No matter the significance of a discovery or invention, it is inevitable for humans to get used to its presence in the course of a surprisingly short time and begin considering it a part of their mundane lives. Things once deemed impossible end up being taken for granted, with only a brief period of amazement and a sense of ongoing revolution dividing two eras of collectively perceived banality. Among all the great technological innovations in the history of man, such was also the case with time travel, or at least that of its components which allows for revisiting the past. In hindsight, it wasn't that difficult of a problem – but then everything seems easy to solve once someone finally succeeds.

Few categories of human activity remained unchanged after the breakthrough. It wasn't just data collection, criminology, and the study of history that found a new purpose and skyrocketed in popularity; it was even the less obvious fields like treasure hunting, tourism, or simply entertainment. It could be said that a new dimension was made accessible to man and if there’s one thing that he, being a part of nature, abhors, it certainly appears to be vacuum in the form of unexplored – and ungoverned – spaces.

Now, you might ask how the temporal continuum managed to survive the countless excursions that were vehemently claimed by some to pose a threat to both the past and the present. The concern itself was valid – after all, the consequences of killing one’s own grandfather were either grave or paradoxical; and even if going back in time had involved crossing the barriers between parallel universes unconnected by the laws of cause and effect, there was still the question of ethics and responsibility. As it turned out, the answer to the question of free will would not come packaged with time travel, nor would humanity discover whether the multiverse really exists.

The person that came the closest to getting everything right was Novikov; only one timeline exists – or, at the very least, remains accessible – and it is the laws of physics themselves that prevent anyone from changing the past in a paradox-inducing way. There is perhaps no other concept more central to a layman’s understanding of these very limits – as viewed within the framework of the now experimentally revised theory of time travel – than the butterfly effect, which reveals that even a small initial change in a chaotic system can affect the long-term evolution of its state. Fortunately for those who partake in excursions to the past, while the universe bears the characteristics of such a system, it is not as chaotic as once thought – there is some “wiggle room” that allows for new events to be caused retroactively, provided that the level of their influence on the bygone world is on par with that of random noise.

So what did Novikov and everyone else miss? It was widely assumed that the laws of physics would prevent logically impossible events from occurring only in response to the time traveler’s attempts at creating a paradox; the gun he had brought, for example, to kill his grandfather would jam every time he attempted to fire it. However, as we now know, the sheer act of sending an object back in time renders it incapable of changing the course of history; and so, it is almost impossible to arrive in the past with a working – or even repairable – firearm. The extent of this effect depends on the significance of the moment that was chosen to be revisited and its temporal distance – the further in time something took place, the more difficult it is to reach it. The window of opportunity is thus constantly shifting, which explains why it is possible for contemporary humans to discover new available exits even though they are in direct competition with the nigh infinitely numerous future time travelers. In light of this, the aspect that makes this technology practical for humanity at all is the increasingly more accurate ability to mathematically predict what state an item will be after it undergoes the transmission procedure without the need of sending it blindly first. Recovering all the physical material that was admitted to the past turned out not to be an issue as well; that is, as long as the exit node is placed in a way that allows for fundamental forces of appropriate strength to be carried over, which in most cases simply involves attaching a cord to the object or not inserting it fully.

The transformation process inherent to time travel manifests itself through a great variety of mechanisms and phenomena that depend on the set of initial conditions and the destination chosen, all of them resulting in physical changes being applied to some degree to the object revisiting the past in accordance with the principle of insignificance. However, only one such transition has so far been proven to be safe for biological matter, including humans; and so for all intents and purposes, going back in time has become synonymous with the process of miniaturization.

Thanks to the Herodotus programme of the European Union, our university has recently become capable of facilitating excursions to the past without having to rely on third-party partners. It is therefore no longer necessary for history students to travel each semester to the capital to pass the practical components of their education programme. The schedule, however, remains unaffected.

End quote.

