3000 years in the future a dig team excavates an ancient tomb, the name of its dead lost to the ravages of time, but its opulence and grandeur still imposing upon the careful, reverent scholars. they make their way into the tomb through twisting hallways with walls that undulate strangely in the light-- surely a trick of the eye, and not actual serpents making their way through the grooves and ridges of their carvèd kin.... the archaeologists plunge deeper, uneasy at the wonders and riches that the tomb beholds. they see echoing chambers with enormous glass vats in the middle, dust-covered and murky liquid hinting at submerged inhuman shapes... ceremonial clothes preserved by their stillness, stained with something dark and tarry down the front, as if their mystics had been pierced, exsanguinated, and their brutal sacrifice arranged for a splendid, violent display... the archaeologists are beginning to lose their nerve, the glow of their lamps somehow only providing an atmosphere of cold, sterile inevitability. but still they descend. down, down, into the stone and glass and steel of the tomb, cold and resplendent, a maddening susurrus of scales and silk pressing at the very edges of their perception. they smell of fear. they sense it on each other but they dare not speak: the icy resignation of human prey, the inexorable call of fatal discovery. after days of plunging the depths of the tomb the dig team finally stumble upon the coffin of its monarch. plagued by terror and nausea, they close their eyes and try, in vain, to remember the warm optimism they had in the beginning of this folly, this hubris. they try to meet each others eyes and fail. wordlessly, they lift the heavy stone slab in unison to unveil me, blinking up with innocent surprise, in my most cozy and sensual of pyjamas. they replace the slab, return to the surface, and never speak of their expedition again.
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