[luxor] valley of the sleeping kings {nephthys}

To Ba’al, going to Abydos was like stepping through a portal into the past. It wasn’t because Egypt was somehow primitive or underdeveloped— in fact, in the recent years the Egypt was modernizing faster than it had in a long time. No, it wasn’t the metropolises that stole Ba’al’s attention, it was the places that were much older. He spent a great deal of time abroad, working with museums and governments digging up history and presenting it to the rest of the world. But when he came back to Egypt, his purpose was the exact opposite. Here his family was by almost all definitions living history. Their job was to keep history buried under miles and miles of sand for no one to find ever. The irony was not lost on the Egyptian man, and there was more than one occasion where he found himself torn between his family duty and his academic code.

This particular trip to Egypt had been rather impromptu, as his father’s summoning had come by way of a messenger, as opposed to a hawk. The messenger’s note was urgent enough that Ba’al had to quickly send an owl to the museum he was working with and Apparate back home. The trek out to the al-Ba’ith ancestral home was half a day by horse, and then the journey down the tunnels to the catacombs was another two hours. Tau and Kneph were waiting for him when he arrived at the bottom of the stairs and begun briefing him. As the three of them walked down the tunnels, the three generations of al-Ba’ith leaders, they were flanked by servants, who removed Ba’al’s jacket, button up, hat, and pants. Without missing a beat, they wrapped him in the white journeying cloak of an al-Ba’ith priest. Underneath the thick cloak he wore only white harem trousers and boots, the numerous tattoos on his body unhidden and completely ready for complete use.

Apparently the reason he had been summoned back to Abydos on such short notice was because his younger cousin Skaara had been injured while trying to reseal a tomb in the Valley of Kings. One of the main duties of the Ausar Priest was to make regular trips to the many, many tombs the family had helped build all those millennia ago and maintain the protective spells that were starting to fail. Somehow, on his last journey, Skaara had tripped a ward of some kind, one that didn’t belong to the al-Ba’ith and had been put in place by someone else. It wasn’t uncommon, since the Egyptian government was very concerned with restoring the old tombs and keeping them safe from tomb raiders. It also made sense because as far as the rest of the world should be concerned, the al-Ba’ith priests of the Old Kingdom are all long since dead. Ba’al, being the most senior and advanced of the current priests (not including his grandfather and father who had other duties to attend to), was being dispatched alone to investigate the tomb thoroughly and seal it back up.

Once he was out of his modern clothes and into the proper priest attire, he was taken back to the surface where his favorite stallion Rya’c, a giant Black Locust desert horse, was waiting for him. The saddlebags were already filled with supplies for the journey, and Ba’al covered his face and took off, throwing up hot golden sand as he rode. From Abydos to the Valley of Kings by horse was almost a five hour ride, sometimes more if he was worried about drawing attention. His family had a lot of rules and were very much old fashioned when it came to magic. Centuries ago he might have just Apparated to Luxor, but Kneph was adamant that he ride. It was “tradition” and also untraceable. Being a dead dynasty was a hassle like that. But Ba’al had learned to ride a horse in the desert when he was six and it was actually quite relaxing to him, so he settled in for the lonely, quiet ride.

The sun was setting in the sky, casting ominous shadows across the stones, when Ba’al finally arrived at the tomb. He tied Rya’c to one of the horse posts and made his way over. Being an al-Ba’ith priest, he could recognize al-Ba’ith magic and quickly picked out the side entrance to the tomb. The hidden staircase led into pitch black darkness as Ba’al descended, lit only by a very gentle flame at the tip of his wand. There were a number of al-Ba’ith wards and traps that he passed, and he made note of each one so he would be sure to reseal them all on the way back. A few dusty, dank minutes later, and a good hundred feet below the surface, he arrived at the first door. Brightening his flame, he ran his hand over the inscription written along the walls, speaking them aloud as he opened the first level of the nine level seal.

