Chapter 38: Sandstorm
The duel was painful for Anzu to watch, not just because she had to watch a monster controlling Marik's body but because he was toying with Kaiba just like he was toying with all of them. And if confident, unshakeable Kaiba could break under the pressure, she didn't want to think what the monster could do to her friends. She shot a few glances at the pharaoh, but he watched the duel with a permanent frown; he never glanced back.
"Pride will be the death of us all," Ishizu murmured at one point, her face pale.
Anzu would have answered her, but she couldn't.
She was suddenly standing in a dark auditorium.
"Marik," she whispered, voice hitching. He was sitting in one of the red velvet seats, head sagging, supported by the chair more like a propped doll than a human. But he looked up enough to give her the tiniest, tired smile.
"Thought I'd visit," he whispered back, "while the rod's wavering."
She dropped to her knees in front of him, tried to grasp his hands. But her fingers passed right through.
"I'm not all here." His smile turned wry. "Not all anywhere. I think I lost pieces . . . in the sand."
Even as he said it, he flickered like a bad projection.
"You're still fighting." She tried for a smile, tried not to let the worry show. "That's good! We're fighting for you, too. Odion's awake!"
"I saw. I'm glad." His eyes narrowed, a hint at the old, irritable Marik. "You were meant to tell him to run."
"He doesn't want to leave you. None of us do. And we have a plan."
"I'm sorry," he said.
She blinked. He looked down at her brace, and she covered it with her good hand, cheeks flushing.
"I told Kaiba." He flickered again. "I couldn't disappear without telling you."
"So that's it?" she huffed. "As long as you make your apologies, you can just fade into nothing, and you think that's fine?"
It was his turn to blink. "I'm trying—"
"I told you to get your body back and we'd talk about it in the real world. About everything. Did I say 'fade into nothing like an idiot'? No. I wouldn't, because I'm not an idiot."
She couldn't twist his ear since he was playing ghost, so she imagined a bucket of his hated popcorn, and she tossed a handful in his face. The kernels passed right through, but he still swatted at them with a scowl. His flickering outline solidified.
"You're turning sixteen in a few months," she snapped. "You haven't even had a birthday party. You've never gone to an amusement park. You've never gone to school. Do you think I'll let you die before you experience any of that?"
"Devil woman," he snarled, "have it your way."
But his eyes were moist.
"I can't imagine what you're going through," she said, gentler now. "And for what it's worth . . . I forgive you." She shook her brace meaningfully. "But don't you dare take that as an escape. If you're really sorry, you'll still be alive after it heals so I can hit you with it."
"If you want me to stay alive just to get punched, you're delusional." He leaned forward, his face inches from hers. "I want a game."
She rolled her eyes. "I'm not a duelist. That's—"
"Senet." He held up his palm, and what looked like a pencil box appeared atop it. The sides were patterned with hieroglyphs, the top with a narrow checkerboard. "If I live, you'll play Senet with me."
"That's all you want?" He flickered again, and her voice softened. "Marik, if you live, I'll play a hundred rounds."
"I'll count them," he said.
And then he flickered once more and was gone. But at least he'd left with a fire in his eyes.
Seto held the visions back with sheer willpower, empty hand clenched in a fist that trembled all the way up to his shoulder, tongue trapped between his teeth and tasting of copper. The audience watched the duel in silence, and he would have appreciated if the field mirrored it, but there was no shutting up the maniac on the other side of it, who cackled on a whim and seemed to feel no social pressures at all, certainly none that encouraged respect or reticence.
"Only three rounds," he taunted, "but your knees say you can't even last that long."
Even destroying his fake mirror god couldn't put a sock in it, though it knocked the Egyptian down to 200 lifepoints. Seto rid himself of the golem at last, but he was down to 500. Both of them hanging on by fingernails. It was not the sweeping victory he had planned, but he would take victory by his fingernails all the same.
Three cards from his entire deck to see him to victory: One card to save his lifepoints from defeat. One Blue-Eyes to stand with him on the field for better or for worse.
And one more. The card he would bet against a god.
"You knew the price of letting me choose three cards." Marik's tongue lolled as he grinned. "A fake god is gone, but a real one shall rise."
If Seto were the praying type, he would have prayed it could at least rise with less talking. Then again, even if gods were real, Seto wouldn't fault them for being powerless to stop the chatter across the field. He was certain Marik wouldn't even be silent in the grave.
And then it arrived at last—
The golden god. Risen from the grave to enact its special attack that would burn everything on the field at once to ash.
The brief glimpse during Yori's duel had done Ra no justice. The phoenix drowned the field in blinding light, filled every corner of Seto's soul and left him exposed to the world. It was the sun itself, and how could anyone destroy the sun when it incinerated with a single look?
