seen from China
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Germany
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Japan
seen from Romania
seen from China
seen from Germany
seen from United States
Cursed artifact: Heart of Burn
A ruby pendant/amulet carved into an anatomically accurate heart that is always warm to the touch and sometimes even too hot to hold. You cannot take it out of your inventory once you’ve picked it up.
fire and poison damage at random intervals of both damage (between 1/10) and time (or if you eat/drink something acidic get random damage amounts instantly)
A crow landed on the path ahead of me, a scrap of cloth in its beak. This was somehow connected to the amulet! I knew it instantly, even before my chaos crystal told me so. The crow dropped the fabric and cawed once. I took the clue, but not the advice.
It's just a little over a week until I go to sea (yes, The Actual Sea!) on a tall ship, and I probably shouldn't pack any cursed artifacts.
However, I absolutely can't resist packing my Swept Away travel mug for the occasion. Or my @astralwhat "Make History Or Die Trying" shirt. And I'm bringing Labyrinth of Ice to read in my downtime. Hell, the fact that I have a The Terror/Franklin Expedition related tattoo probably makes me a cursed artifact.
Ah, well, these will all be helpful conversation starters should worse come to worst...
While trying to find that one cursed Harley Sawyer bootleg plush abomination, I found comedy gold like why is this failed fma homunculus up for sale
Asking the burning questions here
What’s your least favorite figure (if there were any)?
Funko pops.........
Gallery Seven
The climate panel read 68°F. It always read 68°F.
Dr. Mei Chen pressed her palm flat against the plastic anyway. The casing felt warm, a slow-breathing warmth that didn’t match the number. Three weeks since the Egyptian acquisition arrived, and the museum’s air had started to feel like it belonged to someone else.
Gallery Seven sat at the end of the eastern wing, past the Hendricks donor plaque and the polite sign about “sensitive materials.” The new centerpiece waited in the middle: an obsidian sarcophagus that refused to shine. Light went in and didn’t come back out.
Donors called it the star of the Hendricks Collection, as if the pharmaceutical money had dug it up personally instead of buying whatever a field team dragged out of a desert.
Marcus had been the first to say it out loud.
“Case feels wrong,” he’d told her last week, hovering near the display with his infrared wand. “Readout says 68, but my skin says I’m standing next to a rack of overclocked hardware.”
Visitors bothered him too. They came into Gallery Seven and started tracing loops around the sarcophagus, walking the same thin ring in the marble until faint arcs appeared in the polish. They spoke in normal voices in the doorway, then dropped to whispers by the time they reached the case. The ceiling mics picked up sound but not words, a hush that registered as static in the logs.
As Mei stepped into the gallery now, the cool corridor air cut off behind her like a door closing. The room itself felt a few degrees warmer, thick in a way that made her ears ring.
The glass around the sarcophagus showed the same stats as the hallway panel: 68°F, 40% humidity, particulates in range. Numbers sat calm and ordinary while her breath puffed white against the case.
Condensation had bloomed inside neighboring vitrines, fogging the glass over rows of shabtis and strings of faience beads. Someone’s fingers had traced five small clear circles through the mist, a coin-sized star pressed into each surface.
Mei snapped a photo. The flash bounced off the obsidian behind her and came back crooked, shadows bending away from the path the light had taken. Her reflection in the glass blurred where it crossed the five circles.
Phillips, the night guard, had lasted four days after the piece went on display.
“Place feels crowded,” he’d written in his resignation email. “Even when the cameras swear I’m alone.”
His replacement managed two shifts and left a hand-written note on her desk instead of filling out HR forms. Four words, all caps, pen dug into the paper hard enough to ghost the next page:
ARE YOU SURE IT’S EMPTY
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
Marcus: Can’t sleep. Humming again last night. It’s in my teeth now. You hear it too, right?
She started to type no and stopped. The air carried something under the general hush, a tone right at the edge of hearing. Five even steps downward, a pause, then back up. Her pulse leaned toward it without asking permission.
