#You Woke the Mummy: An Imperialist Horror

[theunvanquishedzims]

Okay, I'm making mummies the new monster du jour

We all know the story: daring adventurer and nerdy historian discover hidden treasure in a tomb, and just need to survive the undead and their curses long enough to douse themselves in holy water or whatever to sally off into the sunset with their bags of gold and live happily ever after.

What about the mummy's side?

You're dead. You've been dead for millennia, had your organs removed and rites read, been embalmed and dressed and laid to rest amid vast and well-appointed rooms chock-full of wealth. You strode into the afterlife like the king that you are, and have been reigning ever since. The river flows with milk and honey, eternal virgins attend your every physical desire, and your generosity knows no bounds as you shower endless wealth upon your adoring people.

And then...it stops. The river dries up, sour milk rotting in rivulets across the sticky bedrock. The maidens have vanished one by one, carried off by callous, disrespectful hands. The gold that once towered in piles around your palace disappeared much more quickly, not a single coin or ingot left. And your people turn on you. Not in anger, but in fear, hands clawing you, gaping mouths screaming soundlessly, bodies flattening and fading like living murals.

Anubis snatches you out of the waking nightmare, to something much worse: judgement. What? You have been judged already! Your heart weighed against a feather, the wisdom and love you so carefully curated in life keeping it light enough to guarantee your safe passage into an eternal paradise.

Except not so eternal, it seems. Robbers, he tells you. You cannot believe it. Even the bravest, most brazen, most despicably faithless dogs would not disturb your rest. Raid your tomb, yes, take your finery, yes, strip your body of its ornaments and peel the gold off the sarcophagus, perhaps, but not you. Your body in its wrappings, your organs in their jars, should be left alone. They could dump your empty bones on the floor of the pyramid and walk away with every material possession your people saw fit to entomb you with, but nothing of consequence would be taken from you in the afterlife.

They have not just taken your possessions, says Anubis. They have taken you.

Taken the sarcophagus? Surely they would remove your body to lighten the load--

They have taken you, he says.

Removed me to some lesser grave, to set up some new king in a glorious pyramid he himself could not afford to build? Tacky, and rude, but it has been done before--

They have taken you, he stresses again.

...have I fallen so far out of favor with my people, with Egypt herself, that they would strip me of my title and my rest?

Your god crouches, and looks you gently in the eyes, and says again, They have taken you.

And then he adds: You have ten days to return.

And you awake on a boat, a horrific thing of metal and smoke, surrounded by treasures packed in wooden crates and straw, admired by an endless parade of foreigners who ooh and ahh over your dead body and do not, cannot understand what they are costing you, making you their macabre trophy of the dullest hunt you can imagine.

You will teach them what a real hunt is.

(The rest of the movie is a timed horror-thriller as the hero, trapped in his own desiccated corpse, shambles around London trying to find his heart and return to Egypt, while attacked on all sides by monster hunters and grave robbers who don't understand that they're the bad guys. It is an epic struggle to stay the course and not fall into a vengeful frenzy, to keep his heart pure enough to pass the feather again, to FIND his heart in the first place.)