I am not making any money with this. I do not own Lara Croft, Tomb Raider
etc.
Only to be archived at Fanfiction.net and 'Lara Croft's Tales of Beauty and Power'. All other sites email me first to gain permission.
================================================== The Last Revelation Part II: The Rainbow Serpent by Heidi Ahlmen (siirma6@surfeu.fi) ==================================================
Chapter 3
"Mon dieu, Lara, you scared me!" Jean shouted, and expected for Lara to step closer. Instead she leapt behind him and shut his mouth with her hand.
"Quiet! Whisper, if you have to." Lara removed her hand, grabbing Jean's lamp and shutting it off.
"Where are you?" Jean asked in the sudden darkness, if you didn't count the trailer lights shimmering in the distance.
Lara patted him on the shoulder. "Right here."
Jean turned, and Lara passed his lamp back.
"You nearly gave me a heart attack," he whispered. Lara giggled as silently as she could; a clear, girlish giggle filling the night air. The monkeys had stopped chattering. "What in Heaven's name are you doing here in the dark?"
Lara seemed to be thinking hard for a moment. Kneeling down on the ground, she waved Jean to switch on his lamp and point it down. Lara was holding a small thing in her hand, wrapped in a napkin. She removed the cover. The gold idol.
"What are you going to do with that?" Jean asked in disbelief. The idol should not have been in Lara's possession.
"You'll see," Lara said. "If I'm right this time, you are going to bloody well see something your librarian eyes have never seen before. Are you cold? Do you need more clothes?" She asked.
Warmed by Lara's promise, Jean told her he was alright as he was, wearing a T-shirt and shorts.
"Then let's go," Lara ordered, and grabbed Jean's wrist, pulling him along he could protest.
Somehow, Jean wasn't even a tad bit surprised when Lara lead her to the dig site after a good ten minute walk. Lara kept up a quick pace, but Jean was tired, so she was hurrying him up all the time. Lara's voice sounded different than before. Full of anticipation. Exhilarated. Full of life.
The ancient Inca burial site shone in the moonlight, and the excavation team's plastic covers hung in peace over the stone pillars, as there was no wind at all. Lara jumped down to the excavation hole, and lit a carbid lamp used by the diggers. Now Jean could take a good look at her.
Lara usually favored keeping her hair in a bun, or wrapped it into a tight ponytail. Now it had been carefully braided to a long, shiny plait. She wore khaki shorts, a blue shirt, and hiking boots. She looked a whole lot different compared to her usual look: ripped jeans, cotton shirts and sneakers that had seen their best days ages ago. Jean followed her to the hole, and together they pulled off the plastic covering the tomb doorstone.
"What now?" Jean asked.
"You wait here and I go activate the mechanism." Lara climbed up from the hole.
"What mechanism? Is that what you've been digging out?"
"Guilty as charged," Lara replied as Jean passed her his flashlight.
"Didn't you bring a flaslight? You can't do anything around here without a flashlight!"
"There are plenty of lamps in Professor Sandringham's excavation tent. I'd have borrowed one from there."
Lara disappeared, leaving Jean in the blinking light of the excavation lamp he'd lit.
A moment later, Jean watched in utter disbelief as the the giant door creaked open. How could it move? They had been trying to move it twelve times and it refused to go anywhere. But there it was, moving aside steadily and slowly.
Lara returned with two flashlights - she had borrowed one from the tent. The rock had now uncovered an entrance to what looked like tomb. Lara passed Jean his flashlight, and they stepped in.
"Professor Murray is a little uncreative when it comes to tombs, don't you think?" Lara asked self-consciously, and let her flashlight circle to the tomb roof.
The structure was built inside a large hill. The antechamber was large, its roof supported by pillars, some of them fallen, or touched by the hand of erosion, but most of them stood. The walls were decorated with an unusually carved row of feathery snakes.
"Quetzalcoatl," Lara whispered to herself, and proceeded further. Both Lara and Jean were marveling at the realization that they were making the first footprints in the tomb for centuries. It felt marvellous - like walking on virgin land. Vines hung everywhere and strange kinds of mushrooms grew in the corner of the rock chamber. Thick vegetation formed a green wall opposite the spot where Lara and Jean stood.
"Have you done this before?" Jean asked, still marveling at the ornaments. He had stopped a carefully carved, beautiful jaguar nearby. Lara nodded and walked to the green wall, pulling the vines aside. Jean followed after her, attempting to move to the next chamber, but Lara pulled him back. Jean looked at her, puzzled.
