TIL DEATH DO US START ... Friday's Romantic Challenge_June Wedding

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TIL DEATH DO US START

The mummy wrappings were alive, writhing around my body caressing me tighter and tighter.  I struggled in the moving golden throne, but it did no good. 

 

Closer and closer it flowed like mist towards the waiting arms of Princess Shert Nebti.  She was almost dressed in an ancient Egyptian outfit that she must have thrown into the washer on the Hot cycle.

Her moon-white face creased in fine lines from the mummy wrappings that had smothered her for centuries, she smiled a thing of nightmares as I flowed nearer those outstretched fingers.

The horizon around me was impossible.  I mean, I knew Carnies got around, but to the Nile?

I looked out across the cryptic yellow Nile that is the mother of aeons and dynasties.

Beyond it lurked the menacing sands of the Libyan Desert, ridged and iridescent and evil, murmuring ancient mysteries. The red sun sank low, bringing the relentless chill of Egyptian dusk.

And as it stood poised on the world’s rim like that ancient god of Heliopolis—Re-Harakhte, the Horizon-Sun— hey, I read in those libraries I hid in - I saw silhouetted against the velvet holocaust of night the black outlines of the Pyramids of Gizeh—those all-but-forgotten tombs that were heavy with a thousand years when Tut-Ankh-Amen mounted his golden throne in distant Thebes.

Then I knew that I was done with civilized sanity, and that I was about to taste the deeper mysteries of primal Egypt—the black Khem of Re and Amen, Isis and Osiris.

Sin-black mists swallowed me, and then their lips parted to reveal the Sphinx.   I struggled silently beneath the spell of those terrible unseeing eyes. On the vast stone breast I could faintly make out the emblem of Re-Harakhte, for whose image the Sphinx was mistaken in a late dynasty.

And though sand covered the tablet between the great paws, I recalled what Thutmosis IV inscribed on it, and the dream he had when a prince. It was then that the smile of the Sphinx unsettled the hell out of me, and made me wonder about the legends of subterranean passages beneath the monstrous creature, leading down, down, to depths none might dare hint at—

depths connected with mysteries older than the dynastic Egypt modern Man excavates, and having a sinister relation to the persistence of abnormal, animal-headed gods in the ancient Nilotic pantheon.

And with the thought of those depths, I found myself there – with Princess Shert Nebti not a foot away from me in the swirling dark mists.

An ocean of glistening wet scarabs surrounded her, scuttled up over her, and tittered back down.  I swallowed hard as I saw she was chewing a few who had scurried too close to those thin lips.

A dank breeze moaned around us in barely understandable words:

“The subterranean nymph that dwells
’Mid sunless gems and glories hid—
The lady of the Pyramid!”

I forced a smirk, “Lousy poetry, Princess.”

She smiled with very sharp teeth.  “Just wait until you see our wedding night, Victor -- and my true face.”