Rebirth
Rebirth
Jeremy was raised in the modern religion of the day, which tried to give its followers solace in the ways and works of a theistic God. But the young fox, who had just turned 24, needed none. Shakallah, for him, was merely a manner of living; there were those who followed the ways set down by The Great Presence, and those who didn't. He, quite simply, was one of those who didn't, despite his parents' many attempts to persuade him of Its power.
Later, when he got his degree in Anthropology -- the study of Human History and Art -- he realized it was merely a mixture of the things humans believed thousands of years ago, concocted by Maxwell Schmidt. It was his very first discovery, but one too often made for him to get any academic credit. The journal of Maxwell Schmidt was the first public domain document since the world government had been set up.
The only job Jeremy actually could get was a clerical position at a musem, doing classification and identification of artifacts that came in. It was drudgery, but drudgery which at least stimulated his strong sense of aesthetics. That was only possible, however, because of Dr. Silvers. The kind wolf, an expert by any standard Jeremy could imagine would always tell him about how an item could have been used, the religion it was part of, or some detail that let him paint one of his imaginary scene of human life.
In fact, his ability to draw out Jeremy's asethetic sense made him attached to the wolf -- even to the point of a closely-guarded crush.
But as Jeremy headed out the door for "dinner" -- it was 7 PM, half way through his shift -- he was going to see the only other fur in his life who meant anything to him. Calling him his friend would be a stretch; Tyler was the friend of a friend whom Jeremy had known since college. Jeremy didn't even know what he did for a living, but he could go down to Daisy's Diner, a place owned by a guy known only as Frank, and listen to stories that he was positive could never be heard anywhere else.
Such entertainment was just what Jeremy needed to take his mind off a bad day. He mis-identified the age of a book of Egyptian poetry, which he read and quietly translated most of instead of working on something more boring; and he nearly dropped a roman speartip, which would have shattered the case it was in. Lack of sleep could be blamed for both, but that didn't stop Jeremy from getting disapproving looks -- the most severe punishment possible from the one whom he more than admired.
The fox walked in the heavy door at Daisy's, only to find it so busy that the slam of the door was nearly drowned out. He dodged a lynx who came over to seat him, and quickly walked toward the biggest cloud of furs gathered around a single table. Sure enough, it was Tyler.
"-- hood that completely covered his face," he was expaining to a crowd with strong gestures, sitting at a table for seven covered mostly his food. "I'm thinking 'who the hell is this guy?' Well get this, he sits down next to me, and says some sort of gibberish like this!"
Tyler then spat a string of high-pitched giberish into his hand, the noises sounding more like a weird instrument than speech, with lots of twangs and sharp sounds in it, and almost was melodic. The small group around the table giggled at the huge bear being able to make such a noise.
"Anyway," continued the bear, ignoring Jeremy's movement toward the table, "he just mumbles this stuff, and he gives me this thing."
He reached into the pocket of the heavy cloth work coat he was wearing, and pulled out a small necklace. Jeremy stared: it was a ring of silver beads with a symbol on it he recognized immediately: an ankah, the symbol for rebirth in the Egyptian culture of humans in the First Era.
"I say, 'what?', he says --" Tyler raised his voice as high as he could. "-- 'you will know.' I says, 'what the hell am I supposed to do with it?' and he says -- get this! -- he says, 'give it to someone who will rest in peace!' I says, 'what, like die?' He says nothing. I says, 'okay, how about you?'"
Chuckles and laughs came from the table, but the drama resumed with his next two words. "And then," he paused, "he got real still... and quiet... and he said... 'too late!'"
He lunged, and grabbed a tiger standing next to him on the shoulders. Other than scaring the daylights out of him, it made everyone else jump and laugh.
Tyler often did such things to keep his audiences interested. But Jeremy, who watched the entire thing near the back at the edge of Tyler's field of view, standing behind the group, was genuinely wondering about how Tyler came to posess this strange object. Anyone who knew anything about Human History was someone at least worth meeting, in his book; even if he was insane.
Of course, he couldn't appear to take any of this seriously. His subject of study was considered "outdated", and best left to academics -- despite the fact that furs lived largely by the means humans had developed. If he wanted information, he would have to go about getting it the right way.
Putting on his best face, he asked with a light tone, "hey, can I see that thing?"
"Why? You want to die?" laughed Tyler gruffly.
"Sure," replied Jeremy with a smile, "why not."
Everyone laughed, much to his relief, and the bear tossed it to him, aiming a little high, so Jeremy almost missed.
"You know what on Giaya it is?" he asked, as he watched Jeremy examine it.
Jeremy feigned a brief fit of perplexion. "It looks like one of those symbols from a human religion," he mumbled nonchalantly, hiding the great depth of his historical knowledge, and the powerful images that began appearing in his mind.
"No wonder," Tyler sighed, "he sure seemed like one of those damn cultists."
'Those damn cultists' were tiny groups who tried to revive the old human religions. They were mostly a joke, for many of those religions had animalistic creatures, quite like furs. Furs who worshipped furs, it was thought, were either narcissistic -- for believeing in deities like themselves -- or megalomaniacs -- becuase they thought they had powers like gods.
As Tyler launched into another one of his stories, seeming to have forgotten about the pendant, Jeremy quietly got a sandwitch to go and left. When he returned to the musem, he went to the back room, hid the book of poetry he was translating on the wrong shelf between Darwin and Conan-Doyle, and sat to examine the pendant under his desk-lamp magnifying glass.
