Day 9.- Floating Gardens
A pitch black rain is falling on Ms. Croft's robes. Each drop is sticky, and stinks like death, like sheol. She's standing on the top of a cliff, and the light doesn't come from above, but from below, where it somehow surpasses the mist that can be seen below, at an insurmountable distance, as if heavens were below. Pillars are hanging from the black, dripping top, like stalactites. Plants have somehow adapted to this peculiar environment. "No where to set a foot," she thinks.
There's a pillar at a reasonable length, so she decides to make a leap of faith. The wire spool allows her to hang in a crevice where her axe miraculously stuck, as she bounces from the pillar, and attempts to regain consciousness. She decides to start climbing down, to see how far she can reach the lower heavens. "An inverted Tower of Babel, indeed," Lara thinks. She'd imagined that Kur would smell like death, but life thrives even in surreal places.
She finally makes it to a small crevice formed by an inverted lapis lazuli arc that has been won by vines. A lion head can be seen in the roof of the arc, which serves as a floor to Lara. She uses the moment of safety to catch a breath and see where to head next. She pulls out her binoculars to scan the area. "A bigger dome!" she says. "I can get there by using the vines."
A risky journey, indeed, but balancing through dubious vines is the fastest and safest way to get to the dome, lest Lara Croft should learn how to walk upside-down. But balancing through vines does not suffice. She ought to find an entrance to the upside-down ziggurat. By the distance, she spots a giant snake crawl into a crevice. "That's the temple's entrance!" Lara thinks, as she approaches the serpent's lair.
She eventually makes it into the temple where the serpent lies, and enters it. But the serpent doesn't hiss, it roars! It's two-horned, the first one looks like a unicorn horn, and another that stems from the back of the head, and reaches backwards, ending with a frontal curl. Lara pulls her guns out, and the snake stands up. It has legs… "DRAGON!" she shouts herself, as she tries to dodge the extremely fast beast trying to devour her. Further lead is wasted on the beast, until it is brought down. "Shit!" she thinks. "I don't have infinite ammo!"
She lies on the roof of the temple, by the belly of the now deceased beast and watches a gigantic tomb of a winged woman with prawns. "Ereshkigal…" she says. "Is that your tomb?" She recovers her breath, and decides it's best to salvage the poor dragon. She sets a camp, and calls it a day. "I hope I don't die poisoned," she prays, as she eats a loaf of the dragon. She starts making a bow and arrows with the dragon's bones and scales, and some vines around the temple. Then, she throws the dragon's remains into the abyss. She doesn't want to alert any further beasts around.
She uses her binoculars again to inspect the coffin of Ereshkigal. "It won't open," Lara says. Of course, if the thing is hanging upside-down, it should have fallen by its weight. "To the Queen of the Great Earth," Lara reads. "Who even in her eternal unrest silently guards the unrelenting beast of Primordial Life." Lara smiles, as she's confident that she has arrived at the right place.
But when inspecting the roof - for her, the floor -, she finds an interesting mosaic. "The torch!" she says. "But why is the flame blue and red? Is it magical? Or alien, perhaps?" The Torch stands at the center of the Mosaic, surrounded by a chained beast in the seas. "Tiamat?" she asks herself. And surrounding the sea that surrounds the Torch, two suns. "A never ending day," Lara thinks. "You cannot rest if there's no night." Then, she reads the inscription at the Torch. "An," she says. "The Lord of Lords. This must be His Light imprisoning Leviathan."