A/N: Four more chapters to go and I'll be done with fooling around! What a relief, eh?
FOUR HORSEMEN, HOOVES OF ONE HORSE
"Yaldabaoth?" he says slowly, letting the name roll in his mouth. "Yes, they called me that, sometimes, the Cathars, and look how they ended up. Wiped out - and not by me. At some stage I really thought I might help you all rise above your limitations, but it turned out men preferred to stay apes."
"Emotions, we call that. Love, hate, despair, fury. We are imperfect, but that's the redeeming part. Perfection is the true horror."
"I see. And I hoped that you would be the perfect queen…" clucking his tongue, he turns away from her. Lara's hypnotized by the spiel of his muscles, the angles of bones straining against fabric, stretching, breaking out. The strands of greenish fire rising from his skull, the curlicues bulging under the glowing skin like parasitic organisms worming their paths towards revelation. He turns his face to the side, an inch, his mouth opens. "We're at an impasse here. What shall we do, in your opinion?"
"Negotiate, maybe? Like, say, I walk out while time closes and this temple crashes down again," she points up at the massive sky above, "and go for a nice Turkish bath. You stay here and count the stars. Your time might come eventually, but not tonight. Not by my hand."
"That," he growls, turning, "is out of the question."
Lara sighs, carefully stepping back. "I gathered as much." She brings the gun up and empties the magazine on his empty face.
Seconds after the first bolt hits the spot she was standing on, Lara starts suspecting she might've made a serious miscalculation. There's no pity and no fear in this creature's eyes, just total blankness, a void more sickening than gazing into a deep chasm. And it's a matter of seconds before he scores, no matter how agile she is.
"So you want me to kill you?"
Lara decides she might as well take her chances. "Am I not dead already?"
"What you intend, then, is to kill me?"
"You already pointed out that I can't," she shouts back, annoyed. This always gets so repetitive.
He stops throwing bolts as suddenly as he started and looks at her. She understands he's fighting his own drive there, the pure instinct to crush her like some annoying bug, although no feelings alter his face, the black holes staring at nothing. Lara cautiously ventures, while trying to tiptoe closer to the door, "It's nothing personal. You showed me what you are, I'm showing you what I do. I destroy monsters. In my book, the Nephilim fall into the monster category. Ergo, I destroy them."
Abruptly, he spreads his arms wide, jerks his head back and howls, not at her but at the darkness around him, and there is true wonder in his voice, a total lack of understanding that is all the more tragic in its finality: "How am I a monster?!"
It catches Lara by surprise. She gapes, then collects herself quickly, shaking her head. "Because you can't repent? Because you're utterly unable to admit what you did wrong, and still demand redemption? Why are you asking me, for Heaven's sake? You said that redemption doesn't come without atonement first."
"Atonement to who?! There is nothing out there! Nothing! Nothing!" his voice rises to a whirlwind, almost knocking her off her feet. "There's just me!"
"Again, you've forgotten me. So typical of you…" someone snickers at their backs.
Lara spins around, caught between two fronts now. The creature turns too, assessing, with a single glance, the new constellation.
He doesn't even look that surprised as he takes in the illusionist's shape. Nor the illusionist's companion. "I knew you would fail me this time, Asmodai."
"Lord Aeshma for you, Elohim, just as they sang it by the rivers of Babylon," Luther spits back, but his eye is fixed steadily on Lara's face, his mouth stretched to a wide grin. "Good evening, Miss Croft. Are we too late to see the fat lady sing?"
A man. Not a man. Not a demon either, not completely. Too much soft tissue. When he thinks of himself, he always thinks of himself as a man.
Oh, the power of a name. Asmodai, he's been called, but it makes little difference to him; by that name he was conquered in Solomon's day. And lesser demons can be brought down with the blow of a single word, and he has since learned that true power is letting others do the dirty work. Learned from the Watchers themselves, who were safe and sound as long as they watched, but fell once they decided on action. And he's had time to learn, stuck as he was in a dark library, only mouldy manuscripts for company and only a tired eye for reading them; bottling up his hatred for the right time to let the genie out, awake the Sleeper, not the dead being in his coffin of Anatolian stone, but the living, the running one dreaming within the confines of a human body. Watch, wait. Millennia had to pass for the blood to reappear (and with such force, such vehemence!), bent on extinction as the enlightened knights were –maggots, all of them. The same lineage, the two sides of a coin, one with too much human blood, one with too little, both impure.
Observing the two perfect creatures in front of him, he feels heavy with awareness. Resentful of his own demonic nature.
Two for the price of one, it shall be.
The man is shaking with laughter now, shaking so hard that a single tear spills out of his eye, catching on the long ridges of his scarred cheek.
How did you think I could ever, ever forgive you? Your shadow so thick that it makes me look black.
Am I my brother's keeper?
Definitely not.
I'm just the one that poked him awake.