Using the magnifying lense, he could read a tiny inscription in the glyphs of the original language, which to his surprise was not a verse. It took him quite a while to figure it out, but he determined it was an address written phoenetically. As he manipulated it with his hand, he also felt something odd: the pendant was slightly serrated, with small cuts and bumps along the main part of the cross' side edges. He thought it was wear and tear, but looking at it under the magnifier, it seemed they were carved.
Footsteps in the hall made him quickly turn off the lamp, and hang the pendant around his neck, hiding it under his shirt collar. He managed to pick up his sandwitch and take several bites out just before the grey wolf appeared.
"At least you put the book away first this time," he remarked.
Jeremy just about choked; did he know about the secret translation he was doing, or was this referring to the Tuna Fish near-miss on that Magna Carta?
Hoping fervently it was the latter, he cleared his throat, swallowed correctly, and answered, "yes, sir. And I found a reference to the weighing of the heart, which would in fact date it later than I said."
"Oh, you're still working on that Egyptian book? I thought you would have started that Torah by now."
That was really a form of indicating disappointment to Jeremy, who elaborated the next time his mouth was empty. "I have, sir, and so far it looks to have bee compiled very late."
His master smiled cleverly as he asked the next question. "But is it genuine?"
Being more cautious than last time, Jeremy replied, "I don't know yet."
"Find out by tomorrow morning," calmly instructed the master with a smile, and stepped back out of the room.
After examining the paper and the writing style, he was begining to conclude it was actually written by a human hand, and probably as late as the 17th century. However, to pin the date down, he had to do a line-by-line comparision with a known, genuine article from an earlier century. It would be another long night, he thought.
It was half way through this process that sleep overcame him. He tried to stay awake, but after catching himself three times, falied to keep his head from the table.
He had strange dreams, reading and then living out in rather glorifying detail that book of ancient egyptian poetry he had been asked to authenticate a week earlier. It talked about the gods, the afterlife, weighing of the heart, and speeches and promises that transcended time without fault or falsehood. It was absolutely wonderful.
Unfortunately, when he was awakened by a loud voice, bliss turned into misery.
***
"By Shakallah, you've ruined it!" shouted Dr. Silvers.
Jeremy sat bolt upright at the sound of his master's voice, to find the elder wolf's grey cheeks red with rage.
"What?" Jeremy blurted, still in a daze from his dreams.
He looked around, returning to the room in which his body had lain all night, and looked at the scroll. There was now a small pool of his drool and a lateral tear down the 14th century reference. It took him a moment, during one of his master's ear-splitting yells, to realize that his slumber had destroyed something priceless.
Still groggy, but acutely aware of the situation, Jeremy just stared apologetically at his master while the gray wolf ranted. Jeremy had seldom seem him so angry: tail whipping around; gesturing furiously to avoid destroying something else of value; and tongue moving faster than Jeremy wanted to sprint out of that room. Jeremy had done damage to some things before, but they were far more minor than things so visible as these.
Then, to his astonishment, as his master seemed to be calming down, he heard two words he never expected to hear.
"Jeremy," sighed the wolf, now filled with more regret than anger, "you're fired."
Jeremy wasn't sure if he heard correctly at first. "Sir, do you mean --"
"I mean, you are a good student, but I cannot justify keeping you around after a mistake like this. If anyone calls for a reference, I'll give you a good one."
He turned his back, and marched out in a huff.
Jeremy couldn't believe it, but he followed the direction, and gathered up what little he had, including the start of his secret translation and some notes, still too far in shock to realize he would never again need them.
He was hoping it would all be a mistake, that Dr. Silvers would apologize and come running after him. But as he walked through the hall, out the back door, and down the block, the grey wolf was not there. He managed to hold back his tears all the way to his run-down apartment.
The moment he dropped his weight on the lumpy couch in his living room, he just bawled his eyes out. He had lost both of his pleasures in life, the only ones it seemed he had. All of the different ideas those objects represented covered over the mundane details of what little life he had. But the worst thing he lost, his old master, was more important.
As his mind wandered over thoughts, swimming in an ocean of pain, it took a while for money to occur to him. But by then, the idea he would stave to death looking for a job didn't see all that fearful. He found himself more and more washing away his memories, fears, and pleasures of this life with the contemplation of its end.
He grabbed the translation from inside his shirt of the poetry, and began rereading his favorite passages: crossing the river, the soul flying, the power and wisdom of the Gods -- all hopelessly romantic as the words of any other tome he had read on life after death. And yet, they now had appeal more than ever.
He remembered the pendant on his neck, the sign of rebirth. He took it out, and handling it for those grooves, read it again. "Three Four One Strype Lane," he whispered to himself.
If it was a musem, or even a cult for that matter, they might be one of the few places to employ someone with his talents, be it finding books, or doing translations. If they tried to sacrifice him to their Gods in some strange way, Jeremy didn't care; he was already contemplating suicide.
As one last desparate attempt to recapture some of the joy he had so suddenly lost, he decided to see what was there.
It was overcast when he walked the 20 blocks from his apartment to the address listed, but the sun shone through a break in the clouds. Were he more superstitious, he would have called it a symbolic omen; never the less, the sun's light did make him less gloomy.
The address was situated in one of the nicer suburbs, one near where he grew up. Walking down the sidewalk, he was surprised to see that since he had left almost a decade ago, it apperaed to have deteriorated. The once fine buildings were beginning to decay; they began to sag, crack, and deteriorate with age.
