Rating: MA 15+
The sandstorm came without warning.
One moment, the horizon stretched clear and merciless. The next, a wall of amber darkness rose like the desert exhaling violence, consuming distance in seconds. Nahara's mechanical hand clamped on Sabaku's shoulder, her grip bruising even through cloth.
"Down!" she shouted, already dropping to her knees. "Cover your face!"
Sabaku obeyed, wrapping his scarf around his nose and mouth as the storm hit with physical force. Sand became a solid thing, particles driven with velocity that stripped skin, invaded every opening, turned the air itself into an abrasive substance that scraped lungs raw.
Nahara's mechanical arm wrapped around him, pulling him close. Through the howling wind, her voice emerged muffled but clear: "There!" She pointed with her flesh hand—barely visible through the storm—toward something dark rising from the sand. "Structure! Move!"
They crawled. Walking was impossible; the wind had achieved personality, malicious in its consistency. Sand piled against their bodies, trying to bury them while they moved, the desert's patient attempt at collection. Sabaku's hands found stone—blessed, solid stone—and he used it to pull himself forward.
The structure resolved through the amber chaos: not rising from the sand, but sinking into it. An inverted pyramid, its point driven deep into the earth, its base creating a crater around which dunes had gathered like mourners around a grave.
"Inside!" Nahara shoved him toward an opening—a doorway carved into the stone, leading down into darkness that promised shelter. "Quickly, before the storm buries the entrance!"
Sabaku stumbled through the threshold, Nahara following close behind. The moment they crossed from exterior to interior, the storm's roar diminished to a distant howl, as if the structure itself rejected external chaos. Sand continued to pour through the doorway in sheets, but less aggressively, more like water finding its level than active invasion.
They descended the entrance tunnel, moving away from the fading light. Nahara pulled a device from her belt—a small cylinder that, when shaken, began to emit cool blue luminescence. The light revealed walls carved with hieroglyphs, but these were different from the temple scripts Sabaku had seen. These glyphs were inverted, written upside-down, as if whoever carved them had been hanging from the ceiling.
"What is this place?" Sabaku whispered, though the question felt rhetorical. Something in the air itself communicated sanctity. Or perhaps anti-sanctity. The inverse of holy.
"The Sunless Tomb," Nahara replied, her voice carrying unusual reverence. "I've heard stories, but never thought I'd find it. The priests speak of it in whispers—a place where the old civilization buried its most dangerous dead." She ran her mechanical fingers along the inverted glyphs. "Kings who committed crimes so terrible that even death couldn't absolve them. So they were buried upside-down, their tombs inverted, ensuring they could never rise."
The tunnel opened into a vast chamber. Nahara's light, small as it was, couldn't reach the far walls or ceiling. But what it did illuminate stole Sabaku's breath.
The chamber was entirely inverted. Columns hung from what should have been the floor, extending upward into darkness. Statues stood on their heads, carved faces serene despite their impossible orientation. And in the center: a massive sarcophagus, suspended by chains from the unseen ceiling, rotating slowly in air that carried no breeze.
"Gods," Nahara whispered. "The stories said one tomb. But this..." She gestured to the shadows beyond their light. "This is a necropolis. Dozens of tombs, all inverted. All suspended."
Sabaku approached the nearest wall, drawn by something he couldn't name. The hieroglyphs here weren't inverted—they were sequential, telling a story in panels like a comic strip or film storyboard. He raised Nahara's light closer and felt his heart stop.
The first panel showed a city. Not ancient—modern. Skyscrapers of glass and steel reaching toward a sky filled with aircraft. Cars on geometric streets. People in contemporary clothing, faces too small to distinguish but postures suggesting the casual hurry of urban life.
"This is..." His voice failed. He touched the carving with trembling fingers. "This is Tokyo."
Nahara moved beside him, studying the panel with sharp attention. "You're certain?"
"I lived there." Sabaku pointed to specific details—the distinctive architecture of certain buildings, the layout of intersections he'd memorized through repetitive walks. "This is where I died. Where I was before..."
