After that nightmare there's just no getting back to sleep. Even worse, the snowmobile won't start, so we have to make choices on what to carry. Weapons and food and things to stay warm with. I don't know much much farther we have to go but Lara seems to have an idea. She marks the location of the snowmobile and tent on a map, just in case. We abandon the tent and wrap as much as we can in Lara's sleeping bag for ease of carry. I help too, and even though it's heavy I don't want to risk not having even half these things, so I try to stuff as much as I can stand to carry in my own backpack. The worse snow we ever were in was this one time in Colorado and we'd been in a really nice cabin. Looking back I wonder how things would have gone if we'd confessed our feelings then. Probably not that much different, I think. We'd just have had another year or so together which would have been nice, and making out in front of the fire would be fun. I study her face as she finishes packing. It's completely sappy, but I feel like we really were meant to be.
Once we have our snowshoes on, Lara ties a rope around her waist and then hooks it around me. It's not even snowing but I really don't mind because I don't want to get lost out here, not without her. On my own I'm a dead woman. I'd last like five minutes, tops. The worse part is the silence. It's too much work to talk while we're trudging on the snow, even with the snowshoes. A year ago I don't know if I could have kept up as easily, but I've totally got abs now and I can totally do this. I'm not going to be a drag on Lara. She's probably in enough pain as it is from what Alisha and the Russians did to her.
We're off to save the world. Or something. Stop something bad from happening, anyway. What could Shaw do with this power and this knowledge? More wars, more hurting people, and god only knows what he'd unleash on accident. More of those creatures I guess. That giant void thing with all those stars and eyes is another guess. I have this vivid vision of it opening up beneath London, Tokyo or New York and it's terrifying. Mother fucking kaiju would be better because at least then you can punch them with a robot. A void. The thing looked just like the eyes of the pale creatures that keep trying to kill us.
You know, throwing money at a problem isn't a bad idea when you have enough money and a direction to point it at. Not that I think building robots will actually help, but maybe I can hire the right kind of people to look in the right places. There's only a half-dozen of us, really. If you count everyone. We're really stretched thin and we need to build some kind of network. I stare at Lara's back. We need to find people we can trust, and people like that are rare. Because we kind of screwed up with Amanda. She worked her way into our lives, she wormed her way past Lara's barriers. I'll be looking extra hard at people we meet in the future.
But the more I think about it the more I like the idea. I mean I'm building Lara a ship, but we'll need contacts and suppliers and shit. Soraya obviously has a ton, and then there's Winston, who was obviously a lot more involved in Richard Croft's business than he lets on. I make a note to talk to them about this kind of thing. I know it'll take money greasing palms. Throwing money at the problem. And money is something I have a lot of. I mean the ship is kind of my wedding present but why should I stop there?
Oh man. I'm having all kinds of plans now. It's exciting. Looking to the future, thinking about what we can do after we take a break. And I'm making Lara take a break. She'll want to throw herself back out there but she can't keep doing that. We're taking a vacation. Of course, knowing us, we'll just discover some other new terror filled ruin to explore. Which is where having a network of people to help out comes into play. And even then, Lara can't be everywhere at once, but if we hire people we can trust to check out some of these places, Lara can check into what she really wants to see most.
Lara pauses and looks around, then consults her GPS. I don't know if she's lost, or just getting her bearings, but she puts it away and turns in another direction. West, I think. There's this expanse of white, with mountains towering all around us. I'd thought that the wind would be less cold with the mountains sheltering us. But nope, it's even worse. It blows angry and bitter and frigid, going through my clothing like I'm not even wearing any. The rocks just direct it like a wind tunnel.
"Are we there yet?"
"Are you serious?" Lara turns to look at me, and rolls her eyes when I grin back at her. "Actually, I think we're close. I remember this." She trails her hand along the rock face, searching for an entrance or a secret keyhole or something.
"Maybe next time we could save the world in the tropics. On a nice cruise ship in the Caribbean."