The building was right next to the temple he once went to as a pup, a temple which was now as in need of repair as the houses around it, with peeling paint and a garden full of nothing but weeds. Jeremy considered it rather symbolic of his own opinion of religion: a fleeting glimpse, a distant memory, and a willingness to ignore the situation that was the cruelty of life.
He instead looked at the building next to it, the building whose rusting 341, with the 4 hanging askew, indicated it was his destination. The house, in stark contrast with the three-story temple of cascading white domes and a wide garden in front, was a flat, squat, square building, painted a dingy yellow -- including over all of the windows.
The paint was wearing thin over most of the front, and the brown wooden poles supporting a small arch over the door appeared to have been lashed by the elements for their resistence. It appeared more a storage building than an actual residence, for it was far simpler than the once-elegant houses trying to look respectable across the street.
Jeremy cautiously approached the front door. He heard nothing from inside, and saw no shadows through the painted windows. He wasn't sure what to do, it being so eerily quiet. After a minute or two of building courage, he knocked.
There was no answer. He didn't see any kind of doorbell, or even a plate in the wall where one had been removed. He was seriously considering just giving up, his fear of the silence starting to creep up on him, when he noticed the door's lock. It seemed designed for a stick of gum rather than a key; whatever inserted into it was very narrow, completely flat, and didn't have to move very large pins.
Feeling its edge again, he realized the pendant fit the bill. When he put it in and turned it, he felt a heavy latch disengage, and the door popped itself open and swung inward on its heavy hinges without a sound.
A small wave of dust hit Jeremy's nose as he pushed the door in, making him cough twice -- but he stifled any more for fear of disturbing someone inside. The dim room before him, barely illuminated in the dingy yellow of the painted windows, looked like what should have been a living room. There were overflowing bookshelves along the walls, the floor appeard to be a fine grain of wood, and instead of furniture, life-sized statues of several animal-headed figures stood proudly in various poses in the middle.
Closing the door as quietly as he could, Jeremy first was struck by the statues. He supposed they were those whom the cult worshipped, the egyptian Gods. But it was the bookshelves that interested him, since he supposed they might need someone expert in human religions, of which they were now clearly a part.
Tiptoing over to the nearest bookshelf he found the books were written in the Egyptian language of heiroglphyics. He dared pick up a book whose title he recognized, and found it a modern copy. The book of poetry he recently handled appeared to have been transcribed instead of printed, the glpyhs individually drawn in tight, narrow shapes. It must have taken days, Jeremy contemplated.
As he contemplated what care was required to rewrite this book, he glanced down toward his feet, and realized he was standing in a mess of prints on the dusty floor. There were many tracks wandering all over this room in the thin layer of dust, and this bookshelf was the busiest of the four or five in the room. He immediately put the book back as he was reminded he might not be alone.
He examined the statues more closely; all were done in simple concrete and unpainted, but showed exquisite detail, and a careful hand. Concrete was not very good at capturing likenesses, he concluded; their regality was dulled by the way the material seemed to soak up all the light around them.
The best of all Jeremy recognized as Anubis, the egyptian god of the underworld, who sheparded the souls between this world and the next. His jackal head with sharp snout, sharp teeth, and pointed ears was on a musclar human form. The sculptor had even made the surface of the skin rough, perhaps simulating a fine coat of fur.
Looking at him, Jeremy thought he would be a modern fur were it nor for his human feet, smiling as he remembered the foolish worship of animals by humans -- and now, apparently, his own kind.
Glancing through a doorway on his right, which led down a flight of stairs, he saw more statues. Perhaps because the mystery of its depths intrigued him more, he crept toward the basement staircase. He paused a moment to ensure there was no other sound but him; asssuming he was alone, he proceeded down the stairs.
His heart started beating faster as he walked slowly into a much dimmer room, without a light on the stairs. He found every other step announced his approach by creaking or cracking loudly as the aging wood took to his weight. When it frayed his nerves one time too many, Jeremy attempted to solve this problem by skipping the odd numbered steps, and it worked -- until he failed to notice the third to last step was missing entirely.
He fell in what seemed like a split second, the sound of his hands hitting the basement's concrete and his knee smashing bottom step feeling even worse than it sounded. Instantly, he was staring at the floor, in excruciating pain from the impact of concrete and his newly-sprained left ankle. He clenched his teeth and groaned sharply, barely able to keep from screaming.
He carefully removed his foot from the splintered wood, and with tears now starting to stream down his face, he crawled toward the only thing of significance he saw at the bottom of the stairs: a tall bookstand facing a marble statue of Anubis.
Panting and enduring the pain, he stared up at the far more imposing, powerful figure before him, a painted-over window to the ground above creating a gold halo effect through thick yellow paint. It looked divine, seeming to deflect the dust otherwise accumulating all over the room. The pose, with his musclar arms crossed and legs spread in a stance as if supporting a mighty weight, was one of regal power. The contemplative, dark eyes, Jeremy saw, were staring straight at him, as if demanding an explaination for his presence.
The scene struck Jeremy as nothing had before. The statue seemed to draw out all the fears he had, and focus them on this moment in his life. Not quite sure what he was doing, the atheist grabbed for the bookstand to try and get up to a kneeling position. But he put too much weight on his leg, and it gave out from under him. He lost his balance and fell, spilling the large tone atop it onto the floor.