“'O ba, greatly majestic, behold, I have come that I may see you; I open the Netherworld that I may see my father Osiris and drive away darkness, for I am beloved of him. I have come that I may see my father Osiris and that I may cut out the heart of Set who has harmed my father Osiris. I am noble, I am akh, I am equipped; O all you gods and all akhu prepare a path for me.” He could feel the first level release, recognizing that the seal had been recently released and resealed. That must have been Skaara. Examining the seal more, he discovered something hidden between the first and second level: a ward. Being very careful not to trip it like Skaara did, he examined it closer, but was unable to recognize the source.

At a sound behind him Ba’al straightened up. Had someone followed him into the tomb? Impossible, he would have noticed them. Then again, if tomb raiders were good at anything, it was raiding tombs. They were getting smarter, but that also meant the priests were getting better to combat them. The very dim, almost non-existent glow, approaching the end of the tunnel grew nearer. Not even bothering to hide and with every intention of taking the thief in, Ba’al opened the ha seal on his left shoulder. He could feel the magic being released through his veins in a web of ice cold electricity. He was ready.

“Halt!” he commanded, his deep voice booming through the narrow stone tunnels. “Who dares cross this path?”

She yanked the linen cloth closer to her mouth, lowering her face so she was out of the direct aim of the wind as it slapped sand against her. Sand coloured clothing blended her into the dunes surrounding her, a special fabric used to make her blend into the sand. The Khopesh woman was on a detail that she didn’t much care for, but when one lived in Ireland for the majority of the year, one got the more tedious missions. Digging around in the desert and returning old goods to blessed burial grounds was one of them, and usually took longer than one expected.

Etain had been in Egypt for all of one day before she’d been dragged to the Khopesh compound, and dragged into a mini brawl competition. It’d always been hard for her, having to prove herself against people who were born and raised in Egypt, but when it came to it she was just as good as them. If not better, because of the way she could blend into a crowd. Etain had rarely had a problem fitting in, no matter the place she was. Coming back home, it was like pouring herself into a new self, a different self, but the same.

Light coloured eyes flicked around the high entrance of the tomb, and she made her way up there before meandering through the halls. The items she had to replaced were body parts, hoarded by European wizards with no sense for sacredness. Why would someone desecrate a tomb for a collection? It always made her angry, having to collect those items and having to escort them back home.

Her footsteps made no noise as she slowly eased herself down the pathway, and sighed peaceably. She was happy to be working, especially while Tony was taking him and Nick to a football game. Something about boys time. She’d never been a boy, or truly been able to hang with the boys, so she wasn’t quite aware of what that really meant. Shrugging it off, she was taking off the cloth protecting her face, and she pushed off her hood. Dark red, almost black hair cascaded down her back in wild curls, gold wrapped braids that clinked together slightly as the metal touched.

Then she felt it, and shuddered. Someone was touching one of her wards. It was a gentle caress, almost no existent, but she felt it in her sternum. Her eyes narrowed, and she picked up speed. This was the second time she’d been to this particular tomb, and that war was one of the only reasons she could apparate to the location. Making her way almost by instinct through the halls, she was almost to the net of wards, when a loud voice boomed in front of her. She unhooked the sword that was the namesake of her people, and met the direct gaze across from her.

“You are very loud…almost loud enough to to wake the dead.” She quipped in Arabic, brow arched. “Besides, I could also ask you the same thing, but I already know who you are….” Etain shifted her knife from side to side. “Why are you fondling my ward, priest?” She rolled her shoulders. Not knowing quite who or what he was, she’d only knew that he was clad in what her grandfather considered important sacred garb. “It’s very uncomfortable, and we don’t know each other well enough for you to be sticking your nose into places it doesn’t belong.”

