Title: Valley of the Forgotten
Plane: Amonkhet (Pre-Hour of Devastation)
Prompt: The desert is an unforgiving place. This one is called the Valley of the Forgotten for a reason. Every living thing there has to fight for survival, lest they be lost to the sands. And we would have to fight too, or else…
Genre: Suspense
Characters (In Order of Appearance): OCs
Word Count: 473
The desert is an unforgiving place. This one is called the Valley of the Forgotten for a reason. Every living thing there has to fight for survival, lest they be lost to the sands. And we would have to fight too, or else we too would be lost. I began to wonder then why we had taken on that stupid dare. Go beyond the Hekma, see what was beyond the barrier we were told. We only had to go out one mile and come back. That was it. There were a lot of warning signs when we got out there. Not a few minutes in and a sand wurm breached. It was only for a minute, but it was massive, bigger than anything we had faced during Rhonas' trial. We should have known then that there was a reason there seemed to be so little living out beyond our magical wall.
It was when Kefti and I saw that…thing that things got bad. It walked on four legs, but those legs bent at strange angles, not in any way natural. At first, we were curious. What kind of creature was it? Surely, we had never seen something so strange in Naktamun. But as it drew closer, it became clear that this horrible creature was a very serious danger. It was a walking shadow, its skin so dark as it approached. Long, unreal-looking legs bending and twisting with each step. It had no face, just some golden markings where its face should have been, written in a language so old, even the scribes no longer knew what it meant. But the creature knew we were there. I could see it had no nose. It wasn't smelling us. It could just feel us there. Its head turned in our direction.
Its muscles hardly twitched before I dragged Kefti away, and we both ran. It could probably catch up to us in a few bounds, but I had to try. We needed to survive. By that point, I had lost direction of where we were. Logic told me I couldn't be too far out. I had to be able to see the shimmer of the Hekma, a beacon of safety, but instinct told me to get out of there.
We found some old ruins to hide in, which is where we were now. We could not stay here forever, not without food or water. We had to fight. We had to get back to Naktamun. We were initiates. We could do that, right? Lately, I wasn't so sure of that. But before we could debate that issue further, we both heard rock shifting behind us. Kefti saw it first and let out a small gasp. I turned and only saw the rotted face of what was once a person staring back at me. "Usurper," it whispered.
Author's Note: It's always so fun when a single card can inspire one of these short stories. This time, the inspiration was Scrounger of Souls, which was the creature in the desert our two unfortunate initiates found.