And when you're all done here, I'll retreat into darkness and smile. Or maybe go and read a little.
Back in the days she was young and bold and hardly impressed by the arrogance of demons, she had still believed that a name, a little water sufficed. Those days are long gone (and how could she ever be so fearless? Was she too proud to fear creatures that could turn the hair of a priest the purest white? Had she continued reading the names in the Bestiarium, wouldn't her own name have appeared?)
These are the thoughts that flash in her brain while she prepares, steels herself with a growl. Or maybe she hasn't growled, maybe her mirror has. Or Kurtis, who's turned into a mirror of a mirror. It certainly isn't Rouzic, who's only standing, smiling, a shadow in the shadows, and leading an army of shadows.
"Ah," the fallen angel speaks, his voice a dark rumble coming from a haze of light. "Which of the line are you, keeper?"
The Sleeper hesitates, its tongue unused for aeons has trouble finding the correct words. "Trencavel," he mutters at last, and his horrible face crumbles.
"Really! How interesting…" They are not speaking any language she knows, Lara suddenly realizes. This is not Latin, or Aramaic, or even Urdu, but a sum of tongues, the pure language of the days when men had not yet craved a tower to gain Heaven. "I thought your father had drowned in a dungeon. In his own shit." And the deliberate choice of words is, without a doubt, meant to underline the brutality of the remark.
"My great grandfather."
"Whatever. Not a pleasant death. But we won't call him dead, since he only went to fight his war in the shadows..." -the dismissing sway of his hand encompasses all of the silent audience, the bowed heads of the ghostly army forming around them. "Which of them was he, the one at Carcassonne? Bernhard?"
"Raymond Roger," the illusionist throws in, pouting a little at being, once more, omitted. "A fine chevalier. I was there at the time, Elohim, did you know? Although I didn't call myself Luther back then, but Simon de Montfort. Pretty name, I liked that one."
"Were you, Luther…" Yaldabaoth turns his striking face to him, amused. "You let him escape?"
"What do you think?!" the black man shrieks, losing it. "I let you escape once, and look how you repaid that favour!" He pulls at the taut skin of his damaged face, hatred spilling in waves out of his flashing eye, the remaining one, not the empty tangle of scar tissue and dead skin that has closed the other forever.
"Only yourself to blame," the other one returns, indifferent. "If my memory doesn't betray me –and my memory never does- it was you that buried me first. And atop of me, you put their temple…"
"And planted a lily, and it flourished, blah blah blah. Blah! And know something, Shining One? The sons of the lily, they let me be. Unlike you!" Luther's screams rise, ricocheting off the stone walls. Lara steals a look at Kurtis, standing with eyes shut, rocking softly to the sound of his own inner music. Almost as if he could feel the weight of her stare, his eyes fly open, and instead of pupils, what she sees in them are seas of blood.
"Unlike you…" Luther's enraged voice breaks into a hoarse whimper. "Father."
"Well," the angel laughs, shifting his attention back to Kurtis. "How to love something as ugly as you…! You, lost child, come here. Come closer to me, son." He crooks his fingers at him, invitingly.
"No!" Lara screams, throwing herself in between them, and the last thing she hears before Kurtis slams into her is the roar of an imperfect angel, stating with a perfect American twang: "I'm not your son."
The impact sends her rolling a few feet, knocks the last air out of her lungs. When she reopens her eyes, she's lying underwater, staring through a distorting veil at a huge, starved being, rising over her like a monstrous avenger.
Her hand is empty. The eye has rolled away to the deeper part of the stream. She scrambles up, stumbling, cowering behind her arms. "Kurtis…" she pleads, but this isn't Kurtis, not anymore. Whatever he was, it is gone forever, or buried too deeply under the monster's unflinching stare.
"Don't go at her! Not now, you- you- you stupid thing!" the illusionist shrieks, bouncing up and down the shore like an over-excited child. "Him! Himhimhimhiiiimm!!!"
The Sleeper freezes, trembling. From the cavern of his open gullet, a slow dribble of saliva trickles down. Its head lolls right and left, searching for the Puppeteer's voice, dumb, empty. And then it throws its head back and howls, very much like Karel howled minutes ago, effectively drowning Luther's cry of frustration and his creator's response.
And there go my eardrums…
Lara dives through the pillars of his legs, her hand feeling blindly in the water for Horus' eye, and meanwhile the Sleeper stomps blindly and pained, making the ground quake, stirring the murky waters.
A hand digs into her neck, she can feel the razor sharp nails cutting through skin. She's hauled out of the stream like a limp bag of rags, a soaked kitten. Holding her high over the ground, Yaldabaoth shakes her like a puppet, snarls at his offspring, luring him closer, offering this bait.
Bait or not, it's a good thing she's a contortionist, or she wouldn't be able to twist around and sink her teeth into that hand. And no regrets either, although tonight her fall isn't softened by a canopy.
