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Chapter 2 - The ravine

It was quite cold. So cold in fact that it forced Arthur awake. He was still alive, and with no injuries. Arthur looked up, trying to process how he was still alive, and unscathed from such a height, but he still had to move. If the fall didn't kill him, then the cold would. He began analysing his surroundings.

He was at the bottom of a ravine, where above him was just darkness and the walls and floor were coloured pitch black with the walls having golden hieroglyphics on them. He was at one of the ends of the ravine, so he had to make his way to the other end. As he took his first step towards the shadows in front of him, torches immedialty lit up with a golden flame through the span of the walls all the way to the end, all roughly four meters apart. It was obviously a long way to the other side, Arthur couldn't even estimate how long the walk would be, mainly because he was looking back up.

'Hell no'

Walking in a weird corridor at the bottom of a ravine where torches suddenly lit up, acknowledging his presence was not something a sane human like Arthur would do. He checked around his feet to see if he tripped some kind of mechanism just to find nothing. He began forming ideas. A person could have been down here and maintained the torches so that they would lit up in case someone fell to the bottom, but that was highly unlikely with the thick cobwebs scattered around the corridor and how would the torches know he was here? No one seemed to have made their way through the corridor in at least a couple of centuries, and it was highly unlikely that anyone knew of this ravine. Hamza was always excited to talk about nearby places left behind by the ancient civilisation, but he never mentioned this ravine. So Arhur was definely the first person to have been down here in a couple of millennia. The other possibility was simple, something unexplainable was happening and Arthur was sure as hell not going to be a part of it, so he looked up seeing if there's a way up instead.

He'd rather climb all the way up than walk through a supernatural corridor, he did do a bit of rock climbing over the years, but despite no one having been down here in thousands of years, the walls still looked perfect and were still too smooth and tall for Arthur to climb. He was definitely right. Something fishy is going on. It was impossible for anything built by man to stay so perfect for so long. But now that there was no way of going up, he had to go straight.

He began making his way to the other side of the corridor through the cobwebs. Arthur did not have time to be worried about anything. His fingers and toes were already numbing from the cold, so he had to make his way out quickly. Thankfully he was wearing boots, some thick cargo trousers and a jumper, he was ready to walk through the desert at night where the cold reigns, but it was just as good down here.

As he was running awkwardly (the fall still left an impact on him), he was still surveying his surroundings. The hieroglyphs around him seemed to talk about a man with special abilities fighting against armies by himself and gifting his allies with technology and information. Arthur was too tired to make any sense of what the paintings were depicting, so he just kept running until he saw the end.

He saw a wall in front of him, the other side of the ravine, a possible way out. Arthur ran quicker with hope. He knew that hope could lead to demise even more than it could lead to success, but he couldn't help himself, he was hopeful. He was now in front of the wall, or more like he was in front of a colossus door. There was a double door in front of him, arched at the top, and the top was roughly ten meter above him. Why make doors so high? Regardless Arthur didn't care, the way out was now in front of him. As he began pushing the doorway, a terrible pain stabbed his hand. Arthur recoiled in pain, looking at his hand. There was blood. The door pricked him with a thick needle that was not there before. Before Arthur could make any decision on how to sterilise this wound and bandage it up in case he contracts a deadly disease, the doors flung. And they flung fast. They slammed the walls on the other side with a loud noise. Arthur was momentarily incapacitated by such a loud sound after being in silence for hours, but as he recovered he bagan studying the other side of there doors.

There was a room. A cuboid room with twenty meters in length, width and height. The walls were once again pitch black, only adorned by golden torches. And right in the middle of the room was a tomb. Arthur speculated the person in the tomb was a pharaoh, so he was definetly not messing around with the coffin in front of him in case it's warded with some ancient magic that will curse him for the rest of his life. Unlikely, but he wasn't taking any chance and he doubted he'd gain anything useful to him right now so he just left it alone. On the other side of the room was an arched doorway. Feeling hopeful, Arthur got to it and tried to open it. He didn't mind being pricked again by a needle if it meant leaving this place. But nothing happened. Right as he began thinking, he heard the sound of stone grinding against stone. As he looked back at the door that let him in, the only possible source of that horrid noise, he froze.

What he saw left him speechless. The sound came from the coffin. It opened, and someone was sitting up straight inside of it.

Said someone was staring right at him.