The air was stone-heavy. Ancient. It smelled of oil, incense, and slow rot — the kind that lingered in temples long since swallowed by sand and swallowed again by time. The camera was barely holding focus in the lightless cavern, the lens trembling as if it, too, feared what it recorded.
Somewhere far above, fans screamed. Pyro sizzled. But down here…
Only stillness. And the low, unholy hum of something that was not meant to wake.
He sat like an idol sculpted from vengeance — half-shadow, half-god. Drake Nygma, but no longer. This was The Sphinx.
Cloaked in jet-black robes trimmed in gold thread that glimmered like desert stars, his obsidian-painted hands rested upon the arms of a cracked onyx throne. A throne he had carved himself from the bones of his enemies — or perhaps just the idea of them. Behind him, hieroglyphs that did not belong to any living dialect of Egypt pulsed in dim ochre light. His back was bare, and where most men bore scars, he bore scripture.
Ancient warnings etched into flesh not by blade, but by cosmic decree.
The Sphinx had not spoken in four days.
Not since the match was announced.
Not since the names were revealed.
Daichi Sasaki. Saiko Sasori. Yasha Goro. Takeshi Nomura.
Four offerings. Four masks of hubris carved in mortal clay.
His fingers flexed — a slow, ominous gesture.
Not impatience.
Calculation.
From the shadows emerged Dollia Trypp — the only soul alive who dared approach the throne without fear. Her black hair was pulled into a tight braid, her frame draped in indigo silk. Her expression held the delicate ache of one who watches a loved one sink beneath waves they cannot part. She stood beside him without speaking, her presence not demanding… but necessary.
His tether.
His sister.
Her voice, when it came, was low. Broken like prayer:
“You’re slipping.”
The Sphinx did not look at her. His eyes — twin eclipses — stared forward, unblinking. The air around him thickened, a storm gathering in the ribcage of a god.
“…The sky cracks,” he murmured at last, his voice like thunder dragged through sand.
“The beetle stirs beneath the sunless stone. Anubis whispers secrets in Nomura’s sleep. And Daichi still dreams of thrones he has not earned.”
A slow breath. Measured. Volcanic.
“…The curse of Akhetaten is upon them.”
Dollia flinched. She had heard that name in dreams. In screams.
She took a step closer. “You’re not Akhenaten. You’re Drake. My brother. The world hasn’t seen what you are yet. Don’t let the dead wear your skin.”
At that, The Sphinx stirred. Not fully — just a tilt of the head, slow and serpentine.
“I am the last son of the first sun,” he whispered. “I am the riddle they never dared ask, and the consequence of its answer. I do not wrestle. I judge.”
His hands curled into fists, and behind him, the hieroglyphs flared.
“Survivor Series.” He spat the words like they were filth.
“A name for cowards who beg time to endure what they cannot conquer.”
The room began to shake.
“Daichi fancies himself a godslayer,” The Sphinx continued, rising now from his throne with the terrible grace of a lion in mourning. “Yasha Goro carries steel and sorrow but lacks reverence. Saiko Sasori… he has eyes like poison, but no altar. And Nomura — he has forgotten the old ways.”
He looked to the ceiling now, as if the arena above could hear him.
“I will remind them. With flame. With ruin. With the choir of the mutilated.”
His voice dropped, deeper than before. More ancient.
“Four will enter. None will ascend.”
Dollia stepped in front of him now, hand gently to his chest. “You’re not alone out there,” she said softly. “Takuma. Lulu. Chulunn. They fight with you.”
A pause.
“…Do they?”
The Sphinx’s eyes locked on hers. For a heartbeat, she saw something flicker. Human. Hurting.
Then it was gone, buried beneath epochs of wrath.
“I will not shield them from judgment. But I will let them witness it.”
He turned from her then, lifting a golden mask from the altar beside the throne. A face of a jackal and a man, split down the center. He placed it upon his face — and with it, whatever was left of Drake Nygma vanished beneath divinity.
“Tell the world,” The Sphinx said, voice now disembodied, echoing from walls that remembered tombs. “That the Nile has dried. The sands have turned black. And tonight, the gods do not watch — they feed.”
The scene faded to black, but his final words cracked through the silence like a curse:
“He who survives the storm… shall envy the drowned.”
At first, there was only the sound of her breath.
Shallow. Controlled. Like she’s afraid even that might wake something deeper.