But Seto had built his life by overthrowing untouchable power. He knew nothing else.
So when Ra attacked, he countered with Fiend's Sanctuary. Spells and traps wouldn't work directly against the god, but Fiend's Sanctuary was a spell card that gave Seto a monster to counter another monster. The thin silver soldier couldn't attack, but it stood on the field as a mirror, and Seto smirked behind it. Let the god stare itself down in the reflection and take all the fire of its attack turned back, let it burn out its own eyes. It would not only destroy Ra but count as battle damage against Marik.
"No!" Marik shrieked, but he was unable to recall the attack order. "No, no!"
Above him, Ra spread its wings wide, dove for the attack.
This duel was over.
Seto had won.
He felt the relief as a rush to his system, and that in itself made him burn, because he'd never needed to be relieved to win a duel in the past.
Then Marik lifted the rod, the fury in his face as bright as the god above.
And its hollow eye pierced to Seto's core.
He braced his knees, clawed his nails into his palms. He'd resisted this long!
But the relief had already relaxed him, and through some little crack—
—the light leaked in.
It was not the same library; it was a twisted, nightmare version of it where every bookcase had toppled, and through the open window, a sandstorm had blown in. He was half-buried in sand and books, and when he reached out for his desk, his hand sank into a sand dune that was growing with every second. Coughing, Seto dragged himself to the window, but he couldn't close it; at his touch, the entire wall crumbled, and it was not the mansion's lawn nor the streets of Domino beyond it, but an expanse of scalding sand, red as blood.
And Marik stood above him, his eyes the same shade.
"Bow to me, priest," he ordered.
Seto felt the command in every limb.
But he had never bowed to anyone in his life.
The wind blasted sand into his face, and the ground sucked him in as he tried to rise.
"Bow to me!" Marik shrieked.
Seto was already buried up to his chest, sinking further with every second. The sand was in his throat, in his eyes, but he reached blindly and caught Marik's ankle.
And when he sank into the ground, he pulled the Egyptian with him.
From the start of the duel, Yami had felt the burn of indecision in his stomach. He didn't know what would happen if Marik was beaten. Perhaps he would become completely unstable; Yami couldn't risk that, not with Yori's life hinged on a future match.
But he also couldn't bring himself to wish for Kaiba's defeat.
He glanced at Mokuba. The boy clung tightly to his guard, not even watching the duel anymore.
And Yami remembered an island. A castle tower. Pegasus had chained Mokuba in a dungeon, and Kaiba had raised himself from a coma to save his brother. He'd fought off armed guards when he could barely walk; he'd flown himself to the middle of the ocean, completely alone; and he'd stood at the edge of a tower with madness in his eyes, with the message Kill me if you can because nothing short of death would stop him.
Facing the rise of Ra, Yami saw that same madness in his eyes.
And he saw Marik lift the rod.
"Yuugi," he whispered. It wasn't a question of what the boy would do were he here—Yami knew exactly what his partner would do. On the tower, Yuugi had let Kaiba win even when it meant he might lose his grandpa.
The question wasn't what Yuugi would do, or what Yami would have done with the boy standing beside him.
It was what he would do without him.
And he couldn't decide.
Seto fell through a cyclone of sand and pages, and in the gaps of the chaos, he saw memories—late nights in Gozaburo's library, nodding off only to be awakened with a sharp crack across the knuckles and Hobson's smirk; the first days at KaibaCorp, the terrifying uncertainty as he swept the plaque that said Gozaburo Kaiba, CEO, into the trash and replaced it with one that said Seto Kaiba while something screamed in the back of his mind that he was only fifteen, and the world was too deep, and he was drowning; his first press conference; his first PR slip and the ruthless aftermath. The world was too deep, and he was drowning.
He was drowning. The sand gave way to ocean water, and there was a weight on his ankle, dragging him deeper into black depths. Far above, someone held the key, and they said, "Bow to me," but Seto felt the truth in his palm.
He dragged Marik down with him, and then it was a different storm. Then he was sinking in underground tombs and yellow stone and darkness, and it wasn't Gozaburo lurking the hallways; it was a man with the same shadow.
And then even deeper, to a darkness musty with age and a town with a forbidden name, where the streets ran red with blood and soldiers dragged bodies underground while a man ushered them every moment to move faster, faster, faster.
There was a light far above. Barely a star in the atmosphere. But Seto didn't know how to reach it. All he knew was to hold tight, to keep both of them falling in the eye of the hurricane, because if this insanity was to be his grave, it would be Marik's, too.
Marik twisted to grab Seto by the collar, both of them grappling to throw the other off. And though Marik panted for breath, sweat dotting his forehead, he leered all the same.
