Wow, did I take long enough? .O Sorry about this, guys. A four-month gap between chapters. Eh-heh. But Ryou appears in this one! :D :D :D Yaaaaaay! I've been waiting for this as long as you guys have.
Well, anyway, here ya go…
CHAPTER FIVE
The Mirror of the Soul
Ten years later…
Bakura stood on a small hill in the grey light before dawn. The fierce child had grown into a powerful man, and the Prince of Thieves had become a King.
Yes, he had grown; he was so much taller now, and stronger, muscles rippling under his dark skin like some great cat. He had been perfected by the cruelties of his life, stripped of all weakness.
But the scars were still there upon his face, marking him with the Death God's blessing. They did not mar his strange beauty; they only enhanced it. His smile, too, was the same, and his dark eyes like portals into another world.
It was not that he was particularly big or strong; he didn't need to be. Power flowed in his veins, and darkness radiated from him like heat from a fire. His people whispered about it when they thought he wasn't listening: The aura of another world surrounds him. Demons themselves pay him homage, and the elemental spirits dance in his footsteps. The heir and the embodiment of darkness.
His people, his thieves. They waited just behind the hill, watching for his signal.
He could see them in his mind's eye. Ah, ye Gods, they were a wild crew, the flotsam and jetsam of society; battle-scarred, bristling with weapons, killers in body and soul. Their appearance bore witness to their ferocity, like pariah dogs that lived on their wits and strength.
Bakura smiled darkly. Yes, these were his people and he was their king.
He was robed as such, a killer, a king. Adorned with talismans, gold and jeweled; armed with a sword thrust through a sash at the waist; dressed in the robe of a true ruler, red with trim of white. The color of evil and the color of death. Fitting, certainly, for one such as him.
But there was no time for musings, poetic nothings. The song of destruction and the lust for battle howled through his veins, and those of his companions. They looked to him, and he nodded. Together, they set off at a run over the desert.
Surer, more silent than horses, they raced like a pack of wolves through the graying light, wordless and without sound. And shadows, far deeper than the morning darkness, followed them.
They knew what they must do, and they reveled in it. They had done it a hundred times before, and the steps of the dance were engraved on body and soul.
Like a mirage over the desert, the temple and its little town appeared. Bakura grinned. He'd waited for this.
He often targeted temples. The Pharaoh, his greatest enemy, was by virtue of his very position High Priest and guardian of every temple in the land. So Bakura liked to destroy them. The little towns that tend to spring up next to temples he destroyed too, an added bonus.
But before it even came into full view, Bakura knew something was wrong.
This early in the morning, the town should still be dark, and the gates of the wall around it - they all had walls these days - open to admit the shepherds with their flocks. But instead, lights burned brightly in every dwelling and every gate was sealed shut.
Bakura cursed. They knew he was coming.
He signaled to his band to circle the town and look for another way in, then sped off alone in the direction of the temple. They could fortify the town, but a place of worship wasn't so easily defended.
A wall surrounded the temple, too, curving around the structure till Bakura couldn't see it anymore. But this one was unguarded, and there were steps carved up the wall, so that one might ascend easily to the presence of divinity, up to the pillars that lined the top.
As he climbed up and came near to them, he could see these columned depicted the Goddess Auset at various stages of Her life, surrounded by the hieroglyphics of Her magic spells.
Bakura's eyes widened as he realized it. Fourteen columns, on the great circle of the wall. For the fourteen full moons of the year.
The very temple itself was in the shape of a circle - a full moon. A testament to the Lady, who is light in the darkness and whose symbol is the moon.
The Khemetians don't make their temples like this, he thought. Finding all lust for battle had left him. He shivered and looked at one of the columns, with its carving of the Lady.
Power like a chill wind caressed him. But the air was warm, and there was no wind.
He heard a woman's laughter somewhere.
No, he thought. But then, it was not the Khemetians who made this place.
Standing here, he could see the full temple compound was nestled inside the wall. To the right and left, there were buildings where the priests and priestesses - respectively - ate, slept, worked, and lived. To the far end, there was the sanctuary, a small but beautifully made and painted. And before him, there was paradise.
