Tag: fiction

Where the Gods Weep

On By xunholyanubisxIn Liminal, writing1 Comment

They say—so the elders whisper in the stoa when the oil burns low—that beyond the thinning groves of Attica there lies a place no hymn reaches. A place where even the names of the deathless grow thin, like smoke unraveling in the wind.

It was not meant for mortal feet.

Yet Philokleia, daughter of Mnesarchos, walked there beneath a swollen moon.

She had quarreled with the living and grown weary of their small certainties. So she walked past the last olive tree, past the shrines where offerings had long since turned to dust, and into a silence so complete it seemed the world itself had drawn a breath—and forgotten to release it.

Before her rose the ruin.

A temple—not of any god she knew, nor any named in the verses of Homer or the teachings of the philosophers. Its columns leaned like old men abandoned by time, and its stones bore no inscription, as though even language had refused to touch it.

And there—O dreadful sight!—set into its very heart, was a face vast as a titan’s dream.

Not carved.

Imprisoned.

The lips were parted in some unspoken lament, and from the eyes flowed blackened streams, as though grief itself had turned to pitch and marked the god for all eternity.

Philokleia covered her mouth.

“By Athena Polias…” she breathed. “What forgotten daimon is this?”

Then came a voice—not carried by air, nor borne upon the wind, but placed within her mind as a hand might set a cup upon a table.

“Mortal… thou speakest as though names yet hold power.”

Philokleia turned sharply. “Who addresses me? Show thyself! I am no trembling child to be toyed with.”

“Boldness,” the voice murmured, low and ancient. “A fragile shield.”

Her gaze returned, unwillingly, to the face.

The eyes opened.

They were not of stone.

They were deep, measureless voids, within which something vast turned slowly, like the unseen workings of the cosmos before the birth of light.

Philokleia staggered. “A god…”

“Once,” it replied.

The word fell like a ruin collapsing inward.

“I am Agnostos Theos—the Unnamed, the Unremembered. We who were cast beyond memory when the tongues of men grew silent.”

“We?” Philokleia whispered.

The temple groaned.

Columns trembled. Dust fell like pale rain. And from the darkness behind the great face came a sound—soft at first, then rising.

Whispers.

Not one voice.

Many.

Layered. Overlapping. Pleading.

“We are here… we are still… speak us… remember—”

Philokleia clutched her head. “Silence! Silence, I command it!”

But the voices only grew.

“You walk where memory ends,” said Agnostos. “Where the gods go when they are no longer feared.”

Philokleia forced herself upright, though her limbs trembled. “Then let me depart, dread one. I have no wish to linger among shades.”

“Depart?” The god’s tone shifted—almost amused. “Turn, then.”

She turned.

The path was gone.

In its place stretched a blackness so complete it devoured even the moonlight. No stars. No horizon. No world.

Her breath came sharp. “What trickery is this?”

“No trick,” the god said. “Only truth. Thou hast crossed the boundary, Philokleia. The realm of the remembered lies behind thee no longer.”

“How knowest thou my name?” she demanded.

“Because thou art forgetting it.”

The words struck her like a blow.

“No,” she said quickly. “I am Philokleia, daughter of—”

Her tongue faltered.

Of whom?

The name slipped.

Gone.

“No…” Her voice shrank. “No, this is madness—”

“Not madness,” whispered the many voices now swelling within the temple. “Hunger.”

The ground shifted beneath her feet—softening, as though the stone had become flesh long dead yet not at rest. She stumbled, looking down.

The floor moved.

Not like earth.

Like something breathing.

A wet, slow inhalation beneath the marble skin.

Philokleia recoiled, horror rising like bile. “What place is this?!”

“A tomb,” said Agnostos. “And a womb.”

The tears upon the god’s face thickened—no longer mere streaks, but flowing rivulets of black ichor that pooled at the base of the temple.

And then—

Something burst forth.

With a sound like stone splitting under unbearable pressure, the ground before her split open. Not cleanly—but jagged, tearing, as if reality itself had been ripped apart.

From the darkness beneath, a hand clawed upward.

Not human.

Too long.

Too many joints.

Its surface was not flesh, nor stone, but something in between—cracked, weeping, whispering.

