Chapter Twenty #2
The third test was not a puzzle, but a terrifying test. They stood on a precipice overlooking a chasm that disappeared into a lightless void.
The drop was breathtaking and absolute. A single, rickety rope bridge hung ominously, swaying slightly in the phantom draft.
The riddle was inscribed directly over the yawning pit.
“I am a mirror that shows nothing living. I am a river that flows but does not wet. I am a land where only gods may dwell.”
Max looked dubiously at the impossible drop, checking the frayed ropes of the bridge. “We’re not crossing that. I don’t care what the riddle says. This looks like a fifty-foot fall onto broken rock.”
“You’re right to be suspicious of the bridge,” Eden said, her voice strained by the height. “It’s a decoy for the impatient. The riddle is referring to the Duat, the Egyptian underworld. A mirror that shows nothing living. A river of souls. The Duat is a spiritual barrier, not a physical one.”
She took a small clay tablet from her satchel and placed it carefully on a small, empty altar they hadn’t seen at first, a symbolic offering to the guardians of the underworld.
A moment of silence passed. Then, a hidden panel on the opposite wall slid open with a whisper of stone on stone, revealing a safe, solid path.
“The bridge is a test of conviction,” she told Max excitedly, relief flooding her. “The priests of Anubis had no interest in those who would simply leap blindly into the unknown. We’re doing it, Max! We are solving them.”
An intimidating stone statue of Anubis, the god of embalming and the dead, guarded the final challenge. The air felt colder here, weighted by centuries of power. His outstretched hand held a set of scales, one pan empty, the other holding a single, heavy stone.
“My body is a desert’s length, my head a king’s. I guard the place of quiet sleep. Though I have a human face, I am no man, and I ask questions but have no voice.”
“Anubis,” Max and Eden said in unison.
“The question is a test of our worth,” Eden explained, looking from the heavy stone to the empty pan. “The Book of the Dead says the heart must be ‘lighter than a feather.’ To pass his judgment, we must offer our honesty.”
Max looked at her, his expression serious. “We came here to steal the scarab. Is that a heart lighter than a feather?”
“We came here to preserve an artifact from men who would exploit it. We came for knowledge, not gold. I believe my motives are pure,” she insisted.
She placed her empty hand onto the empty pan, submitting to the god’s unspoken judgment. The scales tilted immediately, her empty hand pushing the heavy stone pan upward. A hidden door opened at the base of the statue, revealing a final, short passageway.
The corridor ended at a door bare of cartouche or sigil, its face as blank and unmoving as the Sphinx. They stood before it, their bodies trembling from the sheer weight of anticipation and fatigue.
“We’re there,” Max whispered, his hand going to the stone. “The last door.”
“Wait,” Eden said. “Look closely.”
She pointed to a circular bronze plate recessed in the center, unmarked save for ten tiny indentations at its edge. The riddle was not written on the door but inscribed on the ceiling above.
“I am a line drawn between two points. I am a measure of a pyramid’s height. I am the eye of the horizon. I am a key to a door you cannot see.”
Eden’s mind flashed back to the stars that had guided her to the labyrinth’s entrance. “It’s the constellation. Orion, the hunter, whom the Egyptians called Sah. The ten indentations correspond to the ten brightest stars of the constellation.”
“But they’re not marked!” Max protested, shining the lamp on the plate. “How do we know the pattern?”
“We don’t,” Eden admitted, her heart sinking. “It’s a pattern of light, not stone. We need something to match the stars.”
Max, his eyes narrowed, was already rummaging through his pack. He pulled out the small, brass calibration weights from his sextant case—ten perfect, identical discs of polished metal. “They used this configuration to navigate the desert, didn’t they? It’s a key based on navigation.”
Working together, Eden positioned the weights according to the precise stellar map she had drawn at the oasis, and Max, using his steady hand, settled them into the shallow indentations.
The moment the final one was in place, the bronze plate shifted, and the stone door groaned, then slid inward, revealing a small, stark final chamber.
No murals, no treasures, no gilded sarcophagi. Only a low basalt altar at the center, and on it, the artifact she had come so far to find.
Even before the light struck it, Eden knew. She knew by the shape, the proportions, the perfection of its form. A scarab, the size of her hand, carved not from gold but the purest black obsidian, so smooth it seemed to swallow the lantern’s light. She’d never seen anything like it.
