Children of Anubis

Anubis is one of several servants of Demegolas, Lord of Malstaris. Anubis is in charge of seeing that the shades of the dead reach Malstaris and stay there, and of weighing their souls to decide which way they go: into the Gardens of Glyss, the paradise within Demegolas's palace, or out into the Black Wastes, which is the name given to everything beyond it.

Long ago, while walking the material plane, Anubis set his mark on a line of mortals and bound them to carry his work among the living. The mark is not blood, and it grants no kinship with him. It is a command, written into flesh in the titans' tongue, the same Deoric that costs life to speak and binds reality to its meaning once spoken. What this command commands is its own continuance. It copies itself from parent to child without fail, generation after generation, and so the marked line has never died out and cannot. No child of the line is born without it. None has ever set it down.

All children are born with the ability to communicate with Anubis on Malstaris. As they grow up, they can choose to serve Anubis, or turn their back on him and leave his guidance forever. This choice typically manifests during adolescence, marking them forever as either Servants or Forsaken.

This is the shape of the thing, though no living person agreed to it. Anubis is bound to Malstaris and cannot do his work among the breathing himself, so the marked line is how he reaches the near side of death: his hands and his eyes in a world he cannot walk anymore. They, for their part, are born owing him an answer. The mark hands every child the same question and forces it to be settled in adolescence, to serve and hunt the dead back to their proper place, or to turn from him and keep the power for ends of their own. Refusing to choose is not on offer. The mark does not grant the option of being nothing, and a child of Anubis who wants no part of either road still wakes every morning able to feel the weight of every soul they touch.

A Servant lays her hand on a dying man's chest in a plague-ward and goes still, the way they all go still in that moment, reading a weight no scale could measure. The man never learns what she has found. She does not tell him. Whatever she felt, the mark on her will pass to her children unchanged, and one of them will stand over some other stranger's chest the same way a hundred years from now, knowing the same thing.

Regardless of which path they follow, all children of Anubis are capable of weighing the souls of those they touch, a power carried in Anubis's mark that lets them perceive the moral weight of a person's deeds.

Vitals

• Size: Medium
• Height: 5.5-6.5 feet
• Weight: 120-200 pounds
• Max Age: 160 years

Heritages

• Servants of Anubis — Devoted death-hunters who maintain the natural order, eliminating undead and guiding lost souls to Malstaris. See Servants of Anubis.
• Forsaken of Anubis — Self-appointed judges who wield divine inheritance for personal justice, feeding souls to Ammit with no divine restriction. See Forsaken of Anubis.