The thing they called Khaemwaset was not a king, nor a priest in any sense we would understand. Professor Alistair Finch knew this the moment he looked upon the obsidian sarcophagus, its surface carved not with gods but with things that writhed between the dimensions of the carved lines. The air in his private study, usually fragrant with pipe smoke and old paper, now tasted of static and the void. His assistant, Lena, her face pale in the gloom, pointed a trembling finger at a specific cluster of hieroglyphs. "It's not a curse of death, Professor. The translation is more literal. It says, 'He who consumes the symphony. He who drinks the noise of the soul.'" Alistair dismissed her with a wave, but his hand shook. The scarab set into the sarcophagus—a lapis lazuli abomination with too many legs—seemed to watch him.
Greed, however, was a louder voice than fear. He broke the seal with a hydraulic jack. The sound it made was not of breaking stone, but of a deep, structural sigh of release. Inside, the mummy was a horror of blasphemous anatomy. It was not wrapped, but encased in a substance like petrified black resin, pulled taut over a skeletal frame that was subtly, terribly wrong—the ribs were too numerous, the skull elongated into a silent scream. The lapis scarab was embedded in its chest, a third, unblinking eye.
The investigation began. But that night, the house grew cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. It was the cold of interstellar space. The lights didn't just flicker; they dimmed as if the very electricity was being drained of its vitality. Alistair, recording notes into a microphone, heard his own voice played back thin and warbling, the words being eaten by the silence around him.
He turned. The sarcophagus was empty.
A whisper filled his mind, not of words, but of sensation: the crushing pressure of the deep earth, the absolute stillness of a dead star. It was a hunger so ancient it had forgotten what food was, only the aching need for it. Khaemwaset stood at the far end of the library. It didn't walk. It translated, its form flickering from one shadow to the next. The air around it died. The gentle hum of the refrigerator down the hall ceased as it passed. The frantic, panicked thumping in Alistair’s own chest began to soften, as if a heavy blanket was smothering it.
Lena rushed in, her mouth wide in a soundless cry. The creature turned its head. The lapis scarab on its chest glowed with a faint, cold light, and Lena’s scream was not silenced—it was consumed. The light absorbed the sound waves, the vibration, the very energy of her terror. Then, the unmaking began. It wasn't that she vanished. It was that she was unwritten. Her edges blurred. The memory of her name evaporated from Alistair’s mind as he watched her form dissolve into a greyish static, which was then siphoned into the scarab’s glow. A final, fleeting impression of utter existential terror hit him, and then there was nothing. No dust, no echo. A perfect nullity.
The thing was before him now. Alistair couldn't scream. His vocal cords were there, but the will to make sound was gone, stolen by the entity’s proximity. The hunger was a physical force, pulling at him. He felt the inner symphony of his being—the rush of blood, the crackle of synaptic firings, the rhythm of his breath—being slowly muted. He wasn't being killed. He was being erased from reality itself, his life’s noise used to satiate an eternal, cosmic appetite. His vision darkened not to black, but to a non-color, an absence of light.
The last thing he perceived was not an image, but the final, deafening thought in his mind being plucked from his consciousness like a note from a string, leaving only an infinite, silent hunger behind. When the authorities found the study, it was pristine. And utterly, unnaturally silent. Not even the buzz of a fly dared to disturb the quiet that Khaemwaset had left in its wake.
