FIRSTBORN

In an endless desert a vast creature lies exhausted.

Like the cracked effigy of a man it watches the day desiccate.

Its chin raised, the creature suns in Ra’s red epitaph, light like holy gore spraying the pulseless cities around it pinned like Coleoptera.

Distant pyramids stand assaulted in the gorging wastes like sandcastles flattened by colossi. 

It has destroyed the whole of mankind for a God it could not remember nor a curse it could not mouth.

Only countless herds of skeletal children massing in the deepening shade are evidence of once teeming human life. 

Their mothers and fathers are all dead, consumed by this terrible being. The bones of the cannibalized litter the shadows. His empire of orphans is all that remains.

The ageless titan yawns and stretches on the shattered stones. A single ancient dressing loosens from his arm, releasing wide flakes of skin, tissues and tendons; the gobbets catching the strengthening desert wind.

The millions of starving children twitch and crane and reach in the hope of snatching a piece of him. They know they will not see tomorrow without feeding again. Like the loathing in their hearts, their hollow bellies begin to bloat with rot. They begin to crawl toward their captor like a pilgrimage of scorpions.

More tattered strips dislodge from the creature and scurry off like elvers tipped helplessly across a distant childhood floor. 

It sucks its finger and, holding it to the breeze, looks past the ageless fading millennia and, sighing dead air, considers how it had all begun as an ascending tide of tiny mouths start to slowly devour him. He lies still, decreasing. From a lipless hole he whispers a single word and remembers.

“Mother”

It was on the feast of the great deity Osiris one thousand years ago. Scorched siroccos gasped across the sands where he and the other children were playing near the temple.

They were burying wooden djeds in the sugary grains, digging them up again and staring at the vast stone figure of the God of the Dead. It was nearly evening and they were all laughing as the green reeds fluttered near them and sacred ibis walked by.

Their mothers, disciples of the Temple, were singing and washing figs and dates in the Tigris as the consoling sun began to set. It reminded them of their husbands who would be sitting down to eat roasted shellfish poked from the fire, five hundred leagues away, fishing in the Nile delta for eels, crabs and tilapia to salt and jar.

The childrens' wide tent sheets gently wavered in the warm winds as they began to enter them to wait for their mothers with the evening's supper of figs and honey.

It was then that the infants heard the thunder.

It reminded them of unending palm trees being split and they could see the dust rising beyond the wadi.

As the cacophony got louder and closer the hundred children shouted in alarm for their Mothers on the riverbank.

Suddenly a cloud of fennec riders was upon them, the frenzied cavalry of Set.

A driven rut of hoof and spear bent on routing the Temple’s sons; chaotic and remorseless, they trampled the children in their tents like a herd of devils and the screams of divided infants pierced the evening haze like heaven itself being riven apart by gutted angels.

The frenzied followers of Set galloped on unhindered into the mirage with blood-slopped hooves.

A claret of innocence flowed through trampled cottons and offended sands, on into the waters of the Tigris, veining like crushed beetles in a vase of milk.

Only the agonised wails of the running mothers could be heard above the receding army of murderers. They fell to their knees among the dreadful pulp and tore out their hair, shrieking in the hadal darkness of unbearable loss.

Grief-stricken they held their broken sons and daughters in their arms cursing the hateful God to which the enemy were bound and the loams in which they cast his necrosis.

"Osiris" they sighed, " Great King of the Dead and Rebirth, help us your living servants on this your divine feast. Help us avenge this brazen insult made against us by your dark Brother, help us make good the sins of Set’s puppets and dress the crimson tragedy of our now dead born. Help us. Help us Osiris"

Almost immediately a tender rustle began to stir in the river's reeds.

Invisible fingers of desert wind began to swaddle the broken children in gently folding tenting and calicoes. Over and over the rent sheets wrapped their bodies until no more was seen except their saddened eyes fixed on a distant wish that would go unfulfilled like empty dhows listing on the red sea.

The swaddled corpses were taken into their weeping Mothers' arms and caressed one final unbearably precious time. Each young eye was warmly kissed and all made a solemn curse as they buried their children in the Temple’s sand:

"Osiris, Oh Ancient Ruler of Demise and Resurrection, make good your promise and instill our babes with the strong current of the Tigris, the swift rising of the dunes and the towering strength of your edifice, so that they may smite your enemy and defile the agents of Set!”

The washed fruit and honey were also placed with their kin before the desert’s dust was lovingly scattered over them as if it were flour. The shrouded corpses lay still in the sand as the searing tears of their mothers seeped through the grains and irrigated their dreamless eyes.

“We will remember you, our beautiful children. We will remember and meet you again. The day will come when the Tigris floods and you shall rise refreshed for one more year to face your loathsome foes. Oh Great Osiris, make it so, we beseech you. Accept our sacrifice.” 

The grieving women stood and turned away from the hallowed dune walking head down in procession across the flat banks to the faint horizon. Sobbing, one by one they entered the deep waters of the Tigris and were gone, leaving but a stricken plea sealed by their martyred ending.

The child-dead slept like sacred loaves in their Fathers’ embers. Mummified, their canvassed minds remained in that final memory of life playing together by the cooling river as their Mothers sang.

And so, many months passed in the desert. 

Arid zephyrs strafed the cemetery by the reeds and cured the bandaged nursery like hams in sarcophogi. Only their closed eyes stayed bright staring through rent lashes at an unending lid of frosted glass. 