The catacombs are older than modern man claims. Older than the building above, older than the ground it stands on. The walls aren’t concrete — they’re stone. Carved with forgotten names and veiled threats in a dialect no scholar alive can fully translate.
But Dollia knows what they mean. She doesn't need to read them to understand them.
Because the warnings are no longer etched in stone.
They are etched in him.
She steps slowly through the veil of incense smoke and candlelight, past shattered relics of battles no one else remembers. Past jackal skulls and broken ankhs and the smell of scorched myrrh.
And there —
on the throne made of silence and sin —
sits her brother.
Or what’s left of him.
Drake Nygma.
Once her tether to reality, her chaos twin. The boy who named the stars with her.
Now? He is barely tethered to himself.
He does not look at her as she enters. He hasn’t looked at her for a full day.
Not since his skin began glowing with that eerie, sunless heat. Not since his voice dropped an octave and started speaking in riddles he didn’t write. Not since the match was announced.
Survivor Series.
Dollia hates the name.
Because it's not about surviving the match.
It's about surviving him.
She walks forward carefully, each step like approaching a sleeping lion.
The Sphinx does not speak.
He does not move.
But the walls tremble with knowing.
She swallows. Her throat is dry. She thinks of the way his eyes used to crinkle when he smiled, the dorky smirk he wore when he solved a puzzle no one else could. She remembers his riddles, the ones he used to whisper to her late at night, like they were secret passwords to the universe.
He hasn’t spoken in four days. And when he does now, it's like the universe answers back.
Still, she steps forward. Because no one else will.
Because she can feel him burning.
And maybe she’s the only one who can still smell the smoke before the world catches fire.
“Drake,” she says softly, voice tight, “it’s me.”
A beat. A pulse in the dark.
No response. Just the low creak of unseen chains. The sound of time reversing.
She tries again.
“You’re slipping.”
And that’s when he speaks.
“The sky cracks.
The beetle stirs beneath the sunless stone.
Anubis whispers secrets in Nomura’s sleep.”
His voice is not his own. It echoes, doubled over itself like a broken radio channeling an old god.But she hears it. She feels it in her spine.
“Daichi still dreams of thrones he has not earned.”
She hates how beautiful his voice is like this.
How terrifyingly complete he sounds.
But she doesn’t flinch. She knows that if she flinches, she loses him.
“Stop talking like the world ended and you’re the only one left to remember it,” she says, stepping into the glow of the candlelight, daring him to look her in the eyes.
“You’re not some plague. You’re my brother.”
Finally, he moves. Not a full turn — just his gaze. Heavy. Seismic. A sunless eclipse where his eyes should be.
“I am the last son of the first sun.”
She’s heard this line before. In her dreams.
In the dreams he infects with his presence.
“I don’t care if you’re the last son of the sun or the goddamn pyramids,” she snaps, tears welling before she can stop them. “I know you. And you’re not this thing. You’re not him.”
The candles flicker. Her words echo, absorbed by the stone — or swallowed by something deeper.
He doesn’t argue. He never argues. He just watches her like he’s mourning something only he understands.
Then, he rises.
And the air changes.
It’s like watching a cathedral unmake itself. Like witnessing lightning unfold from within a man’s spine.
The Sphinx steps down from his throne. Each motion is deliberate. He doesn’t walk — he descends.
“Four shall come.
One wears false steel.
One walks backward through war.
One poisons the moon.
One has no name.”
He moves past her now, and she turns to follow, tears forgotten. There’s no time for softness. Not here.
He lifts the mask. Gold. Jagged. Fused from something ancient and hungry.
“Tell the world… the Nile has dried. The sands have turned black.
And tonight, the gods do not watch — they feed.”
She stares at his back as he walks toward the arena stairs. She wants to run after him.
Wants to wrap her arms around him and beg.
But she knows better.
So she whispers:
“Come back to me after.”
She doesn’t mean the match.
She means the war.
And just before he disappears up the stairs, just before the mask seals over the man she loves most in this world — he pauses.
Not much.
Just enough.
A breath.
A riddle:
“If I kill the man who stole my name…will I remember yours?”
Then, silence.
Dollia Trypp is alone again.
In a tomb where the dead speak in riddles and her brother is becoming the final one.
But she doesn’t cry.
She just turns, whispers a prayer to a god who has stopped listening, and begins the long walk back.
Because tomorrow…
she might have to bury him.
And worse:
She might have to stop him.
There is no sky here.
No ground either.
Just the oppressive press of eternity, curling inward like a closing fist.
