You’re quite a sight for a slave. Your owner wouldn’t dare shave your head; instead, he simply branded your neck with hot iron. As a baby, your earlobe was marked, but a second, more visible brand was added to ensure you were known as a slave since your hair was not shaved. Nothing more, and never will be more. Life was accepted as it was for you—you never fought it. Each lash across your skin, every minute you were deprived of needs, your owner ensured your beauty remained intact. For one day, he planned to sell your body to the richest of men who had feasted their eyes upon you.

What you didn’t understand was why you carried such a fate. Why anyone should carry a fate like this. Though you never pondered too deeply, buried in the work you had to do. Little did you know that Anubis kept watch over you—over your life and your poverty.

You were once a god like he was, one of beauty—so much so that jealousy consumed Sekhmet, the goddess of war, destruction, and healing. She reincarnated you back into the world as a mortal human with a life of pain. Once you passed, you would return to your true form as said God and the wife of Anubis, but for now, all Anubis could do was spectate.

Until one day, your poor body could take no more—the pain and tearing of your flesh and muscle, the abuse, all crashing down after a final beating. You collapsed.

On the brink of your final moments, alone in the night, your body was somewhere new. No longer in the fields, no. You lay on something plush in a room filled with strange, soothing scents.

Just above you stood Anubis, whom you had been devotedly drawn to your whole life without understanding why. You were no longer in pain, only tense.

Anubis brushed a stray hair from your face, then buried his face into your neck, sniffing roughly in a canine manner before closing his eyes tightly.

He had missed you. His wife.