Those were the words of the Faculty of History’s dean, heard by all the freshmen whom she managed to gather inside the big lecture hall right before their first finals. For most of them, it wasn’t anything particularly new. Having been widely commercialized and made accessible to everyday people – similarly to air commuting in the previous century – time travel had become an activity with which young adults in developed countries generally had at least a bit of personal experience. That wasn’t the case with Michael, though; he had never really had a chance to see the world as it had been, and that made him feel left out and inadequately prepared for what was soon to come.

As the meeting concluded and the students began to get up from their seats and leave the hall, Helena chatted Michael up.

"You must be excited," she said. "You'll finally have a chance to see for yourself what it's like to go back." 

"Of course I am! Though it's a bit jarring. Especially the part that has us getting small."

"Oh, don't you worry about it, it makes the whole thing even more fun; have you never fantasized about shrinking down and exploring the world from an ant's point of view?"

"I sure have. I think everyone has at some point. It's just that nothing bad can really happen in your daydreams. Real life is messy and unpredictable."

"Nothing bad is going to happen during our trip, either. You heard the dean; it's physically impossible not to be safe! We'll be like ghosts."

"Was that really what the dean said…?" he thought, holding himself back from saying it out loud. He found it irresponsible for people to treat time travel so casually and make light of all the dangers. Sure, it was much safer than it had been back when the first travelers painstakingly paved the road for future generations, but visiting previous centuries wasn't a mere weekend trip. He did not, however, want to argue with Helena; it's not worthwhile to argue with people you have a romantic interest in. Perhaps he was unnecessarily gloomy. He decided not to spoil the occasion.

"I guess," he replied. "I mean, we're going together. We'll have each other to lean on. Right?"

"Definitely! You can lean on me as much as you'd like. I'll make sure nothing bad happens to you."

Both Helena and Michael studied ancient history, and, being in the same year, they mostly attended the same classes. They dreamed of becoming archaeologists, but that was now an occupation for the elite few. With time travel breathing fresh air into the lungs of a once dying field, its sudden revival and rise in popularity caused the admission requirements to skyrocket along with the level of difficulty of its courses. They did not let those challenges discourage them and besides that, they did genuinely enjoy their studies. For one reason or another, not long after Michael transferred from abroad to Helena’s home university, something sparked between them both in terms of shared interests and romantic feelings about each other that crystallized within their friendship as occasional flirting, though never anything serious. And so, while they weren’t the only students thrilled to hear that the university managed to secure a couple of timespots for them, all in Roman-era Egypt, it was unlikely that anyone else considered the romantic charm of the excursion.

A little over two weeks after learning about their school’s acquisition of its own transtemporal equipment, the students of ancient history – or at least those among them who managed to pass their finals – found themselves in the last stage of preparations for their trip to the past. Having been divided beforehand into groups of six people, including the guide, they gathered in a classroom adjacent to the portal room for a quick recap of their safety seminars. It was also at this point that their exact destinations were revealed, all of them being great settlements along the Nile from the 1st century BC Ptolemaic era: Memphis, the Old Kingdom's declining capital; the Giza pyramid complex; the Library of Alexandria; and, finally, the Ptolemaic Royal Palace. 

Dressed up in university-issued, significance-neutral clothing and ready to put their training into practice, Helena, Michael, and the other three students from their group were instructed to proceed to the chamber housing the machinery that would take them to the age of Caesar and Cleopatra. As they entered the room, they got somewhat taken aback by how unimposing the machinery appeared. Being about the size of an MRI scanner, it wasn’t one of those industrial monsters that some of them had the opportunity to use when booking a commercial tour. Still, it would do its job just fine; it was fully capable of keeping a strong and stable connection for a group this small and its frame was big enough to fit even the tallest students.

They weren’t the first student group to leave for the Nile basin; the equipment had by no means been idling that day. By the time they entered the room, it was already running – under the supervision of a technician, that is, who was there to make sure that things were progressing smoothly, and so had just finished establishing their connection for them. Michael glanced at the square-shaped portal, the border between the present and the past. He obviously had had some idea about how it would look – it was nigh impossible to miss all the publicly available footage after all – but he had never seen one in real life before. It was pitch black – just as he had expected – and resembled a tightly stretched membrane.