In surprise and renewed pain, as his sprained leg and aching knee were rended futhur, Jeremy screamed. He didn't care who heard him. The god of the underworld stared unflinchingly, appraising the pathetic display before him, magnifying Jeremy's fears and pains.
Just as he had felt in his apartment, Jeremy wanted it to end; not the pain in his leg, but his whole futureless, pain-riddled life. There seemed to be nothing else in it but more pain. When he looked up at the statue, the only other presence in the room, he begged for a way out. Anubis was the god of the underworld, he remebered, as the poetry and beauty of the afterlife came flooding back to him. Perhaps he would grant the fox solace in death.
Jeremy dragged the book over to him, crying tears of pain as his leg continued to throb and shoot new stabs with every move he made, and with its pages clenched in his fist, grabbed a random page. The page he turned to seemed quite fitting, what he knew as the Declaration of Innocence. It was a prayer, justifying his good virtues; he had not stolen, not killed, not raped, and not done all sorts of other terrible things which deities would judge his soul for.
Casting himself into the shadow of the statue, Jeremy slid the book over to him, filled with ancient language symbols, and did his best to read it aloud, one sound at a time. He wasn't quite sure what he was saying, but recognized terms involved in death and burial, so hoped Anubis would recongize it and do the right thing.
As he continued to read, enduring the pain, staring up at the shimmering deity, hoping for everything to happen as the humans said it would, he began to feel faint. Jeremy tried to keep reading, starting to raise the volume of his words, but slowly, the symbols started getting harder to read; the stream of sounds made less and less sense to him. The last throes of his rational atheism told him it was over; his leg had a muscular tear of some sort, and he was bleeding internally.
His fears of death were now more strongly upon him than ever. With renewed willpower, Jeremy tried to make Anubis, lord of the underworld, shepard of souls, real. But now, the words on the page were swimming so badly he could no longer read them.
"I believe in you," he finally begged the statue, tears streaming down his face, "please give me something to look forward to..."
The last thing Jeremy saw before losing consciousness was his head falling toward the great feet, where it came to rest with another jolt of pain. It was the last thing he felt.
***
The next thing Jeremy was conscious of was heat. It was a humid heat, wafted around by a slight breeze, that made his fur itch. The second thing was a smell, one of the outdoors, and salt water. The third thing, when he tried to open his eyes, was that it was blindingly bright. And the fourth, only once his senses were taking a full inventory, was the sound of sloshing waves against a shore.
Jeremy had one thought: where am I?
He slowly rolled from his side to his back and sat up, eyes still shut from the light. Only then did he remember he had fallen; but to his surprise, he was in no pain. He felt wet sand beneath him, fine grained sand which he ran through his fingers as he strugged to open his eyes. He concluded that, inexplicably, he was on a beach.
Sure enough, when he managed to open his eyes, and scratched a few itches, he found himself under a bright, blue sky, blinding sun, and stretched out before him was a shoreline that extended to the horizon.
Behind him it turned surprisingly quickly into a grassland, with stalks of novel plants littering the landscape, working up to a full field in a few hundred yards. But it was the teal waters before him that seemed more significant; the blue sky had a bank of storm clouds far off in the distance.
Jeremy was confused, remembering he was in a basement a moment before, begging himself to release his atheism and believe in the power of a deity no culture had embraced for millenia. Still taking in the scene, he repeated his question aloud.
"Where am I?"
"You are on the shore," answered a voice from three feet away, "of the Nile river."
Jeremy's head spun toward what was empty space a moment ago, and found the speaker to be none other than Anubis himself. The great figure he had prostrated himself before, all six and a half feet of the statue, was now flesh and blood.
The awe of the statue transferred immediately to the embodiment of the dog morph before him, and without thinking, he scrambled to his knees, silently begging once again -- for he knew not what. Death? Release?
But the gesture seemed to make no impression. "You are here," Anubis continued in calm, rolling bass tones, "because you have a choice to make. You must either cross this river, from which there is no return; or you must go back to the world you have always known."
Given the state he was previously in on the floor, Jeremy's decision was immediate. "I don't want to go back," he begged, "I have nothing left to live for."
"You do not speak the truth," stated Anubis with great certainty, sounding more like Thoth, the judge. "You still wish for an afterlife of eternal sleep. But now, looking at this, you realize it's not that simple."
As Anubis spoke, Jeremy's thoughts seemed to follow him. He independently came to the realizations Anubis spoke of, which were not very comforting.
"There is something out there," he gestured to the storm far off across the waters. "Something unlike anything you have even known or can imagine. Since you have done nothing to prepare for any afterlife, you should not expect to be treated well."
"You are far less certain about what remains of your existence, aren't you?" added Anubis when Jeremy did not speak.
Since he seemed to be reading Jeremy's mind, the young fox could only nod. Being in the presence of a deity made him nervous enough; if his thoughts could be read, that made him even more nervous.
The realization seeming to be all he wanted, the dog's tone changed. "Rise," Anubis instructed benevolently, "there is no need for such servitude. I am a messenger, nothing more."
Anubis reached out and lifted Jeremy under the shoulders slowly. Jeremy's heart skipped when the impossibly strong hands, and the short black fur brushed against his own. Much to his dismay, Jeremy found his awe had spread into infatuation. With his powerful gaze, muscular arms and legs, bare chest, and only a small cloth over his loins, Anubis was literally a work of art.
In the gaze he found himself lost in, swimming in the deep pools of the jackal morph's eyes, it took Jeremy a moment to realize he was now on his feet. To avoid staring more, looked past the jackal's ear.
