Anaïs woke abruptly, her heart pounding against her ribcage. Her eyes fluttered for a moment before squeezing shut against the harsh light that assaulted her pupils. It felt like someone had turned on a medical spotlight directly in her face.
"Am I in the hospital?"
But her hands, pressing against the ground, didn't meet the soft surface of a hospital bed. No... her fingers sank into something soft, grainy, and yet smooth.
"Sand?"
When her eyes finally adjusted to the overwhelming brightness, she was able to open them.
"A... a desert? But..."
An endless expanse of sand stretched out before her. The gray grains gave the barren landscape a cemetery-like air. There was no sound, no shadow, no sign of life. More strangely, the light seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once: there was no sun, no lamp, no artificial source of illumination. Yet she could see clearly around her. There was no darkness.
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A lump formed in her throat. Cold sweat trickled down her spine. She was in a desert, but she felt no hot air, no cool breeze, no wind at all—just emptiness. The atmosphere felt heavy, and she began to suffocate. Or was it the onset of a panic attack? The place she found herself in was anything but normal. Was she dead?
Suddenly, a man appeared. Could she really call him a man when the head attached to his neck was not human but something halfway between a jackal and a black wolf? A gold collar marked the boundary between his beastly visage and his human form. The rest of his skin was harmoniously tanned on his lean and sculpted body.
He stood there, bare-chested and barefoot, his masculinity concealed by a white loincloth. He stared intensely at a point on the horizon, his head turned to the left, showing only his profile. Motionless, he seemed unaware of the young woman's presence.
Anaïs froze as well, unsure of what to do, worried about whether she was in danger. Those few seconds during which neither moved allowed her to observe the figure. That head looked familiar; she would have bet anything she had seen it before. Something related to Egypt... A god...
"Anubis?" she exclaimed, half-pleased with her guess, half-skeptical about his presence before her.
He quickly turned his head, his black eyes locking onto Anaïs's green ones. Her breath caught in her throat. She felt as if he were probing her soul, trying to bore a hole into her skull, as if he were trying to enter her mind. The exchange lasted only two seconds before she woke with a start, this time for real, in the bed of her small studio apartment.