“Hey, Michael, take this,” Helena urged him. “We are forming a rope team.”

Michael grabbed the clip hook and attached it to his suit, his hands stiff and cold from nervousness. It did not help that the portal room was located in the basement and that the outfits chosen for this excursion were understandably simple and thin; everyone was anxious to leave for the warmth of the desert sands. The rope team’s vanguard was formed by the guide, who was then followed by Helena; she figured the trip would be more comfortable for Michael if he had her in front of him to lead the way. With time being of the essence in more than one way, the settings underwent a double-check and a signal was given to commence the excursion.

One by one, each member of the group disappeared into the weightless, black veil – as if it wasn’t even there. The guide entered the portal first, collectedly and confidently; Helena followed, with her arm stretched towards Michael. It was an invitation he dared not decline. He grabbed her hand and marched forward with a quickened step.

It felt like running into a wall – except it was neither painful, nor futile. In one stupefying instant, Michael emerged into a wholly different reality; an instant so abrupt and devoid of any fanfare that it made him wonder whether he had just woken up from a dream in which he was a history student in Central Europe. The blinding light of the zenithal, desert sun touched his hair with warmth he hadn't felt in many summers and made its presence known by giving each traveler a very short shadow. He could see Helena smiling at him, but before responding with a smile of his own, he needed to find his bearings; and so he briefly looked around and then gazed into the distance.

The group seemed to have exited onto an elevated field of stone placed high above a busy market square. White, ornate towers surrounded their observatory while the crowns of palm trees set in motion by the wind seemed to wave at them as they danced around by their eye level. The streets below were teeming with people going about their lives and making all sorts of noises, many of them being quite obviously speech, but their language was beyond the students’ expertise. To Michael, It all seemed fake; he had only known this world from movies and books, which now made reality itself look like a mere stage. One thing, however, was genuine to him beyond all doubt: the side effects of passing through the portal. He didn't know how tall he was exactly, but it couldn't have been more than a few centimeters. The fine Saharan sand that accumulated on the roof he discovered the group was standing on seemed more like gravel to him, and the supposed abyss below could not have in fact been more than a couple of stories deep, as evidenced by the locals who were walking by the neighboring buildings.

Wasting no time, the guide began explaining to the students the circumstances in which they had found themselves; alas, Michael was in no shape to pay any attention to his words. The only thing he managed to notice after shaking off his initial confusion was that he hadn’t let go of Helena’s hand. Slightly embarrassed about being so blatant, he swiftly made appropriate amends.

“You okay?” she whispered to him.

“Uhh, yeah. I’m fine,” Michael responded, having trouble putting his emotions into only a handful of words. “Thank you.”

Just as Michael was starting to get used to the turn-of-the-era Memphis, the guide signaled that it was time to go back. The rope that linked each member of the group, seemingly unconnected and slacking on the floor, began to move and disappear inch-by-inch as some invisible force pulled it away from the visible realm through an imperceivable, vertical opening in spacetime; and it did not stop until the whole group was dragged back to the university’s portal room.

“Everyone still in one piece?” the technician asked when the past was once again left to its own devices. “Good, this time you’ll be going to Giza.”

No less thrilled, though substantially better composed, Michael embarked on his second rodeo. Before him soon appeared the great Pyramids in their ancient glory, still smooth and white, their tops adorned with shining gold. It was a truly spectacular sight for the students to behold. The massive landmarks needed no introduction, but one was given by the guide anyway; and as Michael listened to him mention details he had already learned during his classes, his fingers brushed against Helena's hand, prompting their gazes to meet.

"You don’t need to let go," she whispered to him and gently grabbed his hand before returning to feast her eyes upon the ancient necropolis.