Shadowed cognac eyes narrowed behind his head cloth as the figure entered, the only part of him visible as his mouth was covered and his journeying cloak kept his body hidden. Her dark skin and tone indicated that she was Egyptian, making it a little less likely that she was a tomb raider. Her accusation that he didn’t belong here rubbed him the wrong way— if anything, it was she who didn’t belong here. But that begged the question of who exactly she was. With a cloak like that, he would never have seen her following him. She wasn’t just any traveler. She had bypassed the Ausar wards and was now referring to this trap ward that injured Skaara as her own.

His eyes went to the curved sword in the woman’s hand, and his historian mind immediately begun flashing through his substantial memory stores of artifacts. The sword looked old, the wicked blade reminding him of a number of weapons buried in various different tombs after 2500 BCE. The blade design was reminiscent of an earlier era, though the handle some of the sharp-edge dimensions were clearly modern. It was a khopesh, a weapon of old, sometimes referred to as the ‘royal sword of victory’. His memories begun to fall into place, the narrative forming itself out of the facts before him. “There are stories,” he said slowly, closing his stance so it was no longer an aggressive one. “Of a group of women warriors who wielded such weapons. Well, they are not so much stories as they are truth, though neither I nor anyone I have known have ever met them. If these stories are true, I have no interest in beginning a fight with you.”

“Though as far as your accusation, I feel the need to correct you. The dead will stay dead if I am allowed to continue my work without interference. If you would be so kind as to remove you people’s ward from my seal, I would be very grateful. It is fine work and I do not wish to simply destroy something so well-crafted, but your magic has tainted the seal and must be completely erased in order for this tomb to be repaired.” He made it seem like he could easily take apart the ward, when in fact he was very aware that it would take substantial magical power— most likely draining his sheut— and time to simply unravel it from the seal, and that was assuming he didn’t accidentally trip it and end up like Skaara.

As of now, if this woman removed her ward, he would only need to redo the first and second levels, but the way the ward was intercalated into all nine levels, it could potentially take him days to unravel it from the seal, destroy it, undo the tainted seal, and then redo all nine levels. Redoing a seal from the first level up was something the al-Ba’ith avoided at all costs, since the modern dynasty was unable to match many of the extremely powerful older spells and seal performed by the priests of the Old Kingdom. Dismantling this woman’s ward should be doable if he were to open three of his tattooed seals and overpower it with one direct burst. However, even if it did work, Ba’al would be substantially weakened and possible susceptible to any other traps left here. The best possible course of action was to have it removed, but whether or not she would agree without asking questions was highly unlikely.

Etain chuckled, flipping her blade in her hand. She stared at it for a moment before shrugging. “This old thing?  I got it in the closet.” She shrugged lightly at his hypothesis, and brushed it off. “Your information sounds a bit antiquated. You might want to do a bit more research.” The Half-Egyptian woman just grinned suddenly at him, a bit of menace and amusement dancing in those bared teeth. “I have no interest in beginning a fight with you.” She had a hypthesis of her own. There was only one other family as comfortable in the tombs as hers was. If she was correct, he must be part of that elusive group that her grandfather just hinted at.

Snorting, she shook her head. “No, sorry. Wrong. The other wards that were twined in here, not the ones with the touch of whatever you’re doing, but the older ones have an Inferi chain in there. Your friend tried to untie the ward that I twisted around it, and thats how he got hurt. I’d rather one person get hurt rather than a few dozen zombies dancing through the sands.” She rolled her shoulders. “Believe you me, I’m not here to steal from this tomb. What use would I have to dabble in your wards if there wasn’t a legitimate reason?”

