Our discovery was supposed to be the find of the century. Our hunt had lasted for years, coming up against dead end after dead end. Mistranslated passage after incomplete map. 

We’d all but given up when we made our final discovery. It was a journal passage from a previous seeker, and last year it would have been dismissed, but we’d discovered something since. We already had the missing piece.

We knew we were getting close when we saw the warnings—the usual threats of curses and traps, designed to dissuade raiders and thieves. 

We lost one team member when he translated a warning about the destructive power we risked releasing. He was right.

We lost another when he fell through the floor and broke his neck. He was lucky.

When we reached the sealed vault, we found a depiction of the sun gone from the sky, crops rotting in the fields, and the spread of terrible diseases and death. It showed the fall of an empire. The civilisation’s last act had been to hide this treasure, and to protect it for the sake of those that would come after.

At least that’s how we read it. Only now do we truly understand; it was not history. It was prophecy. 

It started slowly. The crop failures came first. Then a plague swept the land. That’s when we knew. The symptoms were identical to the bodies in the mural, the puss-filled boils and black lips. The victims would die after days of agony, gasping for breath.

It didn’t touch me or my team, despite our proximity to the artefact. We thought it a co-incidence, but a mercy. Only now, as the sun disappears, do I understand the reality. Our survival, while we were surrounded by death and despair, is neither an accident nor a gift. It is our punishment.