Then another.

And another.

They dragged themselves free—figures half-formed, faces stretched and wrong, mouths opening not to scream but to speak names that no longer existed.

“Thessara—Klymenos—Aithon—”

Their voices overlapped, building into a shriek that was not sound but memory forced into form.

Philokleia tried to run.

The ground seized her ankles.

The hands.

They were everywhere now—bursting from the temple floor, from the columns, from the very air itself, clutching, grasping, desperate.

“Remember us!” they wailed. “Give us voice! Give us form!”

One seized her arm.

Its grip was ice and fire together.

Another took her face, forcing her gaze upward—toward the god.

The eyes of Agnostos burned now with a terrible clarity.

“Thou shalt not leave,” it said. “For thou hast seen. And what is seen must be remembered.”

Philokleia screamed—but the sound twisted as it left her throat.

Changed.

Multiplied.

Her voice fractured into many, speaking words she did not know, names she had never learned yet now could not forget.

Her skin began to harden.

Crack.

Black lines traced down her cheeks, mirroring the god’s endless tears.

“No—no, I beg thee—!”

“Too late,” whispered the god. “Thou art becoming.”

The hands pulled her downward.

Not into the earth—

Into the temple.

Her body stretched, fused, reshaped. Her face pressed against cold stone that yielded like flesh, drinking her in. Her thoughts splintered, scattering into the endless chorus.

And as her final shred of self dissolved, one last truth struck her with merciless clarity:

The tears were not of sorrow.

They were of hunger.

Above, beneath the watching moon, the temple stood silent once more.

But now—

There were two faces weeping in the dark.

The Architecture of the Hunt

On By xunholyanubisxIn writing, Liminal1 Comment

The traveler stepped into the highway rest stop, the heavy glass door hissing shut with a sound like a final breath. The air inside was unnaturally cold, thick with the cloying scent of crushed pine needles and the metallic tang of wet fur.

Under the buzzing, yellowed fluorescent lights of the corridor, the man paused. He looked into the wall-length mirror above the sinks, but his reflection was wrong. Behind his own pale face, the tiled wall had vanished, replaced by a dense, silver-black thicket of birch trees. When he spun around, the door he had just entered through was gone. There was only a narrow hiking trail of grey dirt, stretching into a forest where the trees were spaced with a terrifying, mathematical precision.

He had entered the “Green Room,” the hollow space between the world of asphalt and the deep, ancient wild.

He began to walk, his footsteps silenced by the sterile, white linoleum that was slowly being overtaken by a carpet of black moss. Above, the sky wasn’t visible through the canopy, but a jagged, irregular hole leaked a light so pale it turned his skin the color of a corpse. There was no wind, yet the skeletal branches of the trees swayed in a rhythmic, beckoning motion.

A horn sounded. It was a low, brassy note that vibrated not in the air, but in the marrow of his bones.

The traveler’s pace broke into a frantic jog. He passed a row of rusted park benches, but they were arranged in a tight, inward-facing circle around a pile of bleached white antlers. With every flicker of the overhead lights—which still hung inexplicably from the dark branches above—the pile grew higher. He realized with a jolt of ice in his chest that they weren’t all antlers; some were human ribs, sharpened to needle-like points and polished to a shine.

“Run,” a voice commanded. It wasn’t a vocalization, but the sharp, violent snap of a bowstring against a wrist-guard.

He ran. The trail beneath him softened, turning from dirt into a spongy, heaving texture that felt like treading on a living lung. To his left and right, amber eyes ignited in the shadows. They weren’t attached to heads; they were merely glowing orbs suspended in the dark, moving in perfect, predatory synchronization with his gasping breath.

He never saw the hounds clearly. He caught only the blur of a white flank, the wet gleam of a tooth, and the rhythmic huff-huff-huff of breath that smelled of iron and old snow. They were herding him, nipping at his heels to guide him toward the center of the labyrinth.

He burst into a clearing that resembled an abandoned summer camp from a half-remembered nightmare. The cabins were made of unpeeled logs, their windows dark, vacant sockets. In the center of the camp stood a figure. She was tall, impossibly thin, and draped in a cloak made of living moths that fluttered in a silent, frantic cloud. She held a bow carved from a substance that shimmered like moonlight, and she didn’t look at the traveler. She looked through him, as if he were already a ghost.