It's like Jacob wrestling the angel. An unbalanced fight, and like Lara already knew, it won't last long.
And all the time, Rouzic runs in circles, uttering short cries and gasps of distress or pleasure. The Nephili is enormous, strong, but defective - built with some kind of aberrant geometry, absurd angles that defy all laws of Nature, this monstrous hybrid of two species that were never meant to breed - and as such is no match for its elder. A carnage, over as quickly as it started.
Rouzic freezes, his arms still risen, and dumbly stares at the outcome of his machinations. A moment passes, then he sinks his arms slowly and risks a shifty look at his former companion.
"Weeell…" he mumbles, pulling at his collar. "Perhaps I was mistaken, after all…"
But for now, Karel is ignoring him. His black eyes are set on Lara. With the speed of a cobra, his hand shoots down, and digs deep into the defeated Sleeper's hair, pulling his head roughly back for her to admire.
"This?" he spits out, incredulity mixed with scorn. "This is what you choose? You think I'm a monster, what would you call this?"
Her heart turns in her chest, in revulsion and pity. The veil of blood can't fully conceal the mortal paleness, the scars and burns of the outcast, the sad uncomprehending eyes. "This!" Karel repeats, but he's speaking only to himself this time. He shakes with disgust, and pushes the other's limp body away. "Call me the half breed!" After wiping his hand, he bends down to extricate the Chirugai from Kurtis' clenched fist. "Let go, Trencavel, for this belongs to me…"
"Don't kill him. Please don't kill him," she croaks.
"No?" he mocks. "But I thought you were so keen on destroying the Nephilim!" He places his foot on Kurtis' back and rolls him closer to the pit.
"But he's one of your kind. Don't kill him…"
"Rebellious children, all of them. Sons rising against the fathers, in a very human way. Disgusting!"
She covers her face. She's seen enough, and any more would make her heart explode. Nothing can be gained out of this...no supreme revelation, no enlightenment, nothing. The dice have been cast, four horses unleashed, but no god of light will come to her rescue; she was a fool to believe it would.
What, giving up? Werner's voice falls on her like a whip.
Haven't you punished me enough? Why don't you just crawl back under your stone and shut up?! she shouts back at him, covering her ears. And still, she cannot stop him laughing, his spiteful, cruel laugh. Make me. Make me shut up.
With a scream she charges blindly forward, knocking the Chirugai out of the angel's hand. Startled, what was once (and never was) Karel freezes, undecided whether to go after her, after the Chirugai or after Luther himself, who couldn't have chosen a better moment to attempt flight, flattened against the wall as he tries to merge into the multitude of dead Templars. And she's damned if she'll stop to ponder Luther's fate as The Old One chooses him; she rolls, jumps up and sprints towards the discarded winged disk, barely catching it before it plummets into the pit. As her hand closes over the glaive, something brushes her fingertips, and when she jolts her head up, the Sleeper's face is inches away from hers. For an endless moment she's witness to its inner struggle, and can't help but wonder if every time Kurtis went inside himself, he saw the world not black, like she does, but through a thin red veil. And what it must be like, to look at it through a Nephilim's eye and why he always went such lengths to avoid using the powers that came with his heritage. She flinches, his touch feels so awfully cold, but then he whispers to her, in an agonic, strained human voice:
"It's so hungry..."
Behind them, Luther screeches, trying to shake off Karel's hands. "You are stupid, stupid, you weak... old... toothless... bugaboo! She will never be your queen, don't you get it? You were too slow! She's already with child! His, not yours! His!"
"What?! Wait a m- " she stutters out, shocked. The Sleeper's face twists in pain. Lara yanks the Chirugai out of his hands. "You and I, Trencavel, we've got a lot to discuss later…" she hisses. He reaches blindly out, but Lara isn't ready yet to let go. "Hungry it may be, but it's also blind."
Livid, incensed and utterly pissed off, she slams the eye into the blade's empty socket.
A streak of flashing brightness and the world rotates on its axis, several times. Lara is rocketed through the air, petals of pain unfolding before her eyes. Luther's screech is cut off at the highest note. Light floods every recess of the chamber, frosting the turned-away dead faces, biting their knuckles in the eternal sign of horror, and dims slowly to ominous peace. Time has stopped. The Sleeper rises, and now it has golden claws, but he looks confused, shaken, stunned. Every hair on her body stands up, and even more slowly she rises, paling, knowing.
"Don't look now…" Werner warns her from the distance. It's not like she wants to, but the pull is too strong.
The air is fetid with decay, the silence full of whispers, echoes of screams and clattering swords. Somewhere in another dimension of time, Acre is about to fall, but none of these broken chess pieces will run. In an eerie moment of eternity, three of the four horses stand still, poised in a perfect leap. A heartbeat, a triptych of darkness. White, black, crimson.
And behind her an angel, shifting into his final shape.