Consciousness returned not as a gentle dawn, but as a violent, blinding glare. The sun burned overhead, merciless and overwhelming.
He lay on his back, the heat pressing into him like a physical weight, pinning him against a coarse, shifting bed of sand. His first sensation was thirst, a raw, rasping fire in his throat that made swallowing painful.
His second was a profound and terrifying emptiness. A void where a name, a past, a reason for being should have been.
There was nothing.
No memories. No identity. He was a slate wiped clean, abandoned in hell.
He pushed himself upright, his muscles screaming in protest. Every joint ached with a deep, settled soreness, the kind that spoke of long, unnatural slumber.
His movements were slow and unsteady, as if his body remembered strain his mind could not.
He looked down at himself.
He wore tattered, earth-toned clothing: durable trousers ripped at the knee, a linen shirt frayed at the cuffs, and sturdy boots scuffed and worn from long use. The clothes felt wrong, like they belonged to someone else.
Not him.
His hands were calloused, the skin tanned and weathered by sun and labor, yet they felt unfamiliar, like detached tools without context.
Who is this man?
The question echoed in the hollow chamber of his mind and found nothing to grasp. No answer came.
The world around him was desolation.
Endless dunes of ochre and burnt sienna rolled away toward every horizon, their ridges carved sharp by an unceasing wind that whispered of dust and forgotten centuries.
The sky above was a vast, and of pale blue color empty of clouds, empty of birds, nothing, total emptiness and total quietness.
Here and there, the skeletal remains of structures jutted from the sand like broken teeth: twisted metal frames and crumbling concrete husks, half-buried by the relentless desert.
It was a graveyard of a world, and the sun shine over it with indifferent cruelty.
Panic rose, cold and sharp, clawing at his chest. But it was quickly smothered by something stronger.
Thirst.
Survival instincts surged where memory had failed. Water. He needed water.
He scanned the horizon, his eyes gritty and aching. Heat-devils danced along the dunes, bending the air and forming mirages and shimmering suggestions of distant lakes.
He knew, without knowing how, that they were lies. His body understood this place even if his mind did not.
He chose a direction at random, toward a cluster of larger, more defined ruins in the distance, and began to walk.
Each step was an effort. His boots sank into the soft sand, dragging at his legs. The sun shine down relentlessly, cooking the air until even breathing felt laborious. The silence was absolute, broken only by the sigh of the wind and the crunch of his own footsteps.
It was the kind of silence that felt heavy.
Watchful.
Hours blurred together, measured only by the slow crawl of the sun toward the west. The ruins never seemed to grow closer, a cruel distortion of distance.
His thirst became a living torment, tightening his throat and hollowing his thoughts.
What little remained of his mind narrowed to a single command.
Water.
It was then, as hope began to fray, that he saw it.
Not a mirage, but a real fracture in the land, a dark, shadowed line cutting through the sand. A ravine. A wound in the desert's skin.
Where there were ravines, there could be shade. Shelter?. Perhaps moisture?. Perhaps life?.
With a surge of adrenaline that pushed back his exhaustion, he stumbled forward and slid down the steep incline. Sand shifted beneath him as he descended, but when he reached the bottom, the air changed.
It was cooler.
The harsh glare of the sun faded, replaced by dim, earthy shadow. The ravine was narrow, its walls formed of layered rock and compacted sand.
He followed its winding path, scanning the ground and stone with desperate focus, searching for any sign of green, any hint of water.
He found none.
But he found something else.
Set into a sheer rock wall, sheltered from wind and erosion, stood a large, flat stone.
A stele.
Its surface was carved with symbols and intricate markings that felt alien yet disturbingly familiar. Birds, eyes, serpents, and rigid geometric forms intertwined in deliberate patterns.
Hieroglyphs.
The word surfaced unbidden in his mind, a fragment of knowledge from a life he could not reach.
He ran his fingers along the carvings. The stone was cool beneath his touch. Most of the inscription was dense and unreadable, its meaning sealed away from him. But near the bottom, a single line of larger symbols stood apart.
He stared at them, his brow tightening in concentration.
The shapes seemed to shift as he looked at them, rearranging themselves in his mind. Then, with a sudden jolt, understanding struck clear and unmistakable, as if the words had been spoken aloud.
He did not know the language yet he understood.
"The Curse of the Pharaoh will be unleashed upon those who dare to disturb his eternal rest."
The words hung in the still air of the ravine.
A curse. A pharaoh.
The concepts felt vast, ancient, and deeply dangerous. A chill crept through him that had nothing to do with thirst or heat. This was a deeper fear it is an instinctive warning.
This message was not merely history. It was a boundary and he had crossed it.
Hidden from the sun and carved into stone, this warning felt less like an ending and more like an opening.
Not just the beginning of something ancient.
But the beginning of him.