The second panel showed the same city in flames. Buildings collapsed, streets torn open, the sky dark with smoke and something else—shapes that suggested the Duneborn, those biomechanical horrors that had destroyed Khemet-Ra. But larger here. More numerous. As if they'd evolved, refined their destruction.
The third panel: refugees fleeing into deserts that had once been suburbs, sand reclaiming pavement, nature's violent restoration.
The fourth panel: survivors building new structures, but these were crude, desperate attempts at shelter. Civilization regressing in fast-forward, each successive carving showing less technology, more stone, architecture devolving through centuries in mere meters of wall.
Sabaku walked along the wall, following the story. Nahara's light moved with him, revealing panel after panel of humanity's collapse. Cities consumed by sand. Oceans evaporating. The sun growing larger, closer, its rays carving destruction rather than nurturing life.
And then: a panel showing priests. Ra's Left Hand, he realized. But these were the founding priests, establishing their cult among the survivors. Promising salvation through suffering. Converting desperation into theology.
"The Collapse," Nahara said quietly. "This is the historical record. The story we've only heard in fragments." She touched a panel showing the construction of the first inverted pyramid. "The architects who built these tombs... they knew what was coming. They recorded it before it happened."
"Prophecy," Sabaku whispered. "Or..."
He moved to the next section of wall, and the carvings shifted from historical documentation to something stranger. These panels showed events that felt temporal—scenes not of past or present, but future. Or perhaps parallel present.
A small building. Institutional in its blandness. Children visible through windows, faces pressed against glass. And in the foreground: flames. Figures in masks raising weapons.
Sabaku's breath caught. "That's the orphanage. That's my orphanage."
The next panel showed the interior. Bodies small and broken on sterile floors. And in the corner, barely visible: a kid with dark hair, blood pooling beneath him, hand reaching toward a photograph of pyramids.
"That's me." His voice emerged hollow. "That's the moment I died."
But the panel didn't end there. From the dying kids stomach, a thread of light emerged—golden, delicate—rising through the ceiling, through atmosphere, through the barriers of space and time. And in the final portion of the panel: the thread descending into desert sand, into a small body half-buried and dying, a kid with white hair and a crescent scar.
"This isn't the past," Sabaku said, understanding crystallizing with terrible clarity. "This isn't ancient Egypt. This is after. The end of everything we built. Tokyo fell. All the cities fell. Humanity destroyed itself, and the desert reclaimed the world."
Nahara studied the panels in silence, her mechanical fingers tracing the carved sequence. "The timeline makes sense now. The technology in the ruins—it's not ancient innovation. It's modern technology filtered through centuries of decay and superstition. We forgot what we built and started calling it divine."
She moved to another wall, gesturing for Sabaku to follow. Here, the panels showed a different sequence: the sun growing larger across epochs, approaching Earth with geological patience. Not explosion or collision, but gradual consumption, the star slowly devouring its children.
"The sun is dying," Nahara said. "Or transforming. Becoming a red giant, maybe. But instead of happening billions of years from now, it's happening now. Accelerated somehow. And as it approaches, it changes things. Reality becomes more flexible. Memory becomes tangible. The desert becomes conscious."
Another panel showed people transforming—flesh merging with sand, consciousness dispersing into the desert's collective memory. The sand revenants. The origin of what they'd encountered.
"The Collapse wasn't just civilization falling," Sabaku realized. "It was reality breaking. Physics becoming optional. The boundaries between life and death, past and future, individual and collective—all of it dissolving."
He returned to the panel showing his death and rebirth. "And I'm not special. I'm a symptom. The desert pulled my consciousness across time and space because boundaries don't exist here the way they did before. Because wishes can become real if you want them desperately enough when you die."
"You wished for the desert," Nahara said. It wasn't a question.
"I wished to breathe the air they breathed. To live as they lived." Sabaku's hand touched the pendant beneath his shirt. "And Aru wished for a kinder life. Our wishes intersected. Two desperate prayers meeting in the space where reality thins."
They stood in silence, processing the implications. Above them, the suspended sarcophagus continued its slow rotation, chains creaking with weight that should have been impossible to suspend.
