The Eye of Ra
Gibberish Writing Contest Round 2
Your Challenge This Week: Write a “bottle episode” story with one character in one setting for the entire story. In any genre, give your readers the urgent desire to get out of there! A required story beat is that, at the end of the story, they must get out of/leave the chosen setting. How you guide your readers through this challenge is up to you!
GWC ‘24 Judges:
and .GWC ‘24 Competitors: , , , , and (click through to check out their responses to the challenge!)
Many of my favorite television stories are bottle episodes. The appeal for producers is obvious, but what makes them enjoyable for the audience? With nowhere to go, the camera lingers, sometimes slowing down almost to real time. We sit in the moment with our familiar protagonists, undisturbed in most cases by B-plots or the season’s arc. The writers debate among themselves the words of Anton Chekov: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story.”
Happily, this is not too far off the advice I received last round from the judges - and so this time, I’ve been very careful about where I shine the light…
October 1921 — Valley of the Queens, Egypt
After nearly ten minutes of deafening echoes, the air finally began to quiet as the last pebbles skittered to their resting places in the dark. Seventeen-year-old Lady Amalia Blake lowered her scarf, then quickly raised it, coughing again. The dust might not settle for hours yet. With nobody looking for her, she didn’t have that long.
You wanted some excitement, the girl thought. The cave shrines of Meretseger had been mapped years ago, but they still called to her — she’d been sure there was something there that Schiaparelli hadn’t found. Now she knew why they were closed off. Amalia felt in her knapsack until she found the cold metal of her spare electric torch. It lit up the wall dimly, in shivering concentric circles that suggested it hadn’t taken the fall well.
How far had she fallen?
As Amalia turned the torch around, her light reflected off a massive rockslide behind her — and, before her, a small room that surely had nothing to do with the temple above. Furnishings and other goods were stacked up as high as they could go. Rows of clay jars still lined niches cut into the stone walls, one dripping a glistening liquid from its broken side. She crept forward under the low ceiling, directing the light before her with one hand while the other trailed blindly across the wall, and suddenly stopped short at the sensation of air moving across her forehead. With so much solid rock between her and the surface, there was only one thing a draught could indicate.
She turned and swung the torch around, revealing a deep recession in the shape of a doorway. As she moved closer, weaving between artifacts toppled by the slide, the light found crumbled plaster and a void just small enough to fit her hand through. Amalia reached out and dug at it with her bare fingers until more plaster pulled away, dropping to her knees to get better leverage as the void widened. The plaster seal wasn’t nearly as thick as the rest of the walls, but it was still slow going. Once it was about eighteen inches across and a strong musty odour had begun to filter through her scarf, she stopped to shine the light through.
From this vantage point, her faltering torch reached only a small circle of a corridor’s opposite wall. It appeared to be limestone, as expected at this elevation, but without any decoration that she could see. By crouching down and craning her neck sideways, she was able to make out a single line of hieroglyphics carved into the stone.
“May the earth open its caverns to her,” Amalia read slowly aloud, both her voice and her small laugh muffled by the scarf. How appropriate.
Taking the spell as a good omen, she pulled her arm back in and removed her knapsack to push it through the hole first. Then she dropped the torch through on top of it, plunging the storeroom into darkness. Finally she followed after, squeezing through the hole arms-first and shimmying the rest of her body out onto the dusty floor of the tomb.
For a tomb it certainly was — where else could she have found herself? Amalia couldn’t recall any known burials so close to the temple. As she trod down the corridor towards a space where her light vanished into sudden distance, her steps were slow not from trepidation but the electric thrill of discovery.
The darkened doorway let onto a chamber which seemed to be no larger than the storeroom had been. Her soft footsteps slowed further as she swept the light across the chamber floor to find nothing there except for a granite sarcophagus and a few pieces of its lid. The only egress she could see was by a doorway in the corner, currently blocked by a slab of wood that couldn’t possibly be as old as the rest of the tomb. A little of the thrill dissipated as she realized that looters had been here already. Still, in a way, that was good news: if they had come in, they had surely left her a way out. Amalia could still be the girl who put this tomb on the map, intact or not. She stepped closer to one of the faded paintings and suddenly caught the draught again. To her surprise, it was coming from almost directly above her.
Amalia lowered her scarf to breathe more easily and raised both her hand and the light to find the draught’s source. “O Lady of the Peak, She Who Loves Silence, be mindful of your servant,” she read. “The Eye of Ra rests upon all below.” It was a prayer to Meretseger, the necropolis’ guardian goddess whose temple lay just above them, and it was flanked by icons of the sun disk. One of them was a small, dark void. Standing on her toes to reach it, she loosened a small shower of gravel, and a blast of warm night air followed. By turning her light away and squinting, Amalia could just see the stars at the end of a narrow tube.
Clever way to integrate an air shaft, she thought. Perhaps the living had returned here to conduct rituals, as a kind of annex to the temple above.
She returned her heels to the floor and began to read the rest of the hieroglyphics more closely, curious now about who merited a tomb so close to Meretseger’s sanctum. Many of them were variations on the familiar spells she had studied while trying to convince her father she could be an asset to the expedition. They spoke of the many dangerous beasts against which the soul must be guarded, of the shabti figures coming to life to do the speaker’s bidding. At last she found one that included a name.
“It is the Osiris Djeserit, priestess of Meretseger, who asks admission,” Amalia read — the Osiris here meaning the deceased.
She turned her light back to the broken sarcophagus, the back of her neck prickling. She had assumed that it was empty. Did Djeserit still rest there, awaiting her resurrection?
