The pharaoh's warning echoed in the silent void of his mind. It was an anchor in the sea of his nothingness,a solid point of dread to cling to.
He stared at the stele, tracing the ominous glyphs with his eyes, trying to force more meaning from them.
Who was this pharaoh? What was this curse? And what did it have to do with a world already so thoroughly broken?
The questions were a swarm of insects, buzzing without answer. The only certainty was the cold knot tightening in his gut.
This is important.
This is why he was here.
________________________________________
As he was walking around, he found a house and inside there was a measure of shelter from the wind.
The figure collapsed against a wall, the rough texture of the stone a solid, grounding presence. The darkness was near total, broken only by the cold, distant light of a billion uncaring stars.
In the profound silence, the loneliness was a physical weight. Who am I? The question returned, no longer a panicked cry but a hollow, aching whisper in the void.
There was no answer. There was only the l wind, the sand, and the crushing weight of the unknown. The figure, who for now would be known only as X, curled into a ball against the cold stone, closed their eyes, and let the exhaustion claim them, praying they would not wake up.
But knowing, with a chilling certainty, that they would.
_______________________________________
The cold was what woke X. A deep, biting chill that had settled into the bones, a stark contrast to the furnace of the previous day.
The desert night was a black velvet shroud, and the stars were chips of ice scattered across it.
Shivering, X pushed into a sitting position, every muscle a knot of pain. The thirst was a constant companion, a dull, throbbing ache that had become the baseline of existence.
As the first hint of dawn painted the eastern horizon a fragile grey, X began to explore the ruin.
It was a single room structure, maybe a small house or an outpost from a time before the world had been scoured clean. Sand had drifted into dunes against the interior walls, and what little remained of its contents was broken and decayed.
A rusted metal frame might have been a bed. Splintered wood could have been a table or a chair. It was a tomb of a forgotten life, and in one corner, partially buried beneath a pile of debris and sand, was a metal box. It was dented and rusted, but the latch, though stiff, still held and with fumbling, numb fingers, X worked it open.
The hinges screamed in protest.
Inside, nestled amongst desiccated papers that crumbled to dust at the slightest touch, was a book. It was a small, leather-bound journal, its cover warped and stiff, the pages stained and yellowed with age and exposure.
Carefully, as if handling a sacred relic, X lifted it out. The leather was cracked and dry, but it held together. X opened it, the spine groaning.
The pages were filled with a spidery, frantic script, the ink faded in many places to a ghostly brown. Some pages were illegible, the words blurred by moisture long since evaporated. But others were clear enough.
"Day 47," one entry began. "The dust storm lasted three days. Our water is nearly gone. Hassan swears he saw shapes in the sand, things that weren't there before. He's been muttering about the curse again. I told him it was just the heat, the thirst playing tricks on his mind. But I saw them too. Skittering things at the edge of vision."
X's fingers trembled slightly, tracing the faded words. Curse. The word seemed to resonate with a strange familiarity, a cold dread that had nothing to do with the morning chill. X turned the page.
"Day 51. We found the tomb. Or what we think is the tomb. It wasn't supposed to be real. Just a story, a local legend. But the markings are just as the old texts described. Akhenaten. The Heretic King. We should have turned back. The air feels wrong here, it was heavy, and It gets inside your head. Last night, I dreamt of a black sun."
The script grew more erratic, the lines slanting wildly across the page. "Day 55. It's real. The Pharaoh's Curse. It's not just a story. It's a sickness. It got into Hassan. His eyes… they changed. He spoke in a voice that wasn't his, of a king betrayed, of a plague of the soul. He ran out into the wastes, screaming. We didn't go after him. We were too afraid."
X's heart hammered against their ribs. A plague of the soul. The phrase sent an inexplicable shiver down his spine. The final legible entry was barely a scrawl, the pen having dug deep into the paper.
"Day 60. I am the last one. The world is ending. Not with a bang, but with a whisper. A poison on the wind. It started with the tomb. It all comes back to the tomb. They shouldn't have opened it. Death will strike… wings…"
The rest was an indecipherable smear of ink.
X closed the journal, the weight of the words settling in the pit of their stomach. A Pharaoh's Curse, a tomb, and a sickness that changed people.
It sounded like the ravings of a mind broken by the desert, yet it felt chillingly real. It was the first piece of a puzzle X didn't even know they were trying to solve, a single thread in the vast, empty tapestry of their forgotten life.
The sun was climbing now, its heat beginning to reclaim the land.
The need for water was becoming critical. X tucked the journal into the waistband of their tattered trousers, a small, solid weight against their hip. Leaving the relative shelter of the ruin, X scanned the horizon. The landscape was the same in every direction: a desolate, beautiful, and deadly sea of sand.
But the journal had given X something more valuable than shelter. It had given him a word, a name. Akhenaten. And with it, a sliver of purpose to find out what it means.
The ruins were part of a larger, almost completely buried settlement. X spent the next hour exploring the skeletal remains of other buildings, finding nothing but more sand and decay. It was a ghost town, a monument to a forgotten failure.
As X was about to give up and continue the blind trek across the wastes, something caught their eye. It was a slab of stone, half-buried in the sand at the edge of the settlement, its surface covered in carved symbols.
X knelt, hands digging frantically at the sand, clearing the surface of the stone. It was a stele, weathered by centuries of wind and sun. The carvings were hieroglyphs. And somehow, inexplicably, X could read them.
The knowledge was just there, a phantom limb of the mind, flexing as if it had never been gone. The symbols were stark, a clear and potent warning.
A falcon with outstretched wings, a coiled serpent, a seated king. The translation flowed into X's mind, unbidden and absolute.
"Death will strike with its poisonous wings anyone who disturbs the peace of the king."
The words from the journal. Here, carved in stone. It wasn't a madman's raving. It was real. A cold dread, far colder than the desert night, washed over X. This was not just a random awakening in a desolate wasteland.
This was the heart of something.
A story had begun long before X had woken up in the sand, and now, standing before this
ancient warning, X knew with a terrifying certainty that he were no longer just a survivor.
He were a part of it.