"The kings buried here," Nahara said eventually. "They weren't criminals. They were prophets. They saw this future—" she gestured to the murals "—and tried to warn humanity. But warning of apocalypse is indistinguishable from cursing the world to experience it. So they were buried upside-down, silenced, inverted. Their knowledge locked in tombs designed to never open."
Sabaku approached the central sarcophagus. Up close, its surface revealed more carvings—mathematical equations intermixed with hieroglyphs, scientific notation centuries advanced beyond what should have been possible. And at its center, a name in characters that predated hieroglyphs, something older, more fundamental.
"Can you read this?" he asked Nahara.
She squinted at the text. "It's proto-script. The language that existed before languages. But I think..." She traced the symbols with her flesh hand. "I think it says 'The First Scientist' or 'The First Priest.' There's no distinction in the text. Science and spirituality were the same thing to whoever wrote this."
A sound echoed through the chamber—not from the entrance but from deeper within the necropolis. Rhythmic. Mechanical. Like breathing, if breathing required pistons and gears.
Nahara's hand moved to her weapon. "We're not alone."
They moved toward the sound, passing between inverted columns, stepping carefully around sarcophagi that hung at various heights like grotesque ornaments. The blue light revealed more murals, these showing technological wonders: machines that could reshape matter, engines that harvested energy from human consciousness, biological computers grown from modified brain tissue.
The Pre-Collapse civilization hadn't just been advanced—it had been transcendent. And it had destroyed itself anyway.
The breathing sound grew louder, closer. They emerged into another chamber, smaller than the first, and found its source.
A figure. Human-shaped but clearly mechanical, its body composed of brass and bronze mechanisms, gears visible through translucent panels in its torso. It sat against a wall in perfect stillness except for the respiratory mechanism in its stomach—rising and falling, rising and falling, performing a function it no longer needed for a body that had never been organic.
"An Architect," Nahara breathed. "The engineers who built this place. I thought they were myths."
The Architect's head turned toward them with mechanical precision. Its face was a mask of burnished metal, features sculpted to suggest humanity without claiming it. Eyes of dark glass reflected their light, and when it spoke, the voice emerged from the stomach cavity, resonating with harmonics that suggested multiple frequencies simultaneously.
"Visitors." The word carried no inflection, no emotion, pure information. "The tomb receives its first living guests in three hundred and forty-seven years, nine months, and sixteen days."
"You've been counting," Sabaku said, uncertain if the thing could even understand conversation.
"All I do is count. Time. Breaths I do not need. Visitors who never come. Counting is purpose. Purpose is existence." The Architect's head tilted. "You carry two souls. Anomalous. Unprecedented in my records."
"How can you tell?" Sabaku asked.
"Your shadow falls twice." The mechanical figure pointed with one brass finger. "One shadow aligned with your body. One shadow displaced, as if cast by someone standing slightly beside you. The desert remembers all deaths. You carry one unfinished."
Nahara stepped forward. "You built this place. You know what the murals mean. Can you tell us—"
"I did not build alone. We were many. Now I am one. The others chose dissolution. Uploaded their consciousness to the desert's memory. Became part of the eternal. I chose persistence. Chose to guard the knowledge even when no one remained to receive it." The Architect's stomach-breathing continued its rhythm. "But you have received it now. You have seen the truth."
"That this world is Earth's future," Sabaku said. "That we're living in the aftermath."
"Aftermath implies conclusion. This is transition. The world is not ending. It is transforming. Becoming something new. Something that exists simultaneously across all times, all possibilities." The Architect stood, mechanisms grinding after centuries of stillness. "The prophets who sleep here understood this. They tried to guide the transformation. Make it intentional rather than chaotic. But humanity feared intentional change more than chaotic destruction."
It approached the central sarcophagus, placing one mechanical hand on its surface. "The First Scientist. The First Priest. The first human to understand that consciousness is energy, and energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed. He built the framework for what this world could become. A place where memory and matter are interchangeable. Where death is not ending but redistribution."
