XCEL

… This discovery will prove that the legend of Horus' Banished Disciple is more than just a myth.

The scratching stopped. Katsuro Harigane set down his pen. He leant back in his chair; the wood creaked in complaint. He stretched towards the canvas roof, heavy eyes focusing on his watch. The hands pointed to well past two in the morning. The lights dangling from the mess of wires made it easy to lose track of the time.

Writing his doctoral thesis, he had churned out thousands of words a day. His hand had flown across the page, the tip of his pen a blur. Those days were long past. Desperate to get something on the page, he’d ended up transcribing a train of thought instead. Useless. A heated prickle ran under his skin. The man pressed his clenched knuckles against his brow, wiping away the sweat coating the sides of his face. Removing his glasses, Katsuro cleaned the lenses, and took a swig of water. His expedition into the Valley of Kings had been the first in decades. His colleagues at the university said he was wasting his time chasing a legend. Their discouragement fell on deaf ears. All his life’s work had led up to this.

They had called him crazy. Perhaps he was crazy.

He peered back down at the page, eyes narrowed. Day fifty-three of their expedition, and still nothing. Had they been right all along? Had he wasted all this time, all this money, just for his gamble to turn up snake-eyes? No. He couldn’t return empty handed. Not to the university, not to his sponsor. He had gone to prove them all wrong, damn it!

He tore the page from his notebook. Damn it all.

Nothing left but to try again tomorrow. Tomorrow was a new day—or was it? The days had started to bleed across one another; the candle of his hope could only persist for so long.

Katsuro scrunched the torn page into a ball, and tossed it at the wastepaper basket. Bouncing off countless discarded drafts, it landed on the carpeted floor nearby. There, it stayed. Katsuro stood and caught his reflection in a mirror hanging on one side of the tent. He stalled for a moment, wondering if he’d always had those grey patches of hair around his ears.

“Professor Harigane, please excuse me,” came a voice from outside.

“Come in.”

A man pushed his way past the tent flaps: Kenjiro Hayakawa, one of Katsuro’s graduate students. Tall, thin, and with a lined face that made it seem he was twenty-seven going on forty. Any sense of composure he held seemed forced; his eyes cried urgency.

“You’ve got to take a look at this, down at the site.” He paused. “The others—the night shift—they’ve found the door.”

Katsuro’s eyes widened. They left the tent at a run, crossing the hundred or so yards between the tent and the main excavation site in no time at all. There had been promising moments before, but they had all accounted for nothing. Katsuro did his best to quell his hopes, but a few embers refused to die.

The two soon arrived to join the night shift, all crouched in and around the tunnel. Some clutched tools: the standard chisels, shovels and brushes to cleave away at the sandstone; others jotted down anything of note. It was slow but thorough work. Part of Katsuro’s research involved the triangulation of the tomb’s rough whereabouts. He’d taken contemporary records, many of which he had been able to recover and stitch together from the catacombs of Nekht-al-Amaan, some thirty miles further up the Nile. With the lay of the land under their belts, the excavation team got to work, armed only with light machinery to aid in their efforts. Anything larger was out of the question. They couldn’t risk damaging the tomb, or anything else buried alongside it.

Approaching the mouth of the tunnel, Katsuro apologised, parting men holding shovels. Peering down the tunnel, there was no sign of any door.

“The others and I heard about it via radio,” Hayakawa explained. “I ran to get you as soon as I’d heard; thought you’d want to see this.”

“Absolutely.”

“I expect they’re still clearing away debris. We’ll be able to see it shortly.”

“Not without light, we won’t.” Katsuro cupped both hands around his eyes and squinted. No such luck. They had dug a few hundred feet deep into the face of the valley by now. The tunnel went at a forty degree angle, stabilised by wooden frames at intervals of around fifteen feet. Lanterns hung in a line, suspended from wire, all the way down. From where he stood, the ambience wasn’t enough. Katsuro turned to one of the excavators. “I can’t see a thing. Can we get some more light down there?”

