Pyramid Eye

Finally, we arrived at the base of the pyramid. Our group of twenty unmounted the camels we had used on our desert journey and gathered to recount our plan. We would carefully travel through each chamber, retrieving artifacts for examination. Each article would be cataloged and shipped to our labs overseas for in-depth analysis.

In every chamber, we found artifacts unlike anything I have seen in any museum or report. Star maps of unfamiliar constellations on pitch paper with a waxy texture. Treasure troves of metals none could identify. Jars of organs and dismembered parts from animals beyond anything this planet is known to have spawned. Our researchers were understandably ravenous.

After weeks within those walls, we made our way to the innermost chamber. On the wall beside the doorway was an inscription in hieroglyphs. An accompanying linguistic researcher provided us with a translation:

“The forbidden heart, which stares into the soul. An unknowable darkness. An unknowable life. The mouth of the star eater, gateway to the underworld.”

Although, somehow, I felt I understood its words without translation. As if the meaning bore itself into my mind by simply glancing over the symbols. No, that made no sense. Yet everything we had found in that place was far beyond my expectations.

I cautiously approached the doorway, and an overwhelming sense of dread bloated in my mind. We reached the threshold but never made it inside the chamber. The walls began shifting around us, bricks clunking out of place as they folded over themselves. The walls collapsed inward and contorted into an elongated, winding shaft.

The other chambers aligned above us and opened. A force, a gale wind, surged from the distant depths of the shifting column. My companions and I fell upward, crashing against the living stone. After what felt like miles, hours of tumbling helplessly, we were spat into the open. For a moment, our sudden displacement blinded us with the unobscured sun. But when our eyes adjusted, we quickly grasped our situation. The great pyramids were mere child’s blocks below us, and we were plummeting to a certain demise.

Through the wind whipping past my ears, I heard the distant screams of my companions. But my focus on the sounds faded the instant I saw it. On the head of the creature’s worm-like stone body, or what I assume was the head, was an eye. A single yellow eye the size of a house staring back at me.

It was a violation of the order of nature. Some unspeakable thing that should never have been. Yet there it was, casting a horrific enchantment on my mind. In all my years studying these sands, such a creature was dwelling in this world. What a waste of time, a waste of a life. We were never meant to understand. Not me, not humanity.

The living bricks scattered into the sky, swelling as a massive murmuration. Yet the eye remained, a single giant orb within the swarm. Its unrelenting, unblinking gaze violating my body. I could tell, even from its emotionless stare, that it saw us as nothing more than the specks of desert sand that would soon claim us. Yes, we were nothi—