A garden, where bloomed every kind of plant, tree, fruit, and flower he had ever heard of, and then some. They had been planted by a genius hand, and the place was a marvel of art and beauty. Footpaths wound through the flora, leading to the priests' or priestesses' quarters, the sanctuary, or other locations.
Everything, without exception, was utterly deserted.
Bakura continued forward, as through drawn by magic. He went down another flight of stair on the wall (ascending on one side, descending on the other; for the ascending and descending rites of the Lady, he assumed. Ye Gods, everything in this place was charged with divine symbolism), continuing on to a path in the garden.
He walked through it, overcome, and feeling like the serpent in this Eden. But that did not dim his awe, and he found he could not harm a single stone of this place; the utter peace of it brought him to his knees.
He followed the path, and eventually it took him to the sanctuary, or the steps leading up to the sanctuary. Whatever had made this place, Bakura thought, it must have been step-happy. There were a damn lot of steps here.
But these thoughts were quickly dispelled, because there was someone on the steps where no one had been before. A young boy. (Actually, he looked only a few years younger than Bakura, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, but so full of love and compassion that Bakura found himself calling him, 'the boy.') He seemed such a part of this place, so filled with the beauty and serenity, that Bakura did not at first realize he looked just like him.
His hair was the same color as Bakura's, ghostly white, uncut and unbound, falling freely around his face and shoulders. His skin, though, was fairer than Bakura's, fairer than that of most people who lived in this sun-baked land. Fair as the first glow of dawn.
His eyes were of brown. Beautiful eyes, as full of light as Bakura's were full of darkness. Eyes that held all the lights of the universe, worlds within worlds that Bakura would never know. Innocent without being naïve, wise without being cynical; nothing could hide from those eyes, that looked on a cruel world with infinite compassion.
But the lamp is only a vessel for what lies within it, and Bakura knew that however strange this boy may look - however much like himself - his body was only a fragile lamp for the light that dwelt within.
It seemed he had known him before. From the dreams he did not remember, the lives he had forgotten. His reflection, who held him and was held, loved him and was loved, two halves of one circle - ever-changing, ever-lasting, its only assurance in its own eternal self.
The boy spoke, and his voice was clear and sweet. "Take off your shoes, for you walk on hallowed ground."
Strange, to the King of Thieves, to be spoken to thus. Stranger still, that he found himself obeying.
The boy smiled at him, sweet as the sun rising. "I'm afraid you will find nothing here, Thief Lord. Everyone is gathered in the town, armed, and the gates are barred against you."
Bakura managed a soft, "How?"
The boy was still smiling. "She told me, in a dream."
And Bakura knew that this 'She' of whom he spoke was no mortal woman.
The boy came down the stairs, smoothly, swiftly, until he stood face to face with Bakura, each of them looking into his own reflection, the mirror of the soul. Without fear, the child reached up and stroked the harsh scars on Bakura's face. "You have been marked by dead," he said softly.
The breath caught in Bakura's throat. "Most don't realize."
The boy gazed at him. "No, but then they are only human."
Bakura realized he was afraid. He, who feared nothing, feared this young boy. The child knew a magic against which Bakura was helpless. He awakened things that had lain long dead in the Thief Lord, a tenderness that made him tremble to the core of his being. And Bakura knew only one way to deal with what he feared - by destroying it.
Darkness whispered once again at his ear, and the gentleness woken in him turned its face away, fading as if it had never been.
There was a great crash as Bakura's band stormed the temple and swarmed into the garden. On Bakura's orders, they took the boy hostage.
Beautiful and utterly indifferent, the sun rose, light shining on innocent and guilty alike.
888
They took the boy with them when they left across the desert, sole prize of a fruitless raid, who came almost willingly. His hands were bound behind his back, yet he walked so peacefully between heaven and earth, and even as a captive seemed the freest of them all.
The faces of his captors passed before him like figures from a nightmare: a monster of a man covered in scars; a beautiful woman with a fierce face, and an empty socket where her left eyes should be; a quick dark man with the pale smile of a demon. None spoke to him, though, and none looked him in the eye. And he understood he was a dead man walking.
