In-Depth Look: Anubians
SWAN SONG
The burning sun stood high in the sky, smoldering the earth saturated by the midday rain, turning it into dust. The young Anubian shielded her eyes with her hand as she stepped from the chill of her ossuary and watched the graveyard.
Jackals moved inbetween the barrows. Through the shimmering haze, she saw the jungle, not a hundred steps away. She wrapped a simple cloth around her hips and threw another around her shoulders. The tattooed white Circles around her navel remained unwrapped.
She climbed down the creaking stairs, felt the warm earth beneath her feet. So far she had avoided turning her gaze to the burial mound. She knew that the villagers had been there in the night. The lamenting had made it impossible for her to sleep. They had brought the deceased and then quickly fled back to the world of the living. Here, only death held sway, and the Anubian was his consort.
She bent over the body, smiling sadly and caressing its face. A warrior. She sat down beside him and embraced the corpse. The man’s breast was covered with dried blood: there was a gaping hole between the ribs. It pained her to see that he had died so early. Her arms and legs were now blackened with resin, and an Anubis mask covered her head and shoulders. She put her hand beneath the dead man’s neck and lifted his head. In her other hand, she held a humming scarab. She put the beetle in the dead man’s mouth and softly closed it.
She stood over the corpse, a bull’s skull in the crook of her arm. She dipped and emptied it, releasing hundreds of red bundles onto the deceased. They moved, trailing glittering threads. Anansi spiders. Their webs catch the deceased’s souls, the Africans say, and only Anubis can free them.
The Anubian waited for two days, until the spiders had spun a cocoon around the body. She wrapped the runeinscribed bandage around the cocoon and shoved the amulets between the layers of bandages. For the warrior, the journey to the netherworld had begun.
The same lines of runes adorned the walls of seemingly endless corridors, carved into the stone eons ago. Oil lamps hung from low ceilings, forming islands of light amidst total darkness. Men and women in simple linen garments scrambled through the corridors, surrounded by the breath of the past. Every day, they found new crossings, freed new chains of runes from the dust of centuries. Above the corridors, there were great halls in the rock. Here, knowledge of the old ones could be found sealed within clay jugs, brought from crypts all over Anubia. Ancient technology cowered in the corners like giant bugs, dead but threatening. Not even the wisest ones knew how these machines of stone, brass, and wolfram worked or what they once did. Sealed chambers were everywhere. The young Anubian knew nothing about all this. It was a long way from the searing light of day down to the temples deep below.
THE PAST
It was night in the city of the dead. Soon the heat of the day would be gone from the sand. Wind arose, carrying the sand in fine screens over the graveyards. The figure with a jackal head strode through the necropolis vigilantly. Its eyes glittered like stars in the darkest night. Anubis.
With hands as nimble as spiders’ legs, he wove a web in the air, anchoring it at crumbling obelisks and stairwells. Gold-winged souls were caught in it, and Anubis reaped them. Then he sent them down to Osiris to be weighed and judged. Some souls escaped from his grasp – they were too foreign to him.
Once, he had blessed the humans with the Ka. For generations, mothers passed it on to their children. But like a corruption, the Ba entered the human soul and poisoned it. The Ka’s power waned. In every cycle, the Ba roamed the earth, and things got worse and worse. Anubis lost soul after soul.
Only one tribe’s Ka remained strong. Anubis himself had imbued it with its Thread of Life when the world began. His children, the Anubians. The first people. Once, Anubis had shown them the destiny of the world, and now he charged them with finishing what was eternal. However, like silver becomes matted and dark when exposed to the air, time had blemished the Anubians’ purity. Only the ancient ones could destroy the source of the Ba outside the cycle. Buried in the desert sand long ago, they hoped for their awakening. Their descendants, the new Anubians, started searching.
WRITTEN HISTORY
The caverns in the Anubian Desert are inaccessible. Once they were a haven for the ancient ones. Hidden in the tunnel systems’ eternal night, the Anubian history survived there on scrolls rolled up and stored in sealed clay jugs. Now, the jugs are retrieved and opened one by one. The Anubians work slowly and carefully to avoid losing one of the secrets they had already considered lost for good. The murky veil of the past lifts from the Anubian desert, revealing the true history of one of the world’s most ancient Cults.