The temperature strip stayed frozen at 68°F. Her fingertips stung with cold.
“Beautiful piece, isn’t it?”
She hadn’t heard the door open.
Dr. Reeves stood at her shoulder, tie loose, hair more chaotic than his usual conference portraits. The museum had flown him in to authenticate the coffin and to tell donors they had funded something “unique in the pre- and proto-dynastic record.”
He stared at the sarcophagus like it was an old argument he wasn’t sure he’d won.
“You don’t see obsidian worked like that in tiled goods,” he said. His fingers tapped his briefcase in sets of five. “Lid alone would bankrupt a normal tomb. Someone wanted this built to specification.”
“For what?”
“The inscriptions are a palimpsest of bad decisions,” he said. “But there’s a phrase carved near the base that keeps surviving revisions.” He traced air just shy of the glass. “Closest I can manage is ‘those who keep the count’ or ‘those kept for the count.’ Depends on how generous I’m feeling.”
His pupils were too big for the bright gallery.
“Containment?” Mei asked. “Or some kind of… log?”
“Collection,” Reeves said, and smiled with half his mouth. “Some things archive and broadcast at the same time.”
Her phone buzzed again.
Marcus: Humming stopped. Whole building went quiet. Feels wrong.
The vents cut out mid-breath. No air movement, no escalator drone, no muffled school group from the next wing. Silence hit hard enough that she had to swallow twice before her ears popped.
She turned back to Reeves.
The space beside her contained nothing but chilled air and a faint smell of old stone.
She scanned the room. No retreating footsteps, no closing door. Just marble, display glass, and the obsidian block in the middle.
Hairline fractures had spidered across the sarcophagus lid, radiating from a shallow dimple she did not remember. Under the gallery lights the cracks caught a dull glint, five rays spreading from a central hollow.
She stepped close enough that the glass fogged under her breath.
The pattern on the lid echoed the finger marks in the condensation. Five points, inward and out. She raised her phone. The obsidian gave her back a hall of Meis: one straight on, others fractionally late, posture off by tiny degrees. One blinked slower. One’s shoulders sagged. One smiled.
Her real face stayed still. The version in the stone peeled its lips into a deliberate, confident curve.
The smiling Mei in the reflection lifted her hand and set it against the inner surface of the lid.
Heat punched through the real glass into her actual palm. A deep, bone-side warmth that shot from skin to wrist in a heartbeat. She yanked her hand back.
Five white blisters stood out against her skin, arranged like the points on the cracked star. The flesh around them flushed red, then leeched to a flat gray, color draining as if pulled through invisible threads into the stone.
The humming in the gallery surged.
It did not come from the coffin. It came from her.
A tone vibrated in the back of her throat, smooth and inhumanly steady. Five steps down, hold, five back up, lock. Her chest started matching it. Each breath lined up behind the sound like it had been waiting for new instructions.
She clamped her unmarked hand over her mouth. The noise dulled but didn’t stop. Bone carried it. The tile under her boots answered with a faint sympathetic buzz.
Other notes joined in, far away at first and then closer. Higher, lower, folding into the same pattern. A guard at the north stairwell. A conservator in the restoration lab. Dr. Reeves, wherever he’d vanished to. Voices she recognized from staff meetings now humming without words, as if the building had finally gotten all its channels on the same station.
Her phone vibrated in her fist.
Marcus: Tried the staff entrance. Card reader cycles and spits my badge back. Stairwells jam midway. Guess that’s our lockdown notice.
On the far wall, a monitor showed the security feeds. Gallery Seven flickered into view: sarcophagus under glass, clean arcs of scuffed marble around it, no body where hers should be.
Reeves stood in the frame instead, half in shadow, hand on the glass. His mouth moved in time with a sound the camera did not capture. The skin along his jaw looked too smooth, like stone worn by many hands.
The feed cut for half a second and came back. He had stepped closer without crossing the distance. His palm stayed fixed on the case.
