It was a rather warm early evening in the middle of summer in the small village of Soulaires, in the French countryside. Going out onto the garden terrace of their house, Isabelle Parrish then noticed her son, Mathias, then 10 years old, sitting alone on the swing at the bottom of the garden, and looking sad.

Isabelle came to see him and actually saw traces of tears on his cheeks while the child remained gloomy, staring into space and seeming more alone than ever. Saddened to see her son like this, Isabelle came to sit beside him, wrapping her arm around his shoulder to comfort him.

_"Still children who bothered you at school, right?" she asked, but knowing in advance that it was that, knowing that look.

Mathias nodded slowly and revealed in his hands a sheet of paper torn into several pieces and which seemed to be the text of a fantastic story he had imagined and started to write.

_"They took the sheet from me and tore it mockingly, I couldn't do anything, I was alone." replied Mathias with a lump in his throat with sadness but also with anger. "I hate them all!"

Isabelle listened to him and was sorry to hear that, taking her son against her to hug him and try to console him a little. She knew the shy and reserved character of Mathias, and also his passion for fantasy and monsters, which had often led to mockery from other children in all the schools he went to.

_"Why are they doing this to me, mom?" Mathias asked then, news beading in his eyes as he looked at her. "What's wrong with me?"

_"Nothing, Mathias. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you." her mother then said with support and love. "You are as you are, my son whom I love and will never stop loving. They try to lower you lower than they are because deep down they are unable to accept themselves. You, on the contrary, have a sincere, generous heart, mixed with an imaginative and dreamy spirit. You know where you want to chart your course and that's the main thing, and above all never let anyone decide for you. You have a choice. You are the master of your own life."

Mathias listened to these words filled with love and support that his mother said to him and found a semblance of a smile on the corner of his lips.

_"So please don't ever say you're not normal again, because it makes me sad." Isabella added. "Stay who you chose to be."

_"I... I promise, excuse me mum." replied Mathias, snuggling up against her in an embrace full of tenderness. "I promise you. You will be proud of me."

_"I already am, sweetlove... I already am..."

While his mother's voice faded into the distance and the vision of him as a child and his mother disappeared in a veil of light, Mathias, back to the present moment, emerged with difficulty from a heavy torpor.

The first thing he saw as he awoke and his blurry vision recovered was a black and white ceiling like a checkerboard, lit by neon lights. His whole body was numb, he could feel it. Looking around, he saw that he was lying in a single bed, covered with a white sheet, in a modestly sized room that strongly resembled a hospital room. He also saw that his injured thigh had been completely bandaged and healed, even if he still felt some residual pain, and that an intravenous was hooked up to one of his arms to readjust the amount of blood he had lost. A small transparent oxygen mask, connected to a canister next to the bed, covered the lower part of his face. His clothes he was wearing were on a chair nearby and he was dressed in a hospital patient shirt.

Where am I, was the first question he asked himself internally? And also, why had he dreamed of this childhood memory with his mother? He remembered that moment vividly, and a year later his parents would both die in a car crash.

His mind was still affected by everything he had been through recently and was obviously still trying to sort out right from fake.

_"Glad to see you're okay, Mathias." said a voice he recognized.

Standing in front of the window that gave out and where night seemed to have fallen, Jonathan de Mirand, dressed in a smart suit and tie, turned to Mathias, looking serious and somewhat glum.

_"J...Jonathan?" groaned Mathias, still weak. "But... where am I?"

_"In a hospital in Baghdad." explained the heir approaching the bed. "You stayed two days in a coma, we thought we lost you. One hour too late and we would have been powerless to save you."

Two days in a coma? Mathias had trouble realizing it.

_"But... and Sandra Winters? Dexter Loomis? The soldiers?" Mathias then asked, concerned.

_"Everyone is alive, don't worry." Jonathan told him. "Professor Winters and Loomis left for Cairo yesterday, but know that I will let them know as soon that your condition improved."

Mathias was reassured to hear that everyone was fine and it took a weight off his heart. Jonathan returned to the bedroom window, however, his pensive, morose gaze centered on the observation of the nocturnal city. Seeing the tense and frustrated expression of the heir, Mathias guessed that something was wrong.

_"I was so stupid..." Jonathan whispered. "With my immense fortune and the means put in place for this expedition, I thought I was smarter than a bunch of anarchist shepherds living in the mountains lost in the middle of the desert. You have to believe that life likes to remind us of our poor condition of little mortal beings with our flaws."

_"You couldn't have known what was going to happen." answered Mathias to try to support him a little.

_"Exactly, but I should have." Jonathan added, his voice laced with guilt. "It was my expedition, my responsibility, and by my stupidity, and even though you were aware of the risks, I put you all in danger. And now the whole operation will have been a total failure."

A total failure? Images then returned to Mathias's head, seeing himself lost in these underground galleries and reaching this immense room carved into the rock and proving to be the secret tomb of Princess Ahmanet. He was about to say it but refrained however, because other memories came back to him. He remembered this kind of waking dream, Ahmanet talking to him and touching him, calling him by this word, Setepai, but also when this creature, this emaciated and ferocious mummy had appeared and saved her from the terrorists who threatened him. Mathias very strongly hesitated to talk about it, afraid of sounding like a madman, because who would believe such a story? He didn't know what to think anymore, wondering if he was not dreaming all of this.