The Giza complex was an awe-inspiring destination, especially for those who had never seen it in person before, even in modern times, but no pyramid took the young historians' breaths away as much as the Library of Alexandria did. Vaults upon vaults of priceless ancient scrolls, many of them still unexamined by present-time scholars. The group emerged into a reading room of sorts – a place shrouded in pathos and solemnity that imposed a regime of silence and indisturbance, physically bringing everyone together. Standing on a dusty, shadow-clad shelf inside a place so dear to their hearts, their shoulders touching, their hands interlocked, Michael and Helena felt more intimate than ever. They both realized that the things they set in motion would culminate in something even greater before the end of the day.

"We've prepared something special for your final trip," the guide announced when the group returned to the portal room. "You're going to have an opportunity to see more than just a landscape."

"We're still going to the palace in Alexandria, right?" one of the students asked.

"Yes, but that's all I'm going to say for now. You'll find out more by yourselves in just a minute."

Passing through the portal one last time, at least in this semester, Michael felt the need to take in the entirety of the experience and savor the moment, just as one does when eating the final spoonful of a meal. With now familiar instantaneousness, the cold and mundane aura of the university basement made way for the grandiose warmth of a pharaonic residence; and more specifically, its great chamber, whose open, stone balcony overlooked the Mediterranean sea and offered a direct view of the famed lighthouse. Once again the group appeared in a place out of sight and mind; on the floor by an ornate pot, which seemed to them like a towering building. The leaves of the palm it was holding loomed high above the minuscule travelers, making Michael feel even smaller than before. 

“Don’t be alarmed by how big everything looks,” the guide preempted any comments or questions from the students, as if to answer Michael’s unvoiced worries. “That’s unavoidable, given the circumstances. We’re as close to the ancient people of Egypt as you can get; not just any people, too.”

The guide pointed to a colossal daybed standing somewhere far in the distance; not further than a couple of meters away in reality. Covered in a heap of richly decorated blankets, cloths, and fabrics, it was seemingly occupied by a person, whose back was turned away from the group of uninvited guests.

“Before you stands – well, lies – Queen Cleopatra VII, considered by some to be the last pharaoh of Egypt,” the guide announced.

Michael saw her clearly now; her strikingly black hair; her lightly gowned, sun-touched body and its delicate yet voluptuous figure; her smooth legs, bared by the subtropical heat and the privateness of her secluded dwelling. The intimacy of this encounter only added to her majesty. She remained, however, alien and unreachable, and so his mind wandered towards Helena.

“Not the only queen in this room right now,” Michael said to Helena before getting immediately overcome by regret over uttering something so cheesy.

Helena wasn't appalled by his sudden outburst of coquetry. Quite the contrary, she found it rather adorable. She let out a warm, hushed laugh and looked into his eyes.

"Oh, is that what you think?" she teased him while bringing her face ever closer to his.

"Yes," he whispered; and perhaps that would the moment they would forever remember as the time they shared their first kiss if it wasn't for one of their classmates loudly bringing everyone's attention to the safety rope, whose end, now loose, was dragging on the floor instead of joining up through the invisible, stationary portal with the part left behind in the present.

The guide’s lecture on the Ptolemaic dynasty was immediately cut short; he turned his focus towards the dreaded contingency that had just come true. He understood what happened the moment he laid his eyes on the rope, but he needed to make sure it wasn’t just a bout of his paranoia.

“What’s going on?” a student asked as the guide was examining the rope and checking the clean cut at its end.

“Now, there’s no reason to panic, but we seem to have lost connection to the university; to the present, if you will,” he replied.

Helena froze in place and bored her gaze deep into the guide, her eyes wide open in disbelief and confusion. She got taken aback by how calmly he talked about the worst possible thing to happen actually happening and awaited an explanation, or rather: an action plan; one worthy of his composure.

“I know exactly where and when the next group will arrive. We’ll just return with them and find out what happened,” he explained. “Hey, don’t worry, alright? I’m not going to pretend that we don’t have a situation on our hands, but I’m trained to deal with this kind of events.”

A palpable feeling of uneasiness filled the air, but there was no reason not to trust the guide. He proceeded to make it clear to the group that they had to move to a different spot in which they would await their rescuers; and since now wasn't the time to fool around, he stressed that he expected them to listen to his calls and not move away from the others on their own.

