The Last Priestess

Prologue

(A/N: Welcome to The Last Priestess. This is a Rick O'Connell fanfic. And I hope you enjoy it!)

********************************

The sun was hot.

You could hear that sentence and believe you were almost anywhere in the world. But when you were in a desert, it carried more weight. And when you were in a desert in the middle of Egypt, it stopped sounding like an observation and started sounding like a sentence. A death sentence, more specifically.

The sun beat down mercilessly on Rick O'Connell as he crouched behind a crumbling barricade of stone and sand, the ruins at his back and death galloping toward him across the horizon. Sweat ran into his eyes, stinging, blurring his vision as he barked orders to the men around him; soldiers who were already wilting under the heat, under the fear, under the growing certainty that they were about to be overrun.

Behind them, the dead city loomed, ancient and half-buried with its broken spires clawing at the sky like withered fingers. It looked less like a shelter and more like a grave. That was fitting considering that it was named the City of the Dead.

The men along the wall raised their guns with shaking hands as a massive horde of Tuareg bandits advanced, their numbers stretching far beyond what Rick had hoped for. Horses thundered across the sand, hooves churning the earth into a choking cloud of dust that rolled toward them like a storm.

Rick turned just in time to see their general—coward or realist, it hardly mattered—throw down his sword. Without a word, the man spurred his horse and fled toward the ruined city, desperation written into every frantic movement as he tried to put as much distance between himself and the battlefield as possible.

Beni watched him go, horror and resignation warring on his face. He looked up at his American companion. "You just got promoted," he said hopelessly.

Rick inhaled deeply, forcing his lungs to work through the heat and the panic. Then he straightened and bellowed an order in French, his voice cutting through the chaos, commanding the men to hold their positions.

The bandits answered with hollering cheers as they closed the distance, their cries wild and feral, their horses kicking up a whole desert's worth of sand.

"Steady!" Rick called, gripping his musket tightly. "You're with me on this one, right?"

"Your strength gives me strength," Beni replied.

"Steady!" Rick shouted again.

Beni lasted only a few seconds more. The fear won. He backed away from the wall, turned, threw down his gun, and bolted toward the city. "Wait for me!" he screamed at the general, who was already long gone.

But where Beni vanished, someone else surged forward.

The fallen gun barely hit the ground before a hand snatched it up, swift and decisive, as if the moment had been anticipated, as if they had been waiting for it. Rick barely had time to register the movement before a figure took Beni's place beside him. And most surprising of all, it was a woman.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?!" Rick shouted.

She moved with startling confidence, settling into position as though she belonged there. Dark brunette hair was twisted into a neat knot at the base of her head, a nurse's cap pinned firmly in place despite the chaos. She wore trousers instead of regulation skirts, and the uniform marked her as someone who was never supposed to be on the front line in the first place. But in that moment, skirts and rules and expectations felt laughably irrelevant.

"Saving your ass," she returned calmly as she took aim.

"Do you even know how to shoot that thing, woman?"

She cocked it. "If we weren't about to be attacked, I'd use you as target practice to answer your question. I've only been saving your asses this entire time. And by the way, my name's Isobel."

Rick huffed, there being absolutely no time to question who she was or why she was here.
"FIRE!" he bellowed.

Gunshots cracked through the air. Smoke, sand, and screams blurred together as the first wave fell.

Rick focused on his targets, on survival—but out of the corner of his eye, he couldn't help noticing her. Isobel moved like she had been born with a gun in her hands. Every shot found its mark. Every reload was fluid, instinctive. At one point, she reached over, plucked extra rounds straight from the belt around Rick's chest, and reloaded without hesitation.

"Hey!" Rick exclaimed.

"Scold me after I save your life...again," she shot back, extra rounds clenched between her teeth as she fired again.

It was clear they were hopelessly outnumbered. One by one, soldiers fell from the walls, knocked from their perches by blades and bullets alike.

The bandits breached the line.

Machetes flew through the air, impaling men where they stood. The barricade became a slaughterhouse.

Rick stumbled back from the wall, grabbing Isobel's arm and pulling her with him. She wrenched free immediately.

"I don't need you to save me," she spat.

Rick ducked just as she swung her gun, the heavy stock connecting solidly with the skull of a bandit who had been charging up behind him, sword raised to strike. The man crumpled.

"But clearly you need me to save you."

Rick had all of a second to simply gawk at her in shock and awe. To blatantly stare at how well she handled that gun, and surprisingly, how good she looked even covered in sand, as she grew her kill count. Then he was forced back into battle mode. He lost sight of her after that.

Chaos swallowed everything—horses screaming, men shouting, sand stinging his eyes, bullets tearing through the air. He ran, driven purely by instinct, straight into the City of the Dead.

Beni slammed the door to the catacombs shut behind him, sealing Rick out with the bandits. Rick ran until his lungs burned and his muscles screamed. He lost his musket. Then his handguns, one by one, until he was left with nothing but his breath and his will to live.

He staggered deeper into the city, finally cornered before a massive stone statue head half-buried in sand. The bandits skidded to a halt, terror flashing across their faces at the sight of it. One by one, they fled.

That was when the city turned on Rick.

The sand seemed to come alive, rising, shifting, whispering with something ancient and hungry. Rick barely remembered stumbling out into the open desert, half-dead, sun-blind and delirious.

He never knew that while the sand tried to kill him, it did the opposite for Isobel.

She never understood how the ground itself seemed to answer her presence—how sand rose to swallow bullets before they struck, how bandits faltered and lost her in the shifting haze. She only knew that when the fighting ended, there were footprints ahead of her—bare, unsteady, leading away from the city.

She followed them.

They carried her out of the desert, back toward civilisation, before disappearing entirely as if they'd never existed.

Little did she know that their paths would cross again years later. Or that more than once, over the next three years, Rick O'Connell would wake from uneasy sleep, dreaming of a strange woman in the desert who had saved his life and vanished just as magically as that sand rose.