They walked for a long, long time in the desert in the heat of the day. Though no one seemed to be following them, they could not risk being tracked and thus often had to wait as Bakura or one of the others erased their prints from the sand. They split up and backtracked so many times that the boy became well and truly lost, and couldn't have found his way back to the temple if he tried. Not that it really mattered.
The sun was low in the sky by the time they reached Bakura's destination. The thieves slipped away, one by one. None of them wanted to be here when the sun went down.
At first glance, it didn't look like much. A little hollow in the sun-baked earth and gravel of the desert. It was very rocky here, and boulders of all sizes littered the area.
But there was a cleared space in the center. Here there was a great standing stone, rising from the earth but not of it, and upon this stone were carved the tiny letters of a lost language.
The boy understood, and shuddered.
There are some places that are sacred by virtue of their very being; places where the veil between the worlds wears thin, where there is no division between the past and future, the living and the dead.
There are many such places across the face of the world. The standing stones on Salisbury Plane, the house of the Oracle at Delphi, the great Temple in Judea…and this place. This, though, was sacred not to the light, as the others were - but to the darkness.
Before the Khemetians had conquered the Valley of the Nile, before even Bakura's people had come here, there were those who watched the waters rise and fall, who lived off the bounty of the Nile and paid its Gods their tribute in blood.
They gave the greatest offering they knew: a human life. Yes, they had sacrificed here, and the screams and blood of the victims tainted this place even now.
The boy looked to the sky and saw that the sun was resting on the horizon, an eye of light above the rim of the world. Sunset, that transition time. The shimmer of the Gods is easier to perceive at dusk and dawn, and in the mix of shadow and light, the gateway to eternity opens.
All the other thieves had left. Bakura and the boy were alone now, alone with the dead and the desert silence. Bakura dragged him over to the standing stone and forced him to his knees.
The shadows took them. That was the only way the boy knew to describe it. The growing darkness surrounded them, fell over them like a blanket, though no earthly darkness was ever this bleak. Nameless things flickered at the corners of the child's eyes, and the wind seemed to carry whispers of death and the fate that awaited him.
But he could see, and he saw in the Thief King's hands a knife where no knife had been before. He smiled, and as the boy watched, Bakura took the knife and opened a deep gash in the palm of his own hand. Bakura had always loved pain, even his own. He cupped his hands, and the blood filled them as water from a spring fills a sacred pool.
The little things the boy saw flickering grew ecstatic, and flocked to drink of Bakura's blood.
In ages after, from such would come the legends of vampires and blood-sucking demons, but in truth everything dead hungers for blood. Blood is life.
So he commands the spirits of the dead, the little souls, and binds them to him with his own blood, the boy thought. The souls of his victims.
"Yes and no," Bakura replied, reading his thoughts effortlessly. "Some of them were my victims…and some of them were never human. This is but the appetizer before the feast."
They drained the blood from Bakura's palms, and began dancing and flickering around the two, frantic with anticipation. Yes, the child thought. They will devour my body so that the Thief Lord can take my soul.
Bakura kneeled so that he was face to face with the boy. "Long ago," he whispered, caressing the shadow-knife with love. "Set, the Evil God, killed his brother Ausar and cut his body into fourteen pieces with a knife both sacred and profane."
The boy's eyes widened. "Even the wisest of the priests do not know from whence came a blade that could kill a God, or what became of it."
"Well," Bakura said, still smiling and holding the knife. "You know, now."
With that, he sealed his mouth over the boy's and drove the knife into the child's heart.
Pain exploded in Bakura's own body as steel entered his own chest. He opened his mouth to scream, but it was filled with blood. He tore his lips away from the other's, looked at his face…and saw himself.
They had switched places, their souls switched bodies. The boy's soul looked out from Bakura's body, and Bakura looked out from the boy's. The spirit of one in the body of the other, each the mirror of the soul.
Then vision took them like a riptide, and they thought no more.
Children were playing in the garden; their laughter rose with the dust in the golden light of the afternoon sun. A woman, laughing also, was bringing them in for prayers. The white-haired boy was leading them, singing, and Bakura realized it was his past that he saw, the boy's life in the Temple of Auset.