The girl pushed her hesitation aside and strode across the burial chamber, the light of her torch two steps ahead of her. When she reached the sarcophagus, she tucked the torch under her chin and used all her strength to topple what remained of the heavy stone lid.
The scraping of granite on granite gave way to a resounding crash in the dark, and Amalia looked down at the exposed mummy of an ancient noblewoman who had expected with a faith approaching knowledge to one day see the sun.
She stood there without moving for several minutes, breathing heavily from the exertion and equally fascinated and repulsed by the featureless shape of the resinous bandaged head. Grave robbers had removed coffin lid, mask, ornaments — but not her body. She must have lain undisturbed for some several hundred years, or else, driven by the craze for mummy-flesh, they would surely have taken that too. As Amalia panned the light down the body, the edge of the light caught something glinting on Djeserit’s heart. It was an Eye of Ra amulet, a protective charm in the form of the right-hand wedjat eye personified as Hathor, Mut, and Meretseger. Within that eye was contained all the avenging fury of an otherwise benevolent deity.
Entranced, Amalia reached out and wrapped her fingers around the Eye to tug it free.
Within seconds, she had her back flat against the opposite wall, gasping as her own shriek echoed away down the corridor. If asked at that very moment, she would have sworn to God and back that the mummy had moved in its coffin.
She kept her shaking torch pointed as closely as she could toward the open sarcophagus, waiting.
As the seconds progressed and no varnished claw appeared to exact revenge, she began to feel a little foolish. Finally, she forced herself to laugh. Of course prying an ornament from bitumen that had secured it for millennia would cause the body to settle! And what business did she have moving an artifact without recording its position first, anyway? What sort of would-be archaeologist did she call herself? The girl crept back towards the sarcophagus and swung the light over it to satisfy herself, finally, that Djeserit’s mummy remained firmly in place. Then she rested her torch on the coffin’s edge and pulled out a notebook to sketch the amulet’s former position on the body.
It was a beautiful piece of jewelry, lapis lazuli laid in gold. It was a silly thought…but she wondered as she finished the sketch and closed her book whether it wasn’t the amulet itself that had called to her. Perhaps Meretseger, the Eye of Ra, had finally come to terms with the secrets of her necropolis being laid bare.
“Well, either that, or she’s lured me into a trap,” Amalia murmured.
But of course it wasn’t a trap. She had that door, hadn’t she?
Starting to feel uneasy again, Amalia set the notebook down and flashed her light around to find the door in the corner. It certainly looked like a functioning door, but she supposed she couldn’t be sure. She got up and walked over to put her shoulder to it, expecting minimal resistance.
The wood creaked forward a couple of inches — and then stopped. When she shone her torch into the gap, she saw rubble piled up against it. The door had been blocked from the outside.
Amalia’s thoughts swirled as she fought a sense of panic. There was no need to panic, not when this was her great chance to prove her resourcefulness. She could climb; perhaps the rockslide hadn’t completely collapsed the temple entrance, and she might get out that way. Perhaps she could signal to the rest of the expedition through the air shaft. How far away was dawn?
She found the shaft again and then turned her light to the floor. A soft glow lingered around the void, hinting at the sun’s return. She could go and check the entrance now if she liked.
Amalia returned to the sarcophagus and bent down to pack her kit back up, but stopped as she noticed an unexpected character in the hieroglyphics along its side: appeasement. Intrigued — and hoping to settle her nerves — she put the knapsack down again and read further.
Rather than a spell for the deceased, these carvings seemed to be testaments from the sarcophagus’ artisan creators. ‘I did what was wrong, but by this work my Lady is appeased…’ Yes, she had seen something much like this on stone stelae in the temple above. As the guardian of the necropolis, Meretseger was known to punish workmen who stole from their dead masters — only with repentance would she lift her curses. A fine tomb for her most revered priestess seemed fair enough as reparation.
Amalia paused with the draft from the air shaft on the back of her head, frowning into the darkness at another sun disk that didn’t look quite right. She focused her light on the disc as she read the hieroglyphics around it: “Behold, the Osiris Djeserit shall come forth by day, and she shall not come to an end.”
From somewhere behind the sun disk came a metallic ping.
And then, the creaking and groaning of stone and wood as the penitents’ greatest work came to life.
Amalia stood up slowly, clutching her torch in one hand and the Eye of Ra in the other, and looked straight into the accusing face of Djeserit’s mummy.
She screamed, and she ran.
The light swung wildly as she guessed at the position of the corridor, running into first one wall and then the other in her haste. It took longer, too much longer, to land the dwindling circle of light on the white slick of plaster and find her entrance. The dry limestone scoured her neck and wrists as she pushed her way through and tumbled back into the storeroom, landing roughly on the floor. Amalia shook off the pain and threw herself onto the rocky slope, pulling herself towards the dim light above. There was just enough space between the rocks blocking the cave entrance for her to shove them aside and stumble out into the dawn.
Amalia looked down at the just-waking valley below her, the tents, the tombs. The Eye of Ra gleamed in the pink sun, and she shivered. She turned and climbed slowly around the rocks of the Peak until she came to the spot where Djeserit’s sun-shaft let out.
Bending down, she let the golden amulet fall until it hit the bottom.
Wordcount: 2,1211
Boy, that was close. (The limit for this week’s entry is 2,150!)
Ahh, who doesn't love a good mummy story? Well done!
Wow this is a good thriller. It's like watching a movie in my mind. Beautiful landscape, you are quite well versed, are you well familiar with such mythology? Excellent piece.