"Remember it, priest? Is it all coming back to you?"
And then it was Yori in the background, singing in the lounge while Seto stared and thought there was something just out of sight, just out of reach, an idea he'd never before had and couldn't articulate.
Marik cackled. The sound warped the images, darkened Yori's skin and washed the lounge away into harsh Egyptian sunlight. She bowed to Seto and said, "Yes, master," and if he looked, he knew he would be wearing the gaudy jewelry, the imposter's cape, but he refused to look, and all he thought was, Not you, too.
"If you'll fight me," Marik screamed, "then fight!"
Now it was Marik with the gaudy jewelry and imposter's cape, Marik who looked back at him with his own face, with eyes as blue as his own and skin as dark as Yori's.
"I am commander of the rod," the imposter hissed. "And all will bow to me. Even this pathetic echo."
And Seto knew.
Gods, he knew.
That he was looking at himself.
Only the mirror could ever be so arrogant.
His grip slackened, and then Priest Seth seized him by the wrist, twisted it back. Seto grabbed with his other hand, but it was too late.
The priest threw him into the storm.
A hundred rounds, she'd promised him. A hundred rounds if he could just survive. If he could just outlast the darkness. When Marik had first fallen into the dark, he'd been just as terrified of going back to the sun as he was of sinking into the depths.
Now he was afraid of only one.
There was a battle for the rod; he could feel it shake the walls of his prison. And he would not be content to stand back and hope Kaiba won. He had to do his part to make it happen.
He focused his mind, and even though he trembled, even though he flickered in and out of existence, the tombs around him gave way to soft orange sand.
The moment he stepped onto the dunes, a red sandstorm whipped into existence, tried to batter him back into hiding, but he pushed his way through, through the dark and the memories, even the moments when his own father's blood was on his hands, when the seventy white candles burned hot in his mind; he pushed through. And he found the monster standing over a black cage, crowing over his newly trapped prize, ready to unleash the full power of the rod.
"I'm still here," Marik said. He couldn't manage volume or conviction because he'd barely regained a voice at all, but it was something. Even if he could see through his own hands like he was made of glass, it was something. "I'm still here."
"Are you?" The monster turned, grinned at him with his own face.
But he was missing an eye.
The monster wasn't whole, couldn't be whole, not while Marik was still standing.
"It's my body," Marik said. "It's my life."
"You're the one who asked for power," the thing spat. "Don't blame me if it overwhelms you."
It launched itself at him, knocked Marik back with a wave of force that jangled his bones like wind chimes. He remembered a battle of power with the spirit of the ring; he'd nearly lost, even though the spirit was half-dead from a shadow game and Marik had been rested and whole. Now he was the one half-dead, and the monster howled with the voice of a hundred shadows.
"One hundred and twenty-seven"—the monster grinned—"to be exact."
Marik's feet sank into orange sand, but it held him up. His was a shifting, unsteady foundation, always had been. But he had to keep standing.
A hundred rounds, she'd promised him.
"Oh." The monster's red eye lit with delight. "She matters to you, does she? And your brother out there, too."
Marik slipped.
"We've already killed your father. Let's take out the rest of the crew."
Marik leapt forward, tackled the monster into the sand, and they grappled in a cloud of orange and red, the monster cackling all the while. But Marik was weak, and sometimes his hands didn't exist where he needed them to.
"You can't control me!" the monster hooted, single eye bulging. "You never could!"
The air shone gold around them, vibrating with the power of the rod.
"Anzu!" Marik shouted desperately.
And then the world exploded.
Anzu had thought Ra's light was blinding, like throwing open the curtains in a dark room and finding the sun right in the yard. But when the thing controlling Marik lifted the rod for the first time in the duel, its light was almost worse, not blinding but insidious, something that raised the hair on her skin and dried her tongue like sand. It flooded the field, and it froze everything in its wake, encased them in gold until everything was a statue, waiting for permission to move—Ra frozen in its dive, Kaiba's monster as still as a true mirror.
And the players, too. Even the referee, a slack-jawed statue, stopped mid-word.
"Seto!" Mokuba shouted.
He jumped for the field, but the guard held him back.
"What gives?" Joey demanded. "Yami, is this a shadow game?"
But the pharaoh didn't have an answer, and his eyes were on Kaiba like maybe he wanted to jump for him, too, but there was something holding him back just the same.
Anzu.
Goosebumps prickled her neck. It wasn't a voice, but she heard it all the same, felt it in the base of her skull. And she saw the way the gold at the edge of the field was beginning to fleck away, like bits of sand in a breeze.
"Get down!" she shrieked, grabbing Ishizu because she was the closest person, dragging her down to the metal roof.
