Brushing cobwebs from her blonde hair and with a keen eye out for any more traps, Virginia Rhodes slowly approached the sarcophagus of King Uzziah. The leper king, they called him, his body cursed by god to rot even as he lived. They said he brought his kingdom to ruin in pursuit of any way of escaping his curse. Ancient history, and not a lot of good it did him, but at least his infamy would earn him pride-of-place in the British Museum, where such a find belonged.

Her crowbar broke the seal on the heavy stone lid, releasing a stench of decay as fresh as it had been 3,000 years ago. A veteran archeologist, she was no stranger to such things, simply holding her breath as she peered fearlessly into the sarcophagus. Her lamplight illuminated a shriveled husk of a corpse, twisted and deformed even in life, and the years had certainly done it no favours. Yet the black leather box clasped in the corpse’s hand was strangely untouched by the ravages of time. The king’s phylactery. She reached for it.

The lid of the box snapped open. Blackness overwhelmed her, a rushing sensation. She blinked. She was naked, lying in a coffin-sized box whose walls were made of black leather. Even more bizarrely, her skin body glowed softly, her flesh half-transparent.

She shrieked as a vast, golden-haired head appeared overhead. Her head. “A soul for a soul,” it intoned in her voice, yet the words were ancient hebrew. “King Uzziah accepts your sacrifice gladly.”

The phylactery lid snapped shut, sealing Virginia’s soul within. Uzziah smiled, the unsettling smile of a man who hadn't owned lips in three millenia, stretching his lithe body with relish. His hands explored the unblemished skin of his face, gliding down over the smoothness of his neck, and finally cupping his divinely perfect breasts. In a long forgotten tongue, he gave a gleeful, blasphemous curse to the heavens, knowing at long last he had escaped His judgment.

He rifled through the panicked thoughts and memories of the soul trapped in his phylactery. How fortunate to encounter a student of history, one with the knowledge to fill him in on all these missing years. Her mind would be his to plunder, as she had countless tombs.

"So you planned to put me on display? How fitting that you'll adorn my new body," he said, slinging the phylactery between his breasts.