The Black River and the Golden Pyramid: Eternum, Part one

A royal body should not move after sealing. It should not open its eyes beneath the linen. It should not speak from an empty chest. In the mortuary chambers beneath the Golden Pyramid, Tawi Meret knows the rules of death better than anyone. Every body has a procedure. Every anomaly has a classification. Every witness has a place in the record—unless the record must be changed. When a sealed royal corpse produces black water, a forbidden white line, and a voice no dead mouth should carry, Tawi is ordered to accept the official explanation: technical defect. Across the royal city, archival scribe Kai Nefer uncovers another impossible fracture. Ancient ritual texts have been altered. Words of refusal, witness, and permission have been replaced by language that serves the Crown. The Archive calls this correction. The Workshop calls its own failures silence. Between them rises the Golden Pyramid, a monument to eternity built over something far older than the kingdom that claims it. As Tawi and Kai follow the trail from sealing rooms to burned scrolls, quarry ledgers, night boats, and the black river that carries away what the city refuses to remember, they begin to understand the danger: the dead are not the only things being processed. Some truths do not stay buried. Some bodies do not stay still.