There was light—a blinding, incomprehensible light that speared him from all angles—and voices that he only half-knew were screaming in languages he knew did not exist. Gleeful, that light plucked at his mind, reeled memories from it like tape pulled from a cassette. Everything he knew was paper to a flame. Someone called Luke was screaming. He was quite sure he knew no Luke. All the names his mind could offer him—Luke, Emmy, Bronev, Descole, Aurora—felt foreign and strange to him, strings of words relating to faceless people.
At one point, he was sure, the pain had been unimaginable. Now, he felt the exertion it put on his mortal body like you would feel a breeze brush your cheek. Whatever he was now could not be touched by something as human as pain. Indeed, he felt every twitch, every cry, every tear that was pulled from his eyes, and whatever greater consciousness he had found marvelled at it, the great fragility of man laid out bare.
Tired of itself, the light quit its malignant trade and ceased to glow, letting darkness sweep in and claim what was left. It was not simple darkness, that stuff, not the tame dark that lives beneath closed eyelids. This dark was peacock feathers, ice winds, and open wounds. Layton—for he thought that was his name—was certain he could hear it laughing.
For the longest and shortest time, there was nothing. His soul stood in the void.
Then everything happened at once: ground and sky grew bored of their positions, switched; light was dark, dark was light, and the world knew of neither; heat chilled him where cold burnt his skin; and he had the brief vision of being stood in a room—a room without walls, a room where everything was a floor—and walking towards a table.
Upon that table, he knew, there was a puzzle. Solve it, and he knew that the room would dissolve in to something less than a dream.
All of that occurred in less than a second.
Hershel Layton opened his eyes and found himself staring down at a tiled floor that was a great deal closer to his face than usual. With an eyeless look, it stared back, a mixture of welcome and amusement in the face it did not have.
Heaving himself to his feet, Layton glanced about, recognising, one by one, the chamber, the crystals, and the three strangers, who were also beginning to rise. Each face was assigned a name—the too-small boy was Luke; the whiplash of a girl was Emmy; the grim, old man was Bronev—but he failed to give them meaning; the names tasted like dust.
By the fifth crystal, at its base, there lay a heap of grey fabric and feathers. Layton was briefly struck by a swirl of memory—a barn owl crashing into their window and lying broken on the paving in a mess of bloodied plumage. Crying to his mother, his father's hand on his shoulder. A burial at the bottom of the garden, amidst the roots of an apple tree that hadn't born fruit in years.
With a tip of his hat, he commiserated, with this new owl, it's fruitless journey. Then he paused, feeling over what he instinctively knew to be the brim of the thing that found itself on his head. Though the soft fabric was intimately familiar, he had no memory if it becoming so, no recollection of placing the hat there.
The boy, Luke, also wore a hat. Layton wondered if they looked the same.
Shudders raced through the ground, splitting tiles in to pieces and throwing those pieces in the air. The very air seemed fit to break apart, as though great hands had it in a reckless grip and were pulling in separate directions. The thing in the centre, the thing that looked like a girl but was not a girl, screamed in a voice of fractured crystal.
"Go! All of you, please! You need to run; the Sanctuary is collapsing!" The words did not move her, her lips scarcely parted, he eyes dull and unblinking. But the fear in that high, childish voice would have been enough to turn an army.
Vaguely, Layton recalled a great height, an island suspended above a lake. That, he decided, was where they were taking up residence...an island which was beginning to fall.
There had been another island, he knew—one of traps and games. A long table bedecked with delicacies; a castle from an Escher painting; a mechanical nightmare, a plane made out of a barrel, and organ music.
There had been a man, a man with a sword. A man, without a face or a name, that the professor felt he had known his whole life.
"We must leave now!" He found himself calling to the collection of names in the room. Like manikins, they stood unmoving on their plinths, looking about them with glassy eyes. Luke turned to him; his young face was blank and waxen, and his eyes were cold like buttons.
"Let me go with you, professor! I could learn from you!"
There was dead creature being washed down stream; a flooded town; a cult of market children in long coats; and a garden of unspeakable beauty with a thousand crystals instead of a sun.
There was a boy clinging to him, all spindly limbs and iron will.
Layton blinked. Luke was no longer a name; there was a boy behind the empty word, a companion knitted from trust. Luke Triton—he remembered the name, now, as though it had never been absent from him—his apprentice.
Layton extended a hand to the boy, a rope thrown out over a chasm separating two people who could hardly remember each other. "Come on Luke," he murmured, voice barely audible over the screams of the falling building. "We have to go."
Luke blinked once, blinked twice, life returning to the pools of his eyes. Hesitant fingers found Layton's and held them tight, with certainty that his face could not mirror.
