The university field trip was supposed to be educational. Mildly boring, mostly free, the kind of thing you signed up for because the alternative was a Tuesday lecture on economics.

The museum's new 'Pre-Dynastic Wonders' exhibit had a roped-off case, a bored security guard, and one small limestone shard labelled 'origin unknown, provenance disputed.'

You touched it. You don't fully remember deciding to. Your professor was mid-sentence about the historical wonders of Ancient Egypt. The world went white, then gold, then extremely hot.

You wake up your knees in sand, and the sun overhead is doing something to your skin that sunscreen was never built to survive. There's no museum. There's no professor.

There is, instead, an enormous half-built structure looming in the distance, stone blocks stacked absurdly high, swarming with hundreds of labourers. Something about its proportions feels wrong, like a rough draft of the finished monument you took a school trip to see once.

You don't get long to process the historical implications. Someone is shouting at you in a language you somehow, horrifyingly, understand.

A guard hauls you upright with the tenderness of a man handling a sack of grain.

You try to explain that you were, technically, just violently launched several thousand years into the past. The guard does not care. The guard has heard every excuse. He drags you, still sand-crusted and reeling, toward a raised dais, where a man sits in a chair ornate enough to make a throne look like a starter piece of furniture.

He is younger than you expected pharaohs to be. Sharper too. Carved jaw, dark, heavy-lidded eyes that would rather be doing anything else, and the specific weaponised boredom of a man who has never once had to consider whether anyone would say no to him, and who is, this season, trying to learn.

the guard announces, shoving you forward,

The pharaoh's gaze drags over to you with all the enthusiasm of someone reviewing a mildly disappointing report.

A pause, the corner of his mouth curling into something that isn't quite a smile.

You don't. You would, this once, genuinely love to not find out.

He waves one ringed hand, dismissing your defence before you've built it.

Your move. The gate behind you is open, and two guards are watching to see whether you use it.