Episode 37: God of Death
Written By Karl White
Earth’s rotations around the sun, were long, hard days to early humans, but passed quicker than the blink of an eye for Anu. He had no purpose, no mission, no subordinates, only the recognition that this miserable world would be where he’d eventually die. Alone, he sulked and fed.
Time moved populations like tides, and Anu drifted with his food. Around 6000 BCE, the nomadic predator would follow the largest swell to North Africa. Arriving at the Nile River Valley, Anu was shocked to see the advancing Neolithic cultures flourishing in what would soon become Egypt.
He didn’t hold back. Night after night, he terrorize the humans. At first, they regarded him as a monster, ferocious and violent, not unlike any other carnivore in the night. But as new generations encountered him, they’d recall the stories of the horror passed to them by their forefathers. Anu’s vicious stealing of life evolved as they did, into the culling of a vengeful God, righting the world by taking those he saw fit, into the afterlife.
Relief carving of Anu - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Soon the Egyptians were bringing the savage hunter offerings to appease him. At first it enraged him. He refused to grant them the complexity he saw in their eyes, But as the area began to become unified around him, Anu found himself as much a fixture of Egyptian life as anything else. So, he acknowledged the cultural symbolism, finding it preposterous, but seeing it as an opportunity in domination.
In 3245 BCE, past vigilant guards, Anu slipped into the personal chamber of King Ka, third Scorpion King in Upper Egypt. He played the role he’d been given by fear itself -- a god come calling. He demanded reverence across the kingdom, no qualms, or questions.
Anu sneaks into King Ka’s chamber - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Ka, petrified, but eager to be spared by the embodiment of Death, agreed. Anu would “watch over” his reign as a living deity. He took a name that fit the story already forming, Osiris, soon to be synonymous with the God of Death, usher of souls to the underworld.
Osiris was the part of a lifetime, and it suited Anu. He was feared absolutely and wielded whatever influence he wished over each passing pharaoh. He fed well, night after night. His commands were met without delay.
He also delighted that he would choose when a rulers time had come, getting to feed on their bodies to the point of draining them completely of blood. From this horror, a ritual took root. To keep their kings intact, the court perfected preservation. Thus the practice of mummification found a new urgency, born, in part, from a Vampire’s lust.
History notes Osiris could also “raise the dead”, a memory warped from truth as Anu’s blood could make a human undying.
Yet in nearly eight millennia in Egypt, Anu made only one of his kind, and that, was out of spite. In 2177 BCE, a boy-king took the throne, King Kawekperure, young, smug and iron-willed. Anu kept to shadow, fed by sacrifice, and was rarely seen. The new pharaoh called the god’s terror a trick, a cult’s ploy to siphon power from the crown.
One night, Kawekperure slipped into Anu’s temple and pushed past the High Priest who guarded the feeding chamber. He demanded proof, no more excuses, no more murmurs. If “Osiris” was real, let him show his face. If not, the god’s priests would answer for the lie.
King Kawekperure confronts the High Priest - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
HIGH PRIEST: Your Highness, the offerings are not pageant. They are the covenant that keeps us alive.
PHARAOH: An archaic show. Purist blood marched into this chamber, yet no prayers are ever answered. Crops are dying. A plague cripples the West. Everything is done to please this figment, yet nothing changes.
HIGH PRIEST: I assure you, he’s very real, as is his wrath.
PHARAOH: Then what does he look like?...Why the silence? You enter daily and cannot name his face?
HIGH PRIEST: His embodiment is meant to connect with us. He appears like you or I. But to look upon him is a weight even a pharaoh is not meant to bear.
The Pharaoh would scoff, demanding to see the God or else... and the High Priest bowed at last and set his hands to the heavy door…
Eerie silence filled the darkened chamber. The boy-king squinted into the black, eyes hunting shape from shadow. From the far side, a voice cut clean across the dark.
ANU: You doubt my existence, brat.
PHARAOH: I am the ruler of this kingdom. Man or god, you will address me with respect.
ANU: Quiet, boy. There’s nothing noble about you. You are a lowly ape, grasping at fruit, too high in the tree.
Anu stepped from the shadows, tall, pale, light-complexion, he looked human, yet there was something ageless in his face. Seeing this man before him, the Pharaoh pulled a dagger, eager to prove the bluff…But he quickly learned he was in fact, facing more than a mere man. Anu’s eyes went hollow black, his fangs protracted.
Anu, God of Death - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
PHARAOH: I—I was wrong. Spare me. I’ll serve you...I swear.
ANU: Did you know humans are the only creatures that sob at the thought of death? It’s a grotesque and unnatural flaw.
PHARAOH: Please, I beg of you...I can’t die. I’m the chosen one. Picked by the creator.
ANU: The power you have isn’t real. There’s no difference between you and a slave. Someone ought to teach you that...Let me show you real power.
He forced a single drop of his blood onto the boy’s tongue. The change took hold quickly. The pharaoh convulsed, remade into a Ghoul.
ANU: Feel it? The agony. That hunger deep down, it never quiets. It ends only two ways, you drink again from me and finish the turn, or feed on the red, rich blood of your fellow man.
He lifted the boy from the ground and set him inside a stone sarcophagus. And before he closed the lid...
ANU: One drop is all you get. I’ll have you buried deep, in the lowest chamber of this temple. You’ll never have the strength to escape, and you’ll never die. You’ll feel pain until the sun you worship burns out. This is what you get for doubting my existence...That is real power.
Anu ordered the pharaoh entombed in the dark, where he remained for eons…Until 1923, when British archaeologist, Alfred Pratt’s expedition penetrated a deliberately sealed shaft in the Valley of the Kings. A sudden sandstorm trapped them as they opened an inner chamber. His crew forced a door that had not moved in forty centuries. The room breathed, and something hungry breathed with it.
The Ghoul entombed - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
By dawn, a team of rescuers reached the chamber...the sarcophagus was open, all the men were dead. And the Ghoul, the boy-king, was at large. He'd terrorize the darkness of Cairo. It would take a small army to hunt and finally take him down. That was only one small cruel reverberation of Anu's wicked and dark journey through the night.
TO BE CONTINUED…