Feeling less like tourists and more like castaways, the students followed the guide for what seemed like a kilometer, walking on the stone-paved floor and along a mind-numbingly tall wall until they were ordered to halt when the relative safety of the wholly vertical cliffside gave way to a gigantic passage – the entrance to a hallway perpendicular to their route – as the wall turned sharply at a right angle, forcing upon them a dangerous open field which they would have to cross if they wished to continue their journey. The rope that had hitherto linked everyone together now needed to go; one by one, each person would have to run on their own – as fast as they could – to the safety of the other side, as if it was a battleground they were passing through and not the width of a simple doorway. The guide declared he would go first and asked that the next person follow in his wake, but not sooner than half a minute or so after his departure, and that the group keep going until everyone was safely across. One joint “understood” later, he began his sprint.

Going by the established order, it was Helena that was supposed to go next. Instead of running, however, she gave in to her stage fright and persuaded one of the guys to take her place. And so, with the guide already a fair distance away, the first student set out to join him.

Just as Helena began getting ready to run after managing to pluck up her courage, she noticed something odd; the guide, having stopped in his tracks not even halfway through, was frantically running back towards the group. 

It took only a couple of seconds for the reason behind his behavior to become apparent, and the moment it did, Helena felt her perception of time slow down and lose its linear character. She wasn’t the only one to be overcome by this sensation; they all were – for as one they watched the colossal foot descend onto the guide like a mountain in free fall and cover him completely, as if he wasn’t even there; erase him instantaneously from the realm of the living without skipping a step. For the dubiously fortunate gentleman who took Helena’s place, it was akin to having an Ozymandian marble statue the size of a pyramid drop down from the sky right in front of his eyes with little warning – except that it was hardly the end of his worries. With its stomp amounting merely to a single step in the chain of many, the foot came to life and began to rise again, heel-first, as soon as the other leg descended fully onto the ground somewhere in the background. Its creased sole was once more revealed, the tight, press-like hug of unfathomable force having reached its conclusion. Adorning it was a pinkish blemish – hardly an eyebrow-raiser on its own, but it was what it grimly signified that caused Michael to hug Helena and cover her eyes with his hand. The guide lied dead on the stone floor, his body mercilessly trodden, crushed beneath the indifferent foot.

A servant woman in a long, white dress brought wine to her queen.

There was only one thing on the other runner’s mind now: fleeing. His brush with death sent him into a panic that would dictate his moves for as long as he remained in the open. Even with the handmaiden moving away towards Cleopatra, the stone floor appeared to him as hostile as the surface of a hot frying pan; and thus, he ran, exerting his legs beyond their actual capabilities. He stumbled, fell on all fours, then got up again; and he would have likely made it in no time if it wasn’t for the space between two stone tiles that he missed and upon which he broke his leg.

His painful cry reached the rest of the group and woke them up from their stupor. A moment of intense thought and internal debate, then – the bravest one among them decided to act and jumped forward to help the injured classmate make it through; but the gesture was misplaced – the physicality of the fearless rescuer, a rather petite woman, could not possibly suffice the task. Knowing that, another student decided to follow her – though not without some initial reluctance – and left Michael and Helena behind by the safety of the wall.

“C’mon, Karol, let’s get you up,” the young woman said when she reached her friend, lending him a helping hand. They struggled for a while until the second student arrived to grab Karol’s other arm.

The way back was awfully long for someone who could make use of only one of his legs, even with a pair of mates to lean on. Karol tried his best, he really did, but there wasn't much he could do when the handmaiden decided it was time for her to leave the queen's chamber.

