Maerya was already entering the second corridor—one lined with curse marks so deep the stone still wept salt.
Something clicked. A trap primed itself.
“Watch your step,” she said without looking back.
At the third corridor—the most treacherous—she whispered a name I hadn’t heard in millennia. The air changed. The ceiling shook.
Skeletal hands appeared from the walls, holding relics: a crook, a shattered harp, the cracked mirror of a priest-judge.No warriors—no, worse. These had been memory-keepers. Death-listeners. They lined up on both sides of the corridor, oblivious to us.
“Do not touch them. Hold the line,” Maerya said softly, touching each skull as if blessing them. The dead did not answer. They simply stood.
Daphne pressed close, and I could hear the hasty beating of her heart beside mine. Yet she didn’t complain. She walked past the rows of ancient dead, eyes fixed somewhere ahead.
Maerya touched the wall. A faint click and a hidden tile slid open. She smirked.
“Still works. They don’t build traps like that anymore.” She said and vanished beyond the arched door.
It got colder. The ley lines beneath were pulsing brighter. I tasted metal and ozone on my tongue. Magic hummed in the air, and loose strands from Daphne’s hair rose to the vaulted ceiling.
We had reached the Salt Womb chamber.
“So this is where the good times will happen?” Camille spread her arms and twirled among the pools carved into the floor, salt crystals still shimmering inside.
Orren stood at the base of the central pillar, palms pressed to the limestone floor. His mouth moved in silence, summoning the roots of things too deep to see—tendrils of life that answered only to him.
His eyes opened, glowing faintly green. “The foundation’s awake,” he said. “If they breach too far, the pyramid will bury them alive. Will arrange a few moresurprises for them. Scorpions, snakes, the usual thing,” he said casually.
Camille passed behind him, sliding daggers into the folds of her sash. Her expression was unreadable, but I saw the faint glimmer of red at her pupils. Blood-magic: the same one that earned her the nickname the Amazonian Vampire.
“You good?” she asked Orren.
He cracked his knuckles. “I’m humming with murder.”
“Delightful,” she purred.
I looked at Daphne again. She stood at the mouth of the Salt Womb itself, her silhouette framed in the flickering blue of the ley line light, cast like veins along the stone walls. Back straight, breath steady, she looked every inch a queen-in-the-making.
“When does it begin?” she asked, her voice even. Not trembling.
“Soon.”
She was ready.
I wasn’t sure the world was.
Maerya pulled an old map from her pocket and spread it across a stone slab. Camille leaned in, her earrings catching the blue magical light.
“Three corridors fan outward from the Womb—north, south, and west, where we entered. They’ll come through all three. And we’ll meet them at every turn. I’ll take the northern mouth,” Camille said, her voice too smooth and sweet. Knowing her, that was spelling carnage. “I’ll wait in the embalming niches—if they breach, I’ll bleed them slow.” Her smile was all teeth. It didn’t reach her eyes.
Across the chamber, Orren was already working at the southern tunnel. Vines slithered through cracks in the stone, roots thickening into living snares.
He lifted a thorny sprig to his lips, whispered something in the Old Tongue, and watched it twist into the shape of a serpent.
“The main corridor is mine.” Maerya declared and retraced her steps back to the tunnel we used to reach the Salt Womb.
“It’ll begin soon.” I pointed at the glowing veins of pure, raw magic that thickened in the sandstone around us.
“Do you need any help to place wards around the chamber, Emrys?” Camille asked.
