She turned to the sound of her dog crying. Dog Gone, a silhouette, otherworldly against the mother-of-pearled sky. He began to gallop toward a distant black speck of a figure walking down the beach.

Dog Gone. The dog that had come to her after Cyrus vanished. Just as Ever had come to her.

And then Aurora knew. Sky perverted the myth by trying to control it, by trying to claim it as hers alone, but in some ways the truth of it remained.

Isis was born in the desert. Her mother-betrayer laid herself out upon her lover, the earth, her belly a great blue egg speckled with stars. Geb impregnated Nut with his trees and his mountains, his fields of wheat stalks and corn. Isis and her brothers and sister burst forth in the light of their grandfather Sun, the maker of all, the bright dung beetle in the sky, the golden scarab, the all-seeing eye.

She and her brother-husband bathed in the lotus pool, anointed each other’s pulses with fragrant oil of myrrh and frankincense, adorned each other’s brows with garlands, adorned each other’s eyes with lapis, tourmaline, and emerald, adorned each other’s lips and hearts with carnelian, adorned each other’s skin with gold. Hummingbirds thrummed at their necks and wrists. Butterflies flew from their lips when they opened their mouths. Their scapulae sprouted wings. They let the wild flowers grow unfettered. Bees hummed and their hives sang like lyres.

They went forth hand-in-hand to irrigate dry land, to plant wheat and corn, to weave fine linen and make barley beer and date wine. They were not wasteful. They burned the wick all night and wasted no light. Draped in white linen and gauze she knelt before him and offered him her breasts; she straddled him and offered his staff to the cleft between her thighs.

When you create, you sacrifice a little of yourself, a little of your seed, a small blue egg. When two bodies struggle against each other in the war of love, a child may be conceived. Children are gods and goddesses, slick with blood as they arrive in this world. When you paint a story on the temple wall you lose a little blood. But when you are done, you will walk the flower path dripping with hyacinth, fragrant with calamus, unfurling the blue lotus in the silver pool; you will walk forth into the flower fields of peace.