He spun away as Raziel easily slashed forward with the sword. Raziel continued the attack, pressing harder and harder into his guard, but always Moebius seemed one step ahead, as if he knew exactly where each blow would fall. Lara took aim and shot with the Desert Eagle once as an experiment. She watched as by the time she had fired, he was no longer where he had been.
"You fools," Moebius chuckled. "You cannot touch me. I can see exactly where each sword stroke will fall long before it's there."
"What did you have to give up to be here, Moebius," Lara taunted. "You're most powerful and prideful possession of time?" She watched as his face narrowed. She had hit a nerve.
"You've never been a true Guardian, Lara," he hissed as he avoided Raziel. The Reaver of souls had drawn next to Lara. "You don't know what it's like to be apart of them for thousands of years. You'll learn eventually if you were to live, but you don't know now. So you could never know what it's like to be revoked of that position, to lose touch with the Pillars."
Raziel, understanding, pointed out, "You're no longer the Guardian of the Pillar of Time, are you, old man?"
"Alas, no. It was the price my god assigned me for failing him. He felt that if my roll as Time Guardian had not alerted me to the end result of the battle, I needed it no longer."
Raziel smiled slowly. "Then it makes it all the more sweet killing you for all you have done to our world." He finished the thought with a pointed stroke of the sword, intended to behead the man, but just as before, Moebius was one step ahead of him. Lara frowned. This wouldn't do! She glanced upward and saw him moving under the hanging light fixture. Well, it seemed he could still foresee direct actions against him, but if he wasn't the Time Guardian anymore, could he still see indirect ones? Lara aimed and fired, her bullet breaking the wire holding the light aloft. It came crashing down and only Moebius' reflexes saved him from getting hit. Raziel's eyes lit with the new information given to him. He started spinning the sword before him very quickly until it became a circular blur. He turned to Lara and told her, "Shoot at me."
Lara blinked a few times, but starting shooting. With the sword moving so quickly, Raziel managed to deflect the bullets and shoot them toward Moebius. His eyes widened as he realized they had found a gaping whole in his armor. He resolved to do the one thing any normal man would have done long before: run. A bullet grazing his leg and side further added to the resolve. He darted out the door, slamming it behind him. Raziel and Lara followed, only to find themselves looking down the barrels of about twenty guns of guards who stood waiting for them. Raziel slammed the door shut and shoved Lara safely out of the way as he felt the bullets bit into his flesh. He moved away from the door and sighed as the flesh mended itself. Well, that was a pair of clothes ruined. He walked to where Lara stood.
"It seems we can't leave the normal way."
"That it does."
He extended his hand and she looked at it with foreboding, asking, "We're going into the Spectral Realm again, aren't we?"
"Would you rather stay here with them?" he jerked his head toward the closed door where the guards were telling them to come out slowly with their hands up. Lara snorted mentally. Like she hadn't heard that enough. She stood and took his hand. Raziel concentrated a moment, then slipped into the Spectral Realm, bringing Lara along with him. She looked around. Unlike on Nosgoth, there were no Sluagh here, and quite a few souls floating around.
"There's nothing here to eat them," he explained, seeing where she was looking. "Come on. I'll take you back to your mansion."
As they walked, he glanced over at her. "It seems that your house is . . . larger than most normal people's."
Lara nodded in response. "My family was one of the remaining noble families of England. I belong to high England aristocracy."
Raziel smirked as he looked at her. It would figure that of all the women he found tolerable, the one he liked most was of noble blood.
Lara glanced at him, then at the sword he still clutched in his hand. "What will you do with that?" she inquired, jerking her head to the sword he still held in his hand. He glanced down at it, as if only now realizing it was there. He shook his head slightly to clear it, then turned back to her.
"I'll take it back to Nosgoth and go speak with Kain."
"Although, a thought did occur to me. You said the Reaver was the key while the Pillars were the lock, right?" When he nodded, she continued, "Well, you came here for more firepower, yet what if Earth's Reaver doesn't work on Nosgoth because it is not there that has the lock?"
Raziel sighed. "I inquired the same thing of Kain, but he surmised that since the Pillars resonated the same energy, they might be the same lock. Which means that a key for one lock would be capable of unlocking the other. We had no reason to believe Earth's Reaver would work any differently on Nosgoth than the normal Reaver."
Lara was silent for a moment. "But with all these locks and keys, what are they locking in? Or out?"
Raziel fell silent for a long time, before finally answering, "I don't know. I've come to the conclusion that the Pillars were erected to either banish or cut the demons' powers, perhaps to lock them away somewhere. But with the Pillars here, I can't necessarily believe that's the case. If it were, it would mean that our two worlds are either not that far apart, or have been somehow in correlation with one another long ago. But that's not entirely likely. Both worlds would show strange similarities if that was the case, and aside from the humans, there really aren't any. So what could they possibly be holding?"
"Tell me, Raziel, is it possible that there are more Pillars on more planets? And if that's the case, could it be that they might just not be 'in phase' let's say, with these ones?"
Raziel shrugged, uncomfortable with the concept, but Lara continued headlessly.
"As such, is it not true that one could go so far to say that the Pillars hold the key to opening a gate to another dimension? Or perhaps even hold an entire planet?"
He sighed. "I don't know, Lara, I honestly don't know."
Silence fell between the two for a while as they continued walking before Lara finally broke it, asking, "So your stay with us has ended and you'll be going back to Nosgoth?"
Beside her, he nodded. "Yes, I believe I'm done here for right now. But I don't think I'll be leaving just yet." When Lara looked up at him, he continued, "I finished what I was sent here to do, but a new problem has opened itself up, and its name is Moebius." Lara smiled slightly.
After a while of walking, Raziel finally indicated to a form emerging out of the blue mists. She recognized it as a more malformed version of her mansion. He brought her to one of the conduits and shifted them back into the normal world. They calmly walked up to her mansion, and she opened the door to let him in. She closed the door quietly and started to walk past him, but was stopped as he gripped her hand lightly. She turned to look up at him and found his intense eyes staring down into her own. Not conscious of doing so, she stepped closer to him, laying her hand on his chest. Raziel's other claw drifted up to the side of her face and lifted it slightly toward him. He leaned toward her, and she stretched, allowing herself to drift closer to him.
Hillary suddenly came around the corner and spying them, shouted, "Oh thank God you're home, Lady Croft! Rose has been a terror ever since you left!"
"Oh no," Lara sighed.
"Rose?" Raziel asked blankly behind her. A scream broke off anything else he would have asked.