Max stayed by the doorway, posture rigid. “Well?” His voice was hoarse. “Is it what you came for?”
She didn’t answer at once. She lifted the Scarab. The underside was blank; only the wings were detailed: two panels laced with the finest lines of something pale and ghostly.
“This is older than anything I’ve ever seen,” she whispered, reverence thick in her voice. “It’s not the Eighteenth Dynasty. It’s not even the Old Kingdom. It’s... something else.”
He stepped closer. “You want to tell me why there’s no inscription? Not even a curse?”
She turned the Scarab until the lantern’s flame struck its surface. The black drank in the glow, and the phosphorescent lines on the wings began to pulse with a soft, internal light.
Max stepped back, instinctive caution in every line of his body. “That’s... odd.”
“It’s responding to the light. Max, help me.” She looked up, helpless with excitement. “The torch. Hold it steady, there—no, tilt it up. Like the midday sun.”
When the white heat struck the artifact, a beam of blue-white lines leapt from the scarab’s wings, weaving into a complex lattice on the altar stone.
The projection wasn’t a map of the pyramid.
It was cosmological—the Duat itself, rendered with mind-boggling precision.
Along the central axis, twelve distinct portals unfurled like petals.
“I thought it was a myth,” she said, voice shaking. “The Blueprint of the Underworld. This is a navigation chart for resurrection.”
Max frowned, his jaw set. “Are you talking about a resurrection ritual? Bringing the dead back to life?”
“Imagine if the British Museum got this,” she whispered, bitterness thick in her voice. “They’d tear it to pieces. File off the obsidian for samples. Publish a pamphlet calling it a hoax.” She ran her hand over the altar. The obsidian scarab fit the depression perfectly; it was meant to stay.
“We can’t take it,” she said at last, certain. “It was meant to be here. The whole complex is built around this room. This wasn’t meant for me, or for anyone who sits in London.”
Max exhaled, shoulders relaxing as a look of relief flitted across his face. “So what now?”
“We document,” she said finally, mouth set. “We record every line, every glyph. We leave the artifact, but we take the knowledge.” She gently placed the Scarab back in its depression on the altar.
“Hold the light steady. I want a copy of the main projection first.”
Eden pulled out her notebook and began sketching frantically. But before she’d hardly started, a low, sickening grumble started deep in the bedrock.
“We triggered something by entering this chamber,” Max yelled, grabbing her arm. “It’s collapsing!”
Sand, mixed with stone dust, poured from the ceiling behind them where the Anubis chamber had been. The path was closing.
“My notes!” Eden cried, clutching the charcoal-smudged notebook.
Max shook his head and pulled her toward the wall, away from the collapse. “There’s no time, Eden! We need an exit, now!”
He ignored the obvious path back toward the entrance, which was now filling with debris. Instead, he slammed his shoulder against a section of the far wall, listening to the hollow thud. “This isn’t load-bearing stone! There’s a void on the other side. Maybe an old drainage shaft!”
Eden shoved her notes back in her satchel and threw her weight against the same spot. Max kicked out a wedge of stone, revealing a narrow vertical shaft. Sand and fine grit poured down, but it was open.
“We go up!” Max ordered. He braced himself against the wall and pushed her into the vertical crawlspace. “Don’t stop! Climb!”
She scrabbled upward, using every inch of purchase to ascend the slick stone. Max followed, his body acting as a shield against the raining debris. The sound of the main passage imploding behind them was a roar that threatened to deafen her.
They burst out of a barely visible cleft in the rocky outcrop, far from where they’d entered, collapsing onto the warm sand. The sun was high, baking the desert in golden light. The sliding sand sealed the small hole they emerged from almost instantly.
Max lay beside her, breathing in ragged, painful gasps. He was covered in blood, sweat, and stone dust, but alive.
“The Scarab?” he managed to choke out.
Eden shook her head. “I left it. I had to, Max. It belongs there. The knowledge it contains... It terrified me more than the floor shifting beneath us. I managed to make a few notes. That will have to be enough.”
Max looked at her, then back at the rock formation. He reached over and stroked her cheek with a thumb black with grit.
“You did the right thing, Eden,” he whispered. “We weren’t meant to have it.”
Then he pulled her close for a kiss that celebrated the fact that they’d made it out alive.