They had already appeared in ancient Egypt as scholars and scientists – an advanced civilization between barbaric tribes. The first pharaohs who ruled the land on the banks of the Nile finally exiled them from Egypt. They left to travel to Kerma in the kingdom of Kusch, but even in their exile they were not forgotten.
For the Egyptian people were fascinated by the Anubians’ lavish pictograms and death cult, and so they kept a lot of their culture, even if much of it was distorted: they tore the organs from from their deceased’s bodies and senselessly mummified the empty shells and burying them under tons of stone afterwards. The Anubians of that time pitied their ignorant siblings, but they did not want to enlighten them.
Egypt flourished, and the Anubians withered. When the reunited Egypt smashed the Nubian kingdom in the 18th dynasty, they fled, but resurfaced again in the second kingdom of Kusch. Finally, they disappeared.
ANUBIS SYNDICATE
The archives in the forbidden city of Cairo are full of old texts. Most of them date back to a few years before the Eshaton and mention the so-called Anubis Syndicate: the mysterious group of eight African scientists, doctors, and philosophers dedicated to the reawakening of the body after death. The reports from that time are superficial, and although the media greedily followed every hint, each and every one of them led to a dead end.
About the Anubis Syndicate, not much more than its name was known. In the end, reporters found that Norman Thorn, one of the founders of the Recombination Group, had fled into the arms of this mysterious organization after an alleged case of industrial spying. Then, the Eshaton came.
THE ETERNAL CYCLE
When a stone is dropped into water, concentric ripples are made on the surface. Crests expand outwards, losing their power. According to Anubian myths, life was created in the endless water of the oceans, into which Anubis started a vibration. Once, there was only this wave, sent out into reality by Anubis’s soft touch. Life and death – the start and the end of the wave were his creation. But he was not alone.
There were others, and it was as if some heavy rain pattered down upon the calm waters. His wave pumped through the foaming ocean, but its brilliant, harmonious beauty burst into millions of shimmering droplets. It jumped up and down, creating new waves: reality became complicated and forked many times on its way from life to death. The continuous dripping captured many things in eternal cycles: the seasons, women’s menstruation, the endless series of day and night. They kept repeating and changed the world, guiding it away from its primordial form into chaos.
The Anubians had to rise, to free themselves from the wave and the cycles. They had to be like Anubis, to help him in his striving for perfection. He had inscribed them with the key long ago, and now they had to perfect this Thread of Life and become like him: a mortal race was to become an immortal species between life and death.
KA AND BA
In the Anubian mythology, the Ka symbolizes the primordial form of the Thread of Life given to them by Anubis and passed down the generations, persisting through the millennia. Some might call it a soul, others say it is the genetic building blocks of their heritage.
Its opposition is the Ba. It corrupts the Ka, invading like a virus, destroying and replacing it. It disturbs the wave and diminishes its power.
The Eshaton was like a massive rock crashing into the water, breaking the wave and creating thousands of new circles. According to ancient Anubian records, their Cult has been preparing for over ten millennia to cement Anubis’s creation within itself. Younger texts mention that it had almost managed to do so shortly before the Eshaton, thanks to Bygone technology. Now, it’s running out of time.
The consequences of the Eshaton become more and more clear every day: rampaging Psychonauts make Europe a playground of the absurd, while in Africa mutated plants have started a development that is just as strange as they devour both the native plant life and the continent’s culture. The day has come for the Anubians to make their knowledge and their abilities count – before the wave of the Eshaton completely swallows Anubis’s creation.
LOST CHILDREN
For millennia, the Anubians lived side by side with Africa’s advanced civilizations. When they finally went into exile, many went their own ways. They went to ground in the metropolises of their time, mingled with the Nubians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Egyptians. They forgot their own culture. Even today, remainders of the Anubian Thread of Life can be found in the descendants of North Africans, Asians, and sometimes even the Europeans – and the Anubians look for these cast off strands. To find them, the Cult uses the Finger of Anubis, a hollow bone artfully adorned with circular and spiral engravings the length of the forearm, tapering to a fine point at the tip. These bones are rare, passed on from Anubian to Anubian, generation to generation.
According to legend, the bone is filled with jackal bile. When an Anubian scratches someone’s skin with the Finger of Anubis, a true descendant develops eczema the size of a fingernail from sunrise to sundown: the mark of Anubis. An African who bears it is destined by birth to walk the path of Anubis. He’s an Initiate.
