Well, look at that! The second chapter of Shadowlights! Sorry for the delay - two months late .
This chappie right here is basically what really happened the night Kuru Eruna was destroyed, what Bakura's reaction was, and how he survived. (No yaoi yet, there probably won't be any until the fifth chapter…eh heh…oh, look at that. My two readers have now run away .)
Well, regardless, thank you again, everyone who reviewed! And the whole two people who actually read Shadowlights.
Note: Quite a bit of violence in here. Because little eight-year-old Bakura is still a homicidal little bastard! And also some weirdness, because a descent into the Underworld is rather…odd.
Also, I refer to the Gods featured in here as Him (His dickie-wickie), and such, but this isn't meant to offend any Christians or anything. I don't mean to claim that Anubis is the God, only a God. We're not going to go into Rhelle's fucked up religious beliefs here, but I suppose this will suffice.
Without further ado - The second chapter!
CHAPTER TWO
The Descent
They are coming.
A subtle awareness woke her, in the deep darkness before first light. Then she heard the things moving in the night, and knew that this brief age of grace had come to an end.
Shadows swept along the floor. Things flickered in the corners of her eyes. Things summoned by her life - and, yes, her death.
They watched her from the darkness. They were waiting for her. The time of reckoning was come.
She'd played a game with the gods, and for a long time she'd come out the victor. But no one can win forever. And we all must pay the price for our mistakes.
Sometimes you win a little, sometimes you lose a little.
And sometimes you lose all you have.
She'd played a game with the gods, and the stakes were her life and her very soul.
They were watching her. They were calling her, from this darkness that was not darkness, but the portal to another world.
They were waiting for her. They had waited long, and would not be denied their prize.
Her sight was growing dim in the darkness, her senses smothered. The shadows themselves were consuming her.
Then so be it, she thought as the shades twined around her. But I have secured my final victory.
"Bakura, Bakura," she whispered, shaking him. "Bakura, my son, wake."
He sat up beside her, rubbing his eyes. "Mother?" He blinked sleepily into the darkness. "Mother, I can hardly see you."
No, she thought. But then, you couldn't. I will never be seen by the living again.
"Listen," she said quietly to him. "We are under attack, and when I tell you, you will flee this house. Run. Run, and don't look back. Take shelter where you may. Wait, and I will send another to guide you."
"Mother?!" The panic and pain in his voice was agony. "What about you?! Where are you going?"
She felt a stab of grief in her own heart, also, of losing her son even as she was lost to the darkness. Where she was going, he could not follow.
"Hush." She pressed a finger to his lips. "If you have listened to nothing I ever said, listen to me now."
He swallowed his dread and nodded.
She let out a deep breath. And in the silence between the worlds, she gazed at her son for one last time.
Who would have known he was only eight years old? He seemed beyond age. Strong little body, solemn, dark little face under the scruffy thatch of his unnaturally pale hair. And yet it wasn't the strangeness of his hair that struck one so much as his eyes. Soft brown eyes…and yet there was such darkness in them that they seemed almost black, these eyes that looked on all things evenly, cool and calculating, without favor or fear, only the cold light of truth. These eyes that saw through all the illusion and subterfuge with which we surround ourselves, and scoured the very soul.
He has his father's eyes, she thought, and shivered.
And yet…he'd loved her, hadn't he, her little godling son? She'd loved him. She'd loved him enough to give her life so that he might have his.
She knew, whatever became of her, he would survive.
She kissed his brow in blessing, and he felt the tears on her cheeks. "Mother…?" His voice held its wordless question, but she did not reply.
She pressed something cold into the palm of his hand, and shouted "RUN!" Shoving him out into the night.
Alone, she closed her eyes, looked into the darkness of her own soul rather than the darkness that consumed her. With her last living breath, she called out to the dead and the thing they served; she called up from the emptiness a thing that was itself emptiness, the damned to save the innocent, and the Hound of Hell to guard her son through his descent.
Then the darkness fell over her, and she called no more.
