Wouldn't It Be Better to Just Keep Me as a Dog? [Egyptian Mythology]

The traveler An came from a distant land, journeying to fulfill a marriage pact between her family of travelers and an Egyptian god. Along the way, she passed through a city as resplendent as gold, where she happened to buy a gloomy, antisocial young man at the local slave market.

The man had broad shoulders and a narrow waist, with striking, perfectly proportioned features like a figure from a finely detailed painting. Yet most of his face was concealed by a leather animal mask.

The slave merchant said, “He’s a dog, a bad dog that bites.”

At the time, the naive An thought it was just an exaggeration.

She wanted him because he was strong, cheap, and healthy. So she bought him, thinking he could help carry her luggage.

The merchant was right. He really was a vicious dog: wary, cunning, violent, and strangely obedient... Yet, unexpectedly, he was loyal.

While they were together, she had to put up with his excessively feral behavior and undisguised stares. And she had to endure his increasingly blatant and forceful trespasses across the boundaries between them.

Until one day, the little slave cornered her and firmly claimed that he was Anubis, fallen into misfortune because his half-brother had schemed against him. He said he could only return to his homeland if the person he loved acknowledged him.

She looked at the temple murals beside her, half laughing and half crying. “...Do you think I’ve never read your country’s mythology?”

Then she started hallucinating. The man transformed out of thin air into a black hound over two meters long.

“...”

An had found the person she was promised to marry. It wasn’t Anubis, but his younger brother.

Anubis deeply regretted coming clean to An, and asked what he was supposed to do if she got married.

An decided to restore his status as a free man. After all, no one would dare enslave a god.

Anubis was furious. Anubis was hurt. Anubis questioned her: the person he loved was going to marry his younger brother, yes, they were about to fulfill their marriage pact, but what did that have to do with him? The three of them could each have their own arrangement.

“Wouldn’t it be better to just keep me as your dog?”

No, it wasn’t that it wouldn’t be better... An thought. It just didn’t seem quite right.

[Reader Advisory]

1. Dog-training romance + Egyptian road story. Anubis is the ancient Egyptian god who guards the entrance to the underworld. In this story, he is a highly aggressive, dog-like man with long, curly black hair.

2. Don’t get caught up in the power-scaling. There’s no intent to put down the strength of any of the Egyptian gods. Anubis ended up in the slave market because of his personality: as a young man, he was arrogant and reckless, and he had a love-hate relationship with his younger brother Horus. They often made bets, and he always honored them when he lost. (Entirely the author’s own invention.)

3. Multiple one-on-one pairings. Later on, the heroine gets involved with the hero’s brothers, uncles, and aunts in an all-in-the-family situation. The hero goes through some angst (but he enjoys it, so don’t worry about him). His mortal body has undergone physical castration, so please be aware. The author writes for fun and loves coming up with this kind of ridiculous stuff.

Anyway, I’m going to write about feeding a big, delicious dog.

Theme: Grow courageously and stride forward.