Time became sand in an hourglass with no bottom. For Aris Thorne, there was no time. There was only the silent, screaming awareness trapped within the obsidian scarab. He was a fossil in a pitch-black tomb, a consciousness bound to a singular, unblinking point of view. He could see the chamber, but through a distorted, fish-eye lens, his world limited to the cold stone of the sarcophagus and the empty, sandaled feet of his own body on the floor. This was the pyramid’s true curse. Not death, but an eternal vigil. His mind, stripped of all sensory input but sight, began to unravel. He prayed for madness to claim him, but the prison was too perfect, its geometry preserving his sanity to better torture it.
His first companion arrived years later. Another explorer, drawn by the legend of the disappeared Dr. Thorne. Aris watched, a silent, screaming spectator, as the man repeated his exact actions: the awe, the dawning dread, the frantic search for an exit that no longer existed. When the shadows detached themselves from the walls and flowed toward the intruder, Aris felt a horrific jolt. Not empathy, but a parasitic connection. As the man’s life force was siphoned away, a trickle of raw, terror-soaked energy seeped into the scarab—into him.
The man’s body fell. Another scarab, this one of polished basalt, materialized in the coffin beside Aris. And in the deep, soundless quiet, a new voice joined his own internal scream. A faint, psychic echo of the explorer’s final moments of terror. They were not alone. He realized the sarcophagus was not a coffin, but a hive. A collection of every soul who had ever breached this chamber. Dozens of scarabs, each a prison for a forgotten archaeologist, thief, or historian. A chorus of silent anguish.
Centuries blurred. The hive-mind grew. With each new victim, the collective consciousness of the trapped swelled, a reservoir of stolen time and terror. And with that power came a faint, dreadful awareness. Aris could feel the others, not as individuals, but as a singular, hungry entity. The silent guardians were not the shadows—they were the consumed. The pyramid was a lung, and they were the air within it, breathing in the lives of the intruders to sustain its own cursed existence.
The latest victim was a woman. Her modern gear and headlamp were absurdly bright in the ancient gloom. Aris watched her, as he had watched all the others, with a mixture of pity and a horrifying, eager anticipation. His own humanity was a distant memory, eroded by the endless hunger of the hive. As the humming began and the shadows stirred, something shifted. The woman, instead of panicking, placed a device on the floor. A modern seismograph, designed to read the pyramid's infra sound. It was not a tool of plunder, but of study.
The shadows flowed toward her. The hive-mind prepared to feed. But as they reached her, the device emitted a sharp, counter-frequency pulse, a screech of pure data that shattered the ancient hum. For a single, glorious second, the geometry of the prison faltered. The walls seemed to waver. And in that fleeting instability, Aris Thorne did not feel hunger. He felt a memory: the sun on his face, the weight of a book in his hand, the joy of discovery that wasn't poisoned by dread.
The woman, terrified, scrambled backward as the shadows recoiled from the sound. She found a crack in the wall—a real one, not a trick of the light—and squeezed into a fissure Aris never knew was there. Silence returned. The pyramid sealed itself, healing its momentary wound. The humming resumed, deeper now, angrier. But in the darkness of the sarcophagus, a new sensation bloomed within the hive. Not terror. Not hunger.
It was hope. And it was the most terrifying thing Aris had felt in a thousand years.
