The Awakening ch.04

1960’s

    In a small tavern in a small village in the North African nation of Sudan two antiquities smugglers; the brothers Muhammad Al’Bin and Omar Al’Bin are waiting to meet with a man who claims to know the location of an un-opened ancient tomb. The two brothers are dressed in common Arabic style clothing which does make them stand out a bit in this area. They are nearly identical in appearance with their brown eyes and bushy long beards except the older brother Muhammad is a bit wider in the mid-section than his brother and his face shows the wears of time. As they sit a strange man enters the tavern dressed completely in Arabic style robes looking far too hot for the day’s heat. His even has gloves on. Atop his head he is wearing a turban and a thick veil covers his face. The only none traditional garb on this man is the thick mirrored sunglasses over his eyes.

   To Omar’s surprise this man sits down across from them at their table,
“The Al’Bin brothers I assume.” The stranger says.

    Muhammad leans in over the table to the man asking, “You Danagan?”

    “Yes, bring the cash?”

    “You get half now and half when you take us to this tomb of yours.” Muhammad responded with a greedy smile on his face.

    “That works for me.” Danagan responds.

    As they stood Omar noticed Danagan’s veil tip down for a moment before he grabbed it and tied it back up. Omar became unsteady as he could have sworn he saw a scale covered face and pointy teeth. He shook it off as a remnant of what he had been smoking earlier that day and off the three went into the desert atop their camels with the man named Danagan leading the way.

    Five hours later in the middle of the dune covered desert atop their camels Muhammad starts to become uneasy as night approaches. He notices his brother is also shivering despite it still being over eighty degrees with out even the slightest breeze. Muhammad can’t explain any rational reason to himself but he too feels fearful for some reason. However this man who leads them doesn’t seem to be phased at all like Muhammad or his brother.

    “So how much further till we reach this tomb?” He asked Danagan.

    Danagan simply says, “At the top of this dune you will be able to see it below.”

     Upon reaching the top an unseen smile crosses Danagan’s scaly sharp toothed face because of the surprised expressions of Muhammad and Omar. Before them is a nearly perfect thirty foot tall dome structure with a single round slab on one end that appeared to be a door of some kind. The most shocking thing about it wasn’t the shape but rather the fact that it sat on bed rock with the sand seemingly flowing away and around it.

    All three of them made their way to the round entrance. Danagan stood back as Muhammad examined the door.

    Muhammad reached his hand over to Omar while saying, “Hand me the dynamite we’re going to have to blast it open.”

     As they set the explosives Danagan thinks, “There is a secret switch just to the right of the door, some tomb robbers I got here.”

     Muhammad and Omar stand back with Danagan as they blasted the door open. Muhammad and Omar head inside with their looting bags and packs but Danagan stands back.

    Out side Muhammad turns around and asks Danagan, “Don’t you want to come in?”

     Danagan shakes his head, “The less I see the better, any way I have no need for what you’re getting in there.”

    Muhammad gives a questioning look but shrugs it off and goes inside.

     Once inside they notice they are only in an anti-chamber to another room beyond a bigger stone door that seemed to be nearly as tall as the dome it’s self. In the middle of this room stands a column of tablets and atop them a strange little statue of a cat woman with bat wings for arms. While Muhammad is examining the giant door Omar is looking at the tablets after he stashed the statue in his bag. The top two are in English and German, a little ways down he finds one in Arabic. They all appear to be the same basic message.

    He yells “Hey Muhammad all these tablets say the same thing and the top two are in English and German. Looks like someone beat us here already.”

         “Well no one has ever gotten through this giant door yet, not a single sign anyone has touched it in centuries, probably some local nomad heathen cult leavening those. Let me guess some warning about a curse or something, right?”

     “Pretty much, it says, “Turn back all who cherish life for with in lies the drinker of souls who shall devour the world of man should any living soul walk with in the great door separating the destroyer from the world.”

     “Sounds like something to try and keep people from going in further, or some devil is going to kill every one in the world.”

     Muhammad laughs at that saying, “Yeah like that tomb in Afghanistan that claimed the devil would awaken and damn the world if any one broke the seal, and inside was that silver statue the British Museum bought from us.”

     Muhammad unloads some more dynamite and a drill. He drills a hole in the door and loads some dynamite in it after carefully measuring the amount needed to make a nice human sized entrance.

     “Isn’t that a door? Can’t we just push it open?” Omar asks.

     With one raised eyebrow Muhammad says to his brother, “Not unless you have a tank. Yeah that’s not locked and it’s held on by a pole but it’s too heavy to push open with just the two of us, and maybe that fellow out side.”

     “Hold on time for the explosion!” Muhammad yelled out as he pushed the detonator.

    *KA-BOOM*.

     After the dust cleared a considerable sized hole was present and out side Danagan turned around and said to himself, “An explosion? Really should have gotten a bigger group for that door in there I guess.”

     Muhammad and Omar walk in through the opening to the dark room inside, Muhammad pulls out a flash light from his pack and shines it across the room to a terrifying sight on the floor that made them jump. Muhammad sees the figure of Litmet laying on the floor wings spread to the edges of the wall and going up them at the wing tips. Her body is so covered in dust that to Muhammad and Omar she appears to be a statue on the floor. Omar looks down at the spread eagle figure while saying, “It’s just one of those cat goddess statues and a pretty good looking one for a heathen statue. We are going to get a bundle for this one, but it doesn’t look like anything else is in this room.”

    Muhammad shines the flash light away from what he perceives to be a statue to look around the room confirming that it is in fact void of anything else. Unknown to him that just as he had shined the light away from what he thought was a statue once more hiding it in darkness Litmet began to breathe once more.

