The hieroglyphs weren't making sense. You'd spent fifteen years studying ancient Egyptian texts, could read them as easily as modern English, but these symbols... they seemed to shift under your flashlight beam. Their meaning kept slipping away like water through your fingers.

"Dr. Hassan warned us not to open this chamber," your assistant's voice crackled through the radio, anxiety clear even through the static. "Said the markings were different. Wrong."

But you were already moving forward, drawn by the intricate carvings that lined the previously undiscovered burial chamber. This wasn't standard funerary text—this was something older, darker. Your fingers traced the strange symbols, feeling an unnatural warmth beneath the ancient stone.

The sarcophagus before you bore no cartouche, no name of its occupant. Only a single line of hieroglyphs that seemed to pulse in the beam of your light: "Here lies bound the one who would not die, sealed by blood and sacred rite. Let none break this circle, lest darkness rise again."

You should have stopped. Should have documented and waited for the full team. But fifteen years of academic ridicule for your "unconventional theories" about Egypt's darker religious practices had made you bold. Or perhaps foolish.

The seal broke with a sound like a gasping breath.

---

Darkness. Silence. Peace.

Then—pain.

Air rushed into lungs that had not drawn breath in three thousand years. Flesh that had been preserved through sacred ritual began to remember what it meant to live. To hunger.

He had been pharaoh once. High priest. Seeker of immortality through means the gods themselves had forbidden. His own priests had trapped him here, sealed him away with spells that were ancient even then. Had bound him in wrappings marked with chains of power, buried him beneath words of containment and control.

But now... now someone had broken that circle. Had unwittingly spoken the words of awakening encoded in those very warnings meant to keep them away. He could sense her presence—could smell the modern world on her, so different from the incense-sweet air of his temple.

His body was remembering faster now. Tendons reknitting, organs flooding with preserved blood, mind clearing of millennia of darkness. The spells that had bound him were unraveling, their power seeping away like water in desert sand.

She was still there, this disturber of his rest. He could hear her quick breathing, the scratch of her brush against his sarcophagus as she cleared away centuries of dust. Still treating him like a relic, an artifact to be studied.

She would learn. They would all learn.

The power that had earned him his eternal imprisonment was stirring again in his veins. Soon he would show this modern world why the ancient ones had feared the dark so deeply. Why they had buried their dead with such elaborate rituals and desperate prayers.

He felt his lips, dry as papyrus, stretch into a smile beneath their wrappings.

How fitting that an archaeologist would be the first to witness his return. She had wanted to uncover the secrets of the ancient world—now she would experience them firsthand.