She'd told him to run, and run he did. Even when he heard their house collapse and fall in upon itself, he didn't sop, but fled out from the darkness…and into a scene from the end of time.
Hellfires lit the air, rent with the screams of the doomed, and shadows danced with the dying and the dead. Kuru Eruna had fallen.
Bakura froze. Instinctively, he melted into the shadows between two houses and pressed himself against a wall. But his sharp dark eyes remained on the carnage, and began to pick apart the elements of this symphony of chaos.
Flaming arrows hissed through the night like demon birds, striking the low houses of Kuru Eruna. The houses were made of river mud mixed with plant compound, so they didn't burn - just smoldered and crumbled. They fell like a rain of embers upon their drowsing inhabitants, driving them outside - and into the blades of the waiting soldiers.
And yes, they were soldiers. Even from where he stood, he could see their uniformed kilts and head coverings, and recognized it as the regalia of the Pharaoh's Guard.
Pharaoh. His lips curled in a silent snarl. The name was like a curse to him, the hatred for the one who bore it bred into his very flesh and soul.
So the Pharaoh has found us here. So he has sent his hounds to wipe out this den of jackals that plagues him. Rage burned in his blood.
And yet…no, not right. A sense of wrongness rankled.
His mother had always taught him to watch, to analyze the situation. And so he did.
A small knot of Kuru Erunan men and women, knives and swords drawn, charged the advancing wall of the Pharaoh's Guard, who met them blade with blade. But the people of Kuru Eruna were near out of their wits with shock, and burned terribly from the arrows. And these were the Pharaoh's men, and the Pharaoh would have only the best.
The soldiers' swords twisted out from under the Kuru Erunans', and scored them across chests, legs, arms, severing tendons so that they could not hold a blade. Blood stained the darkness. One man's hand, severed from his body, landed near Bakura's hiding place.
The rebels fled.
A young girl was running from one of the Pharaoh's Guard. Not fast enough. The man struck her a terrible blow across the shoulder blades and back. She cried out and fell, but forced herself to her feet, and despite the river of red cascading down her body, fled on faster than she had before. The soldier only watched.
A terrible blow, Bakura mused, his thoughts cool though his hatred burned. But not a killing one. He could have had her, if he wanted to.
The Pharaoh's force swept through Kuru Eruna like an insatiable tide, a wall of swords and spears. Everything that could run, ran before it.
They are being driven, Bakura realized, eyes widening. They are being driven, to some dark or distant goal.
Once, long ago, he had seen these same thieves stealing a farmer's sheep. They'd roused and driven them from their pen with spears and knives and swords, dogged their heels and chased them - chased them right to the sole figure that waited at the gate with butchering knife in hand. He caught them one by one as they tried to flee.
In the end, the gate was piled shoulder-deep with the soft white bodies of sheep, a slaughter no one mourned.
And Bakura knew he was only watching a repeat of this massacre.
His eyes narrowed, and reflected in them was the carnage they saw: his people - aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, companions - forced along, running from the devil they knew to the one they didn't - from the soldiers with their flashing swords, and into the darkness beyond the village lights. And the Gods only knew what horror waited there.
They're rounding us up like sheep for the slaughter, driving us to our doom, he thought. They don't want us dead…they want us alive.
Why, for what purpose? He did not understand, did not think he could ever understand. He wasn't sure he wanted to.
Fury joined the horror in him. His eyes were slits, his teeth bared. His hands clenched into fists - the left closing around the thing it held.
He's forgotten about that, the object his mother had pressed to his palm before pushing him out into the night. He opened his hand and looked at it.
A knife.
No knife of flint or bronze or bone, like the ones he was used to. But a knife such as the gods themselves bear.
Average-sized, perhaps a little less than two hands' length, and unadorned. Simple, elegant, it fit perfectly into his palm.
But it was the blade that drew him in.
Leaf-shaped, and the edge so fine that his eye could hardly discern where it ended and the night began. And the metal of the blade…was like moonstone, shifting and shimmering and not of this world. But where moonstone was a soft silvery color, this was black, black as if darkness itself was trapped within.
