The Milk-Name

Tomorrow the dig committee opens the tomb of the child-queen Neferkara — with crowbars, cameras, and a minister's speech. Tonight there is only you, the expedition's junior epigrapher, keeping the watch below. Torches burn in the antechamber, the sarcophagus two rooms deeper is still sealed the way its builders left it, and three thousand years of cold rise off the stone. You have until dawn, and the feeling — quiet, insistent — that someone long ago left a gentler goodbye down here, waiting for whoever came first.