"I'll make sure to tell the next person who takes advantage of supernatural events to do so where you can have drinks with umbrellas in them."
We don't see the cave until we're right up to it. Lara freezes, staring at it and I nearly run into her. "Sweetie?"
"This..is it. This is where my parents died." She braces herself, and enters without me having to prod her. I pull my camera out to film. There's some runes and markings on the inside, and I get a good shot of those. Most of them look familiar, mostly from other places we've been, but there's one that looks like what I saw on crests and banners in my weird dreams. Great. Lara glances at me and I nod at her.
Lara doesn't say anything else, just quietly lights a torch and leads me deeper. Soon enough, we have to cross a river of that black water. Lara sighs and stares down at a bridge someone had left behind. "They're already here."
I test it with my foot and it seems sturdy. "I don't want to take a dip in that, so lets be careful."
We cross carefully, and I squeeze her hand once we reach the other side. "It's not too late. Just...call that a gut feeling, I guess. I can feel Himiko. She's like this..static buzzing in the back of my head and it's getting louder."
"They're already in the chamber." Lara pats the kris in her belt. "He recognizes some of them."
Lara starts to turn right, but something catches her eye and she takes the left fork instead. I follow her down a long tunnel. It gradually gets more and more cramped, but I can see something metallic glinting at the end. It's clearly a dead end, and I don't know what Lara's thinking or what she saw.
I'm not expecting the skeletons.
It's like the sort of thing you'd see in an Indiana Jones movie. Two bodies leaning against one another, wearing the tattered remains of winter clothing. Their boots looked expensive. One is clearly made for a woman. My breath catches in my throat. There's only two people these could possibly be. "Lara…"
Lara lifts her hand to her mouth, and she starts to shake. She just drops to her knees, one hand still over her mouth and the other reaching towards the bodies. It just hangs there in the air for a few moments. I kneel behind her. They must have crawled here after whatever went down with Shaw. How long did they have left together? What were they thinking about in their final moments? From what Lara had said they were both in serious trouble when the dream had faded. Part of her had probably hoped they'd somehow made it.
She leans forward, gingerly unclasping a watch from her father's wrist. The leather strap is faded and brittle from age and the cold, and the glass is foggy but intact. Her father's name is clearly engraved on the bottom as she turns it over to look at it. Confirmation. Lara's shoulders tremble and I know she needs to cry but she won't. I touch her. "Lara. Honey. We'll come back for them. Take them home and give them a proper rest. But right now we have to stop Shaw."
"We are Crofts," she says, voice unsteady. "It's what they would do. I never wanted to…" She gestures at their bodies helplessly, then reverently puts the watch in her pocket. "I guess this is it, then. They really are gone. No more tiny hopes that one day they'd come back. That they were just hiding, or lost somewhere."
There's a necklace on her mother. A pendant and I'm pretty sure it's the kind with pictures in it. Okay this is kind of gross and creepy, but I don't want to leave it, so I carefully pull it over my mother-in-law's head. "I know she'd want you to have this. In case something happens and we can't get back in here." I don't know if there's any other jewellry but I'm not looking. I mean technically my engagement ring was Amelia's but that wasn't taken off of her corpse.
Lara nods. "I'll open it later, I'm not sure I can handle what's inside right now. Can you hold onto it for me?"
I stuff it inside my jacket. "Of course." She doesn't have as much from her mother. There's that art room we never go into. Amelia Croft liked to paint and do sculpture - and Lara freaking about Dolma's art suddenly makes a ton more sense. But I don't think Lara ever really got a chance to mourn her mother. She focused on her father and blamed him for so much.
She gets to her feet, favoring her parents one last, long look before turning back down the tunnel. I hurry after her - it really feels like we're being watched. Did their spirits get stuck here, like Setsuko's back in Japan? I'm not going to die here, I'm not going to haunt these tunnels. We're not going to have two generations of this family die in the same place, even if I have to drag Lara out with my teeth.
