Day 16. Glacial Pathway IV
The yupik shaman hasn't left this world completely yet. He stands still, floating atop a river, looking straight at Lara, cursing and daring her to get into the storm. As she runs to get near him, a thunderstorm rages, which cracks the ice and feeds the river. A squeal is heard, and the shaman simply fades away. Lara is no longer in control, and sweating and heated in spite of… waking up. "A glacier and a river, then…" she whispers to herself while watching her hands sweat. The shaman has gotten into Lara's dreams now.
Lara follows the lead of her dream, as it coincides with her vision of the masked ones carrying out a blue phoenix above a glacier. Of course, that simply could have symbolized the migration of native Asians into the Americas. But Lara, she always yearns for adventure and the glacier challenge makes her recall those old days in the search for Kitezh, like a cycle that may come to an end.
Only that this time, she's more alone than ever. Perhaps this is a kind of rite of initiation for her, where she stops relying on others to have her job - raiding tombs - done. In spite of being midday, the sky goes dark as the night, and it starts… rainfall and storms. A lightning strikes nearby her, cracking the ice. Then, she hears it… a squeal, and flapping. She's been hunted from the skies.
She's brought the heavy artillery for this one, as the challenge rises. A bird of massive size starts circling Lara, awaiting her to trip or fall, and hunt her. Lightning arcs surround it, which deviate all arrows thrown at it. Lara simply switches to the long range machine gun and starts firing. Some shots hit, so the bird enrages, and approaches her for a deadly blow.
The claws of the beast get at a dangerous nearness for Lara, who manages to evade the monstrous bird with a sideflip and a roll. Her new set of moves lets her have an opening against the bird, which becomes one-eyed. A further squeal deafens Lara, and allows the bird to retreat and attack with lightning bolts from distance. A succession of long range attacks is evaded by Lara with a sideflip combo, and unrelenting machine gun fire burst.
In the end, only one stands victorious, and that is Lara Croft, who hasn't calculated the fall of the big bird, and starts running to avoid dying crushed by the sheer weight of it. Upon falling, a piece of the fang cracks, which exhibits a fragment of a blue crystal. Lara suddenly feels empowered by it, but rejects the offering. In exchange, she obtains another vision of the blind shaman, the one who is awaiting her with another piece of the crystal in the forest. The one who will be killed by Konstantin with that strange divine dagger of his. "Is my destiny to die blind if I fail to resist the power of this crystal?" she asks herself, after finding the end of the glacial pathway.