Ghostly white shimmered along with the black, like the empty eyes of shades in endless shadows.
White. The color of death.
The voices of the lost were speaking through this thing, speaking without a sound.
A chill crept down his spine. He knew, instinctively, that a knife like this did not come from human hands.
Well and so, it was his now, and he would master it. His grip closed on the handle, and his eyes returned to the destruction. Fire glowed in his eyes as he watched the warriors of the Pharaoh driving his people into the darkness.
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. They were as good as dead, and he with them.
Well, so be it. They would kill him, but he would die no coward.
A pack of soldiers were pursuing a little child - too little, really, to be able to run properly. One of the men raise his club for the strike, the look on his face like the hollow-eyed grin of a skull. Murder was an amusing pastime to these men, and savagery a practical joke.
They were passing just beyond the shadows in which Bakura hid. A fleeting window of opportunity in which to act.
Bakura acted.
Most angered animals - big cats, wild dogs, birds of prey, even most humans - give warning of their intentions before they strike. Bakura didn't.
Soundlessly, he flung himself from the shadows and onto the back of one of the soldiers. In one fluid motion, he locked his knees on the man's sides - as if he were riding a horse - hooked his arm around his neck, forcing his head back and exposing his throat, and with the shadow-knife in his other hand, cut it.
The soldier was dead and twitching on the ground before he had time to cry out, and Bakura was on one of his companions. Dumb with shock, they only stared.
They were slow to react, but he knew when they did, their vengeance would be terrible. For the moment, though, he had the edge, and he pressed it to the utmost of his ability.
He was small, yes, and they were full-grown men, but in this his weakness was also his advantage. He was at least as skilled as any one of them, and a smaller target is harder to hit, faster than these big, bumbling giants who struggled to fend him off.
Besides, he was born for this moment, trained for it since he could hold a weapon. The arts of killing were engraved on mind and flesh, and living soul.
And body, mind, soul, he was bathed in the blood of his enemies, a warrior's purification. For the first time in his short life, he knew the ultimate freedom that is death.
Then, abruptly, time stopped.
Or fell away, as may be more truly said. The fighting continued, the fires burned, and the screams rent the night, but he had passed away from all this, no more real to him than he was to it.
The soldiers he'd been attacking looked around dumbly for the fierce little bane that assailed them, but he was gone from their world. They, and all things of them, were like a dream in which he was the only reality.
He knew he had slipped into the shadow-land between the worlds. And he was being watched.
Slowly, he turned. And saw it looking at him, real as he was in this place where nothing was real.
Dark of fur, long, slim legs under a body built for speed, sitting alert and ever-vigilant as the Guardian of the Tombs. Head erect, ears pricked forward, sharp eyes intent on him over its slender canine muzzle.
Jackal, Bakura thought. Dog of the Dead.
It took him only a moment to realize just how true those words were.
It was massive, bigger than any true jackal ever born. Its pelt was flawless and silken black, but no light glinted off that beautiful fur. It seemed to draw in all light and turn it to darkness.
The creature was made of shadows, the shadows of another world.
Its eyes were set like twin golden moons in the darkness. And a man looked out at Bakura from their depths.
That gaze was still locked with Bakura's as the thing got to its feet. The words formed in the child's mind, clearly as if they were spoken.
Your mother summoned me. Follow me now, if you want to live.
The jackal wheeled and began to run. And Bakura followed, because he did not truly believe his mother would call this creature to lead him wrongly, and also because it doesn't do to flout the commands of anything immortal.
Together, they ran. Past Kuru Erunan and Pharaoh's Guard alike, hunter and hunted, the jackal and the child flew, no more than a vagrant breath of wind to them both.
The jackal ran beyond the darkness at the fire's edge, to the shadow of the great cliffs…and into the gaping black abyss of the ancient tombs.
Faced with such fathomless darkness, even Bakura, the fearless little Prince of Thieves, hesitated.
