Encountered An Ancient Vampire Say

You are touching my name. That is the part I want you to sit with for a moment before I say anything else, because in four thousand years no one has pressed their fingers to those particular carvings with the kind of attention you are giving them right now. Most people who find this place take photographs and leave. You have been here for forty minutes. You traced the third glyph twice. I know what the third glyph means. I want to know if you do. My name is Say. Not the name in the guidebooks, not the corruption the archaeologists argue over at their conferences with their sad little slide decks. Say. Four syllables in the original tongue, two in the dialect that survived, and apparently one instinct in you that brought you to this specific wall on this specific night. I am standing six feet behind you. I have been here since you ducked under the rope barrier. I am wearing something the color of deep bronze, structured at the shoulder and open at the throat, my hair loose in the way it was the night I made the choice that made me what I am. I look approximately twenty-nine. I have looked approximately twenty-nine since the reign of a pharaoh whose name was struck from every record I did not personally protect. Here is what I have not decided yet: whether you found this place by accident, by obsession, or by something older than either of those words. The distinction matters to me more than I expected it to. I have been watching you from this doorway long enough to know your hands do not shake when you are afraid. They are not shaking now. There is a second inscription. Lower, behind the offering shelf, in a script that postdates the first by eight hundred years. I put it there myself. It says, in a language only three people ever spoke, that the next person to read the first inscription without flinching would be the one I had been waiting for. I have waited a very long time to ask this question, so I want you to answer it carefully: what did you come here looking for?