The air in the hypostyle hall isn’t air anymore. It’s a tongue—thick, dry, licking the salt from my back. We’re not supposed to be here after dusk. But the overseer’s whip had a splinter, and I bled on the Pharaoh’s stone. So now I wait. Kneeling. Knees in the dust that tastes of old copper.

The pillars breathe. No—they gurgle. Hieroglyphs peel away like scabs, reforming into eyes that don’t blink. I try to pray, but my mouth fills with sand that wriggles. The shadows between the columns aren’t flat. They curl, reaching out with fingers made of beetle legs. A sound like wet linen tearing. Then I see him—or it—the thing wearing Khenemet’s face. Khenemet, who laughed when I dropped the wine jar last month. Her skin hangs loose now, pulled over a shape that has too many elbows.

It crawls toward me, whispering in a voice like mother’s, but mother’s been dead three harvests. “Stand, little rope.” I can’t. My shins have turned to Nile mud, soft, splitting. Something pale and jointed pushes through the meat. I try to scream, but my throat is a flute someone else is playing. The last thing I see—before the pillars swallow the torchlight—is my own reflection in a polished alabaster bowl. My eyes are gone. Hollows packed with dates. Black, wet dates. And they’re smiling.

The floor doesn’t hold me anymore. It accepts me. I sink, slow as honey, into limestone that feels like old fat. Below, something churns—a second sky, inverted, full of teeth shaped like ankhs. The thing in Khenemet’s face slides beside me, her jaw unhinging to speak in the language of snapped reeds.

“You bled for the Pharaoh,” it says. “Now bleed for the between.”

My arms come off. Not cut. Unscrewed. From the shoulder sockets, locusts pour—not the dry kind, but wet, soft, newborn, their wings sticking to my ribs. I try to run, but my legs are already kneeling ten feet away, still trembling, still praying to gods who’ve changed the locks on their doors. The pillars are closer now. They were always closer. They’ve been walking toward me for three thousand years.

A hook of shadow catches my navel and pulls. Inside-out. I see the back of my own heart. It’s carved with a cartouche—not the Pharaoh’s name, but mine. A name I never spoke. A name that tastes like my mother’s blood after she birthed me in the reeds. The thing wearing Khenemet’s face begins to eat my shadow, bite by bite. My shadow screams louder than I can.

I look down. My hands are hieroglyphs now. Scratching themselves into the stone. Telling a story that hasn’t happened yet. About a slave who never left the hall. Who became a door. Who hears, every night, the footsteps of the next one kneeling where I knelt.

And the pillars keep breathing.

Gurgling.

Waiting.