CHAPTER EIGHT #2
“Time for me does not move as it does for you. The millennia since our reign do not seem so long. Every hundred years, a soul emerges whom I am able to shepherd.”
“But why still do it if you are the only god left here?”
“It was the task my father gave me when I was first created. It is all that I know. What else would I do?”
“So, you never got any say in it?”
“I do not understand.”
“I mean, you never got a choice? In how you spent your life?
“That is not the way of gods.”
Mina was close to protesting, but then looked away. It wasn’t really the way of humans either.
“You deserve that choice,” Mina said, almost as much to himself as to Anubis. “We both do.”
“It is not our way,” Anubis repeated.
“Are you happy doing this? Will you be happy forever?”
“I am happy right now.”
But even as he spoke the words, something dark passed over the god’s face, and Mina worried that he wasn’t telling the full truth.
“There will be others? After me?” Mina felt a burning jealousy cut through him.
“No,” the god said quickly, laying a massive hand on Mina’s still resting on his knee. It was the first time the god had touched him in such a tender, familiar way. Mina’s stomach ached.
“I mean, yes. There will be others, but every soul is different. Some need strength. Others need to be reminded of their worth. Some need to let go of bitterness. Some need to seek out justice for wrongdoing. Some need to seek forgiveness, others to give it. But you, Mina…”
Mina shivered at the sound of his name rolling off the god’s tongue, in his deep, intoxicating voice.
“…you had stifled the basest parts of yourself. Denied so much for so long that I knew this would be the most effective way for you to see your desires in the broad light of day. To see them for the pure, animalistic, beautiful things that they are. Look at me. My appearance to you is of part animal, and yet still you speak with me as you would any other human in your world. You burn with desire toward me. Men have created so many rules along with the false gods they’ve constructed or the true gods they’ve misunderstood that even the things that past cultures took for granted have become tainted.
Ruined. You were broken, Mina. I believed I could help you.
Life is more than these things we crave and these pleasures I have helped you discover, but still, to deny them is to douse the fire that makes mortals the beautiful beings that they are.
And that stifled fire begins to suffocate and choke out other areas of your being.
Now that you have discovered yourself, you will be more alive than you have ever been.
That knowledge fills me with joy. It fulfills my purpose.
Even though it has been a century since I’ve been able to shepherd a soul, it has been worth the wait for the chance to…
” The god hesitated. He slid his hand off the top of Mina’s, scratching awkwardly at his chest. “For the chance to help you,” he finished.
Mina leapt forward and threw his arms around Anubis.
As he did, he felt the god lean back, every muscle in his chest tightened, and his neck bulged, rigid.
But still, Mina held on. He climbed onto Anubis, straddling his waist, wrapping his arms around him, and burrowing his face in the soft, velvety nape of his neck.
“I love you, Anubis,” he mumbled into the god’s warm skin. Mina stiffened. Had he just said that out loud? “I just mean thank you.”
“You are welcome, Mina.”
The slowly forming knot in Mina’s stomach pulled tight. “But we’re not through yet, right?” Mina pulled back, locking his fingers around the back of Anubis’s neck and looking into his eyes. “I mean, I feel like I have so much more to experience with you. I’m not ready to leave you.”
“Do not worry, son of man. When your learning is complete, you will feel ready.”
“Anubis?”
“Yes, Mina?”
“I want to kiss you.”
The god looked away, into the fire. “Why?”
“Let me rephrase that. If I kiss you, will you stop me?”
“In this form, that might prove difficult.”
Mina blushed. Sometimes he forgot about the less-than-human parts of Anubis. “Oh. Right. Didn’t really think about the mechanics of it.”
The god’s eyes stormed. A battle raged behind dark clouds.
The god wrapped his long fingers around Mina’s waist and moved him off his lap.
Mina pulled his legs up to his chest, burying his head in his knees. He wished he could disappear. He was ridiculous to let himself fall so quickly and so hard for something so impossible.
But then something changed. A strange quality to the air around him, and a shift in the weight beside him.
Mina looked up. Anubis’s eyes blazed red for a moment, and then Mina fell back to the other side of the couch.
Something was wrong with Anubis. His face contorted into a grimace of pain as the muscles and bones began to rearrange themselves.
His jaw shortened. His ears grew smaller.
Where once there had been a snout, there was now a pair of full human lips and a short button nose.
His skin morphed from the obsidian black of a jackal to a deep brown mahogany.
Dark hair clung in tight ringlets close to his head, and full muscles rose in smooth hills across his body.
He was the most beautiful human Mina had ever seen. And Mina said so.
“You prefer this form?” the mortal Anubis asked.
“No. I mean I think you’re gorgeous both ways. I just love that I get to see a new part of you. Every form you take, I want to know it.”
Mina moved closer on the couch, butterflies filling his stomach. He chuckled. He’d had every inch of this god’s cock down his throat, and now he was nervous to move closer to him. Nervous to touch him. Terrified at the thought of initiating a kiss with him.