The man tried to scream, but his throat had tightened. He looked down at his hands and saw them hardening, the fingers fusing into dark, cloven hooves. His ears lengthened and twitched, catching the sound of his own heart, which now beat with the frantic rhythm of a cornered animal. The liminal space had stripped away his clothes, his name, and his humanity.

The goddess raised the bow. There was no anger in her face, only the clinical satisfaction of a craftswoman seeing a project reach its inevitable conclusion.

The traveler realized then that the forest hadn’t grown around him; he was being woven into it. As the silver arrow left the string, he wasn’t a man escaping a rest stop anymore. He was just another trophy, another branch in her endless, silent architecture of the hunt.

The Hypostyle That Breaths Back

On By xunholyanubisxIn Liminal, writing1 Comment

The air in the hypostyle hall isn’t air anymore. It’s a tongue—thick, dry, licking the salt from my back. We’re not supposed to be here after dusk. But the overseer’s whip had a splinter, and I bled on the Pharaoh’s stone. So now I wait. Kneeling. Knees in the dust that tastes of old copper.

The pillars breathe. No—they gurgle. Hieroglyphs peel away like scabs, reforming into eyes that don’t blink. I try to pray, but my mouth fills with sand that wriggles. The shadows between the columns aren’t flat. They curl, reaching out with fingers made of beetle legs. A sound like wet linen tearing. Then I see him—or it—the thing wearing Khenemet’s face. Khenemet, who laughed when I dropped the wine jar last month. Her skin hangs loose now, pulled over a shape that has too many elbows.

It crawls toward me, whispering in a voice like mother’s, but mother’s been dead three harvests. “Stand, little rope.” I can’t. My shins have turned to Nile mud, soft, splitting. Something pale and jointed pushes through the meat. I try to scream, but my throat is a flute someone else is playing. The last thing I see—before the pillars swallow the torchlight—is my own reflection in a polished alabaster bowl. My eyes are gone. Hollows packed with dates. Black, wet dates. And they’re smiling.

The floor doesn’t hold me anymore. It accepts me. I sink, slow as honey, into limestone that feels like old fat. Below, something churns—a second sky, inverted, full of teeth shaped like ankhs. The thing in Khenemet’s face slides beside me, her jaw unhinging to speak in the language of snapped reeds.

“You bled for the Pharaoh,” it says. “Now bleed for the between.”

My arms come off. Not cut. Unscrewed. From the shoulder sockets, locusts pour—not the dry kind, but wet, soft, newborn, their wings sticking to my ribs. I try to run, but my legs are already kneeling ten feet away, still trembling, still praying to gods who’ve changed the locks on their doors. The pillars are closer now. They were always closer. They’ve been walking toward me for three thousand years.

A hook of shadow catches my navel and pulls. Inside-out. I see the back of my own heart. It’s carved with a cartouche—not the Pharaoh’s name, but mine. A name I never spoke. A name that tastes like my mother’s blood after she birthed me in the reeds. The thing wearing Khenemet’s face begins to eat my shadow, bite by bite. My shadow screams louder than I can.

I look down. My hands are hieroglyphs now. Scratching themselves into the stone. Telling a story that hasn’t happened yet. About a slave who never left the hall. Who became a door. Who hears, every night, the footsteps of the next one kneeling where I knelt.

And the pillars keep breathing.

Gurgling.

Waiting.

My First Stream Dive into Expedition 33 — Worth the Hype?

On By xunholyanubisxIn Gaming, ReviewsLeave a comment

My first stream of Expedition 33 turned out to be a much more positive experience than I expected, and honestly it set a really good tone for how I want my streaming journey to go. Going into it, I was a bit nervous because I wasn’t sure how people would respond, and I also didn’t know how smoothly I would be able to manage talking, playing, and interacting at the same time. But once I actually started, everything began to feel more natural than I thought it would.

The game itself helped a lot. Expedition 33 pulled me in right away with its atmosphere and pacing, which made it easier for me to stay engaged and keep the energy up while streaming. I didn’t feel like I had to force commentary because there were already moments in the game that naturally made me react and share my thoughts. That made the stream feel more authentic instead of awkward or scripted.