"Ricochet arrows. Regular Peruvian trick. See those small tube-like things that look like ornaments in the ceiling? Unusual placement, but ricochets all the same. See," Lara said, picking up a stone and throwing it the middle of the next chamber. It was a small rock room that looked like a short haalway. The moment the rock hit the floor covered with woodsticks ricochets, still quite sharp, gushed out of the tubes in a deadly swarm. No- one could have survived that attack. Jean looked at Lara and couln't help but admire her instincts.
"Horizontal arrows are easy, you can crawl or jump, but anything that comes down. You have to be careful. Short hallways are the worst. You think it's just a hallway - and the next moment you realize you own a harp and a pair of feathery wings."
"Or a spiky tail," Jean mused as he inspected the hallway with his flashlight. "So we can't get through, right?" He wasn't too excited about seeing more ancient Peruvian tricks. Despite the carvings, the tomb hadn't been anything special yet. That didn't fit with the gold idol and other precious things they had found.
"Who says we can't?" Lara said, and reached for her shorts pocket. She pulled out a pistol and loaded a couple of rounds.
"You can shoot?" Jean asked.
"No, I just carry a lethal weapon for fun," Lara snorted. "Of course I can shoot. I could outshoot a regular GI Joe anytime."
"Pardon," Jean mumbled, "I've never seen an archaeologist with a gun before."
Lara removed the safety clip and adjusted her finger on the trigger. "You know, if you had bothered to read a guide book or two, you'd know these forests hide jaguars and all sorts of things waiting to have a tasty piece of your cheeks, Jean. And I don't mean the ones on your face." Lara shot a serious glance at him. "One would think that when you've triggered the arrows once, that would be it. Wrong. When you step on that plate, another set flies down." Lara aimed, shot and in a moment another wash of ricochets showered down.
Jean and Lara walked across the hallway, and Jean picked up a fallen ricochet. "Pretty nice work. There must've been some kind of poison inside, but it would have lost its edge by now."
Lara didn't share his relaxed mood. She moved drastically, turning around many times, inspecting the chamber. "Never underestimate the Peruvians, Jean." Lara stopped at his feet, grabbing his arm. "When I say run, you run like a bat outta hell. Got it?"
Jean nodded and swallowed, all relaxedness gone.
Lara walked a couple of steps forward, and yelled "RUN!"
They both dashed to the other end of the hall as a third storm of ricochets rained down. When they found themselves safely in the next chamber Jean waited for his ragged breath to calm down and then whispered; "How did you know?"
Lara pointed at the hallway floor. It had lowered a couple of centimetres.
"When you stand on it long enough, you get disembowelled. That's the name of the game. Think or die."
"Lara Croft, I appreciate your skills very much and think you are a brilliant archaeologist, but can't we get the hell out of here before we end up as a meal for some fortunate jaguar?" Jean asked with sarcastic politeness.
"We came all the way here - it would be such a waste to stop here. There's something worth all this trouble waiting for its finder at the end. I just know it. Remember the idol."
Jean crossed his arms in disbelief.
"It is not our job to find this, whatever it is. This is not the right time or place to go grave robbing. We should have Professors Murray and Sandringham with us. This should be done during daytime, with proper methods."
Ignoring him, Lara moved to the next chamber. "Jean, if you want to be someone and not just an unknown standard archaeologist, you have to stop thinking so conservatively."
Jean wondered for a second if she was right or not, decided he wasn't sure, and followed Lara.
At the entrance to the next chamber, they stopped in amazement.
It became quite obvious then that the tomb could not have belonged to an indifferent person in ancient Peruvian society.
It was a large chamber with large knot-decorated tapestries on the walls - outlined in red and embroidered with images of striking panthers. In the middle lay a large gray rock coffin. The coffin itself was simplistic; like a rectangular box made of solid rock, but the cover was most impressive.
There were carvings on it, carvings of the Rainbow Serpent and other mythological figures - and the hollows spots in the ornaments were filled with solid gold. Jean and Lara stepped closer, almost forgetting to pay attention to possible traps.
"Like a diamond in a beggar's hand," Lara whispered as she ran her fingers along a snake-shaped carving on the surface. Jean was unsure of what she meant. Not the professors?
Reluctant to leave the coffin, Lara took a quick look at both of the alcoves on the left side of the chamber. The whole burial room was the shape of an E. The main chamber consisted of the coffin and the dais that it stood on. The left antechamber was filled with spears and other weapons. Lara stretched her arm behind a pile of arrows and pulled something out from near the wall. She returned to the main chamber with her discovery.