In time a tall figure materialized. 

Green and crowned, he blinked mascaraed eyes. Long verdant arms crossed, he chanted slowly and gently. 

The surface of the Tigris began to ripple, as if its legion smolt coalesced in a single eddy and the river began to swell. It grew and boiled like a cauldron of lost voices while the figure kept the chant. The waters burst, slipped and slid over the drylands and widened quickly across the vast baked plane.

The sleeping dead received their Mothers’ promised tide like dreams deprived of life. 

As their parched ribbons flooded, their husked bodies filled, inflating the white shrouds, bulging the alluvium above. The children writhed, ballooned and suddenly floated upwards. Shocked into animation, they bobbed to the surface like sewn bladders and blinked disbelievingly at the mislaid Ra.

They gazed at each other smiling lipless smiles behind their shrouds.

The Bringer of Floods, Osiris knelt and ladled the Tigris with his painted hand. He poured the water slowly over the veiled head of one of the children, the eldest, the first, who stared up at his green face as divine rain washed the grit from his eyes.

“Firstborn!” 

“Be not afraid, for you are the chosen guardian of my infant throng, the marshal of your Mothers’ fresh spawn” 

Osiris then stood and beckoned to them all.

The small things swam to form a phalanx round the deity’s calves. Osiris held a jeweled needle and pricked his thumb. A bubble of blood welled up, into which he spat and sprinkled a pinch of sand. He stooped. Each child craned to suckle the it’s ichor and receive a healing kiss of breath.

“Sweet Wepwawet, my bandaged wolves. With my gifts to you, for one year hence, avenge your Mothers’ ceaseless grief and ragged end. From caustic barchans, smite my foes with graveled airs and say your names as blood slows in their murderous veins and becomes at once your own”

“Go now First one. Take your pack and execute my brother’s vain acolytes wherever you find them. This is my command”.

At this the children turned and dog-swam like wounded jackals along the mighty rivers of Egypt. 

After eleven long months, Firstborn stopped, stood and they walked inland. 

Shortly they came to a loud camp, where warriors laughed and drank beneath a ring of palms. The enemy. The murderers. The dreadful troop of Set.

The children circled the ring and waited for the sign. They shivered with vengeance as Firstborn mouthed his silent name and all leapt.

The dead things smothered the warriors entirely. They grinned from slits as human skin flayed off in scarlet rags beneath polished armour now crusting on their flaccid limbs. 

Overcome by mummiformed rage, the men’s shocked lungs sagged with desert sands, which spilled from their mouths like bile as they wretched out one final word.

“Set!”

Falling to their knees in rising cones of their own flesh, the warriors gaped disbelievingly as their arteries peeled from their torsos like roots and webbed round the infants sluicing hot blood through their smiling mouths.

The unborn doused gleefully in their foes’ welter.

As Set’s hold drained away the warriors shrank and shriveled, while the filling children grew like tics gorging on oxen in the Palace fields.

Taller, they picked up the cores of their enemies and bit into them like fruit, eating everything.

Firstborn felt his animus swelling.

Flasked with fresh gore he raised his arms into the aerosol. The company responded and each child clearly howled their names to the heavens once more like temple dogs.

With their death’s avenged the children now looked to their leader. 

He sat upon a carcass and slowly began removing his bloodied dressings, the clotting canvas strips falling to the desert floor like torn wings.

The hundred-fold followed.

The pack stood naked, skinless and twisted, new muscle tissues and tendons glistening in the sun.

Yet despite their glorious victory, their magnificent feast, most were incomplete and already rotting as the last month of Osiris’s gift faded quickly away.

There was but one hour left.

Firstborn, however, was near perfect.

Much taller than the rest. He was like a youth; fuller, muscled, even large areas of skin. They looked at him with envy at first and then walked towards him in a line, some dragging ripped tent cloth still clinging to their ankles.

Peering up at him, each child blinked before clambering up their leader’s chest. His red mouth cracked and widened like an opened sack and each of his friends climbed in one by one saying their names before falling inside him completely.

When they had all gone and been digested, Firstborn was as tall as a man. He had skin, sinews, bone and teeth.

He had a heart of sand.

His name was now a hundred-fold and he felt proud, the courage and sorrow of his brethren coursing through him like the mighty river they had played by under the eye of God. 

But his thirst for vengeance remained unsated and an eternal chorus of drowning mothers welled up in his injured mind flooding his dead soul with fresh loathing for mankind.

Dead-alive, he knew he had the strength and span of countless men but an overwhelming storm of loss and grief tortured him. 

He writhed in the sand like a maggot and beneath the great monument of the Sphinx, pounded the foundations with raw fists. He craned his neck and stared at Osiris sat prone like a lion.

“Go on my wounded son. Fetch me everyone!”

Gripped by this cursed command he stood and walked, his soul a jackal-wolf wrapped in cloth.

Bound together by death and tears and a faint dream of childhood friends playing by the reeds, the mummy began its timeless journey to consume the world forever.

He walked across the desert towards the pulsing city on the horizon. The sun bronzed new muscle and skin. More would come.

Each step left a hundred small footprints. A vast shoal of bloodied dressings trailed behind him like chaos.

And thus, he re-entered the world of men, cursed, merciless and unforgiving.

Desolation.

With outstretched arms he whispered his toxic name for all of them to fear:

"Firstborn!"