Offspring of priests and priestesses, as well as children abandoned on the temple steps, are often taken in as wards of the sanctuary. Bakura understood that the boy must be one of these.
Whatever he was, he had been happy. He had walked his first steps here, spoken his first words, had grown up from an infant among those dedicated to the Sacred, and though he was never really one of them, he had been happy here. Raised in perfect innocence in the shadow of a Goddess, surrounded by a kind of grace Bakura could not even imagine.
Bakura felt his own history being drawn from him, his life, in all its darkness: his childhood in Kuru Eruna, its destruction, the war he waged against the Pharaoh. All his secrets were laid bare before this simple boy.
Light and darkness, their histories and their souls blending like a rising canticle until neither could tell where one ended and the other began.
They spiraled into the past they shared, to other lives where their two had been one. Beautiful stories with tragic endings, always, love destroyed by hatred and reborn to begin it all again.
Always.
888
Bakura opened his eyes, in his own body again, lying on the ground. The visions, the little spirits, the shadow-knife were all gone. Darkness surrounded him, but it was only the deep indigo of an earthly night. Judging from the positions of the stars, dawn was not far off.
He rolled over and saw that the boy was awake also, and looking at him. They were, Bakura slowly realized, both completely unharmed.
"Ryou," Bakura said, which he knew was the boy's name. He tasted it on his tongue like strange wine. He had never heard a name like that before, and indeed, he never would again. It was a word of power in a language that would not be spoken for two thousand years.
"Bakura," the boy - Ryou - replied, and the Thief King stiffened with horror.
To Bakura's people, one's name is what they are. It is a word of power over your soul; if someone knows your name, they can use it to command you as they choose.
Very, very few, living or dead, had knowledge of Bakura's name. But this boy, this child…he knew.
The child knew his name. Bakura couldn't kill him now even if he wanted to.
His band of thieves were there, peering at him and looking very puzzled. Bakura sighed; whatever else he was, he was a King. Still shaking, he rose to his feet and said with a confidence he did not feel: "You are to take this boy to The Camp, and treat him as a guest of honor. You will give him food, drink, anything he desires. But keep him under watch at all times, and do not let him out of the camp. I shall be in my own tent."
No one had ever come back alive from the sacrifice, least of all as a guest of honor. Bakura expected to hear mutterings and whispers colored with wild speculation.
But instead there was only silence and a hundred pairs of questioning eyes pressing against him as he turned and walked out into the night. Utter silence.
To be continued…
Notes:
- Bakura is eighteen in this, if you didn't realize, and Ryou is about fifteen.
- I hope I described the Temple well enough for you guys x.x It's not based on any historical model of any Egyptian temple, as far as I know, but that's not the point.
- You'll find out more about Bakura's people in the next chapter. I like them. They're pretty damn cool :D
- The standing stones on Salisbury Plane refer to Stonehenge; The Oracle at Delphi refers to the prophetess of Apollo in ancient Greece; the Temple in Judea was the one that Solomon built. They're all very spiffy.
- In many cultures, sunset and sunrise tend to signal strange happenings. I'm not aware that the Egyptians themselves thought this, but I wanted to work the legend in here.
- The Egyptians believed that if you destroyed a dead person's body, their soul would wander the earth without any way to rest. Bakura's little spirits devour the body of his victims when they're dying, and Bakura yoinks their soul. Crazy klepto Bakura.
- Sorry if I confused anyone in the part where Bakura and Ryou switched bodies. :::sweatdrop:::
- The bond between Bakura and Ryou goes back many lifetimes, and I needed to work that in here (I stuck it in during the visions). Their love is, however, cursed. Mweh.
Only Bakura would show his affection for a person by trying to kill him, wouldn't he? XD Oh Bakura.
Don't worry, if you're dissatisfied with the interaction between them in this chapter, the next chapter will be much more juicy. ASS PIRATES! BOOTY BANDITS!
Bakura: I hate you so much.
Yes, but you love Ryou .
A massive thank you to everyone who reviewed last chapter. I love you all. Bakura better thank you, too; it's because of you that he isn't the Pharaoh's ho.
Bakura: … :::flees:::