It was a large sword, of some sorts. The whole weapon was made of gold. 'No wonder the Incas didn't win their wars,' Lara thought. Gold was a quite a weak metal compared to the conquistadors' iron weapons. But, all the same, the sword was a masterpiece. Wielding the same panther figure, it was over a metre long, and heavy as a battleaxe. Lara swung it a couple of times, trying to get the feel of it. Jean followed her movements with his eyes, amazed at the beauty of the sword and slightly taken aback bu Lara's seemingly professional grip of the formidable weapon.
After a few minutes Lara suddenly stopped, and after grabbing her flashlight again, pointed it at Jean, and asked; "What's the time?"
Jean lifted his left sleeve. "Half-past three in the morning."
"Good. We have time to check out the coffin and the rest of this place."
Lara put the sword carefully back behind the arrows, and joined Jean, who was inspecting the right antechamber, walking slowly as though trying to keep quiet.
"What's the matter?" Jean asked. "We don't have to keep quiet, we're all alone."
Lara grinned. "The spirits will hear us."
"What spirits?" Jean was confused.
Lara jumped behind a pillar, pointing the flashlight in her neck. "I am the spirit of the rainbow serpent. Beware, you worthless mortal!" she joked.
"Stop that or the spirits *will* hear us," Jean snapped, but not harshly. He was catching Lara's good mood. She acted like a kid in a candy store, inspecting and trying out everything. Lara walked forward, deeper to the pitch dark right chamber. Jean followed her close by. Suddenly, he heard something crashing and Lara cursing.
"What happened?" he asked, pointing the light at where he thought Lara was. She was picking up the pieces of an amphora she had obviously stumbled upon and broken. She didn't seem to mind, and Jean soon saw why.
What Lara had picked up was not a piece of an amphora. It was a bone. A human mandibula, no doubt about it.
"Do you think they carried out sacrifices in honour of their dead high society?"
"That's more than obvious," Lara replied, placing the bone carefully on the floor.
The right chambed was full of amphoras, and Jean noticed some more broken ones. Bones and mold had fallen out of them. If there was one victim per amphora, then there must've been at least twenty people offered at the funeral of this deceased man. Perhaps he'd been a priest?
Without a word, they left the chamber and returned to the coffin. Together they decided to push off the lid so that they could see the inside. Soon the heavy rock lid moved as they pointed their flashlights to the crack that had been revealed.
-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~
As always, comments and reviews would be much appreciated - they're the fuel that feeds this creative furnace.
siirma6@surfeu.fi
Only to be archived at Fanfiction.net and 'Lara Croft's Tales of Beauty and Power'. All other sites email me first to gain permission.
================================================== The Last Revelation Part II: The Rainbow Serpent by Heidi Ahlmen (siirma6@surfeu.fi) ==================================================
Chapter 3
"Mon dieu, Lara, you scared me!" Jean shouted, and expected for Lara to step closer. Instead she leapt behind him and shut his mouth with her hand.
"Quiet! Whisper, if you have to." Lara removed her hand, grabbing Jean's lamp and shutting it off.
"Where are you?" Jean asked in the sudden darkness, if you didn't count the trailer lights shimmering in the distance.
Lara patted him on the shoulder. "Right here."
Jean turned, and Lara passed his lamp back.
"You nearly gave me a heart attack," he whispered. Lara giggled as silently as she could; a clear, girlish giggle filling the night air. The monkeys had stopped chattering. "What in Heaven's name are you doing here in the dark?"
Lara seemed to be thinking hard for a moment. Kneeling down on the ground, she waved Jean to switch on his lamp and point it down. Lara was holding a small thing in her hand, wrapped in a napkin. She removed the cover. The gold idol.
"What are you going to do with that?" Jean asked in disbelief. The idol should not have been in Lara's possession.
"You'll see," Lara said. "If I'm right this time, you are going to bloody well see something your librarian eyes have never seen before. Are you cold? Do you need more clothes?" She asked.
Warmed by Lara's promise, Jean told her he was alright as he was, wearing a T-shirt and shorts.
"Then let's go," Lara ordered, and grabbed Jean's wrist, pulling him along he could protest.
Somehow, Jean wasn't even a tad bit surprised when Lara lead her to the dig site after a good ten minute walk. Lara kept up a quick pace, but Jean was tired, so she was hurrying him up all the time. Lara's voice sounded different than before. Full of anticipation. Exhilarated. Full of life.
The ancient Inca burial site shone in the moonlight, and the excavation team's plastic covers hung in peace over the stone pillars, as there was no wind at all. Lara jumped down to the excavation hole, and lit a carbid lamp used by the diggers. Now Jean could take a good look at her.