What really stood out to me, though, was the small interactions I did get. Even if it wasn’t a huge audience, having people stop by, say something in chat, or just lurk and watch gave me a sense that I wasn’t just talking to myself. That alone made the experience feel rewarding. It motivated me to keep going and stay consistent instead of overthinking everything.

By the end of the stream, I felt proud of myself for actually starting and following through. I noticed areas I can improve, like keeping my commentary more consistent and being more confident when there are quiet moments, but overall I left feeling encouraged. This first stream made me realize that I can build something enjoyable here if I keep showing up and learning as I go.

The Crocodile’s Due

On By xunholyanubisxIn Liminal, writing3 Comments

The Nile ran thick with blood that season—not just the usual crimson of silt and sunset, but the deeper, richer red of human sacrifice. I watched from the reeds, my scaled body submerged save for eyes that burned like amber coals. They called me Sobek. They feared me. They fed me.

Tonight’s offering was different. A girl, no older than twelve summers, trussed like a piglet at the water’s edge. Her eyes were wide with terror, but not the usual kind. There was something else there—defiance, perhaps. Or madness.

“Please,” she whispered as the priests chanted their hollow words. “I don’t want to die.”

I almost laughed. Who does? But death comes for everyone, even gods. I should know—I’ve been devouring the dead and dying since before the pyramids rose.

The priests pushed her in. She sank with a splash, her bound limbs useless against the current. I waited. Patience is a virtue, even for monsters. When she surfaced, gasping, I struck.

My jaws closed around her waist. Bones cracked like dry reeds. Blood filled my mouth, hot and coppery. But as I dragged her under, she spoke again—through a mouthful of blood and broken teeth.

“I see you,” she gurgled. “Behind the scales. Behind the teeth. You’re just a scared old thing, aren’t you? Afraid of the dark.”

I froze. No mortal had ever spoken to me like that. Not in all my millennia of existence.

“What did you say?” I rumbled, the sound vibrating through the water.

She laughed, a wet, choking sound. “You heard me. You’re not a god. You’re just a big, dumb animal with a god complex. And I’m going to haunt you.”

I crushed her skull then, ending her insolence. But as her lifeless body sank into the mud, her words echoed in my mind. Scared old thing. Afraid of the dark.

The next night, I saw her. Standing on the bank where she’d died, transparent in the moonlight. Watching me.

“Still hungry?” she called out. “Or are you afraid I’ll taste better dead than alive?”

I ignored her. Gods don’t converse with ghosts. But I couldn’t ignore the cold that seeped into my scales when she was near. A cold I hadn’t felt since before I was worshiped.

She came every night after that. Sometimes she’d just watch. Other times she’d mock me, her voice carrying across the water like death’s own whisper. I grew restless. I stopped eating the sacrifices. The priests grew worried. The Nile grew stagnant.

One night, I surfaced near the bank where she stood. “What do you want?” I growled.

She smiled, and for a moment, I saw the girl she’d been—before the terror, before the blood. “I want what you took from me. Life. But since that’s not possible, I’ll settle for your fear.”

“I fear nothing,” I lied.

“No?” She leaned closer, her ghostly face inches from mine. “Then why do you sleep in the deepest parts of the river now? Why do you flinch when shadows move? Why do you whimper in your sleep?”

I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Because she was right. The darkness had become my enemy. The silence, once my comfort, now rang with her laughter.

The priests stopped bringing sacrifices. The people stopped praying. The river stopped giving life. And still, she came.

“You’re fading,” she said one night, her form barely visible in the moonlight. “Without belief, without fear, you’re nothing. Just a big reptile waiting to die.”

I was weaker now. My scales had lost their luster. My eyes no longer burned. The Nile that had sustained me for millennia now rejected me.

“I’ll make you a deal,” I rasped, my voice barely a whisper. “Release me, and I’ll grant you peace.”

She laughed, and the sound was like grinding stones. “Peace? I am peace. The peace of vengeance. The peace of knowing that even gods can be made to suffer.”

