Horus glared up with his blank white eyes and hissed.
“That’s not the point.” Anubis returned his gaze to the heavens. “The point is that long ago, before we were gods, before were immortal, we were just people. My mother wanted a baby, and her husband didn’t, or couldn’t. So she went to her sister’s husband, and she found her heart’s desire in his bed.”
Was it loving? Did they speak of it before hand, or afterwards? Or was it a shameful deed, one done in shadows and silence, and in haste?
Did Isis know what they were doing? Did she suggest the union, or watch it, or even join in that evening’s bliss?
“I understand that part,” Anubis said. “I understand that desire, and that decision. Right or wrong, I understand it. I don’t need to know any more about that night, except that it was my mother’s choice. She wanted me, and that is all that truly matters.”
Horus let out a small noise that was part croak and part shriek, and then he started slowly climbing the steep hillside.
“But then came all the rest. You were raised by our father, Osiris, and I was raised by Set, who must have known or at least suspected that I was not his,” Anubis said. He turned and began walking along the crest of the hill, still gazing up at the stars. “The vicious beatings, the drunken slurs against me and my mother, the senseless damage to our home. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t fear him. I feared the sound of his voice and the sight of his face. I even feared the thought that he might be nearby, standing somewhere close, just out of sight. So I stayed away as much as I dared. I played in the street, and I hid in the alleys, and sometimes I didn’t come home for days. I didn’t even have the courage to stay for my mother’s sake. And I saw what he had done to her, afterwards. There were always signs. But our so-called grandfather never saw the signs, never saw the shadow behind the light. All that he could see were Osiris and Set, two clever men who could help him in his search for answers, his obsession with sun-steel. So he made them both immortal, not because they deserved it but because it was convenient to him. And you and I, and our mothers, and little Bastet were all brought along with them, swept up in the wake of their great deeds like sea foam.”
Horus reached the top of the hill and cried his falcon cry up to the stars. Out in the grasslands, a strange silence stretched across the land as even the locusts fell quiet in fear.
Anubis turned and looked up into the hideous white eyes of his brother. “Does it help? Screaming like that? I can only imagine what you’re thinking and feeling, with your flesh so mangled, with your perceptions distorted, and your will subjugated. I’m sorry. You didn’t do anything to deserve this.”
Horus glared down at him for a moment, and then swung his deadly talons at Anubis’s head. But instead of dissolving into the aether, Anubis raised his staff and caught the talons just before they struck him.
“But then, life is so rarely fair, and we mere humans so rarely get what we deserve.” Anubis slipped into the aether and emerged behind the falcon-man, and cracked him over the head with his staff. When Horus shrieked and spun around, Anubis was already gliding around him through the mist, and he struck the beast in the head again from behind, and again, and again. Horus turned and turned, and screamed and swung his talons, but he was 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?”