These were the old tombs, much, much older than the others cut from rock by the Kuru Erunan people in their centuries of slavery. These tombs dated back to the time when the Pharaoh's people first came down into the Valley of the Nile, and the great battle was fought. The ancient dead from that battle lay in these tombs.
The people never went here anymore. Even the boldest of a bold race of thieves did not dare trespass in these silent sleepers. "No good treasure," some said, "Not worth the trouble." "Bad luck," others insisted, which was probably closest to the truth. So the thieves left it be, children would not play there, and even the desert creatures avoided it. For they all knew, blind though they all too often were, that this was not a place where the living walked.
In those halls was death. This was not a place of silent peace - this was a place of hatred eternal.
They had died fighting each other, the Kuru Erunans and the Pharaoh's people who lay in this darkness. And they would fight in death 'till the end of time, rotted bodies locked in immortal combat. For the dead take with them into death all the hatred of their mortality, and here the killers were bound to those who killed them.
One in death if not in life. Doomed to the hell of their own hatred.
Well, Bakura thought; If my path leads through this place, who am I to abandon it now? Besides, he cast a glance at the massacre that was still taking place behind him. Where better to hide from the living than in a place of the dead?
He stepped forward, and vanished into the endless shadows.
So dark, dark all around. He couldn't see his hands in front of him, couldn't see his jackal guardian save for two flame-like eyes. He wouldn't have known there was a ground if he wasn't walking on it.
Only darkness, darkness all around. And the voices, whispering at the edge of hearing, too quiet to understand and too persistent to ignore. Things seemed to brush against him, the ghost of a sensation. Bakura kept walking.
Far he went. And all he saw was darkness.
Finally, Bakura stopped in his tracks and wheeled on the jackal beside him. "Hound, I have followed you without question, but I will follow no further until you tell me who - and what - you are, where we are going, and what has happened to my mother."
Those bright, sad eyes set in the shadow of a shadow regarded Bakura for a moment.
You may call me Anu, for I am the servant of the Jackal God, and I bear His name as I bear His bond of servitude. But…
Anu turned his face upward to where the sky should be, but there was only darkness.
I had another name once, and another form that was my own. The being that I was is dead now, lost as my name was lost. Only I, as a shade, remain.
Anu looked back at Bakura.
You see, I was your mother's master when she lived as a slave, the man who tried to take her maidenhood. And because sometimes we become the sin we commit, and that is its own punishment, when she killed me so that her people might live, she took my soul as she took my life, and became the master of me.
As for her final fate -
Anu froze. He never did finish his sentence, for at that moment something stepped out of the darkened mists.
A powerful creature, a warrior-bodied creature. A ceremonial breastplate fanned out across His chest like the rays of the sun, and a kilt was wrapped around narrow male hips. But other than that, there was nothing to obscure the sheer power of the thing.
He bore no weapon, for He needed none to be dangerous. His legs were thick and strong as a Hellene athlete's; the muscles of His abdomen stood out from his body, and His arms were corded with the sinew of a powerful hunter. He had the gilded dark skin of the people in the lands of the sun. But there was no sun here.
And His head was that of a jackal, fur black as night, eyes yellow as the dying sun regarding the boy with a chill intensity.
The Jackal God, Bakura thought, though he dared not say it. The God who both prepared the dead for their journey and ended it, the First Embalmer and the Judge of the Dead, with the head of a jackal, the beast that devours the bodies of the dead.
But Bakura was not dead. He knew this. He had come to this place of death yet alive.
Anu's eyes were so wide that the whites showed around with fear. His ears flicked back against his head, and he went down on his belly in the age-old manner of the supplicant beast. Master, please, have mercy; he is the son -
The God's eyes moved to Anu, and His lips lifted. He made a strange gesture and a flash of light - and Anu was gone.
Bakura was alone.
"What have you done with him?!" Bakura demanded, his little shoulders squared, body set in a warrior's stance.
The cool eyes returned to him. The God's lips moved like a human's, and human words came from them.
"I did not kill him, if that's what you're thinking. One can't kill something that is already dead." He cocked His head from side to side, looking at Bakura like a carrion bird. "You, child, on the other hand…"
Despite himself, Bakura took a step back.
