By Joshua Vise – November 26, 2025

Published in Unholier Than Thou: Original Sin by Wicked Shadow Press. Lulu: Paperback or EPUB

The ancient desert, usually so still at night, rippled in all directions as they dug their way out of the desiccating sand.  One by one, they slowly crawled, pushed, and rocked themselves free from the choking silica that had covered them for eons, their thin, unsteady limbs sweeping arrhythmically from side to side, hoping in vain to find something to grasp.  They emerged into either a moonlight so blue that the dunes resembled stationary waves on a motionless sea, or into a cold, timeless blackness so thick that the Berbers believed it had the power to erase memories.

Having freed themselves from their internment, they shambled ahead, trudging forward on sand that gave easily around their feet and ankles, as if the desert was eager to redevour what it had consumed so long ago.  Those whose legs were too feeble to support their weight clawed deeply into the loose grit and propelled themselves forward one scratching armlength at a time. They moved slowly to the east as a single, hideous horde striving towards something unseen, impelled by a mysterious force that called to the swarm with an intensity unequalled by any mortal feeling, a force with the power to rouse the dead.  They bumped and jostled each other, climbing over one another, seemingly as indifferent to the trespasses of their neighbors as they were unaware of their own encroachment upon others.  In this way, they traversed the desert, a collection of bodies torn in ways thought pleasing to god, numb to everything save for the sole object of their focus.

Only rotting leather armor clung to the stout corpses of captured foes.  Anything of greater value or utility had been stripped from them by the mighty armies of the pharaoh.  Bronze, copper, and iron armor was melted down and recast.  Swords and daggers were confiscated, their scabbards later adorning the hips of Egyptian infantrymen lucky enough to have survived the conflicts.  The unlucky: the fallen Hittites, Nubians, Hyksos, and Sea-Peoples, advanced on ragged stumps, the feet and hands of these warriors having long ago been hacked away in shame.  Even so, centuries in the desert could not take from these soldiers the code of duty that their training had instilled in them.  They marched, to the extent that their infirmities would allow, with their heads held high, seemingly ready to refight the battles of the past in anticipation of a more victorious outcome.

Young women embraced their own severed heads much as they would a child, either cradling it in their arms or on their hip, their long wisps of dark hair fluttering behind them as they trekked forward.  The relentless punishment of the harsh desert environment had robbed their clothes of their colors over time, and yet these brownish, mottled remnants still retained a sense of poise and grace befitting the wearer’s former youthful loveliness.  Some women carried with them small trinkets from their previous lives.  The bracelets and rings that adorned their limbs were gifts from fathers whose hopes and dreams for their daughters had been overruled by the will of the priests.

Unlike their feminine counterparts, the men bore a much more variegated assortment of mortal wounds.  The crowns of their skulls were sunken from the blow of the mace, and ragged punctures marked their torsos in places where the blades of swords or spears had entered.   Deep burns circled the necks of those who had met their end at the strangling hands of the noose.  Hideous and unnatural disfigurements hinted at more exotic tortures, though whether these secretive techniques were performed in service to the gods or to satisfy the bloodlust of their tormenters remained locked in the mangled hearts of the victims.

This horrible assemblage of individuals, this collection of bloody offerings, marched as one mass through the wasteland, with only the moon bearing witness to their migration.  Underfoot, the loose sand gave way to rock, and then to the dark sediment of the Nile.  For some, this return to the earth was a return to their ancestral home; for others, the banks of this river represented the end goal of a failed conquest.  Yet for all, the dark soil that clung to the banks of the life-giving river offered a path leading to the feet of the one who had demanded their sacrifice.

The towering statue of the king of kings was situated astride the stark line marking the edge of the floodplain.  There he stood, one foot among the reeds, the other solidly on a bed of rock.  His mighty, muscled arms were crossed in front of his chest, the crook and flail clenched tightly in his hands, cementing his claim to the throne.  Upon his head, the double crown of a united empire loomed over a face that bore a sneer of cold command.  It was the visage of a man prepared to be a god, who had replaced the images of his divine father on the walls of the temples with his own, and who had ordered the death of those now amassed before him.  

This statue’s granite eyes looked out on his works unblinkingly as the multitude slowly pressed forward.  Under his lifeless gaze, the tribe of victims surged ahead, pushing and leaning with the weight of time and death behind them, grinding their mangled bodies into those in front of them, without fear of repercussion from a would-be god who had yet remained mortal.  Their single, unspoken goal was articulated only through the force of their actions, a force that toppled the granite, sending it crashing to the ground, to be buried and forgotten under the mud and sand that it had straddled, and leaving only trunkless legs of stone standing in their wake.

The results of their efforts were met with neither cheers or lamentations from the crowd.  Instead, their work having been completed, they dissipated, scattering aimlessly into the desert.  There, they would be lost to time, with only the ever-shifting dunes as a monument to their memory.