"I am certain I have nothing to live for," he insisted plainly, "I want to go with you, whatever awaits me."
"Concentrate not upon harm to befall you, but what you shall lose. What about living for life itself?" rhetorically asked Anubis. "You know what it is to live. Sight, smell, touch," Anubis whispered as he reached out and raised Jeremy's chin.
Jeremy's eyes snapped back to the face of the jackal, as his heart started racing. "They are what you know. But the afterlife is beyond description. All you have read is a pale shadow, the only thing that words can make of the impossible."
Much to his embarassment, Jeremy's fear of his future mixed with the power of the protective -- and powerful -- visage before him. The result was that his fully-cloathed body was forced to hide a hard on. He wished he could ask, nay beg, for an opportunity to spend his now full erection with the jackal, but couldn't bring himself to say a word.
At least, when Anibus released his chin, the end of skin contact helped Jeremy to try and focus on the subject at hand. But the end of the touch made him long for another, and he failed to succeed.
"Your thoughts are clearly not contemplation upon the afterlife," he remarked cryptically. "Is something distracting you?"
"I'm sorry," Jeremy mumbled, hoping that Anubis' apparent mind reading talent would not cause him more embarassment.
However, Anubis' next suggestion shocked him in its apparent inaccuracy. "Perhaps you miss Dr. Silvers," he suggested.
Jeremy never even thought of the old wolf since he had arrived. It certainly had the effect of taking his mind off the magnificent form before him for the moment, and turning his thoughts back to his old life.
"He's gone," Jeremy sighed, indeed starting to miss him, but expecting the jackal god to do nothing about it, "or really, I'm gone and he's not."
"You can still return to life. Here is why you should consider it."
Anibus ushered Jeremy over to the edge of the gentle waves, eyes becoming focused and muzzle becoming sterner. With a gesture, he made a small area of them seem to calm themselves into a smooth surface, as if oil has been poured upon them.
When the ripples settled, Jeremy saw not his own reflection, but a room, as if submerged on the bottom of the lake. He was looking down at a cramped office he didn't recognize. It was full of shelves of books, leaving room for nothing but a doorway, and a large desk covered with a stack of papers and severl small artifacts of stone and bronze.
A familiar wolf appeared to be asleep, his head face down being supported by crossed arms. The stacks of paper, apparently, mostly homework, were interrupted only by a small volume that looked like a diary.
To Jeremy's surprise, Annibus reached through the surface, picked up the book as if it had been sitting on the river bottom, and pulled it up, offering it to Jeremy.
Without thinking, Jeremy blurted, "that's private!"
"I shall return it before he awakens," reassured the jackal, face and deep voice returning to faint kindness as he held out the volume.
Remembering that this was the will of a God, Jeremy chose to perform this ethically questionable act, and opened it.
"Read the last page," commanded Anibus. He flipped through dozens of pages of scribbled text, whose lines seemed to have been written above a ruler, and found the last page. He took a deep breath, and read the text in a whisper, irrationally fearing he would wake Dr. Silvers.
"Dear Diary. Today was the worst day I can remember. I came in today and found Jeremy had accidentally ruined at 14th century Torah. I had no choice but to fire him."
However, it was the next words which really surprised Jeremy. "Now I find myself wondering whether or not my feelings for him are more than an old wolf's passing infatuation."
Jeremy had to pause at the idea, his heart skipping, before he could continue. "I just keep imagining that poor fox sitting at home sulking, and I wish I could lighten his spirits. I endlessly wonder if he has affections toward males..."
Jeremy stopped reading, needing more time for the realization to sink in. He had never suspected his secret was shared by its object.
"He cares a great deal about you," Anubis reinforced. "If you leave your body behind, you will leave him nothing but a broken heart."
The shell he had discarded would not have zero effect after all, Jeremy realized; it would create a lot of pain. That got him seriously considering going back, but he could not forget the pain that was also in that life.
"But I don't work for him anymore," he argued, more with himself than with Anubis, a last ditch effort of his rational mind to stand against his emotions, which had already swayed the other way.
"You care a great deal about him, do you not?"
Jeremy nodded; that was a rather drastic understatement.
"Mutual love could mean great happiness in your future; a future you are willing to abandon before you see how it turns out."
Put that way, Jeremy realized what he was about to do seemed very foolish indeed. He sighed, and looked at Anubis again. The eyes were staring gently down at him, seeming to observe his every movement and thought.
As Jeremy watched his master nap on his arms, wishing he could ease his pain, Anubis slowly took the book from Jeremy's hands, and put it back on the desk.
Jeremy now missed the wolf incredibly; he wished he could just reach through that pool and pull Dr. Silvers out here to this beach. He wished he could spend eternity here, in sunshine and cloudless skies, not a care in the world -- and together.
But Anubis waved his hand, and the glassy water dissolved back into the pattern of waves on the shore. Jeremy watched the ripples fade out of existence, a sudden pang of angst filling him as his master seemed to slip away like sand through his fingers.
Jeremy blinked, trying to prevent thoughts he knew were coming, and stared back down into the pool. He suddenly felt alone on this beach, and stared blankly at the sand.
"Is there anything I can do, Osiris?" asked the reassuring, deep voice beside him.
Jeremy did not understand the invocation of the only God ever to appear to the humans. "Osiris?" he repeated dumbly.
