Disclaimer: I don't own anything Mummy related, but Naida is mine. No-touchy.

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Chapter 1: The Storm

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I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

"Ozymandias", Percy Bysshe Shelley

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The woman gazed across the blazing sands furiously, her eyes squeezed into slits to keep the whirling sands. She pulled her face scarf up higher, cursing her refusal of a full face mask. Under the thick cloth, her tongue darted out to wet the cracked surface of her lips. Almost as if embarrassed by the innate action, she sucked her tongue back in, diligent in her refusal to lose the precious moisture in her body.

Sighing in exasperation, she moped at the beads of sweat on her exposed skin, shoving the piece of cloth back into place. The robes she ore were the color of wet sand, just light enough to reflect some of the sun's heat and styled in the practical loose ants and long sleeved tunic of a men's clothing, which formed a shapeless, sexless figure.

Turning back to her thankless task, she plowed the blade of her shovel into the yielding, shifting sands, not even glancing at the many excavators around her as they pushed to complete a similar task. She allowed her thoughts to wander, her movements becoming mechanical and fixed, shoving the sands aside in the tedious, repetitive action.

Oh, how she longed for the sight of the Nile flowing just below her riverside Cairo apartment! For a woman of the 1920's, she was remarkably independent, having lived on her own for years. But her mind could not concentrate on the dry malleable sands all around her with this train of thought. She could feel her eyes glaze over slowly as she thought about the brown waters of the life-giving Nile River. Dark with silt, rich and fine, the river was always shifting, unpredictable even with the seasons so marked. Rushing and roaring in the inundated season or soft and laughing in the unique burble of water as the level dropped in the dry season.

She could almost hear the tide crashing against the levies. Rushing, hissing, jumping, roaring, straining to be free of its confines…

"Naida!" a man called out, snapping her from her reverie. A man, cloaked from head to toe, shook her arm, gesturing wildly as he fought to be heard over the rising winds. While in her mindless state, a violent storm had arisen, washing the world in a tide of undulating brown sand. Naida followed him at his unspoken order, looking back as she stumbled, nearly blind, through the dunes.

A wave of dust cleared for a moment, allowing her to glimpse the sneering visage of the ancient stone head of Ozymandias. Ramses II. The long-dead pharaoh whose crumbling visage challenged all passerby to surpass his deeds. In the briefest moment before the sands obscured her vision once more, the lithe black form of a man upon a horse was visible next to the towering legs and pedestal that were the final remnants of a once great king.

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This would not, could not, be allowed.

He was internally fuming, furious at this new band of overly curious "archeologists". The term itself made him sick. He of all people knew that some things should remain undiscovered, lest ancient evils awaken to continue their dark legacies. The party would have to be stopped one way or another.

But the mercurial mature of the desert could not be halted, even as he mused silently. What was at one moment as calm, blazing stretch of sand and rock became a raging beast of the same material, whipping the loose folds of his pitch black robes into a swirling frenzy.

The sand and dust maelstrom cleared for a moment and, from his chosen vantage point, he glared at the briefly exposed worker as he struggled, even with assistance, to reach his camp.

Fools. All of them great fools. Anyone oblivious enough to ignore the warning signs of a sandstorm was dead without dying in the unforgivable world of the desert. This group would soon meet a worse fate should the Medjai allow them to find what they desperately sought. All of them would have to be stopped.

Ardeth Bay whipped his horse around in a tight half-circle, galloping away through the haze to his assembled warriors.

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Consciousness.

A cold mind, dormant for so long, stirred restlessly. A pause for observation in the impenetrable darkness.

If it could have, the thing would have grinned. So close, so close. The presence was almost palpable. The proper disturbance of a century old safeguard and… there. It was done.

Soon it would begin; this the creature knew with great certainty. This time, it would not fail. The truth of its failure had been discovered over the millennia of isolation.

A cold, deep laugh echoed through the mind, inaudible to the ear.

Unbeknownst to the surface dwellers or the mind-that-was-cold, water seeped up through the bone-dry sands, spilling into the empty chamber deep underground as though relieved to escape captivity.