Douglas's gaze slid past the sarcophagus.
His attention was snagged, arrested, by a pile of something in the tomb's far corner.
Bones.
But unlike the bleached-white remains littering the floor, these were a sickening, unnatural gray-black. The bones were web-cracked, as if something had swelled and rotted from the inside out for millennia. Not broken by force. This looked like… self-destruction.
Beside the gray-black bones lay a scatter of shattered pottery.
Bill followed Douglas's stare. His brow furrowed instantly.
"An eighth urn?"
He strode over, voice thick with disbelief. The fragments were nothing like the seven outside. Not Nile clay, but a cold, black basalt. Bill crouched, not touching it. He tapped the largest fragment with his wand-tip.
A spike of pure cold shot up the wand-core. Not magical chill. This was a hollow, ravenous emptiness. Like his wand was butter, the fragment a red-hot brand, trying to suck the magic—the life—right out of it.
Bill yanked his wand back.
Douglas stepped closer. His own senses screamed.
His fingers just grazed the black basalt. In his mind, the world screamed back. A silent, shrieking keen.
This wasn't just magic.
This was a tearing.
He tasted it—the rust-metallic tang of a soul being ripped away. He heard it—the groaning protest of life-force, twisted, forced into a vessel that couldn't hold it. It was familiar. So like Voldemort's Horcruxes, but older. Cruder. Filled with a volatile, failed rage.
"This wasn't a seal," Douglas said, standing. His voice cut the tomb's silence clean.
"This is a failed container."
His eyes moved from the shards to the gray-black bones. A terrible idea clicked into place.
"An object meant to hold… a torn soul. It couldn't bear the strain. It broke. And it broke whatever—whoever—was holding it with it."
He thought of the old Head Boy. Of Herpo the Foul. Had someone, long before, on this sand-and-god-scorched earth, already walked that forbidden path? That road to a false forever?
This shadow-priest, Ankh-Ka. He hadn't just left a story of guardians and sacrifice.
He'd left evidence. Proof of a much older, much darker experiment. And it had failed.
Then.
A patch of shadow in the corner didn't retreat from their wandlight. It deepened. Grew thicker than the surrounding dark, like a piece of space had been cut out.
Slowly, silently, that patch of shadow peeled itself upright from the wall. A two-dimensional silhouette projected into three dimensions. No features. No substance. Just pure, moving darkness.
When Douglas and Bill looked at it, they both felt a cold "gaze" sweep over them. Then settle on the shattered black pottery.
Bill's eyes widened. He snapped his wand up, moving instinctively to block Douglas.
"The Stowaway of the Field of Reeds…" His voice was bone-dry with shock. "The legend was true. He traded his own shadow to Anubis. To bring her back."
The thing—the Shadow—lifted a flat, jointless hand.
It pointed at Douglas.
A silent, wordless thought-flow, cold as groundwater, seeped into both their minds.
Understanding… not opposition.
For millennia, you are the first. To fight oblivion with memory.
The Shadow bent. A slow, impossibly deep bow from its two-dimensional form. An ancient gesture of respect.
It straightened. Its mere presence warped the light, the dark. Thinned the air, made it colder.
I am the Shadow of Ankh-Ka. The persistence of his thought.
The silent voice flowed again, no longer cold, but ancient. Tired. Like a scroll, dust-sealed for ages, finally finding someone to listen.
The Shadow told a story. Nothing like the legend.
Ankh-Ka was no guardian. No prisoner. He was a seeker who took a wrong turn.
Images, faded like tomb paintings, unfolded in Douglas and Bill's minds.
Obsessed with the soul's secrets. Convinced the Egyptian concepts—the Ka, the Ba, the Akh—were steps on a ladder to immortality, not the end. He believed if he could separate the core of the soul, the Ba of memory and self, from the life-force Ka, just before the final judgement… he could fool Osiris's scales.
So Ankh-Ka devised a forbidden art. An art never seen before.
A vision flashed for Douglas: the priest atop a temple under a full moon, a blade of black obsidian carving intricate runes into his own chest. The agony wasn't self-harm. It was a ritual. A tearing.
He didn't murder another. At the peak of his own vitality, through this excruciating rite, he tore his own soul. Into seven pieces.
He sealed each piece into an urn. An urn fired and tempered by a single, powerful emotion. A disguise. A thick cloak for a soul-shard, to hide from Anubis's ever-watchful gaze.
He hid these seven urns. Across Egypt. At points aligned with celestial patterns, to draw power from the world itself.
Seven locations, their coordinates and vistas, flooded Douglas's consciousness.
One urn, buried at the unmapped source of the Nile, crushed by millions of tons of water, pulsing with the heart of Africa.
One urn, dropped into the Red Sea's deepest trench, where no light reached, only glowing, monstrous fish.
Another, placed beneath the foundations of Alexandria's fallen lighthouse, buried under the dust of dead civilizations.
Each site, thrumming with raw, primal power.
He had miscalculated.
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