"No wonder Horus vanished, he and nearly everyone else around him are dead... But Amun-Ra lives, barely...fuck!" The Death God froze as red flashed across his vision, ripping him away from the letter clutched tight in his grasp. It pulled him from his panicked mindset, yanked him out of his worry and doubt, and filled him with trepidation bigger than before all at once. He saw the hieroglyphics clear as day against the stone floor.
The voice on the holoscreen louder than the chirping of a million birds.
ALERT, ALERT, INCOMING MAGIC POWERED SUPERNATURAL PLANETARY INVASION. ALERT, ALERT, INCOMING MAGIC POWERED SUPERNATURAL PLANETARY INVASION.
Osiris felt numb and colder than normal, though he was a god of death and feeling such a way was normally a good thing, right now, it was not. Far from it in fact, to be honest he had never felt worse in all his existence. Fear wrapped around his neck and hung him from its noose as the Death God walked past their bedchambers. The once calm lake only a few moments ago was bubbling over, water turned to what appeared to be blood, animals face up and fish belly up, in the murk. The cranes lay dead, each of their heads smashed into the pillars of the bed; beaks splintered and cracked, wings broken and dangling uselessly at their sides. The bed itself was covered in rotted water lotus and the other small animals that lived there, the smell of death and rot even more powerful than his natural scent.
He had to turn away from this, looking at it did nothing but fill him with sadness like a sickness he could not shake away from his form. In a rush, he went up to the surface, but before doing so he made sure to hide the sword away in a dark tunnel in his throne room. He went up to the surface as cold as the sands in the depths of the night, when the wind blew nothing but freezing stillness onto what was once heat and sweat inducing waves of the sun.
His mind went blank, he watched the destruction taking place, the souls he watched dance along the air, they kneeled before him, clawing at his very feet. Pyramids had been toppled, by creatures too big for this world. They were massive, red trunks like elephants, bodies like white lions, heavy blue feet thick, dragon like and tipped in deadly bird claws. Their bulky forms towered over even the tallest pyramid, or what was left of the pyramids. Their cries ripped open the eardrums like an explosion, burrowing inside his very soul.
He walked away quickly, kicking the wailing souls aside, trying to ignore the haunting calls of the great beasts. The city he'd entered the mortal world in front of was burning, brighter than the depths of the underworld, he watched the fire as it leaped and danced through the empty buildings, and the buildings still filled with the unfortunate souls unlucky enough to have been sleeping.
He watched the flames lick at the sky above, as if taunting the Gods for being unable to stop such planetwide desolation. He collected as many souls as he could, but without Anubis to weigh them, their sins, it was pointless and he knew it. People were screaming, running, grabbing at their pus leaking faces, the water around them turned into blood. Fire rained down along with frogs from the sky, locusts, but not ordinary locusts, these locusts had stingers, they were viciously stinging out people's eyes.
Like a mighty wave of anguish famine dashed through the lands, killing everything it touched, he watched this, watched the souls as they spiraled outside of the emaciated and twisted husks that were once bodies. Osiris walked deeper into the city watching the boils cover the flesh of every human, hearing their pathetic cries for salvation or help, listening to the bubbling sound of flesh melting into pustules that then burst like rotted sacks of rancid meat left out in the twin suns of Planet Egypt far too long. Watching them lift up their children who were now little more than
small meat flaps that melted over the hands of their parents, covered in warts and pus. Osiris listened to the gasping gurgles, the dying drowned in pools of their own blood, suffocating themselves and family members as they fell atop them in attempt to comfort no doubt, trapping them under their blood swollen and leaking forms. He watched, expression inscrutable, staring at every macabre sight as if it wasn't even there, his face was cold and just as dead as it normally was.
These people's souls were uncollectible, they would roam this planet until it was destroyed, waiting for help that would never come, praying to Gods who were not listening, could not listen, for who would listen to the cries of the Gods themselves? Casting all these thoughts and more aside for now, Osiris current and only concern was finding Anubis. He was worried for what would befall the Gods, what would their fate be in all of this?
