Chapter 48: The Corridor of Forgotten Souls
Arthur Ferguson arrived in the land of Egypt. While his ships were unloading their cargo in the ports, his mind was elsewhere entirely. It wasn't the trade of silk and spices that quickened his pulse, but those golden sands that hid the secrets of eternity beneath them. As soon as his feet touched the Egyptian desert sands, the "Ring of Reflection" on his finger began to vibrate with an unusual violence, as if the rare metal it was forged from felt a magnetic pull toward the heart of the desert.
Arthur ventured deep into his expedition, moving away from the city's noise, until he reached a deserted valley containing an ancient temple unmentioned in any maps. The temple walls were covered in cryptic inscriptions describing the soul's journey from the underworld, "Duat," and depicting the passage of entities between the life of mortality and the life of permanence. The scene was awe-inspiring, as if the walls spoke the silent language Arthur had read about in the sorcerer Malakar's book.
As Arthur felt the inscriptions with his hand, searching for a link between the sorcerer's lore and Pharaonic art, the ring suddenly stopped vibrating and began to glow with a deep crimson light. The light pulled his hand toward a side wall, where his eyes fell upon a strange relief; it did not represent a god or a king, but a featureless "shadow" sitting on a throne of sand, holding what looked like an eternal hourglass.
The moment Arthur's hand touched that inscription, the unexpected happened. A deep grinding of stone echoed through the temple's foundations, and a section of the wall slid away to reveal a narrow passage descending into the depths of the earth. The smell from the corridor was not that of old dust, but of "burnt incense" and a "chill" that did not belong to this world.
Arthur realized this was no mere tomb for a mortal king, but a "gateway" between worlds. He drew his lamp, looked at the ring whose light had now stabilized, pointing inward, and took his first step into the dark passage, unaware that at the end of this path, the entity his grandchildren would seek a century later awaited him... Toula, in his original form, was waiting