She faded then, leaving me alone with my thoughts. And my fear. The darkness pressed in, thicker than water, colder than death. I closed my eyes, but I could still see her—standing watch, waiting.

In the end, I did what any cornered animal does. I fought back. I rose from the Nile for the last time, a shadow of my former self, and crawled onto the bank where she’d died. I lay my head on the stones and waited.

She came as always, but this time, she touched me. Her ghostly fingers sank into my scales like hooks. “Ready to die, god?”

I didn’t answer. Just closed my eyes as the cold consumed me. The last thing I heard was her laughter, echoing across the silent Nile.

The next morning, the villagers found my body—massive, ancient, and very dead. They celebrated. They feasted. They forgot.

But I wasn’t truly gone. I was just… waiting. In the mud. In the dark. And sometimes, when the moon is right and the water runs just so, I can still hear her laughter. And I know that even in death, I’m not free.

The crocodile always gets his due. But sometimes, the due gets you first.

The Verdict of Unsetting Light

On By xunholyanubisxIn Liminal, writingLeave a comment

The sun did not rise that morning.

It peeled itself over the horizon like a wound reopening.

High above a city that had forgotten how to pray, Shamash watched from the seam between night and day. He was not the gentle warmth painted in temple hymns. He was judgment cast in light. He was revelation without mercy.

And something in him had begun to rot.

The sky hung in a color that did not exist in nature — not gold, not red, but the bruised yellow of old parchment soaked in blood. The air felt abandoned. Dogs refused to bark. Flies gathered where there was nothing visible to feed on.

Shamash moved across the heavens in his chariot, but the wheels no longer sang. They ground. They scraped against the firmament as if the sky were bone. Each turn carved a thin white fracture through the blue. Each beam of sunlight fell too sharply, like blades lowered from a surgeon’s trembling hand.

He saw everything.

That had always been his burden.

He saw the lie before it formed on the tongue. He saw betrayal while it still lived in the marrow. He saw hands that would kill before they even curled into fists. His light entered rooms without doors. It pried open eyelids. It crawled beneath skin.

There was no shadow deep enough to hide.

But now, as his gaze pressed down upon the earth, something stared back.

Between the alleyways and abandoned courtyards, in the long hallways of half-empty hospitals and cracked school buildings humming with old fluorescent light, the shadows did not retreat. They thickened. They clung to corners like damp cloth. When his rays struck them, they did not dissolve — they blistered.

And the blisters opened.

Inside them were eyes. Hundreds. Lidless. Reflecting his own terrible brightness.

Shamash faltered.

For the first time since the first dawn broke over Sumerian stone, his light flickered.

The flicker lasted only a heartbeat, but in that heartbeat, something shifted. The world felt it — a subtle misalignment, like a bone sliding from its socket. Birds fell mid-flight. The sea hesitated against its shore. Somewhere, a newborn inhaled and did not exhale.

He remembered when mortals carved his likeness into clay and called him just. When they believed the sun revealed truth so that healing could follow. They did not understand that truth, exposed too long, festers. It peels skin. It hollows out the soft places meant for hope.

He had been burning them slowly for centuries.

His chariot dipped lower.

Light flooded the streets, and where it touched flesh, veins darkened beneath translucent skin. People stood frozen in doorways, unable to step back. Their secrets rose from them like steam — visible now, writhing shapes that clung to ceilings and wept.

Shamash saw every cruelty. Every unspoken hatred. Every quiet act of indifference that had cost another their life.

The weight of it pressed into his solar core.

The god of justice was drowning in evidence.

Above him, the sky split along the fractures his wheels had carved. Through the cracks seeped something blacker than night — not absence, but accumulation. The discarded guilt of empires. The unscreamed confessions of kings. The prayers never answered because they were never meant to be.

It dripped onto his light.

And where it touched him, his radiance curdled.

The sun shuddered. Its edges dimmed to a sickly amber. Shadows lengthened not away from him, but toward him, as though trying to reclaim their maker. Buildings stretched thin and warped. Hallways bent at impossible angles. The world became a corridor with no clear exit — a liminal space suspended between verdict and execution.

Shamash understood then.

He was not simply revealing corruption.

He was feeding on it.

