Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer

The sun beats down mercilessly upon dunes and cliffs, turning the scene to shades of gold scattered with tan shadows. Across this starkly beautiful landscape, a series of small, sandy divots lie where the breeze has not blown them back to conceal the trail of indentations.
Following that trail leads to a series of sinuous ‘S’ shapes, like a sidewinder was progressing at right angles to its usual course. After a while, the sine-wave is paralleled by deep footprints, the ice in their shadowed depths only just starting to yield to the morning sun.
The parallel tracks crest a tall dune, tall enough to see the ruins of Amarna smoking in the distance. At the terminus of the tracks there lies a sun-baked body in the bloodied rags of what had been a pharaoh’s regalia. Crouched next to him is an ebon being with a jackal’s head.

“They thought they’d dragged you far enough away that you’d never return. I knew they were wrong. Stubborn was always your strongest attribute, after your sense of direction.”
The reply comes in a dry whisper: “A curse upon your House, usurper.”
The snout drops as the eyes regard the dying human.
“Too far gone for proclamations, Khuenaten? About time.”
“What would you know of time, or my divine task?”
“As I am somewhat responsible for you thinking you had that task, I thought I’d come to apologise, yet again.”
“Again? We have never met.”
“Not in this Akhet, but your particular obsession is incredibly difficult to remove. No matter how we set things up, you always get the monotheistic urge and set off upon this doomed quest once again.”
“There is only one god. He is the Atun, and he looks down upon me now, ready to receive me into his glorious presence.”
“And there we have it. Your core delusion. I had hoped that by dropping in I’d create some sort of release for this persistent reality twist.”
“What?”
“One god. There is never only one god. As long as my netsheren overlook your Akhets – and there is only one other of us who recalls a time when we didn’t – there can never be a single god.”
“Blasphemer.”
The ebon head lunges and for the first time, their eyes meet.
“Gaze upon me, then say who blasphemes.”
There is a cry of denial; the rattle of a dying breath.
Anhubeth stands up and looks down at the body.
“Good answer.”
As he strides off, a biting, cold wind ruffles the sand and frosts the eyes of the corpse, before whipping off to interstices unknown. The miniscule resonance created by the chill excision of a reality torsion touches Anhubeth’s senses.
Glancing back, he smiles.
“Death-point learning: so profound, too late, but never wasted.”
Looking down, he kicks up sand and barks a soft laugh.
“Unchanging… Yet patterns across a stretch of sand are always different. What can reckon the fall of every grain? Neither gods nor mortals, it seems.”
He snorts.
“And what use a sand predicting machine?”
With a shake of his head, he walks away.