Cursed Times - Only Yesterday! Sequel to Wattys 2015 winner!

Chapter 41: Trueth - Emergency Exit

End of last chapter:

The figure raised a hand in greeting, the whispy white hair blowing across her face, then she retreated into the hill. Earth, stones, grass—it all shifted until suddenly there was no passage any more. Only the busy buzzing of insects and a rather blurry expanse of grass.

***

Trueth surreptitiously wiped the tears from her eyes. 'Was she the same person who wrote that scroll?' she asked nobody in particular. 

'There was no action,' John (or Rob) said indignantly, and the brothers walked off to inform the group waiting next to the henge that nothing important had happened, just a boring granny in a sackcloth had been breathing weird comments into their mind.

'Most likely,' Seisi said. 'You will have to ask Imhotep. He must have known that one portal would not suffice. I never knew of this.'

'Did the People of the Mist have dark priests too?' Trueth asked. 'She mentioned the demons.'

'There always will be those susceptible to evil. You heard your ancestor.' Seisi had knelt down and was plucking dandelions. 'But I feel guilty now. These people were not as advanced as mine were. They did not have...how can I say, the same responsibility? She need not have done so, but she did as instructed by the circle. That woman did her duty, and Kemet failed her.'

'Maybe. But she said they did not all pass through the portal, some were left behind. Their descendants arrived a few thousand years later. And you know what this means? My people fled to safety twice— and went extinct both times,' Trueth said. 'Doesn't exactly add to my personal feel-good factor.'

Damian nodded sadly. 'All that's left now is the dregs of whatever talents our ancestors have left behind. Us. Does that mean we will also die here?'

'Maybe it's a case of third time lucky,' Trueth said.

Seisi did not answer immediately. He was creating a chain from the flowers he had plucked and placed it reverently on the grass in front of the mound. 'You all underestimate yourself. You underestimate the people you are descended from. You also do not place enough value on the information we have received.'

Myrtle scratched her nose. 'What was it she was watching? Another one of these portals? You said there would be an exit, is the mound it, then?'

Seisi got up, wiping his hands on his jeans. He wore an expression on his face Trueth did not much care for. She had seen it before. Imhotep's chief spy had scouted vital information and was processing the input. Next, he would come up with something she would like even less. She could of course be reasonable about the whole thing and be grateful that he seemed to have spotted the way out. There was nobody alive to help them, after all. She still did not like the expression on his face.

'She was monitoring the arrival of the Kemet civilisation,' Seisi said. 'My people. We were five thousand years late, so she and her followers never had a chance. This is another reason why I feel guilty.'

'Don't be,' Trueth said. 'You guys did have a backup plan. Things were just a bit too slow for my lot.'

Seisi placed a finger on her lips. 'Hear me out. To be able to monitor our arrival they must have arrived in the same parallel world as Kemet.' He observed Trueth with a quizzical expression on his face, reminding her strongly of her arts mistress in primary school.

Damian was polishing his glasses, having achieved the desired result; he returned them to the place where they were most useful. 'If I understand you correctly you believe us to have arrived in a different part of the parallel world your civilisation is now located in?'