millennia ago

The sun bore down fast and hard, the sands were shifting, like the ones in the hourglass of time. The laborers were dark skinned and groaning. Every now and then, there was a thump, and a whip cracking through the air. The smell of sweat and slavery hung heavy and damp in the air. Otherwise, the atmosphere was dry and arid. So dry, in fact, that it seemed the scratchiness of the air would cut through you like a knife through chicken. If you opened your mouth, you could feel the sand hurtling in, as it tried to enter through every orifice. The pharaohs and their concubines, and their advisors wore clean white robes. The scribes following them, carrying reedy pens and parchy parchments. The laborers wore something that might once have been white, but was now dusty, and dirty, and muddy, and sweaty. They were building a pyramid today. As they did on most days, but this one seemed different, it felt different. Every morning, the feeling was strongest. As the day wore down, the nausea, the overwhelming feeling of being around something they could not understand, that feeling began to wear away. It was as if every night some spell was cast upon what they had built, and they felt the remnants of that power. The guards didn’t know anything about it either. Usually they could not wait to share their knowledge, and thus demonstrate their higher status in society to the slaves. As if they needed to prove it to someone. Themselves? But this time around, with this particular pyramid, they were uncharacteristically tight lipped.

Hur, Hur was curious. He had been brought over from far away. An Egyptian still, but he had somehow managed to travel far lands. They had not believed him to be one of their own, and they had enslaved him. Which was fine, no, it really wasn’t. But while plotting his escape, and wondering if he would survive, he had been put on this project. From the start, he had noticed it was different. Long before the others felt the power, he felt it. Unlike the others, who became nauseated around it, he felt refreshed, alive. They fainted, as if from heat stroke, he felt he could move more and heavier stones that he ever had in his life. He felt addicted. He would wake up thinking about the power, and go to sleep thinking about it. It was… unlike anything he had felt in his life. It seemed to be calling to him. A purple presence, big, ogre-like, yet graceful and lithe like a dancer. So his plans for escaping were all kaput for now. And little did he know, they would be kaput forever. He dug deeper into his work, and worked to be closer to the power, until a thought struck him. Where was it coming from? He resolved to stay up at night to find out. The day he made the decision, he was nervous, sweating all over. The day he made a decision, a new visitor came to the building site.