We creep down the other tunnel, and the sound of chanting reaches my ears. It quickly grows louder. It's not like the ritual we did with Mehit, or what Shaw had been doing on the oil rig. It's an older, more primal chant. A chill runs down my back. It sounds a lot like the chant I'd dreamed about, deep beneath that city, where the priestess had summoned that monster from the void. The High Priestess, something tells me.
I grab Lara's arm. She glances at me, stone faced. Right. Okay. Totally in killer instinct mode. I give her thumbs up and scoot back a bit. She nods at me, then readies her bow. I give her another few seconds to move ahead, then I follow again. I don't want her worrying about me, but I also want to watch her back, and I think I need to make sure we get this whole thing recorded.
The … ritual chamber, I guess, is gigantic. Bigger than any place I've seen yet. The walls glitter with gold and silver and a dozen different kinds of gems and stones. It all kind of leads the eye to a massive stone throne at the other side. There's a golden skull attached to it. Like it's been stuck there for ten thousand years. The freakiest part of the skull are the eyes. They're different from the other ones like they're black and filled with stars.
But then there are the bodies, three men laying around a circle in the same partitioned shape as the one carved near the entrance. The ritual circle that Lara talked about looks exactly like the crest of that fallen city. The rune carved at the entrance to the cave, and into the figurine Lara's father kept in his study.
They men have bled out, the thick red liquid filling the grooves and forming a line between the throne, and all the other artifacts that Shaw has laid out. Linking them. I have the weirdest thought, but the blood basically acts like the metal in a circuit. Same thing - transferring energy and information.
He's got four guards, and Giovanna is standing farther back, holding Himiko's sword.. I don't see Amanda anywhere and it's kind of a relief. That's one thing we don't have to deal with. There's enough going on between Lara's parents and stopping Shaw without throwing our conflicted feelings about the Great Betrayer into it.
That relief kind of fades when I get my first real good look at Shaw. He's dressed in an ill-fitting suit, and has painted, in blood, arcane symbols on his hands and face and his whole body is glowing from this eerie purple light. Lets be real, it's kind of a funny sight because he just looks like he doesn't belong. I can't really laugh. Not after everything he's done. Not when he's trying to do this right in front of us. Not when there's this whirlwind of light around him and the sound of souls screaming.
I don't know what Lara's planning. I don't think she has time for more than one shot before his guards do something and god only knows if she'd even hit Shaw. If it's anything like the Sun Queen it might just deflect off of him. Lara looks like she's thinking the same thing. She draws back her bowstring, and aims. I'm going to have to review the footage later because everything happens so fast once she lets go. The arrow hits one guard in the throat and the next two guards drop as Lara shoots them with her gun. I count like four shots and then it's just us, the last guard, Shaw, and Giovanna.
And you know how some people can be like 'I've made a terrible mistake?' Because we've made a terrible mistake. The blood from Shaw's guards flows into the circle, and it's like that's all he needed. Just that extra bit of blood and the glowing goes into overdrive. There's this thrumming sound. The sword on Giovanna's hand starts to crackle from the energy, even through the sheathe. The ritual circle itself starts to shine like the sun.
Lara ducks into cover as the last guard opens fire on her. She's pinned down so I try to sneak around behind him. I can club him and then we'd just have to deal with Shaw going super-saiyan. It'll be cake.
"Where do you think you're going, sweetie." Giovanna's voice. She mocks me, her tone all fake sweetness. I turn and catch her fist with my face. My ears rings, but I've been wanting to rip her apart for a month. I launch at her, hitting her in the nose and trying to get my nails into her eyes. I want this bitch to suffer.
She knees me in the stomach, and I grab her leg, twisting it. We both go down, my camera skidding across the ground. I claw my way up her torso and bring my fist down as hard as I can on her face. Her nose gives way and she jabs me in the throat, then shoves me off. I stumble and roll, gagging. I'm struggling to breath, but then there's the sound of thunder and it's like the lights go out.