Hooking her sword unto her sheath, she flicked the guard closed. “Your wards are good…” She murmured, rolling her shoulders again. “My family has learned to bypass quite a few. It’s the fact that we only drop off items, never take them.” She reached back and flipped her cloak, showing the bag dangling on her shoulder. “Like calls to like, and the desire for old things  to come home sometimes supersedes the best laid plans. However, there are a few of them that I cannot get through without killing myself or bleeding all over the floor. How about we trade, tall man? I open my words, you let me drop off my goods…”

Etain tilted her head, stroking her sword edge. “Either way, I’ll have to complete my task today…”

At her explanation, Ba’al eased up slightly and took a deep breath. The body seals he had unlocked in preparation for the fight neither of them seemed to want glowed a faint dark emerald for a second before they were resealed and the magic hidden back away. Ba’al didn’t like to fight and avoided it as much as possible. He was a peaceful man. He was a historian who wore little glasses and liked tweed jackets for Ra's sake. The al-Ba’ith priests were held to certain standards and had to act a certain way, but that was not who he was in real life. On the inside, Ba’al was not the tough, cold man he became when he put on the cloak.

What had she said? Inferi? Ba’al frowned deeply, rubbing the short patchy beard that was growing on his chin. “The…people…that built this tomb did not use Inferi,” Ba’al said thoughtfully, careful not to name his family by name. “Inferi, along with the reanimation of any type corpse, is considered sacrilege to Osiris and the House of the Dead. To do so goes against their very religion and is a grave crime punishable by death. It has been written in the books for millennia.” Ba’al stepped closer to the tomb, long fingers tracing the words quickly as he followed the spells along the walls. What she said was true, there was indeed an Inferi chain hidden somewhere within the auxiliary containment wards, within a foreign passage that he had never been able to transcribe.

“These curses,” he said quietly, forgetting she was there for a moment. “Are not ours. Someone has tampered with it.” But the Inferi curse was old, older than his grandfather’s magical signature which lay a good hundred years afterwards. He turned back to the woman, his concern no longer for her identity by now for the tomb itself. “Thank you for warding this Inferi chain. I’m sure this tomb would be overrun with corpses had the chain not been contained. I am ashamed that my people were unable to identify it from the writings. In return, the least I can do is let you finish what you came here for.”

Ba’al turned back to the door, pressing his large palm flat against the stone. If the ward she had placed and Skaara had tripped were not in the gate seal, then he should be able to circumvent the whole tangled system using the back up gate seals. He located the eight gate seals and begun to read aloud, his deep voice rumbling in his chest as he spoke in the ancient  language of their ancestors. “The names of the cattle are: Mansion of Kas, Mistress of All. Silent One who dwells in her place. She of Chemmis whom the god ennobled. The Much Beloved, red of hair. She who protects in life, the particoloured. She whose name has power in her craft. Storm in the sky which wafts the god aloft. The bull, husband of the cows." With each name he spoke, he could feel each guardian gate unfurl within the seal, one by one like a lone of eight magical hooks.

The heavy stone door slid open with a mighty, dusty creak. The path in front of them was pitch black and smelled strongly of ancient magic and the unmistakable scent of petrified corpses. “As I am sure you are aware, entering even the first level of a tomb is an honor. The lower levels of this tomb have not been entered by in thousands of years. This room contains only treasure, where you may leave the artifacts you recovered. I will be going with you, of course. I wish to further investigate the presence of the Inferi curses, as I am beginning to suspect there may be more anomalous curse hidden here. Now that I know the contents of that mysterious passage, I will be able to search for similarly written ones wherever they may be.”

He stepped forward into the dark, then paused. He turned back to her. “You are familiar with the inner workings of the curse, seeing as you contained it. A second pair of eyes may quicken the search considerably. Will you come? You may called me Horus. What shall I call you”

“My people do not deal with the dead.” She began simply, arms folded. “Not often at least, and not in such a disgraceful way. We have not lost our path, as many others have.” Etain’s voice was calm, not judgmental, but a bit sad. Maybe it was because she’d grown up in a family that believed in so many deep traditions that the idea of someone corrupting a resting place for their own misdeeds disturbed her in a level deeper than just anger. Rubbing her gloved hands on her arms, she peered up at her companion.

