CHAPTER FIFTEEN
OFFERING
Mina ran, following the light in the opposite direction of the group as far as it reached. The god was still down here, he was sure of it. The smell of rot lingered, and a heaviness clung to everything.
Mina followed the paintings of Osiris as they depicted him navigating the various levels of the underworld.
Traveling down a river through wild and mysterious worlds.
Giant serpents.
Massive winged beasts.
Lakes of fire and demons with arms and legs bent at wrong angles.
A creature with the head of a crocodile and the body of a lion.
And finally, a massive temple and the Scales of Justice.
As Mina ran, he realized he was also outrunning the light and soon found himself in almost complete darkness.
But still he pressed on, one hand dragging along the wall to his left and the other stretched out before him to keep from slamming into a dead end or corner at a sharp turn.
With the onslaught of the darkness, Mina’s confidence began to wane.
With the cold came fear. His legs felt weak, and his body was starting to shake so much that he was having trouble keeping himself upright.
What was he doing? Soon, the walls were going to come crashing down, and he’d be killed. A soul lost in this place forever.
But he couldn’t turn back now.
These gods could feel and taste human emotions. Weakness was putrid to them, and Mina needed to be strong. Unrelenting.
And that was when he realized. He was strong.
Because Anubis had helped him become strong.
No. Better than that. Anubis had helped him find the strength he had all along.
Anubis. Mina would never be able to live with himself knowing his god was trapped forever in a world he didn’t want to be in after he’d sacrificed so much to free Mina from his own prison.
That wasn’t justice. It wasn’t right. Mina knew it, and now he just needed to convince an eternal deity of it.
Ahead, a golden glow outlined a small doorway. As Mina reached it, the smell of rot became an almost visible cloud pouring like incense from the door of some unholy cathedral. Mina pulled in a deep, sickening breath and pushed the fear from his body. For Anubis. For himself.
He stepped through.
“Osiris! Show yourself! We need to talk!” Mina shouted into the rotting dark that hung like a cloak around him, complete and suffocating. The rank air sticking to his nostrils and skin.
“We’re not done here. I know you can hear me. I’d rather not be crushed under this place when you destroy it, but I’m not going anywhere until we talk. My lost soul will wander for eternity if it has to.”
A blast of cold at his back. A greenish glow mixing with the gold and a voice like breaking bones.
“What is it, mortal?”
Mina turned around, and the god was there. Towering and barely looking down as if he, Mina, were an insect he was trying to decide whether to stomp or throw out the front door.
“Come down to my level. I know you can. I’m tired of hurting my neck to look up at you.”
The God cocked his head. A mannerism so similar to Anubis that Mina felt a pang of sadness at the thought that he might never see him again.
Snapping bones.
Wet sounds of rearranging flesh.
Suddenly, Osiris was a man-sized being and somehow even more terrifying in his corpse-like form that now stood just above eye level. The god settled his red eyes on Mina, waiting.
Mina pulled his shoulders back and met the god’s eyes. “You banished Anubis for eternity, all because of me? Because he didn’t want to send me to my death, you sent him to his?”
“Not death. The Duat is life after life. It is the House of Osiris and the Land of the Gods. Even isolation and desolation are a paradise compared with this writhing in the dirt you call living on earth. This rat maze of stones. It is his home amongst gods, and it is the eternity that he has earned.”
“But he wants to be here. With humans.” With me.
Mina felt his facade of strength waning, desperate for this god who seemingly knew no empathy to be swayed by his pleas and not detect the lovesick note he tried to hide from them. Mina did his best to level his voice.
“Anubis was doing exactly what he was supposed to do. He was helping me. He was helping me become a better person. He shouldn’t have been banished for that.”
“For lying to his father, to his God, he is banished!” Mina gagged on the smell of death that erupted from the rotting god’s black mouth.
“For neglecting his duty in favor of his lust, he is banished.” Osiris pulled back his shoulders, joints cracking.
In a calm voice, he continued, “Eternity is a long time. He will move on from you.”
“But he loves humanity. He…” The god already knew; there was no point in maintaining the facade. “He loves me.”
“His love will fade, and his soul will renew. For that is the way of the Duat. He forfeited his right to earthly pleasures when he failed to deliver the soul which was his duty.”
“So that’s really it then? An equation? His soul for mine?”
“It is so.”
“So then take me.”
Mina felt the blood drain from his face.
Had he really just offered up his own soul for Anubis?
It hadn’t even been a conscious thought.
In the back of Mina’s mind, he still expected Anubis to have a plan.
To have found a way out of this. For the two of them to be together.
If he could just get back to him. If he could just convince Osiris to let Mina see him again, he was sure there would be a way…
“It is too late for that,” the god said.
“Why? Like you said, eternity is a long time. So it took a little longer, but Anubis has made me a better person. My heart is more pure than it’s ever been.”
The god paused and seemed to consider. A slight cock of his head. “You would willingly give up your mortal life so that Anubis may return to this temple of death?”
“I would.” Would he?
The dead god stared quietly down for so long that Mina feared maybe he was ultimately deciding whether to just crush him under rubble right then and there.
“When one travels the Duat, they must face the Scales of Justice. There is no escaping them. And in that moment, it does not matter if you are a better person. It matters if you are the best version of yourself. Many good people have failed.”
Mina’s heart thrummed, his stomach churned. “So you’ll let me see him? Because it sounds like you’re saying I can see him.”
“It is not so simple as you might think. Anubis would typically accompany the soul on its journey. But he will not be with you on your way. The Duat is not like the lands you know here on earth. It is a river through many lands. A place of allies and enemies. Of gods and of demons. It will not be an easy journey on your own.”
“I would make it twice for Anubis.”
“Then go. Your soul for his return. That is the price. With Ra well into his nightly journey through the Duat, the way should be lit just well enough before you, and with any luck, you will pass through the Sacred Lands undetected. But know this. Once you cross the threshold, you will be on a path that will inevitably end at the Scales. And with them you must also face…Her.”
“Her? Who is ‘Her?’”
But Osiris was gone. Dissolved into darkness and an empty doorway.
And then the doorway became something different.
Still a doorway, but no longer leading out toward a dark, empty hall.
It shimmered a soft blue. And something else beyond that Mina couldn’t make out through an undulating haze.
The ground shifted under Mina’s feet. Another earthquake? But when he looked down, he saw that he was no longer standing on stone but on wood. Long, worn planks of dark wood. And when he looked back up, he saw those same planks extend up on either side of him, almost to his shoulders.
Mina was standing in a long wooden boat. And the boat was moving toward the shimmering door.
It was a portal to the underworld. His journey was beginning.
Mina’s stomach rose to his throat as the boat, though still firm under his feet, seemed to fall out beneath him like a log ride at an amusement park.
Mina closed his eyes, reaching out to the side closest to him and clutching the thick wooden boards, fingernails digging in.
A hymn, a prayer. Mina sang as his stomach roiled:
“O brothers let's go down; Let's go down, come on down; Come on brothers let's go down; Down in the river to pray.”
“Anubis,” he breathed. “I’m coming.”
And then Mina felt his mortal body blink out like a light and become nothing.