"Ok...professor..." The last word emerged as a tremulous query. Layton squeezed the boy's hand and the tense little fingers redoubled their grip.
Turning to run—having spotted a fulgent stripe of daylight through a crumbling wall—Layton was brought to a stumbling halt by the boy. Like a little anchor, he was hauling the professor back, feet wedged against the ruined tiles.
"Emmy!" He cried shortly, confusion creasing his brow like linen, "we need to bring Emmy."
Emmy. A kick to the teeth, a snarky comment, long talks on cold nights, and highways that rang with the horns of beleaguered drivers...
She was holding a blade of crystal to the vulnerable skin of Luke's throat, teasing the pulsing jugular with that fine razor edge while the boy struggled and cried.
"I'm Emmy Altava; your new assistant!"
Layton looked at the girl—a woman really, though one several years his junior. She had snagged her lip between her front teeth and was chewing thoughtfully on it, the placid motions of her jaw the only movements she made. He wondered if she was aware of the blood trickling from the split in her lower lip; the inside of her mouth was tinted red with it.
"Come along Emmy, we can't leave you here" Layton ushered her along. A large segment of his disordered mind cursed her, urged him to leave her to the merciless whims of the collapsing building, but there was a portcullis in his heart that refused to let such an idea pass. Emmy would come with them, or they would all remain. Whatever came, they would stick together.
This time, Luke let them run, Emmy walking in brisk strides their side. The man that Layton presumed to be either 'Bronev' or 'Descole'—Bronev fitting more easily—tottered after them, looking uncertainly at the collapsing walls as though he desired to ask them why they fell and were waiting for an opportune moment to do so. Another memory lanced itself into Layton's skull.
An airship that was a curious blend of luxury and mad design. A butler, whose face was more moustache than anything else, a large cat snug by his feet. There was a man at the wheel, the tense lines of his shoulders drawn with anger and determination. Every time he looked at his host, Layton was reminded of night winds and a battle on top of a monster, of a city filling with sand, the taste of dust thick in the air.
Layton frowned, a premonition tugging at the sleeve of his thoughts. Somewhere along the line, he knew he had forgotten something important.
Too late to ask questions, too late for second guesses; they had reached a corridor that—through the designs of the buildings failing stability—opened up to the world beyond. It was a juddering, shuddering tunnel to freedom—freedom being, at this juncture, a faithless leap into icy water that Layton half-believed to be waiting below. Straining his ears to hear above the collapse, he could fool himself momentarily into believing he heard the splash of masonry landing below.
To the left of them, a wall surrendered to the inevitable and reduced itself to rubble, spitting dust into the passage and sending chunks of rock hurtling at the group under some anger-fed delusion that they should die with it. The projectiles missed, causing scrapes at worst. A particularly malicious rock knocked the intrusive hat from atop Layton's head, rolled through a crack in the floor and, smilingly, was gone.
Layton seized the hat before it too could disappear, then held it tenderly in his arms, halted in his tracks. Within his head there was a vice, pressing upon whatever had compressed his memories with relentless, senseless pressure, scraping the insides of his skull raw and curdling his brain. Something had to give.
The hat—it was a catalyst that could be provided by nothing else.
Randal. Henry. Claire. Desmond. Raymond. Everything flooded back to its assigned spot in his mind, real and solid and familiar.
Misthallery. Loosha. The spectre and the flute.
Ambrosia. The Crown Petone. Janice and Melina.
Monte D'or. The dark miracles. The mask.
The legacy of the Azran. Rapt he journey across the globe. Targent. The ruins. His father, Bronev...
The grand architect of it all, the enemy he faced at every turn; Jean Descole, his brother from more than a life time ago...
Too late, Layton remembered the crumpled figure left lying at the foot of the crystal that had killed it. Too late, he remembered who that had been, what had happened to them, and that, though the Azran had been powerful enough to resurrect them, they had not healed him.
He didn't remember dropping Luke's hand; or turning on his heel and sprinting back towards the chamber; or replacing the hat upon his head.
He didn't hear Luke shout his name, or see the ceiling's guillotine fall, cutting off the corridor. Bronev, Emmy, and Luke plunged helplessly, harmlessly, into the waiting embrace of the water below, the surface choppy and ridged with white horses, the bottom a grave for a legacy.
Descole was lying where he had been abandoned, apparently at peace despite the utter carnage of the room around him. Shaken from its gilded supports, the crystal had fallen beside him, missing his chest by playful inches. Approaching his silent brother, Layton was reminded once again of the dead owl; Descole's cloak was spread about him in a messy, funeral shroud, like broken wings, the thin lines of his arms making slight ridges in the fabric. His boa was torn, bloodied courtesy of a sluggish cut on the man's forehead. He looked too fragile to be a man, closer to some broken, dying bird who knew nothing of the secrets of the world.