Each injustice he illuminated added fuel to his blaze. Each exposed sin strengthened his gaze. Justice had become appetite. Revelation had become consumption.

He had mistaken omniscience for righteousness.

Below, the people began to scream — not because they were burning, but because they were seen. Entirely. Without filter. Without mercy. Their faces cracked like overfired pottery, fissures glowing with the same harsh light pouring from the sky.

Shamash tried to close his eyes.

Gods do not have eyelids.

His chariot convulsed. The horses — once creatures of pure fire — bled liquid sunlight from their nostrils. The sky’s fractures widened. Day and night tangled together in a slow, suffocating spiral.

For one terrible moment, the world hovered in half-light. Neither judged nor forgiven.

In that in-between, the liminal hour that never belonged to mortals, Shamash felt something he had not known since before temples bore his name:

Doubt.

His light dimmed again — longer this time.

And in that dimming, shadows rushed forward like floodwater breaching a dam. They swallowed streets. They climbed walls. They entered mouths and lungs. The eyes within them blinked in unison.

The sun above did not disappear.

It decayed.

Still hanging in the sky, still watching, but now sickened by what it had always demanded to see.

And as the day dragged itself forward, heavy and misshapen, the world understood a new terror:

The god of justice had begun to question the value of illumination.

When the sun finally set, it did not sink cleanly beyond the horizon.

It dragged its bleeding light across the earth like a blade reluctant to leave the wound.

The Awakening of the Sphinx

On By xunholyanubisxIn Liminal, writingLeave a comment

In the scorching sands of Egypt, where the ancient pyramids stood as silent sentinels, there lurked a terror far more sinister than any mummy’s curse. The Great Sphinx, that enigmatic guardian of Giza, was said to hold a dark secret—a secret that whispered through the dunes and echoed in the nightmares of those who dared to listen.

The story begins with a young archaeologist named Amelia, driven by an insatiable curiosity to unravel the mysteries of the Sphinx. She had spent countless nights poring over ancient texts and deciphering hieroglyphs, convinced that the key to understanding the Sphinx lay hidden within the sands of time.

One fateful evening, under the cloak of a moonless night, Amelia ventured into the heart of the Sphinx’s enclosure. Armed with a flashlight and a heart full of determination, she began to excavate the area around the base of the colossal statue. As she brushed away the sand, her trowel struck something solid—a stone tablet, inscribed with symbols that seemed to dance in the flickering light of her torch.

With trembling hands, Amelia unearthed the tablet and carried it back to her makeshift camp. As she deciphered the symbols, a chilling realization dawned upon her. The tablet spoke of a curse, a punishment for those who dared to disturb the Sphinx’s eternal slumber. It warned of a creature that dwelled within the statue, a guardian of unimaginable power, waiting to be unleashed upon the world.

Amelia’s heart raced as she pondered the implications of her discovery. Could it be that the Sphinx was more than just a monument, but a prison for an ancient evil? Driven by a mix of fear and fascination, she decided to delve deeper into the mystery.

The following night, Amelia returned to the Sphinx, this time with a small team of trusted colleagues. Together, they began to explore the hidden chambers beneath the statue, guided by the cryptic clues etched into the stone tablet. As they ventured deeper, the air grew colder, and an oppressive silence enveloped them.

Suddenly, a low rumble echoed through the chambers, and the ground beneath their feet trembled. Amelia’s flashlight flickered and died, plunging them into darkness. Panic surged through the group as they stumbled blindly, trying to find their way back to the surface. But it was too late.

From the depths of the Sphinx, a monstrous roar shattered the silence, and a creature of nightmares emerged. Its body was a grotesque amalgamation of lion and serpent, with eyes that burned like embers of hell. The guardian of the Sphinx had awakened, and its wrath was unquenchable.

Amelia and her colleagues fled in terror, but the creature was relentless. One by one, they fell victim to its insatiable hunger, their screams echoing through the ancient halls. Amelia, the last to survive, found herself cornered, facing the abomination that had once been the Sphinx’s guardian.

With a final, desperate plea for mercy, Amelia met her end, her body consumed by the creature’s ravenous jaws. And so, the curse of the Sphinx was fulfilled, a chilling reminder of the horrors that lie hidden within the sands of Egypt.

