Chapter 21: Ecce Veritas

All is not as it seems.

-Werner Von Croy

Lara scrambled to her feet, still training her pistols on the back of Karel's head.

"I knew you'd find the third shard," Karel told Lara as he stood and turned around to face her.

Lara frowned. "But why? You worked for him."

"No," Karel said. "Unknowingly, he worked for me. But his usefulness was ended."

"Will you destroy his work?" Lara glanced up at the Cubiculum Nephili hanging under the dome ceiling.

"Of course not," Karel shook his head. "The Great Work will be finished." He extended a hand towards Lara in a gesture of collaboration. Lara noticed a strange, circular symbol that looked like it had once been cut deep into the flesh of his palm. "I'm offering you the chance to become part of a benign new order in the world."

Lara remained suspicious. "You are kidding … right?"

Karel's body suddenly went through a grotesque transformation. His skin turned dark grey with intricate, scar-like patterns covering his face. His hair changed colour from blonde to white, while his eyes turned pitchblack. "We Nephilim have only ever been trying to survive."

'They were the cursed hybrid offspring of humans and angels - thought to be able to change their physical appearance …'

Lara's eyes widened with awe, and she took a few careful steps backwards, tightening her grip on both pistols. "Too many people have died for me to trust you. Including a good friend - Von Croy."

"He was an unfortunate victim of history, Lara." Karel's body changed again, into that of Louis Bouchard. "Eckhardt was stupid to have killed him." Another transformation, and Luddick replaced the late Frenchman. "I have helped you all along, both here and in Paris." The journalist's appearance was erased, and a duplicate of Kurtis Trent appeared, staring at Lara with those familiar, blue eyes.

The illusion lasted for a mere splitsecond. Karel's Nephilim visage returned, still extending his marked hand towards the woman. "You can trust me, Lara Croft."

Lara stared at the symbol on his palm. Deep lines forming a circle in the pale skin.

A circle.

A flash of lightning is reflected in Werner Von Croy's glasses, briefly forming two white circles over his eyes. He leans forward in his armchair and speaks to his former protégé: "I'm tracking five Obscura paintings for a client called Eckhardt. But he's a psychopath!"

"Why should I care?"

"Because I'm being stalked! I daren't go into the streets." He rises from his chair and points to the window. "People are dying out there!"

Blood pooling from Daniel Rennes' corpse. Arnaud, squirming and moaning on his filthy death bed, awaiting a painful demise.

"Handle it, Werner."

"Lara, please …"

"Look, go and see this woman - Carvier. She can help."

The body of a professor Margot Carvier was found after a woman was seen leaving the building under suspicious circumstances.

"I'm going."

"No, wait!"

"Egypt, Werner. You walked away and left me. There was no pity then."

Eckhardt walks into the apartment with quick, determined footsteps. Werner's eyes widen with dread. "Get out! Get out of the way!" He raises his pistol to take aim at the Monstrum. Eckhardt's gloved hand connects with Lara's shoulder and flings her away. She smacks against a bookcase, lands on the floors, unconscious.

Shots.

The bullets don't even slow Eckhardt down. He knocks the gun out of Werner's hand, grabs his throat and effortlessly lifts him from the ground.

"Von Croy? You located the painting for me. Why have you not delivered it?" His voice is angry, disappointed, tired of waiting. He loosens his grip on the professor's throat enough to let him speak.

"I daren't collect it. It's too dangerous. But she will be able to …"

Eckhardt glances at the fallen woman, then glares back up at Von Croy. His grip tightens like a vice.

"No! Eckhar---" Werner's voice trails off to an agonized groan, his throat snapping like a fragile branch on an old tree. His legs kick spasmodically for a few seconds, before finally hanging limp.

"Your usefulness is finished." Eckhardt lets go of the broken neck. Von Croy falls to the floor with a quiet thud. The Monstrum bends over the corpse.

Lara has now regained enough consciousness to hear the brief, wet noise of a torso being ripped open.

Within a minute, Eckhardt has daubed his symbols across the wall. He walks back to Werner Von Croy's corpse and picks up the old glasses. As he crushes the lenses in his hand, a flash of white light envelopes his body. In the blink of an eye, he has changed back to his true shape. The shape of Joachim Karel.

"You humans break so easily," Karel states and drops the splintered glasses. They land next to Lara's face, right before her closed eyes.

As Karel turns to leave the apartment, those closed eyes begin to flutter open. They catch a glimpse of a circle, an odd symbol on ...

… his extended hand. Lara glared at it, then met the Nephili's awaiting gaze. Tears of anger stung her wide, brown eyes.

"You killed Von Croy."

The tone of her voice and the look on her face was enough to convey the simple answer to Karel's offer: No.

Karel shook his head, disappointed. He had expected Croft to make the right decision, instead of letting her mind be clouded by these foolish thoughts of revenge. But it was obviously too late to persuade her now. "Stupid mortal. So be it!" A green glare enveloped his body, and he ascended from the ground like an angel without wings.

Lara instantly turned her attention to Eckhardt's corpse. The glove had fallen off his limp hand, the Sanglyph still resting on its fingers. Lara picked up both artifacts and sprinted away, as Karel fired a bright green bolt of energy in her direction. It exploded against the floor in a flash of crackling sparks.

