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.