"You are the newest incarnation of the son of Rha," Anubis replied, "as are the others. I am compelled to honor you by your true name."
"Others?" Jeremy asked, still not getting it.
"There have been so many, recently, who have his sprit. It was so quiet for a long time, I still do not understand, but you are the latest of many who visit this place."
"I -- I'm Jeremy," he argued, "Osiris was -- a human."
"You have his spirit," Anubis repeated, "in there."
Jeremy followed the god's finger down to the pendant, still around his neck. Jeremy grabbed it and rubbed it in his hands as he pondered the ramifications. All of the legendary things that Osiris did -- the fights with the god Set, the peaceful watching if the humans, all the burdens he had to bear -- were they now his? He didn't know what it meant, neither in life nor death.
"You have questions," Anibus stated correctly, "is there anything you wish to ask?"
There were too many questions swimming through Jeremy's mind to ask, as his imagination ran through beatuiful and powerful images of stories. Despite this, he didn't ask them. He knew his fate: he would return to life.
But when he finally made up his mind, and settled the question, his heart resurged its rhythm by a sideways glance at the sleek, musclular form of Anibus. He was once again struck by the jackal's form, and his eyes drifted again to the loin cloth -- hanging low enough to cover something quite sizable.
"Are you sure there is nothing I can do?" asked Anubis again, a smile touching the corner of his mouth. Jeremy, however, was too tongue-tied to answer. When the silence persisted, the jackal walked up to him and put both his hands on Jeremy's shoulders.
"Contrary to what has been written, there is no shame in asking for what you want from me," whispered Anubis, a husky note entering his voice. "Touch is something I never shy away from. Every time I incarnate, no matter how many times I have before, it feels --" He startd rubbing Jeremy where he held him, and closed his eyes as if savoring it.
Jeremy didn't mind one bit. He closed his eyes too. Unable to do so with his voice, he silently begged for more, panting with his tongue out, trying to rely on Annibus' telepathic ability. Indeed, as Anubis gently slid his hands up to Jeremy's head, embracing his neck, he whispered, "you really do want something more, don't you?"
Jeremy managed to nod, and grabbed the powerful hands that continued to run in patterns over his neck, shoulders, and now occasionally chest. Still unable to say anything, he removed his shirt, and made them run over his chest fur. Anubis sighed, seeming to enjoy it almost more than Jeremy did.
As Annubis' hands continued in a holding pattern around Jeremy's chest, the fox took his pants and boxers down, stepping quickly out of them, and showing off his hard-on. He turned hismelf around, and knelt on the sand, raising his tail instinctively as he prepared for something he had only experienced twice before now.
"I see," mumbled Annubis as he knelt over Jeremy's body in preparation. Jeremy looked back to find the loin cloth had suddenly vanished, revealing a rock hard dog cock 10 inches long, smooth, and pink.
Jeremy's heart jumped at the size of it, but Anubis didn't seem to react.
Making sure Jeremy didn't resist, Anubis pushed the fox slowly forward onto his hands and knees. "I hope you enjoy this," he whispered huskily, keeping one hand on Jeremy's shoulders while guiding his member with the other.
The moment its tip touched Jeremy's tail hole, he gasped, and slowly Anubis started pushing it in. He then squirmed, groaned, whined and panted in the strange pleasures of penetration. It seemed to go on endlessly, stretching him apart from the inside as it went deeper than he had ever felt.
Once it was all the way in, and Jeremy's cock was already dripping precum, Anbuis started to withdraw. But he didn't get very far before he suddenly thrust it back in, making Jeremy's chest his the ground, as his fingers dug into the sand.
Anibus, now loomed over the fox due to his excessive height as he started thrusting slowly with a deep grunt each time.
His panting from his slow, rhythmic thrusts now landed directly in the fox's ear, who was deafened by the chorus of his nerves on his skin and in his guts. Jeremy moaned and exploded almost right away, pouring his seed onto the sand, and causing involuntary contractions around his anal ring which made Anubis moan himself.
The very moment, it seemed, Jeremy's orgasm had swept over him, Annibus whispered huskily, "please don't ask me to stop." The fox shook his head; the sensations were overwhelming, but for reasons beyond him, gave him more pleasure than he had ever felt in his life.
The jackal, with this authorization, started thrusting faster, seeming to throttle the fox with his cock, giving Jeremy the best fucking he had ever had in his life. His guts were screaming, his cock was dripping cum, and his eyes cried from the overwhelming sensation. Jeremy was convinced that he could feel all the infinite power of Anubis in every grunt, every growl, every squeeze of his shoulders, every shift of balance, and every pant of breath the jackal took.
Jeremy was exhausted, but having the time of his life. He let himself get pounded for what seemed like eternity, well past being sore, and with the remnants of his first still filling his mind, came to a second mind-numbing orgasm. Anibus still hadn't come once when Jeremy's cock spurted out more seed beneath him. With the pains now starting to outweigh the pleasures, Jeremy silently wished the god had had enough, and begged for a failure of what appeared to be divine endurance.
It was just then, as he thought quite consciously of his exhaustion, that there was a growl from atop him, and Annubis strengthened his grip on the fox's shoulders. With a panting snarl, Anubis finally came, pouring out his seed into Jeremy's bedragged tailhole. This sudden surge of energy seemed to radiate to Jeremy, amplifying the effect of his second orgasm. It took several more of the small thrusts for Anubis to get enough. After filling him up quite full, Anubis slowly withdrew -- which to Jeremy felt like a huge plug had been removed from a drain.