Lara usually favored keeping her hair in a bun, or wrapped it into a tight ponytail. Now it had been carefully braided to a long, shiny plait. She wore khaki shorts, a blue shirt, and hiking boots. She looked a whole lot different compared to her usual look: ripped jeans, cotton shirts and sneakers that had seen their best days ages ago. Jean followed her to the hole, and together they pulled off the plastic covering the tomb doorstone.
"What now?" Jean asked.
"You wait here and I go activate the mechanism." Lara climbed up from the hole.
"What mechanism? Is that what you've been digging out?"
"Guilty as charged," Lara replied as Jean passed her his flashlight.
"Didn't you bring a flaslight? You can't do anything around here without a flashlight!"
"There are plenty of lamps in Professor Sandringham's excavation tent. I'd have borrowed one from there."
Lara disappeared, leaving Jean in the blinking light of the excavation lamp he'd lit.
A moment later, Jean watched in utter disbelief as the the giant door creaked open. How could it move? They had been trying to move it twelve times and it refused to go anywhere. But there it was, moving aside steadily and slowly.
Lara returned with two flashlights - she had borrowed one from the tent. The rock had now uncovered an entrance to what looked like tomb. Lara passed Jean his flashlight, and they stepped in.
"Professor Murray is a little uncreative when it comes to tombs, don't you think?" Lara asked self-consciously, and let her flashlight circle to the tomb roof.
The structure was built inside a large hill. The antechamber was large, its roof supported by pillars, some of them fallen, or touched by the hand of erosion, but most of them stood. The walls were decorated with an unusually carved row of feathery snakes.
"Quetzalcoatl," Lara whispered to herself, and proceeded further. Both Lara and Jean were marveling at the realization that they were making the first footprints in the tomb for centuries. It felt marvellous - like walking on virgin land. Vines hung everywhere and strange kinds of mushrooms grew in the corner of the rock chamber. Thick vegetation formed a green wall opposite the spot where Lara and Jean stood.
"Have you done this before?" Jean asked, still marveling at the ornaments. He had stopped a carefully carved, beautiful jaguar nearby. Lara nodded and walked to the green wall, pulling the vines aside. Jean followed after her, attempting to move to the next chamber, but Lara pulled him back. Jean looked at her, puzzled.
"Ricochet arrows. Regular Peruvian trick. See those small tube-like things that look like ornaments in the ceiling? Unusual placement, but ricochets all the same. See," Lara said, picking up a stone and throwing it the middle of the next chamber. It was a small rock room that looked like a short haalway. The moment the rock hit the floor covered with woodsticks ricochets, still quite sharp, gushed out of the tubes in a deadly swarm. No- one could have survived that attack. Jean looked at Lara and couln't help but admire her instincts.
"Horizontal arrows are easy, you can crawl or jump, but anything that comes down. You have to be careful. Short hallways are the worst. You think it's just a hallway - and the next moment you realize you own a harp and a pair of feathery wings."
"Or a spiky tail," Jean mused as he inspected the hallway with his flashlight. "So we can't get through, right?" He wasn't too excited about seeing more ancient Peruvian tricks. Despite the carvings, the tomb hadn't been anything special yet. That didn't fit with the gold idol and other precious things they had found.
"Who says we can't?" Lara said, and reached for her shorts pocket. She pulled out a pistol and loaded a couple of rounds.
"You can shoot?" Jean asked.
"No, I just carry a lethal weapon for fun," Lara snorted. "Of course I can shoot. I could outshoot a regular GI Joe anytime."
"Pardon," Jean mumbled, "I've never seen an archaeologist with a gun before."
Lara removed the safety clip and adjusted her finger on the trigger. "You know, if you had bothered to read a guide book or two, you'd know these forests hide jaguars and all sorts of things waiting to have a tasty piece of your cheeks, Jean. And I don't mean the ones on your face." Lara shot a serious glance at him. "One would think that when you've triggered the arrows once, that would be it. Wrong. When you step on that plate, another set flies down." Lara aimed, shot and in a moment another wash of ricochets showered down.
Jean and Lara walked across the hallway, and Jean picked up a fallen ricochet. "Pretty nice work. There must've been some kind of poison inside, but it would have lost its edge by now."
Lara didn't share his relaxed mood. She moved drastically, turning around many times, inspecting the chamber. "Never underestimate the Peruvians, Jean." Lara stopped at his feet, grabbing his arm. "When I say run, you run like a bat outta hell. Got it?"
Jean nodded and swallowed, all relaxedness gone.
Lara walked a couple of steps forward, and yelled "RUN!"
They both dashed to the other end of the hall as a third storm of ricochets rained down. When they found themselves safely in the next chamber Jean waited for his ragged breath to calm down and then whispered; "How did you know?"