“On it.” One man put down his chisel and took to some floodlights. The roar of an additional generator joined the general din, and a brilliant beam burst into life overhead. At the end of it, a wall of carved sandstone, much lighter than the surroundings, stood firm and welcomed Katsuro like an old friend. He smiled. Had it been that long?

“Isn’t that the door?” said Hayakawa.

Katsuro nodded. No high could come close to this euphoria. “We’ve found the tomb.”

The “Banished Disciple of Horus” was thought nothing more than a fairy tale, shunned long ago by the archaeological community at large. It was so fantastical, the conclusion they came to was hardly a stretch. Pharaohs were gods among men. One wanted more than just that, to truly become one. He tasked his chief priest, his brother and a devotee of the god Horus, to find a way of turning his power fantasy into a reality. The priest devised such a ritual. The powers it granted were a mystery, but their hubris came at a price. The power turned the brothers against one another, and the ensuing conflict cost both the pharaoh, the priest and countless others their lives. The conflict drove a rift into the ancient kingdom, a rift that remained to this day, and a rift in which they now stood. The Valley of the Kings did not form on its own. Geological analysis of sedimentary rock suggested it was too far away to have ever been touched by the waters of the Nile.

The land had been shaped by something, and Katsuro had managed to figure out precisely what. That pivotal piece of evidence was what convinced him that this legend was more than just fiction. For the past twenty-two years, his research had consumed everything. The original texts had never been found. All he had to go off of were inferences made elsewhere. The final details were out there somewhere. He had spent his entire career piecing together clues to find what he hoped, but couldn’t know for certain, even existed.

It wasn’t enough for some.

When the time came for “financial redistribution given unprecedented times—” as the University of Tokyo’s ultimatum had stated—Katsuro had been given thirty days notice to clear his desk. The last he’d heard of it, his office had been redeveloped into a fancy new biotechnology lab.

They had laughed at him; branded him an awe-struck child, simply wasting his time. Who, Katsuro wondered, was laughing now?

“Someone hand me a torch,” Katsuro called out.

Another approached with one in hand.

He took it and addressed those nearby. “The rest of you, prepare some more lights for inside the tomb. We're going to try and open the door,” and to Hayakawa, “follow me.”

On the way down, they did their best not to lose their footing. From where the sandstone had been chipped away at, loose sand was scattered everywhere, making each footfall a potential peril. That didn’t matter. Katsuro was on the pinnacle of achieving the goal of his life’s research.

He had stumbled in the past, but never fallen. He wouldn’t fall now.

The remoteness was another important clue. This place was so far away from the others in the Valley of Kings, he’d wondered whether those who built the other tombs even knew this one existed. Contemporary records mentioning the Banished Disciple spoke of the pyramids as recent developments, not the multi-century projects they were once thought to be. They weren’t just tombs to house the bodies of kings, but monuments to honour the greatness of those that designed them; effigies of arrogance.

It didn’t make sense. Katsuro questioned how the building of such superstructures in such a short time was even possible. There had to be some mechanism to their construction that he had missed and yet, any record of it had been lost. Was the reason why obliterated from history? Katsuro hoped the tomb would answer just that, that it'd be the final piece he'd been missing. Then again, that was just a hope, and never a promise.

They drew closer to the door. Rows upon rows of strange symbols came into view, carved into the stonework.

“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Katsuro marvelled at its grandeur.

“This isn’t hieroglyphics…” Hayakawa scratched his head.

“No, this predates even that.”

“How old are we talking?”

“I’ve only ever seen this kind of script in Giza,” Katsuro admitted, before running his hand over the door’s patterned stone. “That should give you some idea.”

“What does this even say?”

It took Katsuro a moment to translate. He knew this script, but wasn’t fluent. “They’re warnings.”

“Warnings?”

Katsuro traced a symbol with his finger.

“This one, danger.”

And another few.

“A dismal end… to all things, and…”

His brow furrowed.

“It’s pleading with us to leave, and this character,” he traced another. “It’s specific. It's referring to the fear of the unknown.”

“Hold this.” Katsuro handed over his torch, and Hayakawa pointed it back at the door.