Lara reached a ladder and frantically climbed up to the first walkway. Karel floated in circles through the air, constantly firing waves of energy after Lara. "We Nephilim were once beings of light!" he bellowed after her. "We are destined to rule!"

Lara ignored him and sprinted up the walkway. She soon reached the second ladder. Within seconds, she had climbed to the highest walkway. Sweat trickled down her weary body. Karel noticed the exhaustion and fired another bolt, aiming for her leg. The bolt hit its target, and Lara was swept off the metal floor, falling backwards.

Karel instantly rushed down behind her and wrapped his right arm around her neck. Lara tried to hit him with her elbow, but he caught her arm in his left hand whilst tightening his grip around her throat. Before she could struggle any further, he had flown to the top of the dome ceiling. Lara felt a searing heat as the Nephili's green light began to envelop her body.

"The time has come for the Nephilim to live in freedom once more. It's still not too late to join us, Croft," he spoke into her ear.

Lara gingerly slid her right hand into Eckhardt's glove. The Sanglyph felt warm and stingy around her fingers, charged with electric energy.

"You cannot imagine the powers I would grant you. Endless wisdom and strength. Even immortality …" He turned her around and held her by the throat. His pitchblack gaze bored into her brown eyes. "Make the right choice, and we will complete the Great Work together."

"This is the right choice." Lara thrust her gloved hand out and pressed the Sanglyph against Karel's chest.

The Nephili roared in pain and fell down through the entire hall. Lara fell with him, but as they whizzed past the Cubiculum Nephili, she managed to reach out and grab its ankle. The yellowish skin felt cold and slimy.

As Karel recovered from the Sanglyph's painful shock, he used his Nephilim abilities to repress gravity, slowing down to land safely on the floor. He looked up at the mortal dangling from the Sleeper's leg.

Lara attached the Sanglyph to the creature's ankle and let go. The artifact was already shimmering with a blinding, white glare. In mid-air, Lara grabbed a wire and swung in a majestic arch to land on the bottom of the hall.

A white glow started to emanate from the Sleeper. Beams of light shot out from its body, one of them impaling Karel. The Nephili stood motionless and screamed in agony as the light plunged through his chest. The glare spread from the Sleeper and exploded in an immense, white sphere, defeating all shadows.

Lara heard the explosion behind her as she sprinted towards the exit. Rubble fell from the ceiling, barely missing the running woman. Lara reached her hands out, pushed the doors open, burst out to the narrow stone hallway beneath the laboratory. The light billowed after her and filled her vision. For a moment, it seemed as if the whole world was bathed in this beautiful, warm light …

"You did it, Lara. It's over."

Silence. Hesitation.

"I know. Good to see you again, Werner."

"I couldn't leave you."


Lara's eyes fluttered open. She lay on the cold, dusty cavern floor under the Strahov. "How long was I unconscious?"

She turned her head slightly to contemplate the entrance to the Sleeper's hall. The doors had been blown off their hinges and lay useless on the ground. The doorway was blocked by an enormous heap of rocks, metal stumps and other rubble. The hall had collapsed, and no one would ever enter it again.

Lara shakily stood and began wandering up the tunnel. Having attained a slight limp and a throbbing headache, she felt weary to say the least. But she would have to get far away from this hellish complex before she could rest.

The steel door at the top of the tunnel opened into a familiar hall – Boaz' arena. Lara remembered the mutated abomination, and the memories of the man who had stayed behind to fight it came rushing back to her exhausted mind. He had been her only ally throughout this unfair battle. She burst onto the arena and called out his name.

No reply, apart from her own voice echoing off the dome ceiling.

"Kurtis? Where are you?… Answer me, goddammit!"

The hall was deserted. Boaz' beetle carcass lay at the marble wall, ten metres from the late Cabal member's real corpse – a mosquito-like figure with long, blood-smeared claws. Lara deduced that it had to be human blood. Kurtis' blood.

"Oh no. Oh hell no," she muttered and limped towards the middle of the hall. Fresh blood had pooled over the floor in a scarlet oval. Lara stared at the bad omen and felt her hope sink to the bottom of her mind, while despair floated on the surface. She knew she could make it out of the Strahov and continue her life alone, but what would she do afterwards? Or rather, what would she feel afterwards?

She crouched down and picked up a disk from the middle of the blood-pool. The Chirugai blade. The bronze artifact felt much lighter than it looked. She slid her fingers into the five holes and held the disk out before her eyes. That strange, orange glow was still emanating from it.

Suddenly, the razorsharp blades shot out from the disk, almost cutting Lara's face. She stood and felt the weapon vibrate in her grip. It reminded her of the way a trusty dog would sniff the air to find out where its master could have gone.

The disk flew around 180 degrees, pulling Lara with it. She turned to face the broad, dark gateway, from which Boaz had emerged earlier. The blades were retracted. Lara lowered the Chirugai and gave a slight, hopeful smile.

She walked across the arena and through the gateway.

Into the shadows.


A/N: Well, that's it! The oddly unhappy-yet-somewhat-hopeful ending of AoD, put down into written words. Sadly, Crystal Dynamics probably won't continue the Nephilim plot in TR7, but there are still plenty of great fanfics. I really must recommend "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" by theharshlightofday; probably the ultimate AoD sequel. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading this story as much as I did writing it. Thanks for all the reviews … -E.P.O.