In a panic, he crawled forward to avoid making a mess of the jackal god, and expelled the results of their work with a distinct sigh. It was more then twice the cum he thought he generated in both orgasms together. He buried the mess in the sand, and weakly crawled back over to Anubis, still quite sore, muscles exhausted, and mind still spinning in orgasmic afterglow.
While Jeremy was still swimming in the pains and pleasure of the experience, Anubis laid down beside him and spoke in reserved tones. "Have you made a decision?" he asked.
Jeremy sighed. All of it was so beautiful; the sand, the water, the sun, even the distant storm. "Why can't I stay here forever?" he asked, voice weakened by his body.
"You won't want to," replied the jackal. "You will tire of it; even tire of me. There is nothing else here; no challenges of life, no peace of death. Wonderful as it is, you are trapped. That is why you will want to leave."
Jeremy, as with much of his conversation, saw the wisdom of the words as they were spoken to him.
"Then I want to go back to life," he firmly stated.
Anubis now clearly wanted to make sure it was the right decision. "And all of your problems?" he asked. "All of your anxieties? Back to everything you have hated? Back to a life without a future?"
Jeremy, knowing he was about to make another decision as irrationally as the one he made before, stated more carefully, "yes. I am sure. For all the bad things about it, it is the world I know. Besides, there is still so much I could do in the living world -- so many things I could still change. I want to go back."
"Very well, Osiris," stated the avatar, his touch gone and his voice far away in an instant, "until we meet again."
Jeremy was shocked, the fear of losing the creature who had helped him through this landing upon him at once, and making him terrified. "We will meet again!?" he exclaimed, looking up to find nothing but sand.
"We will," whispered a voice, now without an owner, "I promise."
An instant later, Jeremy felt once again bathed in comfort, which turned into an overwhelming urge to sleep. Anubis will return, he told himself as his eyes drifted shut.
***
Everything was dark. Jeremy was aware of distant sounds, a long string of syllables. It took him a moment to focus on them, and organize them into words.
"-- realize that now," they went, coming from a voice burdened by a weight. "I had to think about it for a long time. You don't know how incredibly hard this is for me, Jeremy. I don't know how you're going to take it."
The voice was gentle, and familiar; very familiar.
"I need you. I will do anything if you'll just wake up." Jeremy realized that there was a hand on top of his.
It took all of his concentration to find the right muscles, but he managed to roll his wrist over and take it.
"Jeremy?" asked the voice, now seeming closer to him, "can you hear me?"
He squeezed the hand again, as he now realized his body being supported by something soft, like a mattress. He tried to open his eyes, but it was too bright. He groaned at his failure, and that got another exclaimation.
"He's waking up! Shakallah be praised, he's waking up!" Jeremy now recognized the voice of Dr. Silvers.
How did he get here, he wondered. For that matter, where was 'here'? It did not seem familiar.
He finally managed to open his eyes to find himself in a hospital room. The gray fox was looking down at him, tender happiness in his eyes, and an expression of joy Jeremy had never seen before on his face.
"Jeremy?" he asked again.
Jeremy, wanting his questions answered, managed to ask with a fatigued voice, "where am I?"
"You're in the hospital. You were unconscious when they found you."
"You tore a muscle, and lost a lot of blood," said a tall panther in a lab coat who was watching guages he was hooked up to. "You were in a coma after that which, frankly, I can't explain."
"I'm just glad you woke up," added Dr. Silvers, an unconquerable smile on his face.
Jeremy, however, was still trying to understand his reality. All he could remember was that monument of Anubis, carved in marble, before him as he passed out.
"Who found me?" he asked nervously.
"He wouldn't say," grumbled the doctor, "but he was a tall falcon in a long robe. He carried you in here unconscious, and just ran out before we could ask him any questions. What was the last thing you remember?"
Jeremy didn't want to say where he went, for he had no idea what might become of the place if anyone was told. "I was in an old library," he answered, telling the part of the truth he thought wouldn't cause trouble, "and I had a bad fall down some stairs."
The doctor looked at him skeptically. "I see," was all he said. He then turned and left the room.
Dr. Silvers, however, continued the questioning. "I don't think you're telling me the truth, Jeremy," he stated coldly, eyes showing more hurt than anger.
"It's true," insisted Jeremy, "I did have a bad fall down a flight of stairs. And I wasn't able to get up and get help. It's just --"
Jeremy looked up into his master's eyes. He had to tell him.
"I was just so desperate after you fired me. I -- I got this pendant from a friend of mine, and it led me to an old house, which turned out to be a library."
Dr. Silvers said nothing. His eyes were waiting for Jeremy to finish.
"I don't know who owns it, but it's got the most amazing collection of texts from one of the human religions I've seen."
Dr. Silvers voice trembled. "You were in a cultist's house!?" he snarled in stage whisper.
"I didn't know what it was, I never even saw anyone there!" whined Jeremy, "but this thing pointed me to the house, it --" Jeremy felt around his neck, but the pendant was gone.
Dr. Silvers picked it up off the bedstand. "341 Strype Lane?" he demanded, his voice sharp but his eyes still soft.
"Yes," Jeremy admitted, "and it had a whole bunch of books and statues in it. It was really rather amazing."
Dr. Silvers started pacing in anger. "That was dangerous and stupid," growled the wolf in the voice he had used to tell Jeremy he had misidentified a book. "Going into a strange house for whatever reason, when you don't even know what's in there -- that was stupid!"
