always too slow, and with one last strike Anubis sent him sprawling to his hands and knees with a dark splash of red across the feathers on the back of his skull.
“It wasn’t fair when Set terrorized me and my mother,” Anubis said. “It wasn’t fair when Set was made immortal, despite his crimes. And it wasn’t fair when I had to see you smiling and laughing, and playing and studying with your father. Our father.”
He brought the butt of his staff straight down on Horus’s back and the beast fell flat on his chest.
“This is an old story. A common story. Fate and luck, violence and shame, and hate.” Anubis walked in a slow circle around his wheezing brother. “There is nothing special about this. Fathers and sons, and brothers. It’s common. It should be beneath us. Beneath me. And yet, here we are.”
He kicked Horus in the head.
“Born to the same father, born to sisters more alike than two blades of grass.” Anubis stopped walking and sighed. “But I lived in terror and misery, burning with rage and shame every waking hour of my life. And all the while, you played and laughed and loved right in front of me. Because Osiris married Isis instead of Nethys. And now I have to live with the memory of it, forever. It’s not your fault, Horus. You didn’t do this. I know that. And yet I hate you all the same. I think I hate you more than Set, actually. He was a monster, something dark and foul. It was easy to respect myself even as I hated him, because I knew I was better than him. But you? You were everything I wanted to be. You had everything I wanted to have. And most damning of all, you had no idea what happened to me. You didn’t just live in joy. You lived in innocence. Yes, I think that’s it. That’s what I hate so much about you. Your innocence. You escaped all the pain and darkness of my life by a twist of chance, and you never even knew it, never knew how lucky you were, never felt any gratitude for what you had. Maybe if you had known what my life was like back then, if you had ever felt a moment’s thankfulness for what you had, if you had ever let a shred of that darkness into your heart so you could understand what you really had, then I wouldn’t hate you. But no. You were perfect and pure, and you lived in paradise. And now, four thousand years later, you’re a deformed monster and I still hate you.”
Anubis swung his staff down again, and Horus snatched it out of the air and yanked it out of his hands, throwing Anubis off his feet and sending him tumbling down the hillside. The world spun around and around, earth and sky and earth, and he wrapped his arms around his head and waited for it to stop. When he hit the ground at the bottom of the hill, Anubis stood up slowly, trying to control his breathing and focus on the distant, dark horizon to overcome the whirling vertigo spinning through his brain.
“Horus?”
Like any other bodily wound, the pain and disorientation in his head cleared quickly and he turned around to face the hill again. A scaled fist struck him in the stomach and sent him flying up and back through the warm night air, and he crashed down on his back into a thick bed of soft green grass with a hard grunt.
Apart. I need to pull apart, into the aether…
Thick, muscular talons wrapped around his face and lifted him off the ground by his head. He grabbed at the scaled claws, but they were as immovable as iron, tightening and crushing his skull even as his skull continued to heal itself in defiance.
Apart…
An instinctual part of his mind wanted to grab his staff and strike it on the ground, to complete the little ritual that he now associated with his transition into the world of mists. But deprived of his staff, deprived even of contact with the ground itself, his concentration stumbled. He couldn’t quite focus on the act of dissolving his body without the gesture, without the feeling in his arm, without the sound of the staff thumping on the dirt or cracking on the stone.
Apart…
The pressure on his head suddenly vanished. All sensations vanished as he faded into the mist and sank down and away from his brother’s scaled hand. Bright red drops of blood glistened on Horus’s talons in the starlight.
Anubis let the aether carry him away from the beast and he stepped back out into the moonlight a few dozen paces away, where he knelt and retrieved his staff. He straightened up again and said, “Horus, can you still understand me?”
The great falcon head swiveled to look at him, and nodded, and hissed.
“Do you understand what I’ve said? Do you understand why I hate you?”
Again Horus nodded, and began stalking slowly forward.
“So tell me now, knowing what I’ve just told you, brother, do you regret the past? Our past, our childhood?” Anubis asked.
Horus paused, his long lean frame hunching forward, his bloody talons curled and ready at his sides. The creature shook its head from side to side, and shrieked.
Anubis clenched his staff and glared. “How dare you! You prideful, selfish, worthless filth!”
Horus charged up the grassy slope and lunged at the black skinned youth with both hands. Anubis raised his staff to strike the earth, but a rough-skinned talon wrapped around his fingers, crushing his hand against the hardwood stick in his grip. The youth cried out, gasping, his eyes fixed on his hand buried in the dark scaly fist. And he was still staring when a second fist struck him in the head.
Anubis fell back and would have fallen to the ground if Horus had not kept his iron grip on his hand, holding him up, dangling him by his arm and his staff. The world flashed and sparkled for a moment and Anubis blinked hard as he hung there, helpless and trapped.
Fast… he’s so fast…
He tightened his grip on the staff still clenched in his hand, and felt Horus’s talons crush inward sharply, and he felt his fingers breaking one by one. Anubis gasped and fell to his knees.
He said, “Look how far you’ve fallen, brother. Once the mighty warrior, the beloved prince of all Aegyptus, now nothing more than a rabid animal serving a filthy harlot who AAAAGH!”
Anubis screamed as Horus lifted him up high into the air by his hand, wrenching Anubis’s arm to the side, dislocating his shoulder, and leaving him to dangle again, this time with his feet off the ground and his face hanging just in front of the falcon’s cruel beak.
The falcon shook his head.
“No?” Anubis whispered, struggling to breathe through the pain in his shoulder and the pressure stretching out his ribs and lungs as he swung from his useless arm. “What do you mean, no? No, you aren’t a hideous monster? No, you don’t serve Lilith?”
Again, the falcon shook his head.
“Of course you serve her, you idiot,” Anubis spat through his clenched teeth. “You live in her house, you bring innocent victims to her for her depraved experiments, and this very night you were terrorizing an entire neighborhood of helpless families in your desperation to return to her side.”
Horus nodded once.
“You know this is true? You know you’re her slave? Then why were you shaking your head?”
Horus pointed at himself.
“You?”
Horus pointed at the ground.
“Here?” Anubis frowned, trying to think through the pain in his arm and chest. And then the monster’s meaning became clear. “You mean to say that here and now, in this moment, you’re not her slave? You’re fighting me because you wish to?”
Horus nodded, and then screamed in the youth’s face.
Anubis winced, and then opened his eyes again. “I understand. Thank you.” He wrenched himself apart into the mist again, slipping free of the talons and the pain, and he drifted away across the grass to appear whole and healed a short distance away. “You want to hurt me, Horus? Then come here and hurt me.” He reached up and pulled his black jackal mask down over his face and let the drifting aether distort his appearance, blurring the line between flesh and wood, between man and beast.
I am Anubis. I am Death.
Horus screamed and raced toward him with talons raised.
Anubis met the assault head-on, lashing out with his ironwood staff, striking high and low, smashing the falcon across the face and into the gut. The God of Death became a whirling black cyclone of fists and bludgeons,