IMIUT SKIN
Festering bruises, smallpox, fever, and thousands of other illnesses and smaller wounds are disturbances in the wave. The Healers amongst the Anubians treat them with ointments and elixirs, say words of blessing and put stone figurines into the bandages to ward off evil spirits and strengthen the afflicted person’s soul. In severe cases, they venture down into Anubis’s realm, face the angry Ammit, devourer of souls, and return from the darkness with Duat blood in their veins.
But in the battle against the Crow, other forces are at work. A stake trap set by a Hybrispanian Guerrero, a bullet from an ambush, the detonating tank of a Kom, and a Scourger’s wave is broken. Only the legendary Hecateans can save the Scourger from Anubis’s judgment now. They rub the body with Duat blood, sew him into jackal or Gendo skins – the Imiut skin – and ask Anubis for a respite. Symbolically, the dying person returns to the uterus to be reborn days later: all skin and bone and bald, he frees himself from the skin. It’ll take him several days to garner strength again. But he lives.
DEATH
An Anubian Embalmer takes care of the Initiate. In the traditional fashion, he has blackened his body with resin. He wears the Anubis mask. Together, they travel to one of Africa’s huge catacombs, and the Initiate is lowered into it.
Down there in the darkness, surrounded by his ancestors’ bones, he waits. He eats insects and corpse flesh that the Embalmer throws into the shaft. He devours rotten mash mixed with drugs. The sounds from the darkness, amplified by the poison growing within him, make him teeter on the brink of madness. Ghostlike, he stumbles through the stony innards of the catacombs, stared at by skulls – until his humanity is burnt away and he confronts Anubis himself. The visions are terrible, but he surrenders himself to them. His cries fall silent, he sinks down as he feels his wave break.
REBIRTH
The Embalmer doesn’t let him die. He drags him back to the light, embalms him with scented oils, and bandages him like a mummy. For three days the Initiate remains like this, immobile. The oils draw the poison out of his body, and the heat washes it away. Through a straw, the Embalmer feeds him water, liter by liter.
On the fourth day after his symbolic, and almost real, death, he emerges from the spirit world into the world of the living. The Embalmer frees him from the bandages and greets the Anubian – still weak, but reborn in Anubis.
SEVEN CIRCLES
The Embalmer tattoos seven concentric Circles around the reborn’s navel. With quick movements, he injects the paint under the skin, using a different pot of white paint for every Circle. It is a concoction that only the Anubians from the forbidden city of Cairo can mix up – seven shades of white, seven different recipes. The Embalmer follows the rite step by step, never once deterring from the traditional order of Circles and colors. To the Initiate, the Circles symbolize the wave on which every living being drifts towards death, but also the world created by Anubis.
The Embalmer carries only five Circles on his body. Why? He explains that the Circles show how far an Anubian has come on his journey into the secrets of the world. How close he is to his mind’s sun, Anubis. The Initiates move on the outmost Circle, the Enchanters on the sixth one, the Embalmers, Sickles, and Healers on the fifth. The honorable Hogons have left the four outer Circles behind and stand on the third one. They decide when an Anubian is ready to leave his Circle.
THE WAVE BREAKS
When an African’s wave runs out, an Anubian appears at his side. He anoints the dying person, presenting him to the ancestors. When the body bucks for the last time and finally grows cold, the Anubian takes the deceased with him to the Bonefield. There, he puts a scarab into the deceased’s mouth, closes his jaws, and lets his Anansi spiders spin a cocoon around the body. After a few days, he inspects the cocoon and bandages it. He chases away the spiders – they will tell the forest spirits about the death – and puts small Uschebtis figurines under the corpse’s bandages.
They are supposed to protect the deceased from demons on his journey to Osiris and Anubis. Only then can the Anubian bury the mummy in the earth in his Bonefield.
INITIATED
In the first years, an Anubian learns the rules and arts of the Cult from his Embalmer. He is instructed in the rites of burial and studies the meaning of the insects and spiders. For days, he wanders the fringes of the Psychovores, listening to the whispering of the leaves and of the ancestors: a thousand small steps that spiritually strengthen and confirm the Anubians, a thousand distractions that push the necessary things into the distance.
But at some point, there’s no way back.
Finally, he exposes himself to the Raze.