Dollia doesn't remember falling asleep.
She only remembers grief — that jagged, hot-cold ache in her chest when The Sphinx walked away from her as though he’d never been Drake Nygma. When the mask dropped, her brother became something else entirely.
But in this dream — or vision — or memory not her own — she stands barefoot in black sand, beneath a blood-haloed sun that pulses like a wound.
The world here doesn’t breathe.
It judges.
“Drake?”
Her voice breaks the silence like a whisper through a tomb.
A wind answers. It doesn’t howl — it hisses. Like secrets slithering across hieroglyphs. The dunes shift in shapes she can’t name, forming towers of thought, jagged puzzle-pyramids made of obsidian and teeth.
She walks forward.
And the world unfolds like a puzzle box inside a dead pharaoh’s heart.
The first layer is logic.
Endless halls of numbers carved into sandstone walls. Equations so dense they loop into madness. Every opponent, every outcome, every fatality already calculated. There’s no emotion here. Just cold, brutal certainty.
This is where the Sphinx thinks.
And it hurts to be here — because she knows this is the part of Drake that’s still brilliant. Still methodical. Still him.
But there’s no humanity left in the equations.
Only a cruel sense of order.
“They cannot defeat me,” says a voice not in the air, but in her bones.
“Because I have already buried them in the future.”
The second layer is ice.
White walls. Frigid, sterile, dead. A mausoleum for every emotion he refuses to feel.
She walks through it.
Sees memories encased in glass:
Their childhood laughter.
Her first drawing he framed.
His smile after his first win.
The way he used to touch her shoulder after every match and call her his “secret weapon.”
All frozen. Preserved.
Like specimens too dangerous to thaw.
She presses her hand to the glass.
A crack forms.
Just one.
The final layer is fire.
Not rage. Not yet.
Fury.
Raw. Animal. Divine.
This part is alive. It roars beneath the ice, buried under a thousand years of restraint and riddles and gold-plated godhood.
She sees it — him — chained to the walls of his own mind.
Drake Nygma.
Not the god.
Not the mask.
Not the Sphinx.
The brother.
The man with haunted eyes and shaking hands and a scream in his throat that never got to leave.
He looks up at her.
Bleeding from the wrists.
Mouth sewn shut with hieroglyphic thread.
Tears leak down her cheeks before she can stop them.
“Oh god, Drake… how long have you been here?”
She reaches out.
And the mind around her shudders.
The logic starts to crack.
The ice begins to melt.
The fire swells — not to consume her, but to warn her.
And suddenly he speaks, not with lips, but through thought:
“He wears my face but does not know my name.”
“He solves riddles I did not ask.”
“He buries my soul in sand to keep his hands clean.”
A pause.
“But I remember you.”
Her knees buckle.
She falls to him, pulls him close, embraces the soul beneath the storm.
Her tears are salt on his fire, and his breath is ash on her skin.
“Let me in,” she whispers.
“I’ll carry you if I have to. I’ll hold you the way you always held me. Just… just come back.”
A long silence.
Then:
“If I leave… the god wakes.”
“If I stay… the man dies.”
She sobs against his shoulder, shaking her head.
“No. You’re stronger than him. You’re smarter. You’re Drake Nygma. My brother. The Sphinx is just a mask. You’re the riddle he couldn’t solve.”
And then…
He looks up.
And he smiles.
Not cruel.
Not godlike.
But human.
Broken.
Brilliant.
Hers.
“Then give me the answer.”
She places her hand on his chest.
Right over his heart.
And says:
“Me.”
The world explodes in light.
Fire, ice, and numbers shatter into sand.
And when she wakes — gasping, soaked in sweat and starlight —
the first thing she hears from the shadows beside her hospital bed…
…is his voice.
Hoarse. Human.
“You cracked me open, little riddler.”
“Don’t let me close again.”
And she reaches for his hand.
And holds on.
The god still breathes. But tonight, the man remembers.
The void is vast.
A blackened sea stretching without horizon. Here, there are no walls. No ground. No stars. There’s only the oppressive pressure of thought — infinite, looping, suffocating.
Drake Nygma stands alone.
But he is not alone. He has never been alone.
Because Akhenaten, the ancient god who has been lurking behind his mask for so long, is always here.
Always watching. Always whispering.
The first memory hits like a thunderclap.
It isn’t his memory, not really. It is Akhenaten’s. The pulse of its power reverberates through his mind — cold, unyielding, and primal.