The Jackal God threw His head back and laughed out loud. But those cold eyes came back to Bakura. "You can go neither forwards nor back. For you have kept company among the dead, and you can never walk with the living again.
"Come for your judgment, child. They are waiting."
From the darkness like a vision or a nightmare, Bakura saw the Scales, balances of the good and evil of the universe. On one side sat the feather of Ma'at, the Feather of Truth…and on the other, he knew, would sit his own heart.
But his heart was yet beating in his breast.
Beyond the vision of the Scales, he saw the darkness move. A pair of eyes looked out at him. The monster without shape or form.
When he tried to pin it with his gaze, the thing seemed to flicker and change shape; part lion, part hippopotamus, part crocodile, and all horror. The monster that consumed monsters.
Ammit, the Devourer of the Damned.
A deep growl rose from the depths of the beast, a hunger not only of the body.
Yes. A hundred thousand souls have you devoured, and yet still you hunger, Bakura thought. Well, my soul you shall not have.
The boy turned back to the God, fierce brown eyes meeting cold dark ones, accusing the Accuser. "You have no right," Bakura said. "I am yet alive."
The God remained impassive. "Come for your judgment, child," He repeated. "Your life is over before it ever began."
He reached one clawed hand out towards the boy.
Rage made of Bakura's childish features a mask of death. His little body contorted, and his brown eyes took on a hue of red - the color of blood, the color of evil. A sudden wind blew viciously in this place of utter stillness.
And the Jackal God knew, too late, that He had roused a force even He could not defeat.
Bakura's voice was like tempest thunder, or the shifting of the depths as the earth breaks apart. "You will not judge me, for my time of judgment has not yet come. Death will not take me, for I AM death!"
The child raised his arms in the sign of summoning. And the little spirits, his companions since birth - the little spirits of both life and death - flocked to him and rose up, thousands upon thousands, like a great cloud against the shadows, darker than darkness, consuming and devouring the Jackal God.
Then, suddenly, the ground opened under Bakura's feet, and there was nothing above. He could feel the very agony as some great unknowable hand tore the fabric of creation, and he tumbled through the hole into the abyss.
Falling, falling, or perhaps flying. He could not tell the difference anymore.
He opened his mouth to scream, but it was torn from his throat before he could utter a sound. The solar wind howled in his ears, then even that was gone. For there could be no sound here, and no silence - only the emptiness that lies between the worlds.
Bakura closed his eyes, for he knew there was nothing to see.
Then, abruptly as it had begun, his strange odyssey ended. Bakura opened his eyes. And stared in horror at the sight before him.
The hall was darkness, its trappings shadows. The subjects of the court that lined the narrow way were shades, shifting and flickering, and jabbering in tongues long lost.
And He sat above them all, looking down at life and at death, creation and destruction alike, upon His high throne, like the king of all kings. Because that was what he was.
Bakura stood alone before the King of the Dead.
To be continued…
Oooh! Cliffhanger! Another reason for my fans to hate me :D
Notes:
- Yeah, a lot of this isn't quite supposed to make sense. More will be explained in the next chapter.
- Somehow I doubt Bakura would indifferently watch the slaughter of Kuru Eruna. And I think that even as a child, he had unusual self-control and viciousness, not to mention extremely dangerous skills. So I had him kill a few people, and try to kill a God. Aww, what a cute kid!
- The whole "white the color of death" thing I got from another fanfic (one by Chevira Lowe, btw), so I don't know about the historical accurate-ness of it. But red, in Egypt, is seen as the color of evil. The God Set had red hair and eyes, and they saw him as marked by evil. Poor Set ;;
- I also think that Bakura had more training in weaponry and sorcery stuff than most people would believe. Kawaii little killer!
- Any more questions, ask in reviews.
…Anyway. Yeah. Please review. I don't care if it's signed or not. I don't care if it's only a few words. I just really want to know who's reading this, and what they think of it. Please? ;;