Recovered Statement (Black Nile Archives)
“Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the Pharaoh.”
That was the warning inscribed on a clay slab found in a sealed ancient tomb. And for the first team to breach those stone doors, it proved entirely prophetic.
Back then, even now, the world is intimately familiar with Tutankhamen's tomb, and the excavation expedition of 1922, carried out by Howard Carter, under the staggering fortune spent by his patron, Lord Carnarvon.
What followed immediately after was also not unknown, about the horrific fates that allegedly befell them.
Newspapers fed the public stories of bizarre, cascading tragedies, detailing how each team member, one by one, died from every strange reason one could think of. There were suicides, sudden unidentified illnesses, and unexplained disappearances.
Or who could explain why Lord Carnarvon died of pneumonia from a single mosquito bite? The exact same disease Tutankhamun was estimated to have died of? Or his dog, who howled and dropped dead in England at the exact same moment that man died in Cairo?
Then what of Richard Bethell, Carter’s personal secretary, who was found dead in his bed? Or Professor Hugh Evelyn, who tragically committed suicide by hanging after leaving a letter in his own blood saying that he had succumbed to a curse?
Even Carter’s pet canary was swallowed whole by a cobra on the very day the tomb was opened, a terrifying omen, given that the cobra was the ancient symbol of a protective, vengeful Pharaoh.
They called it the Curse of the Pharaohs…
But those accounts were merely what the authorities decisively leaked to the public at that time. The details suppressed from the press and media were but the tip of a terrifying iceberg. There were so many things the world was never permitted to know.
Like the fact that Howard Carter wasn't even the true mastermind who led the 1922 expedition. He was just the polite face put in front of the cameras.
But that wasn't the worst of it. Among the strictly confidential records hidden in the highest tiers of the institute where Carter worked, there are still handwritten journal entries by the excavation crew, or simply, those who were lucky enough to survive.
Every single record of these contained spine chilling discoveries and incidents.
Including the records where they mentioned things that lurked in the dark depths of the tomb. Things that should have been dead for three thousand years.
The government went to great lengths to sanitize the truth. They hid everything starting from the true number of personnel who breached the inner chambers, to the obscured inhuman ways most of them died before they ever came out of the tomb.
When few rumors spread like wildfire, official channels scrambled to provide rational explanations.
They blamed ancient pathogens, toxic molds, and hallucinations induced by centuries of trapped gases inside the sealed tomb. Perhaps some of those explanations were even true.
But none of them explained what happened to my bloodline.
Among numerous other records, one thing the official archives omitted was that my great-grandfather was also down in that tomb with Howard Carter.
And before the seals were completely cataloged, he did what many desperate men did back then. He looted a few unlisted items.
I didn't know much about the specifics of what happened back then. The fragments of knowledge I possess came entirely from his daughter, who was my grandmother.
Grandmother once told me that after her father returned home with those stolen relics, misfortune followed them like a plague. Her own grandfather eventually grew so terrified that he burned every single item his son had brought back from Egypt.
But the damage was already done. My great-grandfather went crazy a few years after returning to England, and he never dared to step foot near a tomb again.
I still remember grandmother telling me how he would drop into strange, violent trances. He would stare into the corners of the room with a pale, horrified face, screaming that it was coming. Coming to take his life.
As for what it was, my grandmother never said.
And then three years later from his return from Egypt, during a stormy night, he was found brutally murdered in an abandoned alley, his chest torn open by massive claws that shouldn't exist in the modern world. His heart was missing.
The authorities filed it as a bizarre animal attack and closed the case. But logic offered nothing. And I needed answers.
And that unanswered violence is the sole reason I veered back toward the very path my family had spent decades avoiding after great grandfather's death, despite our deep-rooted legacy as excavators.
But whether it was fate, misfortune, or a generational blood-debt, I became the next successor and bearer of that stolen legacy. I didn't return to Egyptology for the love of history. I returned to hunt the truth.
The only thing left of my great-grandfather’s theft was a single object he had managed to hide away from everyone. A broken statue only the size of my thumb, which I assumed, must be an amulet. With a missing half, its cracked silhouette made no historical sense.
It was the same statue my great grandfather was holding in his bloody hand when he was found dead.
I had analyzed the amulet back in my lab in Washington. Culturally, it matched the Amarna period.
Materially? It defied geology.
No laser could scratch it; no furnace could melt it.
My family called it a curse. And as a scholar of ancient dynasties, I knew science wasn't going to save us.
Ever since that shattered amulet fell into my hands, the horror of my great-grandfather’s final years ceased to be a distant memory, and became my living reality.
I began to feel it. The chilling sensation of being watched by something unseen. It wasn't something obvious enough to make me question my sanity right away.
Just a pooling of darkness in the corner of my vision that didn't match any furniture, or a shape that seemed to linger a second too long when I turned on the lights. No matter where I went, I couldn't get rid of them. They just followed me, waiting.
Sometimes, I would wake up in the dead of night, staring at the ceiling with a pale face and a cold sweat, my heart pounding for no discernible reason. It left me with a lingering chill that no amount of coffee or morning sun could burn off.
The nightmares were always the same. Endless, suffocating darkness…
The final piece of the puzzle came from a scrap of a diary entry that never made it to the British Museum, written by an excavation assistant who died in an asylum three weeks after returning from Cairo. He had penned the rest of the inscription.
“Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the Pharaoh…
… and the shadow of those wings shall feast upon their bloodline until the debt is paid in bones.”
That is when I finally realized.
It was never a curse.
It was an invitation.
By Death.
And it was written in blood.
If someday I am found dead in an alley or somewhere deserted, know that I was not killed by anything human.
2026.06.30,
Lin Moxuan,
Qingluan Institute
of Archaeology,
Washington.
