Don't Call it a Comeback (Solo)

A dry heat radiated off the blinding white desert sand as the midday sun beat down from a cloudless sky. A lone man stood before an ancient stone doorway half submerged within a sand dune, clad in but a simple purple coat and brown trousers. He bore not any of the traditional desert faring garb of the Falleni people, carried no pack with him, nor possessed any beast of burden to speak of. To the average observer, he was ill prepared and not long for this savage wasteland. However, this was no average man. This legendary hero had once slain a false goddess, traversed ancient ruins with ease, brought the wondrous joy of pizza to the land of Althanas, and even gotten married in the process.

This man was Vincent Cain, God Slayer, Pioneer Culinarian, and excellent husband. He was far from unprepared, he was slightly more prepared than usual in fact.

The young man quietly murmured to himself as his blue eyes traced over ancient wind beaten runes, hands planted firmly on his hips as if he were about to demand to speak to the doors manager. How dare these runes be in some ancient tongue long forgotten to the sands of time, they should have known better than to let the wind damage them to the point in which the scholar was forced to SQUINT at them, they could be assured he would be leaving them a scathing review on Yelp! that was for sure.

“Most unhelpful doors,” the man muttered in a mocking tone. “Super uninviting, created a real nasty vibe for the whole trip, I most assuredly will not be visiting this place again.” This entire monologue echoed through the empty landscape as the man trudged closer to the door, each step slightly labored as his shoes sunk into the sand. “They didn’t even have signs marking the way to the restroom.” He managed to reach the base of the massive doorway and placed a gloved hand on it, rubbing it over a groove that used to be one of the runes.

“All in all, I only managed to translate half of you, and based on all the cryptic warnings and half riddles I can only imagine I would have needed a keyword to open you up.” He gave the stone a gentle, reassuring pat. “But you don’t have a fucking lick of magical residue left on you so I can only imagine none of the would even work.” He took a couple steps back, looking this door up and down before cracking his neck. “Let’s give this a shot then. Been a bit since I used this trick.”

The scholar took a deep breath, fixed his gaze upon the door, and exhaled. He could feel power crackling deep within his chest, welling up as if it anticipated what he was about to do. He raised his right hand up, palm facing towards the door, and took another breath. The spark within his chest ignited into a flame, sending chills down his spine and goosebumps across his skin as the man spoke aloud in a tongue that transcended sound or even meaning, but instead pure intent left his lips as he gave the door one simple command.

“Open.”

The ancient stone portal had been a worthy adversary, filled with cryptic riddles in a language Vincent only barely remembered, and once upon a time the protections placed upon it would have perhaps thwarted any other attempt to pry the doors apart, but that was then and this was now. The massive stone slabs rumbled as stone scraped against stone, the ancient seal breaking and now letting an avalanche of sand and gust of fresh air flood into the once empty space.

Vincent, a scholar for the dramatic, surfed this white wave of sand downward into the darkness, until the momentum of the sand could carry him no farther forward, taking a casual step forward as one might step off an escalator, or one of those weird moving sidewalks at an airport, and continuing forward. The air was stale, and stunk with the vague stench of dust and decay that this sort of thing tended to house. With one hand outstretched, he lazily snapped his fingers and a crystalline orb appeared cradled carefully in his gloved hand. Holding it out in front of him, the Emperor simply muttered “Illuminate the darkness before me” and with a flash the Orb began to emit an almost blinding light.

He continued his forward movement, the scholar brushed his sandy blonde hair away from his eyes and glanced about at the now illuminated walls to his left and right. The scale of the room mirrored the overly ostentatious doorway, massive with a large vaulted ceiling, walls covered in long faded mosaics depicting ancient persons long since dead performing all sorts of ancient rites and rituals. Perhaps they were telling some sort of story about the ruins themselves, or the people within it? A much younger Vincent would have spent hours in awe of artwork, scribbling down every detail he could in cluttered notebooks, making amature depictions of mosaics and translating every rune he could.

Now? Those runes could have an excellent wing sauce recipe for all he cared for. Among all of his archeological discoveries, this was far from his first, it would be far from his last, and it most certainly wasn’t his most important. In fact, it was one of many on a LONG list of locations he needed to check after trawling ancient texts looking for locations he’d presumed to be untouched. This adventure was in fact, anything but, a simple chore jotted down on a list of many things to do. Pay the bills, go to the market and get eggs, raid a lost tomb, pick up a new jacket from the tailor, go home and kiss the wife. It was rather mundane, and even more so sacrilegious. Had any of the indegeinous people of the land known he was here with the sole intent of plundering the sacred artifact entombed inside, they’d be furious to say the least. Had the gods that once been reported to watch over these lands still been around, they’d have smote the scholar where he stood.

Yet neither of those groups were around, and had they been around Vincent would have had a thing or two to tell the gods given how they’d sat idly whilst the world had suffered a near miss with armageddon. People all over the world were suffering, and if this tomb held what he thought it did, the dead and the gods would have to seethe in silence, because the people still left alive needed this way more than they did.