The chamber where the suit was found was cordoned off the following morning. Sahure had posted guards at each corner, and no worker was allowed near. Ethan had hardly slept. His mind churned with questions, and the flickering phrase on the tablet echoed like a chant in his thoughts: Traveler 07. Deceased. Initiate replacement protocol.
He stared at the containment suit now lying under an oilskin tarp. There was no body, but the suit held a shape—as if its previous occupant had vanished without a trace. The material felt synthetic but not familiar, and the helmet was seamless, with no visor. A suit designed not to be worn, but to contain.
Hemiunu sat nearby, watching him.
"You said this suit is for travelers like you," he said cautiously.
Ethan nodded. "Temporal travelers. Agents meant to observe and report across time. But this technology... it's far beyond what I've ever worked with. It's not just for protection. It suppresses radiation. Stabilizes quantum fluctuation. I think it may even slow aging."
Sahure entered the tent with quiet steps. He carried another artifact—small, cube-shaped, covered in the same glyphs found on the suit.
"We found this buried beneath the sarcophagus," he said. "It hummed when we moved it."
Ethan took it gently. The cube pulsed under his touch.
"It's a data vault," Ethan whispered. "Encrypted. But I might be able to read it."
Using a portable adapter from his own equipment, Ethan connected the cube to a scanner. Lines of code appeared, shifting through languages, symbols, and eventually... audio.
A voice crackled through the silence. Hollow, distorted.
"This is Traveler 07. Containment breach in the Khufu vault. We were wrong. It's not a machine—it's alive. It feeds on entropy. Avoid contact. Seal the vault. If this message reaches the protocol stream... initiate immediate replacement. Before the loop collapses."
Sahure's eyes widened. "What did he mean by 'alive'?"
Ethan turned pale. "Entropy is disorder. The decay of all things. If something feeds on it... it could accelerate the breakdown of reality itself."
Hemiunu whispered, "Is that what brought you here? To stop it?"
"I don't know," Ethan said. "But now I have to."
Suddenly, the cube blinked once more. A second message auto-loaded. Visual this time.
It showed a blurry figure—Traveler 07—in the suit, standing before the same gate mural Ethan had seen in the chamber. But this gate was glowing, open. A pulse of black light surged forward—and the image cut out.
The cube sparked. Then died.
Ethan sat back, shaken.
The gate wasn't a myth. It was real. And someone had opened it.
Outside, the winds began to rise again, lifting waves of dust into the air. But this time, Ethan felt something different in the breeze.
It wasn't the whisper of time.
It was the voice of something that remembers.
And it was calling him.