As he spoke of the curses not matching, her brow arched and she wanted to inquire. She had so many questions, but as she knew there were things that were not her place to ask. Just as it was impolite to ask about the inner workings of her family, she could not do the same to another. But she’d be watching, not to steal, but just to know. “It’s old, but not old enough.” She commented, agreeing with his observation. “Whoever crafted it made it so it blended in with the old wards, and it doesn’t shine like most new wards do.” It was the evidence of a blood based runic set, or something bastardized from and old manuscript. Whatever it was, it was nasty and needed to go.

When her companion stepped towards the door, Etain’s nostrils flared slightly as she felt a wave of big magic. It went down her spine, and made her hands flex as if she wanted to lash out on the source. It was not the antithesis of what she was, but it was different. Etain had never felt the like outside of ward schemes, but to feel it coming from a living being. Twas odd. She watched, oddly detached as he worked. She didn’t bother to memorize his incantation, knowing that it would be nothing that she could use. Her lips twitched in amusement as she touched a red braid, the metal bindings clicking. ’Much beloved, red of hair, indeed She joked mentally, but she was filled with a bit of reverence. The old gods were…big. Powerful. One did not jokingly invoke them, especially in places like this.

She didn’t sneeze when the dust flowed into the air, but merely stared into the dark. Her light eyes flicked around to check the surrounding areas, but there were only two options. Out and in, and the bundles in her bag bade her forward. “I do not take this honor lightly, I promise you…” She murmured quietly, pushing hair out of her face. “My people go no further than the second level of tombs. We are guardians, not caretakers.” She snorted lightly, imagining some of her cousins running around like bulls in china shops. “Some of us are worse than the others. They better at offensive magic…”

Horus? She dipped her chin lightly in greeting, her smile wide. “My people call me many things, but Nephthys is appropriate.” She delved into the tombs of the ancestors bearing the distinction of the goddess of burials. Her grandfather probably thought he was clever. “And I will join you. Lead on.” She followed him as he made his way down the hall, the light dim until they got into an open room. She whispered an incantation, and the torches that were perched on the walls caught a flame that flicked with the gold light that was specific to her magic. Delicately walking past him, she caught site of the place where her treasures had been removed from. Kneeling on the dusty ground, she opened up her pack and pulled out three canopic jars. The white linen they were wrapped in fairly glittered with runic protection, and as she unwrapped them, she put the linen back into the pack. Placing the jars were they were supposed to be, she murmured a quiet benediction under her breath, before standing and turning to her friend.

“There’s my task done~! Lets move on, shall we?” Digging into her pocket, she pulled out a pair of round glasses with a gold frame, and placed them on the top of her head. The glasses were embeded with runes and magic, allowing her to trace wards easily. The only downfall was how sensitive it made her vision. She could feel around the wards until she got to the delicate bit. Etain smiled, her freckled face alight with excitement. This would be an adventure.

Ba’al took the first few steps into the tomb, hearing his companion’s own quiet footsteps as she fell in line beside him. Taking care not to bump into her or anything else, they made their way into a wide, circular room filled with artifacts and tapestries. He heard Nephthys mumble something under her breath and the torches lining the room flared to life, a delicate golden flame sending dancing shadows across the walls. She knelt down a little off to the side from him and pulled three linen-wrapped jars from the bag she was carrying. She replaced them at one of the altars and once again whispered something. He didn’t miss the reverence and respect in her words, though he was too far to hear them.

After that she stood and turned back to him. So she wanted to go with him? Alright. Ba’al carefully took one of the torches off the wall and held it out as they kept moving. The hallway was long and dark, the stone walls seeming to loom and stretch into infinity in front of them. Ba’al was usually reticent to let someone else lead the way, especially in a tomb, but she seemed to know what she was doing. The glasses were an interesting item. He assumed they somehow helped to read or make runes, which would be rather helpful down here. The walls were covered ceiling to floor in long lines of ancient scripture and hieroglyphics. It wasn’t often that he entered the inner sanctum of a tomb, and part of him, the historian part, wanted to stop and look at everything. Nephthys didn't seem to have the same problem, as she was moving quickly in front of him, despite being significantly shorter than he was.