_"Mathias?....Mathias, how are you?"

The young man emerged from his thoughts, as if snapping back to reality to see Jonathan watching him with a raised eyebrow, looking concerned.

_"Are you okay? You seemed... lost in thought."

_"I... no, it's just that I still feel weak, excuse me." replied Mathias massaging his eyelids, only half lying because his body was not yet fully recovered from these ordeals.

Jonathan understood completely and after a friendly pat on the shoulder of the young writer, told him that he was going to let him rest and that he would come back to see him tomorrow morning. Mathias appreciated this benevolence on his part and once Jonathan had turned off the light and left the room, Mathias was left alone in this semi-darkness, the city lights outside reflecting slightly through the curtain of the window.

Mathias felt a bit silly for lying to Jonathan and not telling him what he had seen, but on the other hand he didn't want anyone to find out what he had witnessed, for fearing that it might have consequences if it turned out to be true, or so it seemed to him. This whole story was really starting to get strange and Mathias felt that he had stepped into something that was completely beyond him. He didn't want to involve other people in this, lest it put them in danger. Still feeling the effects of the blood loss on his health despite the treatments, Mathias, very tired, decided to try to get some sleep to regain his strength and think about all this tomorrow morning. He would make the decision whether or not to tell Jonathan everything he saw. Closing his eyes, Mathias relaxed as best he could and gradually let the invisible veil of sleep cover him.

Later that night, after midnight, a heavy but soothing silence had fallen over the hospital and in his room plunged into semi-darkness, Mathias was sleeping soundly.

However, the door of the room opened very slowly, all by itself, then closed again immediately, as if moved by an invisible force. Asleep, Mathias noticed nothing but moaned softly in his sleep. The air in the room grew heavier, more macabre, and the darkness deepened. Stepping lightly and silently from one of the dark corners of the room, Ahmanet appeared. Her body covered with these residues of linen strips, her black hair cascading over her shoulders, her little lines of hyeroglyphs covering her forehead, her cheeks and her chin, the forgotten princess walked with her bare feet, slowly, without making the slightest noise, approaching the bed of Mathias who did not wake up.

Once near the bed, she first remained standing, static, watching Mathias for long seconds, then she sat down on the bed without waking him. Again, she looked him up and down, seeing that his leg had been healed, which seemed to make her smile a little. She mainly looked at his face, with interest. With one of her hands, she delicately touched the young man's hair, pushing aside the strands that covered his forehead. She remained for long minutes watching him sleep, without showing any hostility towards him, on the contrary, as if reassured to see him alive. With her fingertips, she also touched his skin, soft and warm, and it made her smile softly.

But suddenly, Mathias' sleep was disturbed as the young man began to moan and wince, as if something was bothering him without him managing to wake up. Intrigued to see him like this, Ahmanet then decided to see what was haunting him and gently put one of her hands on his forehead, thus infiltrating without him knowing it into his subconscious.

Ahmanet then found herself standing, in the center of a kind of large courtyard filled with children, in a place totally unknown to her. The children were running, shouting and having fun everywhere, without seeing her. But above all, she heard loud teasing that caught her attention. A crowd of children had formed around one, he was totally helpless and above all soaked to the skin because he had just had balloons filled with water thrown at him. Although he was much younger, Ahmanet recognized the soaked and tormented child as Mathias. She then approached, invisible to the children's perception and observed the scene with a certain bewilderment.

Mathias, on the verge of tears and seeing all the other children surrounding him, making fun of him and treating him full of names like "monster" or "weird", clenched his fists and his face filled with a black anger mixed with pain and sadness. All this Ahmanet felt emanating from the child.

_"You will pay for it one day! I hate you all!" Mathias then yelled angrily as he pushed aside other children and ran away, pursued by his tormentors.

Ahmanet watched them go, silent but nevertheless sketched a dark smile on the corner of her lips. This anger, this sadness and this pain that Mathias had expressed in this memory, she herself had already felt them, a long time ago. An all-consuming desire for revenge, and that pleased her.

Coming out of the dream, or rather the nightmare that Mathias was living, Ahmanet smiled even more to see that he himself had once expressed this same hatred for humanity, this feeling of being an outcast. Leaning on the bed above Mathias, the Egyptian princess brought her face close to his, placing her two cold, pale hands on the sides of his face and gazing at him with great interest.

_"Yes... you are the one I've been waiting for all this time... Setepai... Sleep... Our time will finally come..." she breathed, coming to hug him and snuggle gently against him, as to feelher skin in contact with hers.

Despite this proximity, Mathias did not wake from his sleep. Darkness, as if moving on its own, began to gradually invade the room, covering the walls, floor and ceiling like a living tide, and the room began to vibrate slightly. Then, the wave of darkness gradually covered the princess and the young man, who, in just a few seconds, had both disappeared without a trace, leaving only an entirely empty and silent room.