Katsuro ran both hands over the door’s surface, exploring for any possible crevice. He should’ve worn gloves, but it was too late for that now. He was on the edge of a breakthrough here! There had to be a hinge somewhere, a sliding mechanism of some kind, anything. This had none of that. Whoever made this tomb never wanted it open. Part of him wanted to respect that: to turn back and leave it undisturbed. He had no business here. Even so, this door drew his attention like nothing he’d seen. He felt drawn to it, like it was calling to him. He just had to find some opening. Even if it was sealed from the inside, there had to be some way to open this door.

“Hang on,” said Hayakawa. “I think I’ve found something.”

The man pointed at a slight crevice in the dead centre of the door: a circular divot around a raised hemisphere. It looked the perfect size to fit in one’s hand. Stepping forward, Hayakawa gripped it like a doorknob and twisted, but nothing came of it.

The man’s face fell. “I thought I had something there.”

“No, no…” Katsuro put his hand on the man's shoulder and moved him aside. “I think you might be onto something.”

He placed his hand where Hayakawa’s had been moments ago. He swore all of a sudden, and drew the hand away.

“Are you alright?”

Katsuro nodded, taking a look at his palm. “I’m alright. Cut my hand on something.” A trickle of blood oozed down his wrist. “Sorry, I was careless.” He wiped the hand on his shirt. “Show me where you found that handle again.”

Hayakawa did so. Katsuro placed his hand on the protrusion and gripped it. The blood from the cut ran down his palm and soaked into the stonework. Nothing happened for a moment or two. The handle then glowed green, casting an eerie light around the end of the tunnel.

Both men stepped back.

Katsuro found his handhold give way, and he turned it in place. A series of heavy clicks resounded from beyond the door. Met with a rushing of wind and a creaking of stone, a crack split right through the middle. Splinters of stone went flying, the door began to slide apart, revealing the expanse beyond.

The pair stepped forth into the darkness.

“Torch,” Katsuro held his hand out, not looking back. This was the only light they had. He clasped it tight.

At first, it was difficult to make out much of anything. The dust, however, you didn’t need a light for. Katsuro felt the musty air from millennia of stagnation force its way into his lungs, forcing a cough. Pointing the torch around, he couldn’t suppress his gasp.

This tomb was nothing like the others.

Most ruins contained an elaborate series of chambers, depicting stories of great men and their glorious transition to an eternal throne in the great beyond. Here, there was none of that. Here, there was only one room. Immediately, they were met with a well of narrow stairs. Following it, they gazed down into the chasm.

“How far down is that?”

“Watch your step,” Katsuro cautioned.

They began their descent. The cavernous ceiling and striated pillars gave him chills. This wasn’t the least bit grand; this was rueful. Far taller than the tomb of Panehsy in Tell el-Amarna, he recalled; that tomb had filled him with wonder and awe. This one, however? A pit of primal dread burrowed a hole through his gut. The torchlight fell on an altar made of gold positioned right at the bottom. Rows of symbols, the same kind as were on the door outside, were carved into the wall. It was too dark to read them properly. Once they’d strung up some lights, Katsuro knew he’d have to write them down. This could be the pivotal information he had been missing. Would they repeat the same warning as before?

There was something about that altar. The perfect of the gold, the way it drew his eye, it was uncanny; the way the torchlight glinted back at him, unobstructed by dust. It felt wrong, sinful, to look at it for long. Its allure alone felt treacherous.

A chill shot down Katsuro’s spine. He cast a glance around him, but was only met with darkness.

“Do you feel that as well?”

No one could have been here in four thousand years. Why, then, did it feel like they were being watched? Katsuro felt a pressing sensation in his ears, as though underwater. The air down here made it hard to breathe. Just then, he caught sight of the altar and pointed. “There’s something else. Look.”

Katsuro clutched at his forehead with a blood-stained palm, the hand holding his torch starting to tremble. Laying atop the altar, contained within a transparent box, was a perfectly preserved corpse. A muscular man with long black hair, adorned in a faded burial loincloth, clutching a ritual knife to his chest.

“Hayakawa—” Katsuro was unable to take his eyes from the corpse— “get the JPRO Extraction Team. We’ve found the Ascension Blade.”