Heat flared through the marks in Mei’s hand. The gray on her wrist deepened, muting the veins there.
In the control room, Marcus sat rigid at the console, eyes bloodshot, fingers beating against his leg in five-count bursts.
“Visual logs are clean,” he said. The tone under his voice matched hers and made his words feel borrowed. “No static, no anomalies, no hauntings we can put in the incident report. Just a solid attendance day.”
He saw her hand and went quiet.
The blisters had sunk flat, leaving five pale circles pressed into the skin, almost like old vaccination marks. The gray had climbed into the tendons, dulling the sheen of sweat, giving her wrist a matte, stone-heavy look.
“You’re tuned too,” he said.
On the monitors, visitors moved through galleries on casual orbits. In every room where the feed ran long enough, at least one person paced a repeating loop—a tight track around a painting, a slow wheel around a glass case—heel and toe hitting the floor in the same five-beat rhythm as the hum in her throat.
“Why do they keep coming back?” Marcus asked.
Because something inside the walls needed numbers. Because the building now had a central object that loved loops and repetitions, and people were excellent moving parts. She didn’t say it. She didn’t need to.
Mei watched her own reflection in the dark glass of a blank monitor. The scar-star on her hand sat where it belonged now. Her posture had shifted without her consent: shoulders angled toward the feeds, attention more on counts than individuals.
“You see that phrase Reeves kept circling?” she said. “‘Those who keep the count.’”
Marcus nodded once. “We’re hired,” he said.
His throat pulsed with his own note. Their two tones snapped into alignment like magnets: five steps down, hold, five up.
They walked back to Gallery Seven without discussing it. Their strides landed on the tiles in sync, matching the hum in their bones. The ambient noise of the museum thinned as they approached. Escalator buzz faded. Gift shop music dwindled into nothing. Even the buzz of the emergency exit signs pulled back.
The obsidian waited in its ring of scuffs.
The fractures across the lid glowed faintly where they crossed. When Mei pressed her marked palm to the glass again, the temperature strip along the base flickered and climbed half a degree. The number steadied at a new normal.
The system acknowledged its new calibrations.
Behind them, voices gathered in the doorway: Reeves, collar unbuttoned; Phillips, who had quit and evidently never managed to leave town; two regulars with membership pins and the dazed look of people who had forgotten how many Thursdays they’d spent here. Their throats worked quietly. The gallery’s hum gained harmonies.
The lid settled deeper into its frame with a soft internal click. The fractures cinched down and faded from the surface, leaving the obsidian flawless and lightless again. The five-point star stayed hidden under the polish like a watermark.
Out in the hall, the climate panel blinked once and reset.
68°F. 40% humidity. Air quality normal.
Months from now, a new hire would stand where Mei had stood and press their hand to that panel, wondering why Gallery Seven always felt a shade too warm, why it got crowded even on light attendance days. They would schedule duct checks and filter replacements. They would joke about the Egyptian room being needy.
The gray scars on Mei’s palm would twinge when the new person walked in. The hum in the walls would slide, making space in the chord.
The museum now kept more than objects. The building held a living catalog: staff, guards, experts, regulars. Every loop around the case, every breath held a few seconds too long in front of the glass, every late-night shift with that sense of being watched went onto the same running tally.
On paper, the museum stayed healthy. Attendance numbers looked excellent. Environmental readings stayed textbook.
In the service corridors, Mei walked her rounds with a tablet in one hand and the mark on her other burning when a reading drifted. The building pressed its needs through temperature and tone. She responded. Cases stayed stable. Loops stayed neat.
The newest curator of Gallery Seven wore a badge and sensible shoes and answered emails like anyone else.
The collection she belonged to counted deeper than objects.
17
Chapter 16
Mel wants answers, but the one that comes changes everything...
TW: violence, guns, hitting, threats, someone has a gun aimed at them
Bro put these clothes on I swear they aren't cursed bro you totally won't turn into a hot wolf girl with big muscles I promise on my lucky penny