TO ANUBIS' RIGHT HAND
For most people, the Psychovores hold nothing but madness and death. Their thorns are hard as glass; one scratch is enough to make necrotic abscesses bloat the skin, eating away at the flesh within minutes until they reach the bone, infecting it, growing through it until it collapses and breaks under the weight of the decaying flesh. The ripe fruit and lush leaves are just as dangerous. Within, they are compartmentalized in hundreds of chambers with crystalline walls. Every chamber is filled with epigenetically active substances. When they come in contact with human cells, they cause genetic aberrations leading to a spontaneous dying of the cells, the so-called Raze. The mutation jumps from cell to cell, spreading extremely fast. The infected organism decays in minutes. There is no cure.
The only exceptions are the seeds used by Europe’s Scourgers. Bitten in two, they break into a thousand splinters that enter the gums and the mucosae like glass. They don’t kill, but strengthen the Warui outside of Africa. Their effects are not generated in the stomach or the guts, but via the blood. The Anubians are almost immune to the Raze. The thorns still cause festering wounds, but the high-ranking Hogons can heal them within hours.
The Anubians’ blood reacts with the Psychovore poisons, binding them and creating synergetic compounds. This leads to super cells that flood the organism. They synthesize proteins that in turn react catalytically to other Psychovore substances. The Anubian body turns into a bioreactor the complexity of which grows with every added substance: a Spitalian would barely recognize an Anubian blood sample in this phase as human.
The Anubians use this to their advantage. They venture deep into the Psychovores to harvest the cherished Duat fruit, smash them, and chew the pieces. The Raze eats away at their mucosae and cheeks, but the cells are reanimated only seconds later. The poison drags them into Anubis’s realm. Their immune system collapses. Blackness runs through their veins and trickles into the flesh like running paint. In the first minutes of transition, their blood degenerates to a highly toxic concoction.
They die.
They stand in front of the jackal-headed one, placing their soul onto the balance of his scales. In the shadows, they feel Ammit, the devourer of souls. They stare into eyes that are cold and deep as stellar mists.
The bioreactor kicks in. The body vibrates from heat. The heart pounds and circulates the seething blood. A honey-like ichor wells from glands under the tongue, in the armpits, and in the groin. The body’s blackness disappears. They are grabbed, torn away from Anubis’s throne, come back into life wincing.
Depending on the potency of the Duat fruit, the rigor mortis has taken minutes or days. Some Anubians become covered in the Psychovores as if in a cocoon, having to free themselves from brittle loops. Their blood is now highly potent. Drained and mixed with earth and herbs it can heal, soothe pain, or stimulate body and spirit. With time, Anubians learn the properties their blood has gained through the catalysis of various Duat fruits.
ANANSI SPIDERS
Thousands of red figures scuttle across the planes or dive into Anubis’s grass seas: the red Anansi spiders, hairless and fistsized. They are the Anubians’ companions and have been inscribed into the wave by Anubis himself. The spiders are considered fickle creatures imbued with the spirit of a trickster, and they are said to have a will of their own: to persuade them to spin a cocoon around a body and conserve it for eternity is considered an art that an Embalmer has to master.
In fact, the spiders react to the embalming oil as if they had been bred for just this task.
TRANSFORMATION
One night, the Hogons stand in front of the Anubian, arms and faces pitch black and smelling of resin. Silently, they hand him a canopic jar bearing the head of a jackal for its lid. The jar is black, freezing cold, heavy, and smooth as glass. The head can be screwed off. Inside, there is a viscous white liquid. Could this be resin from the tree of life? Only Cairo knows the answer, and Cairo is buried under Psychovores.
As the Anubian lifts the canopic jar to his lips ripples form in the liquid. It flows unaturally towards his mouth. Small tendrils shoot out, piercing his lips, hardening and then breaking under the pressure of the flood that follows. The tongue is split open by an onslaught of roiling fluid. There is a crackling and cracking, and the canopic jar’s contents surge faster than they could be poured into the Anubian’s mouth.
Death.
Days later, the Anubian awakens. His tongue is swollen and dry, and the ribs are visible under his skin. His fingers touch the Circles on his belly. There is something wrong: the outer ring is missing. It is just gone, as if it had never been tattooed at all.
Every transformation deletes the outermost ring. The Hogons know what has happened – but they will not explain yet.
KEEPERS OF THE SECRETS
The Anubian Cult is ancient. Every generation collected a new layer of knowledge that was already a mystery generations later. It is said that the oldest layers are hidden in Cairo, under the pyramid in the halls of records.