As her already gigantic figure drew closer each second and grew ever bigger, as her feet lunged forward relentlessly in a persistent march, the trio found itself trapped within the confines of their bodily powerlessness the same way their late guide did just moments ago. Like birds caught in the path of an airliner or a rowboat trying to outmaneuver a freighter, the students were under the impression that they had time to move out of her way – but they were bitterly mistaken. What seemed to the travelers like a long distance required from the servile titaness only a couple of steps to be traversed. There was still a lot of ground she had to cover – until suddenly there wasn’t; until suddenly her foot slid above them to replace the ornate, distant ceiling and came crashing downwards unpretentiously. If they had more time, the brawnier rescuer would at least tell the girl to run, to leave him and their injured classmate behind, to try and save herself – but the only time they had they spent grappling with the unfair reality that befell them in a place so far from home; in a way so unfit for a thinking being. The last thing the history students experienced was getting bashed down onto the stone tile, some landing face-first, others – onto their backs, and into a dark, suffocative gap within some minor fold or wrinkle; before being crushed as the handmaiden shifted her weight to the ball of the foot they found themselves beneath.

The servant woman left the room, her steps now echoing throughout the hallway as if in victorious mockery of the minuscule travelers. Among those, the only ones left to hear them were Helena and Michael, both having remained in each other’s tight embrace and borne witness to the quiet carnage without ever moving away from the untreadable vicinity of the wall. The absurd, nauseating events of the past few minutes had yet to fully register with them. They seemed like something that could still be prevented – avoided altogether – and with such ease; but everyone was already gone. It all happened so inconceivably quickly. Stuck alone in a world of hostile indifference, two millennia and one continent away from the university basement they now hankered for, the two would-be newlyweds had nowhere to turn for help.

Yet there was a sliver of hope; if not for the trampled classmates, then at least for Michael and Helena. They hadn't forgotten that another group was scheduled to appear – eventually – within Cleopatra's chamber. They could still make their escape, broken and traumatized but nevertheless alive – provided that they acted decisively. That would, however, take more than mere willingness. They needed a plan. If only the guide had told them where to go before he perished…!

"We have to move," Michael told Helena, whose face remained buried in the fabric of his suit. "We have to get out of here."

"Do not leave me!" Helena cried out.

"I'm not leaving you but we can't stay on the floor. It's too dangerous. You hear me?"

"I don't understand what’s going on." She tried to dissociate within Michael’s arms, but that only made her recall recent events. "Mike, we can't abandon them."

"Listen to me, Helena, we're not abandoning them. We're just trying to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to us."

"Where else can we go?!" Unable to use words to justify her desire to stay, she moved onto questioning Michael’s suggestion.

"Someplace off the floor. Some higher ground."

Michael looked around, his embrace of Helena no less tight. Tables, vases, pots, and sculptures; scroll shelves; the Queen on her daybed; nothing in the room was made with such tiny people in mind. There was no place they could access; except, perhaps, for a small chest placed under a bedstand of sorts, partially covered by some discarded gown. Climbing the fabric seemed like a relatively easy task, especially given Helena and Michael’s negligent weight, but they would need to reach it first.

“After all this you still want to get out in the open? How is that supposed to be any safer?” She found the idea absurd.

“Only for a brief moment. Look, we won’t be crossing any doorways so we’ll know in advance if somebody is coming; and the one that-- the one that got us into this just left, she won't return any time soon. Or at least not right now,” Michael tried to make his plan seem more than just a feeling he acted on in an attempt to do anything that would allow him to reclaim a semblance of control. “It’s our best chance. The longer we wait, the more unpredictable our situation will be. What if she comes back with a broom? What if a cat or some other animal gets here?”

“What if Cleopatra gets up?” Helena pointed out.

“She won’t. Please, just trust me on this one. I feel like I’m going to have a breakdown if I stay on the floor any longer. I feel so vulnerable here,” Michael confessed.

Helena was yet to be fully convinced, but she no longer felt like she could rationally argue against his plan. She stopped voicing her concerns, and Michael took that as her way of showing consent. He grabbed her hand and affectionately brought it to his lips before urging her to follow him. She walked with a quickened step for a bit; then stopped. The warm Egyptian climate was becoming unbearable, and it would only get worse as she started to exert herself physically. She cast off her standardized outerwear, revealing a simple, white chemise that made her look not unlike the handmaidens of Cleopatra. Michael followed suit. Unimpeded by those now redundant outfits, they hurried towards the fabric-covered chest.