Ba’al was impressed, not even he could sift through runes that quickly (though he tended to linger and want to break down all the syntax structure— it was always slow going). He didn’t think the glasses were the only cause either. Obviously Nephthys was well-versed in this ancient runic language and seemed familiar with the terrain. If his previous guess was correct, he was dealing with a member of an organization about as near and dear to the heart of Egypt as the Ausar were. He would certainly have to tell Kneph about this. Or…perhaps not. His grandfather might take them as a threat, instead of as potential allies in the fight to preserve their heritage. He would need to think on this more. There was no need to rush into it. Ba’al would ask Nephthys all of his many questions later, once the work was done.

The walkway into the next level was filled with statues and old, fraying textiles that lines the walls like sentinels. He and Nephthys worked side by side in relative silence, both of them probably far too entranced by their work to let something like small talk break their focus as they poured through the ancient scriptures. Most of the seals and wards in this area were still intact, and he saw no obvious traces of the strange Inferi chain’s signature in most of the magic he traced over by the light of the woman’s fire.

Suddenly a chill ran up his spine, like they had stepped through a thick field of…something… that lingered in the air around them. Clammy little fingers of magic reached out and whispered against his skin, and he frowned in disgust as it seeped into his chest and swirled around in there. He was sure his partner could feel it too. This was what they were looking for.

Something’s coming. It knows we’re here.

Ba’al reached forward, grabbing Nephthys hurriedly by the wrist, and pulled her back. “Wait—!”

It happened in an instant. There was a loud crunching sound and the walkway behind them closed up, like someone tightening purse strings until there was nowhere to go. And at the exact same moment, the floor beneath them fell away and they were hurtling into a dark abyss, the end of which Ba’al could not see. The light of the hallway through the hole grew smaller and smaller as they fell. Ba’al instinctively pulled Nephthys to him, wrapping her smaller form within his long billowing cloak. As they were falling, Ba’al released the seal on his left shoulder, opening Ha just as they hit the ground. Luckily, his magic absorbed most of the impact, but in his haste he had drained the seal almost completely.

He coughed in the darkness, barely able to make out the lines of the walls in the eerie green chasm they had fallen into. He had lost the torch when they fell, and it was nowhere to be seen. He took stock of his injuries, opening his cloak to let the woman out.

A noise.

“Do you hear that?” he asked, sitting up. Movement in the corner of his eye drew his attention, and suddenly the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up. Dark, ghastly forms were crawling out from the shadows, their limbs skeletal and their faces pockmarked with rotten flesh and oozing skin. Inferi. Ba’al scrambled to his feet, drawing his wand from the sleeves of his cloak. This is bad. He turned to his companion. However he may have felt about her or her people before, he was just glad that she was here now. He wasn't used to combat at all.

“It appears I’ve gotten you into a bit of a mess. My deepest apologies, but would you help me out?”

She was falling, and she scrambled to grasp onto a wall, a ledge or something.  Everything was so slippery, so when she’d grab hold of something it slipped right out of her hands. Etain curled into a ball to lessen the broken things, but she was yanked into the grasp of her partner, and something big exploded below them. They rolled for a moment, and Etain found herself on the ground, staring up at the ceiling where the floor used to be. Coughing slightly, she shook the daze off and rolled over so she was kneeling on her hands and knees. It smelled rank down there, and she tried to inhale for cleaner air, but something was there. Her sharp eyes shot around the room, and she bit back foul cursing.

“Fucking undead…” She couldn’t help but to snarl, the slow shambling forms causing her heartbeat to race. She swiftly sat back on her haunches to bind her hair back into a tight braid. This was going to bad. She’d fought a lot of things, but only had fought Inferi in strategy games with her uncle. He’d summoned them in an enclosed area so the trainees could learn how to defeat them. That’d been a controlled situation, not the situation that they were in. There were so many, and they kept appearing out of the crevasses. 30? 40? She couldn’t really tell.