He stamped his foot, and took a deep breath. Jeremy, energy starting to return to him, verbally defended himself. "If you had nothing left to live for," he retorted weakly, edge in his voice making up for its lack of stength, "wouldn't you want to see what comes after death?"
That quite effectively stunned the wolf, making him stop dead and rush over to Jeremy's bed.
"Jeremy, by Shakallah!" he exlaimed in a suddenly hushed voice, "you were going to --"
"I'm not now," Jeremy interrupted, a vague feeling he couldn't recall making him reverse his previous decision, "but yes, I was. When you fired me, I -- I had nothing left to live for."
He finished the sentence more quietly than intended as his situation started returning to him. He realized he was still out of a job, still had nowhere to go, and by all accounts, should still kill himself. But a vague feeling, that there was more to this than he could remember, told him not to.
Dr. Silvers also started tellng him not to. "Jeremy," he began gently, walking over to him and standing right by his bed, "you have the gift of imagination, which is just as important as knowledge. I know you can find someone -- someone who will hire you."
For a moment, Jeremy thought he saw a glimmer of something in his master's eye; but the next moment, the wolf turned away from him and started walking around the room again.
"Who would hire me? There aren't any jobs for someone who knows about ancient human culture," he whined. "You hired me only because you saw me in that first History class."
Dr. Silvers sighed. "I wish I could give you your job back, but I can't. I wish I could undo everything that happened, but I can't." He seemed just as frustrated as Jeremy thought he should have been.
Jeremy was once again feeling Dr. Silvers' pain. Something in his eyes and his voice made that connection between them that bonded Jeremy to him. As he watched the old wolf take step after step, pushing one foot in front of the other pensively, his memory was once again stirred. Based on a feeling he couldn't identify, he decided to take up Dr. Silvers on the offer he heard when he was barely conscious, in a manner he had been wanting to for a long time.
He believed that, for some reason, it would work out. He was certain of it.
"There is one way you could help, I suppose," he started to say, his heartbeat increasing slowly on the EKG.
Dr. Silvers stopped pacing. "Yes?"
Jeremy couldn't bring himself to ask, and ended up making a strange economic argument instead. "Well, you see, I have to pay my rent, and it's -- not cheap. Until I get a job I'll have to sell it, and I will need some place --"
Dr. Silvers' eyes widened as Jeremy's tongue tied itself in knots.
"If -- now, if it were possible to -- stay somehwere else, then it -- it would help me, a lot," he finally managed to babble.
Jeremy watched the gray wolf go through concern, angst, surprise, joy, and a few other things in what seemed like less than a second. "I don't know what to say," was his final conclusion. "But Jeremy, I should tell you something first."
He stood right beside his bed, and took Jeremy's right hand again. "Jermey," the young fox heard his master say, eyes as gentle as he had ever seen them, "I -- I love you."
It didn't quite register to Jeremy at first; otherwise, he probably would have set off an alarm on the EKG with a skip. He just stared at his master, glass eyed, joy welling up in him slowly.
"I don't even know if I should have said that," Dr. Silvers continued on, "but I can't hide it anymore."
Jeremy realized he must have looked stunned to recieve such uncertainty, and he needed to do something to show that the feeling was in fact mutual. Since his tongue was tied at the idea living with him -- too wonderful to say -- he just took the hand the old wolf extended him and started kissing it.
After several passionate kisses of the wolf's hand, Jeremy loooked back into his eyes, and saw joy again.
"Would you like to stay with me?" he asked Jeremy.
"Very much," Jeremy answered, the sense of joy building up to a new height as it finally hit him that his crush would be realized.
"Once you get out of here," interrupted a voice, "that will be fine."
The cat was back, this time with a tall, narrow cardboard box. "In the mean time, I want you to stay for observation until I see some better blood pressure numbers. No -- excitement." He smirked, but was clearly still annoyed.
"For what it's worth," said Dr. Silvers rather suddenly, "Jeremy has told me a little bit more about his story, and he told you the important part."
"I don't believe he was lying; his injuries are exactly as he described. I merely don't like all this secrecy. And this came for you -- delievered anonymously."
Jeremy looked up at his master, but Dr. Silvers just shrugged.
It appeared to be about a foot tall, and pretty heavy from the way the cat carried it in and set it down on a nearby table.
"You should be lucky to have such -- good friends," grumbled the cat as he left.
Dr. Silvers opened it at Jeremy's request to find it was a statuette of Anubis. It was a perfect replica of the status Jeremy had fallen before. Seeing the carefully carved face and body once again unblocked Jeremy's memory: the beach, the discussion, the vision of his master's angst, and the wonderful satisfaction of his own desires all came flooding back to him as he looked at it.
Jeremy just stared into space, dumbfounded, trying to deal with all the emotions over again while his master analyzed the statue.
"It looks like Anubis," mulled the professor as he examined it from every angle. "I can't read this inscription," he commented, looking at the back of it.
That broke Jeremy out of his daze. Dr. Silvers reluctantly handed it to Jeremy, who was surprised to find it weighed 5 pounds for a wooden statuette.
"'We shall meet again,'" he read aloud quickly.
He was starting to consider this more seriously, that perhaps it had not been a dream, when his master interrupted.
"I thought it was a one-way trip," smirked the professor, "you see him and you're gone."
"Not if you're Osiris," mumbled Jeremy.
The End.
(version 1.01)