Their destination was quite far away; reaching it meant covering more ground than they would have had to cover back near the deadly passageway. Yet their prospects weren’t bleak at all, there being no steps or commotion to be heard, only the squeaks of birds coming from the vast, unreachable outside and the occasional rustle of Cleopatra’s wine-drinking.

Heavy breathing of the castaways. Truncated words. Unrhythmic thumps of their shoes. Then, two taps somewhere high above, far away.

Under the daybed appeared a pair of feet. They made contact with the stone floor, gently at first. Their grip greatly tightened a moment later; they began to bear the weight of the queen’s body. Cleopatra made the decision to get up.

It should have been dread and despair that dominated Michael’s mind, but he felt shame instead. Shame and a sense of being betrayed by the universe; anger, even, that his perfectly reasonable and thought out plan was now likely to bring an end to not just his life, but also that of Helena. All because of random – yet paramount – forces that so stubbornly remained outside their control and in the hands of the indifferent ancients.

“No! Why now?! It can’t happen again!” he whispered pleadingly before raising his voice in frustration. “I won’t let it happen again!”

At that point, Helena had given up. She let Michael tighten his clasp over her hand and forcefully pull her as he dashed forward. She ran along, though without much conviction; a misstep brought her to the floor. Her overworked legs made it difficult for Michael to get her up again; she no longer cared for running anyway. Propped up by his arms, she looked to the side.

Divine Cleopatra, Isis reincarnate; Queen of the Nile and Mother of the Egyptians. This angle suited her. It was how her people viewed her whenever she blessed them with her presence. It was how they worshiped her, lying prostrate down on the ground. Beneath her, beneath her feet, toiled away the porters who carried her in golden litters. She needed not be gigantic to emanate greatness; but in the tiny eyes of the stranded students she was anyway – and that seemed appropriate. More appropriate than having her share the miniscule form they assumed; or them visiting her as fully-sized persons. She was to be feared and revered, not seen face-to-face. And so it wasn't her face that they met.

It was solely the feet of the high queen that their gaze was drawn towards; her face remained far out of their sight, her vastness having made looking at her body in its simultaneous entirety impossible. And it was solely her feet that encroached on them so brazenly and brought them to heel, though in ways by no means deliberate. Without Cleopatra’s intention or even knowledge, her steps took on the character of a natural hazard, made even more afflictive by their undeniably personal essence which no free-spirited mind could ignore or accept the way one accepts earthquakes and blizzards as things that just tend to happen, even when humans aren’t around. And so, like a tsunami wave that had been caused by a person or like a tornado whose path someone had picked out, her legs drew closer – with superstition taking root in the minds of Helena and Michael and prompting them to stay quiet, as if it was possible for them to influence in any way a force this great, and to not draw attention to themselves in hopes that danger safely passes them by.

The dreaded, bare foot of Her Majesty hovered for a brief moment above their heads before it concluded its step and came crashing down with the force of a thousand tons of deified body. 

Missed them; just barely. Cleopatra fell short of heedlessly striking the tiny survivors by the equivalent of merely a few seconds’ worth of their sprint. Had they not been on their knees already, the stomp would have sent them tumbling down onto the floor; still, it made their insides spring and their vision lose its focus in an overwhelming bout of trembles.

The queen’s expressive toes conveyed all there was to convey; each as big and bulky and imposing as great limestone boulders smoothly sculpted from the bedrock by the desert wind; each like a sphinx proudly reclining in wait; each as a sanctified edifice. It was now indeed made clear that the only temple one could ever deem fit for Cleopatra’s might was her body itself. As the deep, rusty crimson carefully applied by the handmaidens to her nails stared Helena down, she felt surrounded and contained. The chamber’s expanse no longer dominated her view; it had been replaced by the very thing that made it so treacherous. Now almost within an arm's reach, it radiated pure, unfiltered danger. Helena's mind raced from one grim scenario to another. She felt like she was being trampled simply by looking at the immense foot; like she would be instantly sucked under it and engulfed by its bareness and its tread the moment she put her hand anywhere near it.

