the sun god and the anathema
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I heard the man was gone, but one can hear many things in the marketplace. Walked southwards to the barren lands,
walked eastwards, other said, to the red desert and the Red Sea yonder (and then; death.)
But when the hawk circled aloft and I heard the strangled cry of a jackal in the hunt, I knew, I knew for all my years of roaming that the man had gone,
like an outcast,
like a panther- the sands, they all cried, westwards, and I knew it to be true, because I smelt sweat and blood, and tears, in the air, and I know that the wind never lies.
If I could but wager his heart, I could tell if the stories were true- the rumors in the empty valleys; the superstition in the call of the morning breeze. The people in the village, scared, had presented offerings, trying in vain to appease a spirit too corporeal to be a threat anymore; to shattered to be imposing,
nothing but a man, and a man alone.
When I heard the man was gone, I did not fear, but acquiesce.
Fate calls to us by our names even when we have buried them, and it is too late to turn back when we answer, and when we do, our histories are circular and sealed, and so, now, even without the Millennium Key, I can tell you his story:
A handful of stars twinkle over my sleeping Al-Qahira, triumphant city of the thousand minarets, and he steals away into the desert like a cobra wounded, but ever poisonous. He has been reborn from a craft of shadows and ancient magic, without a scream, pain paralyzing each limb to make a movement a little death, but he does not rest- he is a lost, vacant creature, a night-child seeped into a den of sorcerers and guardians, and he knows it,
and he is afraid.
Stealing, he can do, somehow he clothes his bare body. He knew before from his time alive the means, and he treads through pain the way to the boundaries of the city, past the silent slums and the filthy alleyways, and he is through, suddenly roving into the desert like down beneath the Universal Blanket.
He breathes in, and it's cool, but dry, and he walks.
The sun rises, the sun sets again, and Nut spills her basket of stars with a love much more pure over the silvery desert than over the dying city.
He doesn't know hunger, he was not taught that when he had a body before, and now he feels a different kind of pain tearing inside of him, but he is not surprised, only tired, very tired.
On the third day, the midday sun blazes down on an expanse of sand without horizon, and a pilgrimage ceases.
A cry, such as no cry of anguish ever echoed in the naked eternity of the desert, pierces through the air as he falls down on his knees, burying tan and slim and strong fingers into the sand; but he won't become rooted to that which is barely above dust.
Take me, he pleads, take me, and he looks aloft to the primordial skies, blue like the mouth of the Nile- he cries in despair, and every ache in his body is tenfold as terrible because his head pounds like a curse. He was already punished, he longs not to be punished anymore.
He may only want to sleep the sleep that lasts forever.
I took you, and now I gave you back, he hears, a roar from the impolluted skies.
He has been answered- he has found Him and been found; and something akin to the hope of the fearless stirs inside his chest.
Ra, take me back, he insists.
The Sun God will not, he feels it in every wretched fiber of his being, and the pain, the drought, the sun consume him so much he wishes he was naked again; then he could offer himself as a sacrifice and take me, please.
With light, I cleansed your soul of evil, the God tells him, and he, he sees only the midday sun shining over him, but what he feels, is the eternal shifting creation and re-creation of the world of perception. The God of Sun Ra shines like the purest gem before him, and he has never ceased bowing before him, begging...
I am evil, he thinks, and the God hears him, and then he does not know if he thinks or speaks or cries, I cannot be if I am not evil, that is all I am.
With steps that shake the foundations of the Earth, Ra steps in the sand towards him, walks through him, scorches him dead, reborn and anew.
And he dies again, and he again is reborn, and he is, again, anew.
You are, because I have made you. Now choose a name and serve me, and the man once known as Dark Malik blinks his eyes to the old new world, where the first lights of twilight tinge the borders of his field of vision of colors too shimmering to be a mirage from the human world.
Naked, curled into a ball that represents a shell that will break, he exposes his tanned back to the goddess of the sky, and up there in the other world, she sees a young man with a tattoo too beautiful to have been made by human hands, the image of Ra, the Sun God.
When the night falls, he begins to return, somewhere...
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A/N: This is Shadi telling how Dark Malik came to be alive again, and how Ra spoke to him in the desert.
Al-Qahira= El Cairo
