Mumbo

Mahmoudenkahmen sat on a throne of gold, donated by his loving subjects. The desert was a difficult place to exist, yet his rule made it tolerable. People offered sacrifices to him as if he were a god. He refused. He brought abundance to a land where water was a week’s worth of travel away.

The kingdom went silent when Mahmoudenkahmen’s head was snapped clean off by a man named Muhbahn. He was a brute twice the size of a large man, with the temperament of a small man. It was known that he envied the pharaoh, but nobody expected such a violent usurping.

Muhbahn melted down the golden throne as his first act. The people, furious with his actions, expected it to be returned to them as a show of remorse. Muhbahn instead split it between his son and daughter, twins of only ten years old. Public opinion of him worsened drastically.

A few years into his rule, Muhbahn grew wary of the growing threats against him. People hated him more with each selfish decision made. He outsourced a sorceress from a foreign land as well as a craftsman.

They were paid handsomely to build him a personal sarcophagus. He also had them create one for his son and one for his daughter. Muhbahn planned to build a tomb around their burials and they would one day take his position. He wanted to be certain they would be buried with him but once the tomb was constructed, there would be no other way to get the sarcophagi in.

The sorceress instructed the craftsman to make the special pieces and they were placed on a preset plot of land.

“My subjects! I require a tomb be built in my honor! Carry me ten thousand stones from the low lands!” Muhbahn called to the people from his new, wooden throne.

People looked at Muhbahn with disbelief, but none objected. Soon, the masses were put to work building a monument to a leader they hated deeply. Years passed before the tomb was complete. Once the last stone was in place, the pharaoh and his children inspected the entire structure, stone by stone.

“How does it look, Hadza?”

“Good, father.”

“How does it look. Mahfuz?”

“I think good, father.”

“He thinks. Not good enough. Begin rebuild.”

Even those closest to Muhbahn were enraged by the order. By all accounts, the monument was spectacular. One of the greatest achievements in architecture. Muhbahn wouldn’t budge. It had to come down. The people decided that he had to.

Hundreds of thousands of his subjects swarmed Muhbahn. He sent Hadza and Mahfuz away, preserving the royal line as he witnessed his own downfall. He fought, killing a few, but there were far too many. In return for his cruelty, they dragged him into his monument and laid him beside his sarcophagus. For the ten thousand stones he ordered, they stomped on his body ten thousand times.

Well beyond death, he was embalmed and stuffed into the sarcophagus.

The afterlife released Muhbahn exactly one thousand years after his death as inscribed by the sorceress.

He awoke as beaten as he was that day, but wrapped to hold in the spilling flesh and sinew. Just getting his bearings, he was pained to find the two sarcophagus at his side in ruins, heads on the ground. He picked up Hadza’s to find the horror inside. His daughter’s head was inside. Mahfuz’s was as well. Muhbahn let out a powerful cry as he held his children close.

When he squeezed the heads, they released wrappings covered in decay, projecting them across the room. He stood and held firm his son and daughter, kicked out one of the stones blocking his exit and faced a pack of tourists with maps and brochures. A camera flash hit him brighter than the sun he hadn’t seen in a thousand years and he moaned at the slack-jaw tourist behind the camera causing them to flee.

A nearby tour guide walked towards Muhbahn’s tomb.

“People speculate that this was a lesser known pharaoh who took the throne by force and blah blah blah, but I think that’s just mumbo-“

The hulking figure stepped out and stopped the tour guide in his tracks.

“Mumbo.” he agreed before unloading wrappings, creating a mummy of the disrespectful tour guide.