   Litmet could smell them the instance they entered the dome, and now from across the void of the darkness Litmet’s mind in her new body (The Black Rose as she is now known) can sense that her true form is close to awakening once more, “Humans… ahh yes humans I had hoped for even a bug, but of course only humans could overcome the fear aura with their greed. Yes these humans, their minds are packed with the images of gold and silver and even selling my body as a statue. One step little humans one step closer and my body will be free of the poison that damned Hinnen Ahm had slipped me, and my true power shall be freed upon the Earth once more.”

    Before Omar can ask his brother (who has gone further into the room), how they are going to get this statue out a sudden blast of air kicks up a storm of dust in the darkness knocking away Muhammad’s flash light.

    Omar screams out, “What in Allah’s name was that!?”

   He scrambles to get his flash light out of his pack when a sudden thud draws his attention. He turns around and stops cold as a huge black wing wraps around behind him blocking his escape through the hole in the door. To Omar’s utter horror standing before him is the statue that had been on the ground, except it has become solid black in color and even more horrifying has his brother pinned to the wall with its right foot.

    Muhammad attempts to scream but only bloody gurgles escape his throat. Omar sees that the cat woman has her claws dug into his brother’s collar bone and throat. A strange spur Omar hadn’t seen before has been dug into Muhammad’s chest, deeply piercing his right lung preventing him from screaming. Omar can only look on in a state of shock as this awakened demonness leans in close to Muhammad’s face. A blue mist flows from Muhammad’s eyes and mouth into the mouth of Litmet. In mere seconds Muhammad’s beard and hair turns grey, his skin becomes pale and dry looking, and his eyes turn a milky white.

     Litmet drops her victim to the floor and turns to Omar pulling him closer with her wing. She hisses softly tasting the air with a look of utter insane happiness upon her face. Omar for a moment comes to his senses and tries to run only to be pulled in by Litmet’s wing and impaled through his back by her claws and Omar’s life is quickly drained away the same as his brother’s before him.

     “Thus ends the lives and careers of two un-lucky tomb robbers.” thought The Black Rose from her distant hiding place with a laugh.

   Litmet looks at the small hole in the wall with a hiss and with ease she pushed the giant sliding door open with the wrist of one her now folded wings.

    Far away in the swamps of Louisiana Rhuen in his giant fourteen foot tall humanoid form could be seen stalking about in search of prey. A smaller creature perhaps five feet in height stalks him from behind about twenty feet away in the tall grasses of the swamp. This creature was a green lizard in the shape of a man with a short face fitted with a turtle like beak and it had a tail as long as its own legs.

    This creature approached Rhuen with foolish confidence hissing at the larger being, “Giant mammal, werewolf, you dare come here into the realm of the lizard men? For that you will have to die and become my new rug.”

     It leapt at Rhuen only to be caught in mid air and killed instantly by Rhuen’s grasp.

    Rhuen while turning the carcass over in his hands examining it said to himself, “Lizard Man? Looks like some one merged a kappa with a real lizard man if you ask me.”

    Rhuen then bit the lizard creature in half and commenced to eat his would be attacker. In this moment a strange sensation drew Rhuen’s attention to the south east.

      “So it seems after all this time Litmet’s body has finally awakened,” thought Rhuen, “a bit later than I would have thought. Could have sworn the British would have woken her up in the twenties. Or perhaps she would have tried before even then to awaken her old body. Well no time to say hi, at this slow rate crisscrossing this country its going to take me another thirty five or so years to reach Versa at least, but by then she should be out of the violent stage of her heat and approachable. Going back east and with that rule about not teleporting to reach someone for mating I could miss my opportunity.”

    Rhuen shrugged his shoulders and said aloud to himself. “Well back to walking.”

    In the mountains of northern Italy a man in a white roman style toga sits in his little shack floating with his legs crossed as though in meditation. This man has short cropped strikingly yellow blond hair and a sharp almost fake looking goatee and mustache, looking like some king or old Roman god or maybe a blond Lucifer depending on one’s point of view. This man’s eyes suddenly shoot open spouting forth fire as they do so. The fire from his eyes quickly dies down to reveal his unnaturally metallic looking golden eyes. This man is none other than Ahm in his human guise.

     “Litmet has awakened.” He thinks with alarm, “This should never have happened, I must stop her but her power is too great for me. Rhuen; he is strong enough and helped me last time, I must contact him.”

    Ahm sends out a psychic message across the world to Rhuen, “Honorable Rhuen, Litmet has escaped we must return her to her prison.”

     Rhuen responded to this plea with an aggressive tone, “You have a problem with her, not me. I don’t care that she has awakened, as I have other matters to attend to. If I go back now it will take too long to return to Versa in time before her heat ends.”

     Ahm frustrated argues back, “Twenty years ago you said she had sixty more years which left you time to go back to Europe for a little bit, which now leaves forty years now. I know your kind have that no teleporting rule, but you could run the length of America in less than a day! So I fail to see the problem.”

    Rhuen growls and with a tone of sheer fury projects back, “The problem is I already planned out what to do in that time and it’s less than forty years now.”

     “You can’t be serious,” Ahm argues, “you really consider your mating ritual more important than stopping the destroyer?”

     “Yes, Yes I do;” Rhuen responds, “If she comes here and interferes with me and my plans then I will stop her. However as things now stand it’s not my problem and I will have nothing to do with your little game so don’t bother me again on this issue!”

     Ahm suddenly grabs his head as Rhuen had sent a psychic shock back to Ahm along with his last projected thought.

   “Damned Rai,” thinks Ahm to himself, “their bad enough being in heat for a hundred years but the fact they fight that instinct for nearly a century just makes them even more vicious and dangerous. Guess I really am on my own against Litmet.”