>>14262048Imagine an ancient desert kingdom, so old as to be lost to history, sealed away by its pharaoh to save its people from some great disaster. Locked away from the outside world, its people fall into a dreamless sleep to pass the eons until it is safe for them to reemerge.
Millennia pass like raindrops rolling down a window pane. The stars wheel overhead, moving in ways undetectable in a single human lifespan, the constellations changing over time. The climate shifts. The desert grows, then shrinks. For an untold age, the land where once the kingdom lay is entirely submerged by an encroaching coastline. The waters retreat as the air grows colder. A glacier makes its slow procession across the land, dragging fertile soil beneath it even as it scoops the sands away.
Civilizations rise and fall. Languages are born and die off. Ethnic groups emerge and fade away.
Finally, after unknown ages, come the sound of footfalls on the forbidden soil. A group of nomads following their herds cross the kingdom's invisible borders, the pharaoh's ancient spell too timeworn and tattered to turn them away. Amidst the boulders and grasses of the hardscrabble tundra, they spy a stone monument rising from the soil. Their leader, curious and superstitious, calls a halt for the day an dictates that camp be made, so they may pay respect to whatever forgotten god is honored by the menhir.
In an antechamber buried scant feet beneath the surface, the echo of human voices reach ears long accustomed to silence. A sleeper awakens, and commands the massive stone doors of the pharaoh's subterranean complex to open.
The nomads above panic as the ground shakes. A great stone maw widens next to them, dirt falling away to reveal a gaping hole in the ground.
As if in response, the clouded sky opens up too.
A lone anubis emerges into the light of day, shivering and bewildered. She stares upward in blank incomprehension, conceiving for the first time the existence of such a thing as snow.
>What happens next? 