"Descole," Layton whispered, rolling his brother on to his back. He kept his own body bent low, shielding Descole as best he could, and whispered as though he believed the temple would hear him and destroy itself faster for his interruption.
The man in his arms did not stir. Cuts scored his face from where the white mask had broken, shards nestled snuggly against the split skin, the eyes inside those porcelain hollows bruised and gently closed. Descole's face was whey, his lips torn and pale. Layton did not have to lower his head to check if his brother still breathed—cleanly audible, Descole's breaths came sharp and harsh, fast as though they had been snatched from his lungs by some invisible, malevolent hand.
Layton felt over his brother's chest, the fabric of his suit front ragged and dirty, tie askew. It grew crisp at a point low on his abdomen, just above his hip bones and reaching up towards his ribs, the point where the Azran sentry had struck him. Clotted with debris and dirt, the bleeding skin beneath—a bubbling mess of burns that were chemical in their appearance, ridged with scorched tissue, rotted purple in colour—felt less like living flesh, and more like poorly aged leather, cracked and dry. Layton struggled to turn his thoughts away from whether or not such an injury was feasibly survivable, the analytic quarters of his mind muttering their dispassionate doubt.
"We have to go, Descole," Layton murmured, operating on some vague and hopeful delusion that told him his brother could hear. Awkwardly, he slid an arm beneath the unconscious figures shoulders and legs, struggling to avoid jostling him as the floor rocked and swayed, and the walls trembled. Not being a man accustomed to large weights, Layton was grateful to find that years of lifting weighty tomes and regular exercise had kept strong a body that his more scholarly pursuits might have otherwise withered; Descole's limp body was a light enough burden, in physical terms if not emotional. Though the weight was not a prevalent issue, Descole's height was, causing Layton to stagger more than once as he alternated his focus between dodging flying debris and supporting a figure slightly taller than himself. Descole groaned faintly, and—though the noise was felt more than it was heard—in Layton's mind, it was louder and more dreadful than the collapsing world around them.
Finding his way to open air again was an easier task than one may have predicted for, by that point, the vast majority of the walls had broken away, leaving only dusty imprints of themselves in the sudden sunlight. Exposed to open air for the first time in millennia, the doomed sanctuary wheezed fitfully and ripped holes in its own skin, cast into the lake from whence it came. Standing on a plinth that was rapidly defecting from the whole, Layton silently watched the destruction, the final death of the greatest civilisation ever documented. All their knowledge, technology, wisdom—ancient and irreplaceable—would follow the Azran to a silent grave.
It was a fact that he found so very insubstantial, compared to the body in his arms.
Finally, the cracks in the mortar gaping wide enough to warrant descent, the plinth obeyed the pull of gravity and began its final pilgrimage to the lake. They fell slowly; nature had bided many years to defeat the Azran, and now relished every inch of their declension.
Layton lay Descole down at his feet. With gentle fingers, he removed the boa and hat, and picked whatever he could of the mask away from his brothers cut face, before casting the incriminating items aside. The cape, he folded and stowed inside his blazer for safe keeping. In the space of a few seconds, Descole had died, and it was Desmond Sycamore who lay cradled in the Professor's arms.
Far below them, he could see boats, no larger than toys, hurrying towards the sinking pieces of building. Skimming over the waves, they too threatened to deny the laws of physics and reason, and take flight. Layton imagined them rising from the water like too-vibrant kites, the thought bringing a brief, sad smile to his lips; if the boats learnt to fly, they might make it in time. Desmond's breathing was terribly laboured, shaky and infirm. Had you held a feather to his lips, those breaths wouldn't have had the strength to stir the quills. Beneath the thick mask of dust, the undertones of his white face had shifted to grey, and the cuts on his face bled only sluggishly. It would have been easy to mistake him for a recently buried, and more recently unearthed, corpse—and Layton had enough experience to make such a distinction. An edgeless piece of his mind knew that, without some intervention, Descole's life wouldn't last much longer. Whatever rallying force that had fortified him enough to make it to the epicentre had diminished to nothing and whatever was left of the man stood on the dizzying precipice of oblivion.
Running a careful hand through his brother's mussed hair, Layton silently bargained with the uncharitable universe to let him hold out longer. But his own vision was beginning to fade, the headache that had been building since his reawakening beating darkness against the backs of his eyes.
As the lights of the day popped and swam, giving over to joyless night, the last Layton saw was the rising wall of foam, thrown up by the impact of their rock on the surface of the lake, the sound of said collision evading his fragmented mind. Boats surged towards them, but were missed by the Professor, as he too surrendered to peaceable unconsciousness.