“A bit of a mess?” A sharp laugh shot from her chest, as she scrambled to yank off the cloth draped around her shoulders. Cloaks were all good in the sun, and she’d usually use them as a distraction for their enemies to grab onto while they tried to attack them, but she knew she was going to have to move. Her armor was dragonhide, scrubbed with metal to dull the shine. She yanked up her mouth guard, eyes scanning her surroundings. They were surrounded in the front, and to the left side, the other sides blocked by huge piles of debris. They could scramble up the piles to escape, but they’d have to get rid of most of the Inferi in front of them. Etain looked at the man wielding the wand, and tried to make guesses. Would he be able to keep up? She couldn’t depend on him as much as she wanted to, and would have to act as she was working alone. “I will help…but can you keep up?”

Yanking off her gloves and shoving them into her belt, it was a swift movement to unsheathe her khopesh from her back. In one swift movement, she slid it across her palm, covering the curved edge of the blade in blood. Dragging the blood decorated sword in a semi circle around them, she spat harsh words of magic in old Sumatran. Her sword seemed to melt into the ground and cut it like butter, and in it’s path, a wall of flame appeared. It was gold and black, and filled the air with a rushing noise. She could hear the shuffling moving closer, and she watched through the translucent flames as the Inferi began to shuffle closer as they could smell the blood.

Etain wrapped her hand in the enchanted linen to stave the bleeding, and began to dig into her bag as if the hoarde of Inferi weren’t walking towards them wishing to devour them from flesh to bone. “I can hold this for 10 minutes, 15 minutes tops. When it falls, it’s going to flame out…” Rushing feet came towards them, and an eerie howl filled the room. A lone inferi ran into the flaming wall, and tried to claw them out. Its body began to disintegrate slowly, and it shrieked, the sound grating against Etain’s eardrums. It sounded so human, but it was not. It was an abomination, a horror. Fear was raging in the back of her mind, but all she could focus on was survival.

“The shield can take a few more direct hits, but if it gets attacked too much…” She left it at that, kneeling on the ground digging in her bag. She grabbed a dagger and shoved it at him, placing it in his hand as she pulled out balls made out of stone that seemed to suck in all the light around it. “We need a plan, and we need it fast.” She said, watching the inferi creep closer, staring through the flames. “I can fight, but there are too many…If we can get up, I can blow them up, but that’s all I have. We have to scatter them, and get back up there. And dead that f*cking ward…” Clenching one of the globes in her blood soaked hand causing it to glow, she looked up at Horus, and began to joke. She could be angry, she could be sad, but she would take her eldest brother's trick out, and laugh her way through this situation.

“If we could get out of here by dinner time, that’d be great. My husband is cooking tonight, and my son is home from his grandparents…You could probably join us, if you can bring the drinks.” ’I don’t want to die here.’

Even as Ba’al was preoccupied by the Inferi currently surrounding them, he found his curious brain wanting to stop the fight and ask Nephthys a million questions he knew he was in no position to ask. Ancient Egyptian magic was something he had studied since he was very young, though his study was very specialized. The magic had a special place in his heart and it made his sad to know that so much of it had been lost to the sands of time. Watching the woman beside him perform her magic was like stepping back in time and witnessing something no one else in the world had discovered yet. It gave him hope that the ancient traditions were not lost, but were just hidden, much like the Ausar and Khopesh. There was much he didn’t know and had yet to uncover, and the very thought made his frightened blood run hot.

He was mesmerized. She wielded her sword with expert precision—obviously the result of many years of rigorous study. She used her own blood and spoke in a tongue the linguistics professor in him recognized as an obscure derivative of the nuclear Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by the Batak, Nias, and Metawai people, most resembling the southern Tobiac language groups. As it was, he did not know how Nephthys could apply the ancient language to her Egyptian magic. His curiosity was piqued when from her sword a curved wall of flame flared to life, separating the two wizards from the encroaching undead.