Was there truly nothing he could do? He knew in the end, death which was none other than he himself, would have come for the humans regardless of if he actually collected a meager set of souls or not. He kept walking, passing by the people who looked as if their bodies had been sunken in. The guards of the palace who lay dead in the darkness of the burned-out homes.
They'd attempted rescues it would seem, the skeletal remains of children held tight in some grips, the decaying corpses of women and men alike with torn clothing hanging off their bodies and palace guards between their legs in others. The animals, dear fucking hells below the poor animals, they all convulsed and spasmed violently foaming at the mouth until the last of them met their own puss saturated deaths. As he walked onward, he came across a little girl, body laying limp on the side of the dirt path. Just beyond her a pair of animals he could not quite make out the bodies of, he decided to investigate the girl first.
He walked over to the poor child, still alive for he had not passed her yet, death would not come to her until he did so. He normally would kiss those marked for death, but walking past yet close enough, worked just as well. He certainly did not have time to kiss everyone after all. He reached over to touch the girl, her glassy black eyes blinking heavily, her stringy black hair matted in blood and clinging to her tiny face. His heart would have clenched at this sight, had it been able to beat, but he was death, and death had no bias in its workload. His clawed hand stroked the hair away from her face, she stared up at nothing even when he sat beside her.
Her ash blue colored lips were covered in boils he observed, her frame wracked by spasms similar to those of the animals. He watched her as the seizure took hold, head lolling to the side she finally noticed him, and for a brief moment, the shiny yet dull black stones of her eyes shone with relief, hope. It was hard for her, he could clearly see, to do as she was attempting to do, to speak.
After a few long minutes of silence that stretched out like the embers of the dying fire that was this child, her small voice cut through the night, he could then hear her whispering, "S-save me, please, the sickness took ..." a bought of coughing cut her off, blood splattering onto his robes.
"It will be alright child, just close your eyes, and sleep..." he offered her comfort, pulling her into his lap while he stroked her greasy illness laden hair, the sweat sticking to his palm like a second skin, he cringed but carried on regardless. His long fingers, tipped in deadly, shimmering black lacquer painted claws, stroked down her neck, cradling her close as a baby. He cooed to her, whispering of a world better than this, the underworld below and the wonderful things she would do once her soul was found as innocent as the sand dunes that surrounded them all, she murmured something about wanting to see flowers, how much she loved flowers, and small bunnies, the ones that hopped along the dunes as if their tails were on fire.
Her love for her older sister and her father were also caught by his attentive ears. He smiled down at her kindly, seemingly trying to make her last moments as peaceful as possible. "Yes, little one, you will be surrounded by bunnies, so many bunnies that you could reach from all sides to find a friendly face to pet and something to pull against you to snuggle and love." He said this quietly, still cooing to her of flowers that would never grow on Planet Egypt and rabbits she would never see again.
As he rocked her, maggots began to crawl out of her eyes, he sang to her quietly, of the glory of Planet Egypt, and the great kings who ruled every five hundred years until he came to greet them due to war, assassination, or famine, sickness, disease. He paid no mind to the fact her coughing turned to hacking, her tiny stomach distended and squirming. The sounds of shrieking and pig squealing could be heard, the girl crying and thrashing in his ironclad grip.
Not once did he look down, not once did he even acknowledge what was happening as her hacking turned into screaming. Screaming that was choked away as if she were drowning, blood obviously filling her lungs. He could hear the pus sacks that had gathered inside her body, attached to every major organ and squished up inside her blood-filled lungs, burst like an infected zit, spilling over like a water skin that split from being filled past its capacity. Once it was all over, his eyes lowered and he watched impassively, as a big green maggot burst through her belly and left the little girl an empty husk staring up eternally at the blackened sky.
The large green maggot shrieked and Osiris reached down to collect it, his outward facing palm on the ground in front of the corpse, it crawled up his arm and settled on his shoulder. It then shifted into a bat, that hung upside down from his hair, "I was afraid you had gotten sick! I was so worried Nefurure, don't ever scare me like that again" The bat flapped it's wings and he smiled, walking onward, he came across several other animal corpses, the ones he'd noticed earlier, wolves this time, his heart broke. He looked away and walked through the sands and the ruined, washed out buildings, looking at these things would bring him no comfort.