The Sundered Sarcophagus – Part 1
Boy howdy has it been awhile since I’ve done one of these!
A blog post, dove-tailing oh-so-nicely into a story post?! Where do you think this is, The Unsheathed Quill or something!?
On a more serious note, tonight was less about Justin Wallace the Burgeoning Blogger on Medium and more about Justin Wallace the Guy Who Likes When Bears Punch Robots.
When I type that last bit, I’m all smiles and laughter. I love all of you, I love my career, but if I’m gonna make it I need to have some moments (and some stories) where the focus is on writing something I enjoy. You’re enjoyment of such things is tertiary to my main objective, I’m afraid.
That doesn’t mean I will sacrifice quality! Such selfish stories will still get the iron rod of discipline known as editing. They will still be cohesive things with chutzpah and all sorts of other wonderful Yiddish terms that I find endearing. Seriously, Yiddish words have the most wonderful mouthfeel. It’s practically impossible to say them out loud without smiling.
Tonight’s story isn’t really based off anything. I love the campy movie The Mummy, I love detective novels set in steam-punk / noir-punk / cyber-punk style cities (not sure which applies at this stage), and I thought ‘well, why not have both!’
So here we are. Now let’s plug our nose and cannonball into this particular rabbit hole. I’ve no idea how deep it goes, and I can’t wait to find out.
The Sundered Sarcophagus – Part 1
Ifna’s scream of terror was accompanied by the frantic scrabbling of fingernails on smooth stone.
Gone was the casual grace with which she moved through the palace and through her life. Now, howls of murderous retribution and promises of dazzling wealth were hurtled through a throat shredded by their passage.
Her executioners were unmoved by her display.
Their only reply was the whispering hiss of sand as it was slung one shovel-full at a time across the lid of her sarcophagus. It rained down, a jarring staccato to her screams.
The price of her tirade soon took it’s toll. Breathing was becoming an issue; the air was wet and heavy. It pressed down upon Ifna, robbing her of the energy to do much more than gasp in exhausted panic.
There was no more scrabbling within the sarcophagus and no more play of sand on stone. Inside the inky blackness of her tomb, there was only Ifna.
The darkness won, and as it swarmed through her in great cobalt waves, the only thought Ifna had the energy to muster was this:
I guess I finally slept with the wrong woman.
~Four Thousand Years Later~
Ifna woke in the groggy fashion she usually attributed to her worst hangovers. A rhythmic pounding was sounding within her sarcophagus, and the lid above was laced with a spiderweb of cracks leaking light. She coughed, each hacking exhalation loosing a cloud of dust and sand.
Before she could vent her anger at her rude awakening, her brain caught up with her situation.
How am I waking up at all!?
Dying had been an excruciating and terrifying experience, and she remembered it with nauseating clarity.
So why in the name of all the Gods and Demons was she alive?
Pain came, all the worse for having caught her unawares. Every fiber of her being was filled with agony, and she writhed as she tried to master it.
Great chunks of her coffin disappeared with great grunts of effort, although Ifna was in no position to notice.
With no small exertion of will, she forced herself to move beyond the pain and focus on her environs.
The first thing she noticed was the misshapen face mere inches from her own.
Then there was the screaming. Hers or his, it was hard to tell one from the other in the cacophony.
Face contorted with terror, her erstwhile liberator reached towards his belt, withdrawing a smooth, dark object which began to glow at the tip. He rammed the object down onto her chest, and then several curious things happened all at once.
A bright red light filled every corner of her coffin, and a hole the diameter of a dinner plate appeared in her chest.
The omnipresent sand of the desert, which had begun flowing in the moment enough chunks had been removed from her lid, were stirred by a wind which ignored everything else. The specks of sand merged into ribbons, and began flowing over her chest and filling in the hole that had been made by her assailant. His screams drifted back to her, as he’d began running the moment he’d discharged his weapon.
The pain, magnified a thousand-fold when Ifna had gained a huge hole in her chest, began to ease as her body took in more of the sand. She lay unable to move as her body began to put itself back together, one granule at a time.
In the span of ten minutes, Ifna had been resurrected, freed from her sarcophagus, been killed for the second time, and found out that her body parts could be replenished with the dust of her home.
Slowly, with exaggerated caution, she explored the hole that had been. She felt no trace that it had been; the skin was smooth and unbroken, and in the daylight she could see that it retained the same dark luster it had in life.
It was only then that she realized she was naked. She let out an undignified squeak, hands automatically trying (and failing) to cover everything at once.
Moments later she grudgingly admitted defeat and peaked over the edges of her coffin.
She inhaled sharply at the sight of her new reality.
To be continued…
Sandfully,
The Unsheathed Quill
