A/N: Don’t think I’ve abandoned HN, but it’s taking a while so I just thought I’d give you something to read in the meantime. More of a conventional Mummy caper this one, actually the first Mummy fic I ever started, right after I saw the Mummy Returns in the cinema. I held off posting coz its not finished, but I have a lot of it written, so hopefully by the time I have to get back to it I will have finished HN!

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The Eye of Horus

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Prologue

Inside the tomb the air was arid and stale, but besides the mustiness of age there was something else. Something familiar he found almost comforting. He sensed the faintest ghost of an aroma that could have been natron, or sandalwood… or his imagination. After all, he was only just inside the entrance, and such lingering scents would surely be long gone from this ancient place by now.

He proceeded cautiously, feeling and remembering his way almost without the aid of the flickering light of his torch. With each step his sandaled feet sank into the sand drifts, which were trampled into a deep trench by a century of explorers and would-be Egyptologists, and littered with fragments of relief carvings from the ruined walls. The last time he had walked the corridors of this sepulchre the newly cut rock had been swept clear, ready to receive its royal resident, the paint still drying on the elaborately decorated walls.

He looked around him, never ceasing to be impressed by this masterpiece of Egyptian burial architecture. He had been amazed at the tomb builders’ ingenuity when he first saw the plans, truly impressed by their understanding of the ravages of nature and the impious greed of man. The pharaoh’s eternal resting place would remain undisturbed by both, thanks to the enormous pit at the end of the long entrance corridor. The well was as deep as ten men, and nine cubits across, swallowing the waters of the Nile during the annual inundation to keep the flood from penetrating the king’s burial chambers. It also acted as a challenging obstacle to potential thieves.

Or rather, it had used to. On re-entering this tomb for the first time in nearly three thousand years, Akhethotep found the pit filled in with rubble.

“Fools!” he muttered to himself as he crossed the wooden walkway constructed across the choked chasm, only to find his worst suspicions confirmed when he got to the other side; the lower levels of the walls were cracked and stained with water damage. He gazed in open-mouthed disbelief at the crumbling plaster and blistered paintwork, then his proud brow contracted with grief at the loss of so much beauty. He had been in this tomb on many occasions, but this was the first time he had ever been conscious of the presence of death here- and it was the death of his world.

As he continued down to the first flight of steps his torch illuminated the sad condition of the walls with an eerie glow, revealing them as a ghostly shadow of their former splendour. The wall paintings and carved hieroglyphics, decorating every inch of these corridors and chambers, had once represented the highest achievement of Egyptian art. He cast his mind’s eye back, far back over the millennia of oblivion, to the astonishing sight of the newly completed work.

Stepping over brushes and paint pots discarded on the floor, he had moved between each panel in the columned hall, admiring the bright colours and fine detail of the murals, praising the artisans of Deir-el-Medina in awe. Never had such a tomb been built before.

The painted figures had towered above him, larger than life and infinitely more beautiful than any conjuring of his own imagination. The pharaoh had still been alive then, but there he was strolling along the walls, hand in hand with the gods in the afterlife, his rich nut brown complexion glowing with health and beauty, and his youthfully sculpted torso adorned with gold collar necklaces, ornately embellished with carnelian and blue lapis.

But the years had not been kind to this marvel of ancient artistry.

Whilst the backgrounds of the wall panels had then shimmered with gold, now they were faded, tarnished by greasy fingerprints and covered in a thick black build up of smoke from magnesium flares. In some places he could see new hieroglyphs alongside the old, characters he did not recognise crudely scratched into the paint by idle hands. In others there was nothing left of the gorgeous panels but a raw wound in the rock, a gaping hole where a relief sculpture had been prised off and carried away.

But that was not the worst of it.

What had not already been desecrated by human hands was now slowly being torn asunder by nature’s, he realised as he entered the burial chamber. He looked up to see that the starry heavens, stretching across the magnificent vaulted ceiling, bore ominous dark stains, and there was a long, jagged rent in the midnight blue surface. The astronomical procession of divinities was periodically interrupted by a patch of pale bare rock, as if the very sky were falling from above them. The lower part of the walls had gone completely, with plain brick and mortar now standing in place of the painted limestone that had depicted scenes from the weighing of the heart ceremony.

And there in the centre of the chamber, where once had stood the splendid alabaster sarcophagus of the great Pharaoh, was a rough-hewn hole in the floor, fenced off with crude wooden railings.

Seti’s once splendid tomb had been raped of all its glory.

Resting his elbows on the upper railing, the former priest held his head in his hands and wept for his king. As if it wasn’t enough for him to have been brutally murdered at the hands of his most trusted servant- Akhethotep’s own treacherous master- now his body had been ripped from its holy resting place, wrenching his soul out of the afterlife. Who had dared the gods’ anger to do such a thing? To think that Seti’s poor, desiccated corpse should be paraded in a museum for the entertainment of tourists, or worse, ground into dust and used as a cosmetic by rich European women… his heart was ready to crack, just like these sad decaying walls.

He remembered the pharaoh’s death as if the intervening period were only a matter of weeks, not millennia. The look on his twisted face, the pain in his voice, the blood…so much blood, spattering the walls, pooling on the floor, as though the palace would never be washed clean again… The images still tormented him in the darkness.

“My lord…” he whispered finally, wiping his tear streaked cheeks as he straightened up, “I will make it right.”