"Then why the suffering?" Sabaku's voice broke. "Why the torture? Why Ra's Left Hand? Why everything that happened to Aru?"
"Because transformation is pain," the Architect replied simply. "Growth requires resistance. Evolution demands sacrifice. The priests understood this but perverted it. Turned necessary suffering into systematized cruelty. Made tool into purpose rather than means." It turned its glass eyes on Sabaku. "But you—you carry the capacity to correct this perversion. The prophecy marked in your flesh speaks of a child who would choose. Ruin or rebirth. Destruction or transformation."
"I didn't choose anything," Sabaku protested. "I'm just—"
"You chose to walk into the desert when you could have stayed in the city to burn. You chose to integrate Aru's memory rather than reject it. You choose, every moment, whether to surrender or persist." The Architect's hand extended toward him. "The prophecy is not predestination. It is potential. You are the fulcrum. What you decide will tip the balance."
Nahara touched Sabaku's shoulder. "We should go. The storm will pass soon, and we need to move before—"
The chamber shuddered. Dust fell from unseen heights, and the chains holding sarcophagi groaned with sudden tension. The Architect's head snapped upward.
"Duneborn," it said, voice still emotionless but carrying new urgency. "They are drawn to this place. To the concentration of memory. They will attempt to consume the necropolis. Add its knowledge to their collective."
"How do we stop them?" Nahara asked, already moving toward the exit.
"You cannot. But you can escape. Follow the western passage. It leads to the Valley of Reflected Stars. From there, three days to the Temple of Inverse Shadows." The Architect remained still as another tremor shook the structure. "I will remain. Continue counting. Perhaps count the moments of the necropolis's dissolution. A different purpose, but purpose nonetheless."
Sabaku hesitated. "Come with us. You don't have to—"
"I am the tomb's guardian. This is my function. Functions do not abandon themselves." The mechanical figure turned away. "But take this."
It reached into its stomach cavity and extracted something—a crystalline sphere similar to the power cores Nahara collected, but darker, pulsing with deep violet light. "Knowledge compressed. The First Scientist's calculations. The mathematics of consciousness transformation. You may need it. Or you may not. But it should exist outside this tomb, in case I fail in my counting."
Nahara took the sphere carefully, wrapping it in cloth before storing it. "Thank you."
"Gratitude is unnecessary. I am performing function." The Architect resumed its position against the wall. "Go. Run. Transform the world or destroy it. Both outcomes are change, and change is the only constant."
They ran. Through the inverted necropolis, past suspended dead kings and their silenced prophecies, following the western passage as the structure continued to shudder. Behind them, sounds of tearing metal and cracking stone—the Duneborn, arriving to feed.
The passage wound upward, a spiral that made Sabaku's lungs burn and legs scream. But Nahara pulled him forward with mechanical strength, her prosthetic limbs tireless, and eventually they emerged into open air.
The sandstorm had passed. Stars filled the sky with overwhelming brightness, so numerous they seemed to touch, a ceiling of light close enough to grab. And the valley spread before them—sand dunes that reflected starlight like water, creating the illusion of walking through a frozen ocean of light.
Behind them, the inverted pyramid groaned. They turned to watch as the Duneborn descended upon it—three massive creatures, their forms twisting compositions of bone and metal and sand. They tore into the structure with savage efficiency, pulling it apart to consume the memories within.
Somewhere in that destruction, the Architect continued counting. Fulfilling purpose until purpose ended.
Sabaku touched the pendant, thinking of all the forgotten children—Aru, himself, the Architect, the buried kings who tried to warn a humanity that wouldn't listen.
"This isn't the past," he repeated to himself, to Nahara, to the stars. "This is after. The end of everything we built."
"Then we build something new," Nahara said firmly. "Something better. Or we die trying."
They turned away from the necropolis's destruction and walked into the Valley of Reflected Stars, two children carrying the weight of apocalyptic knowledge, moving toward temples that held either salvation or final ruin.
Above them, the stars watched without judgment.
And beneath them, the desert whispered its eternal truth: Everything ends. Everything transforms. Nothing is ever truly lost.
TO BE CONTINED...