Past Moon Knight \\ for Moontober 2025.
Y'all know I had to do it. My man Arthur Harrow B) I always pictured him being very priest-y rather than warrior-y idk it makes sense in my head
Reality, he had concluded, was a fragile construct. An agreement upon neurons, and little more. The mind, unwilling to face its own extinction, drew lines around chaos and called them objects. Memory. Self.
Perhaps that was all faith had ever been; pattern recognition.
Arthur Harrow stood before a glass case, containing nothing but a fragment of painted limestone. The description read of an offering scene, of a tomb from 1350 BCE. The colors were preserved well enough that one could still make out the faint gesture of a hand presenting fruit to a god long since dismantled; it was, by any measure, a gorgeous thing.
A ruined thing.
Once, Arthur had found himself believing that beauty was the evidence of order. Where symmetry appeared, there must be meaning; but now it only reminded him of bone. The architecture of suffering, neat and crisp. Calcium, as the textbooks said, arranged into utility.
Every skeleton had form.
He was unremarkable to the museum's other visitors. A quiet man in plain clothing, attentive but distant. There was no evidence that his eyes had witnessed the underworld, that he had once spoken to gods who spoke back.
Every placard here was written by men who had never touched the divine, and so could afford to romanticize it.
Belief.
Devotion.
Ritual.
Every word was sterilized and neatly labeled, like the remnants of an extinct disease. He couldn't help but wonder, breifly, what his own exhibit would read; perhaps that he was a priest of Ammit. Perhaps that he was known for his unwavering conviction.
Perhaps his cause of death.
The mind was not built to survive gods. It adapted. It rewired, it carved new patterns around the void the gods cut out. What remained was functional but false, a reconstructed skull missing the original bone. The neurons continued to fire, but meaning was gone. It happened to every avatar.
It happened to Arthur. It would happen to Marc. Steven.
Steven was easy to think of. The earnestness in his voice, his love for the museum that Arthur had forced him out of. Steven believed in this, in preservation - Arthur believed in destruction. Opposites that had circled each other for only a short time, the moon and the sun meeting only to leave.
He imagined Steven still here, for just a moment; ghostlike, lecturing some crowd about the moral paradox of mummification, or the culural theft of colonial exhibition. A voice that was bright and cracked through with light; Harrow could almost hear it in the soft shuffle of shoes across tile, in the distant hum of the air conditioning. A phantom sound, he knew, one conjured by the brain's insistence to not let familiarity die.
It wasn't care. It wasn't regret. The words were too dramatic for something as simple as neural recall; this was the echo of routine. The mind's attempt to simulate proximity to what it once found meaningful, like phantom limb pain. The nervous system was screaming for an absence it refused to register, an awareness of his lack.
He passed through the Egyptian wing slowly, cane tapping, steps aligned with the pattern of the tiles.
Old habits. Symmetry. Control. Small devotions that survived the death of a faith. A sarcophagus stood at the center of this room, labeled with its provenance and nothing of its grief.
Death rendered safe for public consumption.
This was what museums did. They took horror and sealed it behind glass. They called it history.
Arthur thought, with clinical distance, that his own life could be curated in such a way. Horror sealed behind glass. A corpse stripped of its mess, of its god-sick fervor, of its failures. There would be a placard, a summary; an explanation that he had been a man of faith. That he had lived and died by the conviction that balance could ever be enforced.
He found himself pausing at a display of scales, something created in delicately reconstructed bronze. The craftsmanship was exquisite.
Perhaps Steven would have said something clever about Ma'at. Perhaps Marc would have called it bullshit. Perhaps Arthur, standing between them, would find himself agreeing with them both; or perhaps it was all just neurons misfiring in sequence, his mind simulating company in the unbearable quiet. Offering relief in place of guilt, as if imagination could ever undo what he had done.
He stood there for too long. He studied the scales until the reflection of his face was all he could see; glass, again.
Always glass between himself and meaning.
There was symmetry here, too, he thought. The kind found in tombs. Stillness mistaken for peace.
Arthur turned away from the display, his reflection fragmenting across the glass. The world continued, of course, indifferent to whether he believed it or not.
Finally, he moved toward the exit. The automatic doors slid open, and for a brief irrational moment he almost thought he saw the underworld again; the weight of his heart, the jaws of a beast beyond comprehension.
Outside, the afternoon light was pale and clean. He stepped into it carefully, as if the pavement might fall beneath him - of course, it didn't.
The museum was left behind him, preserving what he could no longer believe him.
\\ for Moontober 2025 : Sarcophagus
I'm aware this is not a sarcophagus but I love the knowledge that he was never given any kind of proper burial love yall kiss kiss