To this day, the Great Sphinx stands as a silent witness to the ancient evil that dwells within, waiting for the unwary to disturb its slumber once more.

Thirst

On By xunholyanubisxIn Liminal, writingLeave a comment

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.

Hidden Blood Part 13 – Thygon continued

On By xunholyanubisxIn Hidden Blood, My NovelsLeave a comment

The creek’s chill barely registered. His body was a tool, calibrated for endurance, and cold was just another variable in the equation. But the other thing—the pull at his focus, the persistent, unwanted awareness of the woman stepping carefully behind him—that was a variable he had not accounted for.

It was a weakness. A point of ingress. The thing in the woods had seen it, had aimed its words like a blade at the space between them. You would stand between the forest and its memory? Yes. That was his function. His oath. But the second, unspoken question hummed beneath it: Would you stand between her and the forest?

Thygon kept his eyes on the treacherous, root-veined path ahead, his senses fanned out into the dripping undergrowth. Every instinct screamed at the slowness of their pace, the noise of her movements—the rustle of her cloak, the slight catch of her breath on an incline. He could have covered this ground in half the time, in perfect silence. He should have.

He should have left her.

The thought was an old, familiar reflex, as cold and clean as his knife. Survival was a simple algorithm: reduce variables, increase efficiency. She was a complication. A liability. The signet was a lodestone for everything that slumbered in the forgotten corners of the world, and she was its bearer, innocent and unskilled. A spark in a tinder-dry wood.

And yet.

He saw, in his mind’s eye, the way she had straightened her spine by the dead fire. Not with defiance, but with a grim acceptance that had no place on one so young. He had seen her look at his scars not with pity, but with a dawning comprehension, as if she were reading a map of a country she was now doomed to travel. That understanding in her eyes was a hook, buried in a part of him he’d thought long since calloused over.

He had told her scars were reminders of where it broke its teeth. A good line. A true one. But it was only half the truth. The other half was the memory of the wounding itself—the white-hot tear of it, the shocking vulnerability. Caring was the precursor to all wounding. It was the opening in the armor. To feel anything for her—concern, obligation, a flicker of something warmer—was to sharpen the blades that would inevitably come for them both.

The path steepened. He heard her foot slip on a moss-slick stone, the sharp intake of breath. His own hand twitched at his side, an aborted movement to reach back. He clenched it into a fist, driving the nails into his palm. The pain was a clean, focusing thing. Don’t, he commanded himself. She is a charge. A duty. Not a companion. Certainly not…

Not what? The word wouldn’t form, because to form it was to give it power.

But the temptation was not in grand gestures. It was in the small, quiet moments. The urge to warn her of the low-hanging branch before it caught her hood. The impulse to offer the last of the water when her lips were chapped from the cold air. The dangerous, quiet fascination with watching her mind work—seeing her piece together the fragments of this shattered world he moved through, her fear slowly tempering into a kind of resolved steel.

It was a luxury he could not afford. A distraction he could not survive. Every moment his mind lingered on her weariness, her resilience, was a moment it was not parsing the threats in the shadows. The thing from the clearing had not left. It was pacing them, a pressure at the edge of his perception, a taste of iron and stone on the wind that came and went. It was waiting for him to falter. For his vigilance to crack just wide enough.

And she was the crack.

He stopped at the crest of the rise, not looking back, surveying the grey, mist-choked valley below. A good place for an ambush. Too many blind corners. Too much cover.

“We rest here for five minutes,” he said, his voice toneless. He did not sit. He remained standing, his back to her, his gaze scouring the landscape for movement. He could feel her relief, hear the soft sigh as she sank onto a fallen log. He could picture her rubbing her ankles, the weariness on her face. The image was so clear it was an assault.

His battle was not against the things in the woods. It was against the slow, quiet thawing within his own chest. It was the fight to keep his heart a stone, his purpose a single, sharp point. She needed a shield, not a man. A weapon, not a guardian with regrets.

Yet, as he heard her take a small sip from her waterskin, a profound and terrible truth settled over him, colder than the dawn mist.

The greatest temptation was not in feeling something for her.

It was in the fear that he already did.