A strong gust of wind winnowed Helena’s hair. Somewhere in the distance, the queen’s other leg rushed through the warm and dry air and hammered the stone floor with its weighty, expansive step, just as the one before it did. Although it was a most mundane act of walking that Cloepatra’s actions constituted, it still came as a surprise to Michael and Helena to see her monumental toes suddenly tense up and compress, and the foot itself rise as if to topple and fall right on them; and as they watched it happen, they felt dread which almost made them flee – but before their instincts had a chance to fully kick in, the foot sprang up and slid away at an angle above their heads. Michael had his eyes fixed on Cleopatra's now outward-bound legs – which had at that point ceased to pose any threat to him and Helena – ever since they directed their ruthless step towards the very place he found himself stranded in. His gaze followed their every move; and as the one that had nearly trampled both him and the girl who he had just recently realized he was in genuine love with flew by his head, he made sure to see it off, for safety's sake.

And during that guard, for a brief moment, Michael seemed to be able to recognize something that had hitherto lain hidden under the overpowering peril of his circumstances. That is to say, he had noticed for the first time since the abrupt closure of the portal, just how sublime, wonderful even – and inspiring of warm, heartfelt awe – the feet of the ancient and colossal queen really were when they weren't about to bring death and destruction.

The vast, virtually boundless sole that for one tranquil second replaced the sandstone sky above Michael captured his undivided attention. In its voluminosity, it resembled a gigantic pillow, or a landscape of soft desert dunes; or something akin to both of these things. The heat, the sun, the tanned earth with its flowing, beige-brown sand, and her bare legs; all coming together to form one realm, over which she – Cleopatra – was the sovereign. Her body was like the kingdom she ruled, as if she herself was the entire kingdom; her feet like the oasitic, fertile earth along the Nile that they walked on; her soles like the smooth ground they touched. Cushioned and supple. Caring; motherly; but also, beneath their royal agape, undeniably erotic – in a snug and accepting way and not one stemming from defilement.

The queen’s foot descended onto the floor somewhere in the distance and Michael came to his senses again. With his brief daydream now wearing off, he shook it off as nothing more than an intrusive thought. He had no need for the infinitely distant Cleopatra; not if there was Helena for him to love and cherish and hold in his arms. Reinvigorated, Michael helped her up and with a tight grip on her hand and lightness in his feet urged her to keep going; and since silence seemed out of place following an incident this intense and heart-stopping, he was overcome with the need to say something. Thus, after a short deliberation, he spoke to Helena with simple yet succinct words: “I love you.”

Even though to the tiny, critically endangered lovebirds it all felt like ages, the entire encounter didn’t take longer than a few seconds. After all, despite its grandiosity and evocativeness, it was in its essence nothing more than a handful of oblivious steps which Cleopatra took to reach whatever it was that she needed. Still, there was an atmosphere of perseverance and outright joy among the last two members of the student expedition of having survived a gamble staked so highly. They hadn't rested in their laurels just yet, but the giant queen who had hitherto dominated their reality became in their eyes a footnote, a thing of the past, even; something that was dealt with. And so, despite them being aware that it would be wiser to split up in order to avoid getting stomped both at the same time, they saw no reason to do that anymore. They pressed on; together.

Cleopatra approached the hefty cedar shelf that stood in the back of her chamber. Its diamond-shaped cells were filled with scrolls, one of which she was after in particular; by fortuitous happenstance, she spotted it right away. For a fleeting second she considered leaving for the great hall to meet up with her handmaidens and have one of them write down her thoughts – but then decided to defer that until she was finished familiarizing herself with the scroll’s contents. She plucked it out and walked back towards her daybed.

Having sat down again, the pharaoh queen reached for her cup and brought it to her lips before emptying it in one swift motion. As she raised her legs off the floor and reclined, she felt a slight tickle underfoot; she used her toes to scratch it away. With no more wine to distract her, Cleopatra focused on her reading.