In a fit of amusement, the Augury Department today presented me with something I recognized immediately: a short story that I wrote during my time-normal life. Unable to read my native language, they presented it unaware of this fact, but we had a good laugh over it once I saw the transcript. It is only a fragment, but it goes like this:
One morning, when Horus woke from centuries of troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his fleshy back, and if he lifted his feathered head, he could see his belly, slightly domed and also covered in hair. His legs, pitifully thin compared with his once powerful frame, would have made him laugh if he saw them on someone else.
"What's happened to me?" he thought. It was no dream. His room, and its four familiar sandstone walls, stood around him as always. On the table, laid out, he could see his ankh, staff, and crown--Horus was a nobleman--and above it hung a picture that he recently took from an illustrated magazine and housed in a fine gilded frame. It showed a lady, her scales glinting in the sunlight, her upper arms clad in fur, and her lower two arms clasped around her tail.
When I wrote this, I believe it was for some form of creative writing assignment, with the prompt that it must be an homage to some literary great, but with a fantastical twist. As you can see, I picked Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but added something of Egyptian myth, as well as something else. Given the mythic undertones in my recent work on the neo-Aegean data, I could not resist sharing this fragment with you. Perhaps I shall reconstruct the full story for you sometime in the future.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
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