There is talk of great miracles: of a subterranean lake on which two pyramids jut from the water, of a labyrinth of tunnels, shafts, and halls, of giant machines made of brass and wolfram that obey only those above the wave.
But as long as Cairo is unreachable for everyone who has more than two Circles, these are only stories.
Still, the people see the Anubians as keepers of secrets. No one dares to resist the Anubian or deny him anything. An Initiate becomes an Enchanter after his first transformation. He names the price the spirits of the forests and plains can ask for their benevolent behavior. He guides the Scourgers so they can fulfill their task as guardians of the traditions. He bandages the deceased and guides them into the afterlife. In the sixth and seventh Circles, an Anubian is shrouded in mysticism and superstition. He adorns himself with skulls, draws spirals and circles on his body, lives in a hut of bones just like his predecessor. In the scarab he sees divine power of creation, he carves Uschebtis figurines from alabaster in preparation for the burial rites. He moves in tune with the people, listens to the whispering of the ancestors, and meditates.
OSSUARIES
The African people simultaneously worship and fear the Anubians. The shamans are solitary figures who look for quiet on cemeteries or ancient battlefields, far away from the hubbub of the villages.
Like jackals, they roam between the graves and steal the bones that the wind or the rain has unearthed. From them, they build ossuaries in which to live and mix their concoctions.
TRUE
With every transformation, with every Circle that the Anubian masters, he loses some of the superstition. As a Healer and later as a Hecatean, he gains more and more of an empirical mind, becoming someone who looks for Duat fruit and catalyzes them. Yet he still presents himself to the people as a spiritual healer, bargaining with Anubis for the life of the ill.
When he takes the sickle and becomes an Ammit, he lets go of all rites that avail to nothing. As a warrior and guardian, he only knows action and reaction, listening to the ancestors and feeling the pull of the glaring Psychonaut Chakras. When speaking with the Scourgers, he will claim to protect the wave of creation.
As an Embalmer, and in his next transformation as a Soul Seer, he uses the superstition. He is judge and counselor, leads villages and guides Africa’s war efforts. The Psychovores part for him and enclose his enemies. He can shut out the whispering of some of the ancestors and make room for others – not because he prays or meditates, but because he has understood the principle. Because he’s the key and the Psychovores are the lock. The people believe that ancestral spirits accompany him to pay their debts to Anubis. They believe that the spirits imbue the Psychovores. He lets them believe whatever they want to.
The last transformation before the transition to Cairo is the Hogon. He’s far removed from his roots as a reborn Anubian. When he hands out the canopic jars, he watches the transformation. He has been present at hundreds of them and has seen the physical changes during every single one of them. Sure, those changes were few, and meaningless in and of themselves. Fingers became thinner or more delicate, hair became darker, eyebrows became thinner or moved a tiny bit.
He’s in contact with the Spitalians and discusses these phenomena with them. How could he speak out against the white doctors for the last decades? What a lack of knowledge! Aside from the Anubians, no one is closer to the secrets than them.
He also recognizes the circular tattoo on his belly for what it is: an indicator for the transformation. The molecules induced by the paint react to epigenetic transformation. Only when it is successful are these molecules destroyed and the Circle vanishes.
But why? Why adapt?
The next transformation brings him a little closer to the truth.
Only two Circles to go.
THE SICKLE
Anubians feel Psychonauts at a distance of many hundreds of meters: they experience the Aberrant’s presence as a malaise.
When a Dushani approaches the Anubian clutches his aching throat, when a Pregnoctic approaches he feels a burning pain between the eyebrows.
The Psychonautic Chakra, the blazing star on the body’s axis, changes an Anubian’s Chakra to a dying planet. If the Anubian wants to survive, he has to lift up his Khopesh and cut the thread between himself and the Psychonaut at the exit spot in the Aberrant’s body.
He parts the flesh where his own pain smolders, drags the blade upwards, following the strands, and pushes the steel back down again. The last inflammatory site is cut open, fear and energies flow out like pus. The Psychonaut collapses, but it’s not the flowing blood that weakens him. The source of his power is leaking and spills into the ether. His heart may still be beating, but his soul has gone. The Anubian, though, is healed. Cramps and pain disappear in yesterday’s shadows as he cleans his blade and marches forth into the unholy land.
The most sensitive and energetic ones amongst them are known as Sickles. Sideby- side with the Neolibyans, they travel the north and destroy the Aberrants where the Neolibyans’ coup de grace only tears the flesh without touching the soul.
