka down to, and receive offerings, and hear petitions, and take strength into themselves — it would be different. It would become balanced. It must.

So though the father's discomfort was plain, Hotep gave the twins their rites.

And now they stood before that waiting tomb, its yawning embrace. Phoenix's body was laid down.

Here with diorite adze, Hotep touched her lips and eyes, to restore her senses in the afterlife.

A peseshkef of sharp obsidian, passed over her. In this, he cut her cord like one of an infant's. Glistening meat, cut from sacrificial animals, was laid out in offering. The blood of birth.

She was to be reborn! She would sail with Ra when he passed over this place. She would live forever in the halls of Osiris.

He must joy in this... comfort in her eternal life, in her ka's continued presence, in the opportunity to see her, again, one day...

And yet... Hotep clung to ritual as a lifeline. He recited those sacred incantations. One wrong twist of peseshkef and he might be set adrift himself!

It was the sight of Khaemwaset he found most difficult to bear, though jodai stood before the yawning white stone tomb and felt very little. He was not so emptied of humanity to acknowledge the enormity of what had been taken in mere days from the house of Horus. His heart had been made a poor instrument for mourning, the occupation had seen to that, but he grieved, if not for the lost gods and high priestess, for the wounded living.
For Pharaoh, bowing head over the sacred dead beside Setemhotep. Only in silence did Sapair wonder what remained of such divine convictions when the gods had finished taking their khet. These deaths they could not undo.
His wife’s lament rose as a keen within the pale stone walls, the visage of the Nephthys upon her, a ferocity in devotion he could not dismiss as he would with others. She lent something of her own life to that procession into gilt fields. Her husband’s eyes are watchful, granting space until such a time that he may take her into his arms.
Sapair could not give her the comfort of believing that all would be well. He could not promise her that their children would be spared the same end. He could not offer Khaemwaset assurances that his reign would be blessed with heirs, or that the kingdom would endure whatever wrath the gods had yet to devise. He could only stand near and ensure the living would make something of their own eternity.

Tender concern is arranged on the faces which ambit the queen, dragging the beast of grief down through the palatial hallways and out into a path where the procession moves for the pale white wilderness. Silk shifts lay smooth against her ribs and down her face. The collar at her throat catches passing light. The attendants had taken care with her appearance, arranged her furs, fastened the jewels and flowers of divine office before touching pigment to the garnet eyes until she resembled again the queen she had been before the events of that day.

Her head is high. Her children are here. Phoenix Rising is here. She cannot look long.

Sitamun sings. Hotep labors over the funerary rites with a fervor that borders on desperation. Merneith glimpses his shoulders as he restores the senses of the dead through eternal night.

Khaem’s suffering is her torture.

Neith's grief has become distant. It belongs to someone else, now. She does what she has been taught to do, and for satriya. She is not permitted to fall apart.