Ba’al was woken from his academic reverie when she warned him that the shield would not stand for long if the Inferi continued to mindlessly throw themselves into the flames. She pushed a dagger into his hands, and immediately he started to ruminate on the design origin of the curved blade and what sort of steel it might be made of, depending on trade routes and coal access at the time. His academic mind was horribly distracted from the problem at hand, which was one reason Ba’al never did very well in any kind of fight. But then he looked at his comrade’s expression and saw the real concern hidden behind her light-hearted smile, and realized that he needed to shut all that out. They were in real danger now. He could investigate everything properly when they got out of here. If they got out of here.

"Dinner sounds good, I'll even bring tea," he said, with a poor attempt at mimicking her calm.

Ba’al did as she had and unfastened his traveler’s cloak, throwing it to the side. He didn’t study his magic with the intention of fighting, which meant that at any given point, he had an almost-uselessly low level of magic at his disposal since he stored most of it. He would need to take magic from his seals to do anything even remotely useful here. The ankh on his left palm and ka on his right forearm began to glow a dark emerald. His fingers twitched as he searched for the threads of al-Ba’ith magic sewn into the walls of the tomb. If he could pull the right strings, he should be able to do something.

He dropped to his knees and pressed his wand into the ground under their feet. He could feel the magic draining from his body as he poured the magic from his ankh and ka into the solid rock. There was a great rumbling noise as the walls around them began to shake. Loosened rock and debris fell dangerously around them as Ba’al activated the old construction wards criss-crossing the tomb. Following the line of Nephthy’s fire, the ground split in two, the floor under the Inferi sinking down a good six or seven meters so the two of wizards stood behind a wall of fire looking down into a roughly oval-shaped hole of undead. It wasn’t much, but it would buy them a little more time. However, looking down at the hole, Ba’al saw that the Inferi were already beginning to scale the walls.

Nephthys was right, they needed a plan. Ba’al was not a fighter— he would probably only be able to kill a handful of the Inferi if he tried, and at this point he had already emptied three of his seals and was huffing and puffing with a sheen of sweat covering his body. It was a wonder he hadn’t fainted yet. He would be no help to her like that. He needed to use his brain. What did he have with him? Ba’al tapped his traveler’s pack with his wand and it enlarged, the contents spilling out on the floor. He would be embarrassed at how much stuff he carried with him if wasn’t about to die. He rifled through his books and instruments, pulling out a large clay jar and a pouch.

“I have an idea,” Ba’al called to Nephthys over the din of screaming Inferi and rumbling rock. He held up the larger jar, showing her the gooey grey liquid inside. “This is a special concentrated embalming fluid used by my people in the Old Kingdom to seal dead bodies.” It was a thick slurry of palm wine, Nile water, cinnamon, wood tar, honey, and a few other crucial ingredients kept secret by the Ausar for millennia. Ba’al opened the burlap pouch in his other hand and begin to pour the pitch black powder into the embalming fluid. “This is Anapa Soot, a magic desiccant derived from concentrated natron salt, burnt black jackal bones, and blessed kem fragments.”

Once the pouch was empty, he reached into his traveler’s bag and pulled out a small roll of resin-soaked linen. It was usually used for mummification, but it would serve a different purpose. He placed one end inside the jar so that it was submerged in the clumpy black and grey liquid, and let the other end of the linen hang over the lip of the jar. He closed it and handed it to Nephthys. She seemed to understand what it was before he had even finished.

“It’s an explosive,” he said. “The soot and alcohol are highly flammable when exposed to flame. I think if you are able to make a strong enough enchanted fire on the linen, you can throw the jar into the hole and the Inferi will burn alive while their flesh seals shut forever. My magic flames aren’t strong enough by far, and your wall seems to be extremely effective." He gave her a hard look. "Can you do it?”