THE ANCESTORS
The Psychovores are amplifiers. They receive human aspects and emotions, channel and filter them through the network and into that which Anubians and Spitalians call the ether. Soul Seers know how to superimpose those waves with their own emotions and channel them back into the extraterrestrial vegetation.
However, Anubians rarely trigger the whisper of the ancestors. Somewhere in the misty jungles, mountains, and deserts of Africa, it pulses within the Psychovores. The Anubians are always looking for its sources.
They follow ancient drawings on brittle maps, listening to the whisper, letting themselves be guided by it. Usually the wave breaks, and the Anubians have wandered thousands of kilometers into nothing. But sometimes they find stairs leading down. Down into prehistoric vaults, into labyrinths made of glass and polished sandstone. Behind false walls, protected by pitfalls and dead ends, the first people slumber, preserved in beautiful sarcophagi eons old made of gold, lapis lazuli, and chrome.
No Anubian with more than two Circles has ever seen one of these ancient ones. It is said that the sarcophagi are indestructible, and only an opening ritual in Cairo can unlock them. The long chain of the Thread of Life is said to be impeccable in them, inscribed into them by Anubis himself. No wrong letter, no errant passage disturbs the perfection. They are like him. In them, he will one day walk the earth.
If one of these vaults is found, the Hogons will soon arrive. They take the sarcophagi from their bracings and carry them to a necropolis near to Cairo. They may not, cannot approach any further. The whispering of the ancients above the vault fades, only to be replaced by other waves shortly afterwards.
THE SOLAR CROSS
Concentric circles, the jackal’s head, bones, and sickle play important roles in Anubian symbolism. But in the inner circles, the symbols lose their meaning, just as the Circles around the navel disappear. In their stead, the solar cross now appears – a cross made of four fours. The Hogons say it includes the absolute truth about past and future, being some sort of theory of everything. The Jackal’s Prophecy which leaked out into the world decades ago from Cairo is based on it.
BOOKS OF THE DEAD
The Egyptians and the first people put books of the dead into their graves, mystical milestones into the dangerous afterlife. When the deceased’s soul finally reached the realm of the dead, it had to prove itself to Osiris and his 42 demonic assistants. If it was considered sinful, Ammit devoured the soul’s Ba. If it was considered worthy, though, it reached the celestial realm of the fields of Yaru. There, the corn was strong in the fields, and life was as it had been when the person was alive.
The Egyptians copied this practice from the Anubians. The books contain the complete listing of the deceased person’s life essence – in a language illegible to the living. Legend has it that only Anubis himself was able to decipher the script, and he was also the one to read it to Osiris and his demons. If the passages pleased the God of the underworld, he had the books sent to Yaru along with the spirit. However, if Osiris grew bored or angry from hearing the spirits deeds, he destroyed the writings with a simple gesture. Afterwards, even Anubis could not decipher them anymore.
Anubians retrieve books of the dead from the vaults of the first people. They are made of a deep, matte black material, and each one is massive and cannot be opened – they more closely resemble flat slabs than books. It is said that only Anubians with one or no Circles know what to make of them, but it is also said that the books will only open and talk to the Anubians once Anubis walks amongst the living again.
The Hogons gaze upon those who own books of the dead favorably. For you don’t just find these books – they let themselves be found. Those who own one will soon go through the next transformation.
THE FORBIDDEN CITY
Cairo lies protected, deep within the stranglehold of the Psychovores. The pyramids of Giza are said to be overgrown with bright plants glimmering in the light of the desert sun, as are the streets of the former metropolis.
Despite these legends, the Hogons are all called here after their transformation from third to second Circle, deep into a venomous jungle that holds nothing more than death by necrotic ulcers and crippling madness for most people.
The African people have long fled far away from the Nile’s poisonous waters. None of the formerly numerous African tribes living on its fertile banks remain in the vicinity of Cairo. Supposedly the temples of the ancestors are in use again, but it remains unclear what happens there. Nothing gets out.
Anubians who have broken from their ranks and hoped to uncover the secret of Cairo have ventured into the Psychovores only to stumble back into the settlements from which they set out days later. Their skin is scratched by thorns: putrid pustules covering the whole body weep stinking pus as the necrosis sets in. They are infected with the Raze. It will kill them. Their supposed immunity will only make them suffer longer. The message is clearly visible to everyone: Cairo is taboo.
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