Lara pointed at the hallway floor. It had lowered a couple of centimetres.
"When you stand on it long enough, you get disembowelled. That's the name of the game. Think or die."
"Lara Croft, I appreciate your skills very much and think you are a brilliant archaeologist, but can't we get the hell out of here before we end up as a meal for some fortunate jaguar?" Jean asked with sarcastic politeness.
"We came all the way here - it would be such a waste to stop here. There's something worth all this trouble waiting for its finder at the end. I just know it. Remember the idol."
Jean crossed his arms in disbelief.
"It is not our job to find this, whatever it is. This is not the right time or place to go grave robbing. We should have Professors Murray and Sandringham with us. This should be done during daytime, with proper methods."
Ignoring him, Lara moved to the next chamber. "Jean, if you want to be someone and not just an unknown standard archaeologist, you have to stop thinking so conservatively."
Jean wondered for a second if she was right or not, decided he wasn't sure, and followed Lara.
At the entrance to the next chamber, they stopped in amazement.
It became quite obvious then that the tomb could not have belonged to an indifferent person in ancient Peruvian society.
It was a large chamber with large knot-decorated tapestries on the walls - outlined in red and embroidered with images of striking panthers. In the middle lay a large gray rock coffin. The coffin itself was simplistic; like a rectangular box made of solid rock, but the cover was most impressive.
There were carvings on it, carvings of the Rainbow Serpent and other mythological figures - and the hollows spots in the ornaments were filled with solid gold. Jean and Lara stepped closer, almost forgetting to pay attention to possible traps.
"Like a diamond in a beggar's hand," Lara whispered as she ran her fingers along a snake-shaped carving on the surface. Jean was unsure of what she meant. Not the professors?
Reluctant to leave the coffin, Lara took a quick look at both of the alcoves on the left side of the chamber. The whole burial room was the shape of an E. The main chamber consisted of the coffin and the dais that it stood on. The left antechamber was filled with spears and other weapons. Lara stretched her arm behind a pile of arrows and pulled something out from near the wall. She returned to the main chamber with her discovery.
It was a large sword, of some sorts. The whole weapon was made of gold. 'No wonder the Incas didn't win their wars,' Lara thought. Gold was a quite a weak metal compared to the conquistadors' iron weapons. But, all the same, the sword was a masterpiece. Wielding the same panther figure, it was over a metre long, and heavy as a battleaxe. Lara swung it a couple of times, trying to get the feel of it. Jean followed her movements with his eyes, amazed at the beauty of the sword and slightly taken aback bu Lara's seemingly professional grip of the formidable weapon.
After a few minutes Lara suddenly stopped, and after grabbing her flashlight again, pointed it at Jean, and asked; "What's the time?"
Jean lifted his left sleeve. "Half-past three in the morning."
"Good. We have time to check out the coffin and the rest of this place."
Lara put the sword carefully back behind the arrows, and joined Jean, who was inspecting the right antechamber, walking slowly as though trying to keep quiet.
"What's the matter?" Jean asked. "We don't have to keep quiet, we're all alone."
Lara grinned. "The spirits will hear us."
"What spirits?" Jean was confused.
Lara jumped behind a pillar, pointing the flashlight in her neck. "I am the spirit of the rainbow serpent. Beware, you worthless mortal!" she joked.
"Stop that or the spirits *will* hear us," Jean snapped, but not harshly. He was catching Lara's good mood. She acted like a kid in a candy store, inspecting and trying out everything. Lara walked forward, deeper to the pitch dark right chamber. Jean followed her close by. Suddenly, he heard something crashing and Lara cursing.
"What happened?" he asked, pointing the light at where he thought Lara was. She was picking up the pieces of an amphora she had obviously stumbled upon and broken. She didn't seem to mind, and Jean soon saw why.
What Lara had picked up was not a piece of an amphora. It was a bone. A human mandibula, no doubt about it.
"Do you think they carried out sacrifices in honour of their dead high society?"
"That's more than obvious," Lara replied, placing the bone carefully on the floor.
The right chambed was full of amphoras, and Jean noticed some more broken ones. Bones and mold had fallen out of them. If there was one victim per amphora, then there must've been at least twenty people offered at the funeral of this deceased man. Perhaps he'd been a priest?
Without a word, they left the chamber and returned to the coffin. Together they decided to push off the lid so that they could see the inside. Soon the heavy rock lid moved as they pointed their flashlights to the crack that had been revealed.
-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~
As always, comments and reviews would be much appreciated - they're the fuel that feeds this creative furnace.
siirma6@surfeu.fi