"I, the last son of Aten, the one true god, shall claim dominion over the living and the dead. Your soul is mine."
The voice is a guttural growl, ancient and rich with unrelenting rage. It swarms over him like locusts, devouring every inch of his body, his mind, his heart. Drake knows what it is — it’s the first spark. The beginning of his torment.
Akhenaten.
The avatar.
The god.
The Curse
But this isn't just memory. This is a force. It invades the edges of his consciousness with vivid clarity. The feeling of bone and sinew snapping under divine power. The weight of the sun god's rage pressing against him from all directions.
And then there’s the memory of his birth.
Not Drake's birth.
Akhenaten's.
The world was on fire.
Crimson skies burned with the light of a dying sun.
The world was collapsing.
Men and women screamed beneath the weight of history’s greatest transformation. The masses, broken and scattered, worshiped the new sun, a god that demanded more than mere devotion — it demanded blood.
The god Akhenaten rose, and in his wake, destruction flowed like a river, sweeping away everything in its path.
Drake can feel it now, coursing through his veins. The divine rage that took him from mortal man to god, that transformed him into a cold vision of supremacy. The same rage that made him see the world as a puzzle that could only be solved by breaking it. But that wasn’t the worst part.
The worst part was that he remembers it.
Drake remembers it.
The knowledge, the power, the violence.
It feels like he has never truly left.
It feels like Akhenaten is always there, in every breath, in every thought, in every decision. Drake has always had to share his body with a god.
But that’s not the worst part, either.
The worst part is the shame.
He remembers his first real failure.
He had been young then, trying to take control, trying to escape the god’s pull. But instead, he succumbed. A match. A fall. An injury. The memory of his spine snapping. His mind torn open and stripped bare.
And that was when Akhenaten fully consumed him.
That was when he became the god.
"You are mine, child. There is no escape from this. The world bends to my will."
The present day feels far away.
After the Ronin Rumble victory, Drake had expected some relief.
A taste of success. A victory so sweet that it would burn away the god’s grasp.
But the god’s claws are deep in his mind. He feels them now.
The echo of victory is hollow, because the Sphinx knows what the victory truly means.
The Ronin Rumble should have been a triumph. A moment to claim his own. To prove that he, Drake Nygma, was more than just Akhenaten’s shell. But no matter how much he wanted to feel it, all he could hear was the voice of the god, pulling at the edges of his mind. Pushing, always pushing.
The next memory comes —
and it feels like a chokehold.
“Do not celebrate, mortal. You won nothing. You are mine. The moment you defeat them, another shall come. And still you shall obey me.”
The memory is of a battle. A war.
Akhenaten stands in front of him, holding the knife in his own hand, the blade dripping with the blood of enemies. His body is perfect. His skin glows, as though forged in the heart of the sun.
And Drake is not Drake anymore. He is nothing.
Only the mask, only the Sphinx, only the god.
He feels the pull, the pressure, the weight of the power.
The endless hunger to take, to dominate, to crush.
But he doesn’t want to be this.
He doesn’t want to be Akhenaten.
A low, rumbling laugh breaks through the madness.
“You will be me. You are me. Your will is mine. I am the truth. I am the sun. I am eternal.”
The laughter is all-consuming. It swirls around his thoughts, pushing him deeper into the void of Akhenaten’s mind.
But then... something shifts.
Drake fights.
It’s a subtle resistance at first — a single thought, a flicker of doubt. He doesn’t speak it. He doesn’t scream it. He just feels it.
He remembers his name.
Drake Nygma.
He remembers his family.
His sister.
The faces of those he loves.
The victories that are his — not Akhenaten’s.
He remembers the riddles.
The puzzles he solved.
The way he always found a way out.
Even in the face of the impossible.
He clings to that.
The pull of Akhenaten is still there.
But now, Drake pushes back.
The mask begins to crack.
A shadow begins to form.
The form of a man.
A mortal man.
Drake Nygma.
He’s not a god.
He’s not an avatar.
He’s human.
The fight is not over.
But now, Drake knows.
He can win.
He will win.
For a moment, everything goes quiet.
And in that quiet, the two forces — man and god — breathe in the same space.
And Drake Nygma speaks.
“You will not break me. Not again.”
“I am me.”
The Sphinx stands at the threshold of his mind.
And somewhere, in the deepest parts of his soul, Drake Nygma finds the strength to fight back.
The battle is far from over, but the Sphinx feels something shift. The next war may be won. But not yet. Not today.
