Douglas's gaze passed over the stone coffin.
His eyes were drawn to a heap of things in the corner of the burial chamber.
It was another pile of bones.
But unlike the white ones on the floor, these bones were an eerie grayish black.
Their surfaces were covered in fine, cobweb-like cracks, as though some force had split them open from within before they had endured thousands of years of corrosion.
This had not been caused by an external force. It looked more like a kind of... self-destruction.
Beside the gray-black bones lay a scattering of pottery shards.
Bill noticed Douglas's unusual reaction too. He followed his gaze, and his brows immediately knitted together.
"An eighth jar?"
He strode over, a trace of disbelief in his voice.
The material of these fragments was entirely different from that of the seven jars outside. It was not clay from the Nile, but a black basalt that felt icy to the touch.
Bill crouched down. Rather than touch it with his hand, he carefully tapped one of the largest fragments with the tip of his wand.
A bone-chilling cold instantly crept up through the wand's core.
It was not the chill of magic, but a pure, ravenous emptiness, as though his wand were a pat of butter and the fragment a red-hot iron, trying to suck dry and evaporate both the magic and the life force within his wand.
Bill snatched his wand back as though he had been electrocuted.
Douglas stepped forward. What he felt went far deeper than what Bill had experienced.
His fingers merely brushed the black basalt fragment, and the entire world let out a piercing, soundless shriek inside his head.
This was not merely magic.
It was a tearing apart.
He tasted the rusty tang of a soul