So, Mina started small.
He pressed his small hand on the god’s hard chest and held it there. A strong heart hammered against his fingers.
Anubis reached out to Mina, his fingers grazing the silver crucifix still hanging around his neck.
“Why do you wear this symbol? I have seen you clutch it as if it is of importance, and so I did not remove it when I first changed your clothes.”
Instinctively, Mina reached up and took the cross between his fingers. “It’s a symbol of my faith. My God.” Yet even as he said it, the word God felt like a curse. He looked away, dropping his hands to his lap.
Anubis reached slowly toward Mina, taking the cross between his fingers, caressing the face of it.
Mina looked up into his eyes as they narrowed, a low growl vibrating through the cushions and sending a chill down his back.
In one swift motion, Anubis ripped the chain from Mina's neck and threw it into the fire.
The cheap metal instantly began to glow and then melt.
“I am your god now.” Anubis’s voice was a low growl, a command, as he seized Mina’s arms and pushed him down into the couch, pinning him there.
Looming. Mina’s eyes flew wide as a thousand emotions tore across the god’s face in an instant—an agonizing kaleidoscope of anger, jealousy, confusion, and raw lust. But beneath it all, the biggest, the one Anubis fought, wrestled, and finally succumbed to under Mina’s tender gaze: love.
Mina squeezed his eyes closed, terrified that Anubis would change his mind and deny him again. He held the image of Anubis’s face there behind his eyes. He wanted to remember that look. He wanted to pretend that he could hold onto it forever.
Slowly, he felt the weight of Anubis's huge, hard body settle on top of him. A pair of full lips pressed into his. Mina shuddered and didn’t know what to do; his body froze even as a river of pleasure swelled through him, his eyes fluttering, hips pressing.
Yes, Lord.
I love you.
I worship you.
I want you.
Mina opened his mouth and let Anubis’s lips lock into his.
He wrapped his arms and legs around the god’s hulking frame and slid his tongue into his mouth.
The two devoured one another greedily. Anubis sucked on Mina’s lower lip before running his tongue across the line of Mina’s jaw up to his ear, where he explored the whorls and cavities there, making Mina convulse, bucking his hips and arching his back.
“Oh my god, yes.”
“Who is your god, boy?” Hot breath dampened Mina’s neck.
“You are, Anubis. You’re my god.”
“And what does the son of man want from his god?”
“Devour me.”
And so Anubis did.
The fire raged for hours as the pair explored every corner and crevice of each other’s bodies in a tangle of sweating limbs and heavy breath.
Eventually, they tired.
Eventually, Mina slept, curled and wrapped protectively in Anubis's arms as they lay together on the couch.
Anubis stared into the fire and tried to douse the flame of truth flickering to life inside him. The truth contained in a single tear, the first in maybe thousands of years, burning in his eye.
This was not supposed to happen.
This was not how this was supposed to go.
He stroked the disheveled curls on Mina’s head.
The boy with the malachite eyes.
The boy with the beauty of the afterlife in his marble skin.
The softness of this human’s still-healing heart, like a sweet, ripe fruit in his hands.
Never before had Anubis encountered a soul so delicious.
Flesh so intoxicating. A yearning so deep.
A soul so desperate to be seen and loved for all of its innate goodness and beauty.
The thought of any other resting in those green eyes.
Satisfying the yearning. Basking in the honey sweetness of his scent, the golden glow of his goodness—it made a growl quiver at the back of the god’s throat.
Anubis had shepherded countless souls over the millennia, and it always went the same.
Terror. Then awe. Then pleas for salvation.
For a pleasure-filled afterlife. When past souls had realized the extent of Anubis’s power—the manipulation of time, the ability to save them from a dark and abysmal eternity—they had latched onto him like a lifeboat.
A savior. They obeyed him with abject devotion because they believed Anubis could save them.
But none had been like Mina.
None had hearts so pure.
And none had ever challenged Anubis so bravely.
Even in the face of the god’s immense power, Mina’s heart had peered into Anubis’s and declared: I refuse to trust another false god.
Anubis found himself wanting to be worthy of this human. Of his trust.
None had looked at Anubis like this boy had, as another broken soul.
You deserve a choice.
The great stone god felt himself crack under the weight of those simple words.
Anubis had never chosen anything in his existence.
So then why, for this human, had he chosen to defy his duty?
To deceive his father? To prolong their time together?
But he knew why, even as he chastised himself for it.
For all of his existence, Anubis had dealt in fates, in justice, in endings.
But Mina was not an ending. He was a beginning.
The god had sensed the thing growing in Mina’s heart, because it was the same thing growing in his own.
Beneath the lust.
Beneath the worship.
Love. A small, tender, fragile thing still, but it would grow. And then, Anubis knew, he would have to watch it die.
He let the tear fall and become lost in the golden tangle of the human he held.
The human he loved.
The god closed his eyes, and he wept, and he braced for what he knew was soon to come.