And then there was an explosion from the field, a blast of wind and red sand that stole the air from her lungs, pushed her back several inches even on hands and knees. She heard the clang of metal as something hit the railing. A scream.
"Serenity!" Joey bellowed.
The wind still howled, full of biting sand and pressure. Through squinted eyes, Anzu saw her friends clinging to the edge of the field, the roof, the railing, any handhold available. Joey had ducked at her call, but he rose to a crouch, fighting to keep his feet against the wind until his shoulder hit the railing and he grabbed Serenity's flailing right arm while Duke held desperately to her left, and together, they hauled the girl back over the barrier to safety.
Anzu grabbed Ishizu's hands, forced the other girl's arms away from her head.
"How do we stop this?" she shouted, coughing as the sand reached to her throat.
Ishizu only shook her head, eyes squeezed tightly shut.
Anzu couldn't help but wish for Yuugi, couldn't help thinking he would somehow know what to do. But it was only the pharaoh, crouched against the edge of the raised field, fingers clawed into rivets in the metal, somehow still watching Kaiba.
She wanted to tell him to do something.
But she didn't know if he would listen.
Releasing Ishizu, she dragged herself forward by her elbows until she reached Mokuba and his guard, both flat against the roof, the guard shielding the boy with one arm while he held tight to the field with the other.
"Mokuba!" Her voice was almost gone, scratched raw by sand and carried away in chunks by the blasting wind.
The boy squinted up at her, one arm pressed across his face, though it couldn't keep out the sand.
She tried to point to the rod, but it was like hanging her arm out of a speeding car only to have it blown back, twisting painfully against her shoulder. She slammed her fist to the roof instead.
"You beat that thing before!" she shouted, as if she knew anything about it, as if he could even hear her.
"Please grab onto something, miss!" the guard shouted.
The wind blasted Anzu with more sand, stealing her breath, sending her facedown and coughing, but the stinging in her eyes didn't make her nearly as furious as its twisted red shade. She hated Marik's stupid sand, but she hated the monster changing it even more, like he'd reached fingers into every corner of her friend's soul, determined to corrupt and infect even the smallest aspect.
She curled her fingers against the roof, pressed her forehead to the metal, and closed her eyes. But she couldn't find her auditorium or his desert or anything else. She was just a girl caught up in a whirlwind.
All she could do was hold on and hope for a miracle.
Mokuba was scared. Whatever was happening around him felt a bit like when he'd looked into Pegasus's gold eye and felt his soul lift out of his body, and there was nothing he could do to make it go back no matter how he tried.
But Anzu thought he could do something.
And he hadn't forgotten the last time he'd seen sand.
He'd been scared then, too.
He curled tighter against Roland's side, eyes screwed shut, but he stretched one hand out into the whipping sand, and as it sliced his fingers like whirling paper, as it stung and burned, he thought of orange dunes and the warm sun and the calm feeling of sinking. And he thought of the fear, too, and Marik's pale eyes, and the way he looked like Seto in the light.
The whirlwind swallowed Seto completely, stole his breath and filled his mind with a roar. The world turned black around him, with Bow to me cracking like lightning through the darkness. The command he'd felt before returned, a weight on his every limb, on his very blood, pinning him down.
Until—
Out of the dark—
A small hand caught his.
And he looked up into his brother's eyes.
"Seto, fight it!" Mokuba's hand slipped, but Seto held tight to his fingers. "Fight him!"
Fight himself?
It was nonsense.
It was impossible.
Magic items, past lives, reincarnation, that wasn't what Seto's life was meant to be. That wasn't the empire he'd built, the world he'd sacrificed so much for. In the orphanage, every day had been an unknown, the entire future a terrifyingly blank slate. All the unknowns were meant to be behind him now. He was at the top of his company, the top of his field, and the summit was meant to give him a view of the entire world below, every shadow exposed, nothing left to lurk in the dark, nothing left to rear its head and pull the ground from beneath his feet.
But here was a brand new, unknown world. And he still bore the scars from the last time he'd faced a new world. He and Gozaburo had pushed each other to the limits in a fight for it. One of them was dead.
If he fought again, who would die this time?
"Seto, please!"
Mokuba's fingers slipped again, and this time, there was nothing to catch. Just the complete blackness once more, and the overwhelming weight.
Bow to me, flashed the sky.
Seto had never been one to take orders, not even from himself.
And he could never deny his brother anything.
So he curled his hands into fists, dragged himself forward one inch, then another. He remembered the heat in his hands when he'd calmed Yori, the heat in his forehead during the visions. He thought of the impossible library, something from the real world recreated in his mind as some sort of base of operations for all this mind magic.
"Now you want to fight?" A voice in the darkness laughed. "You're the inferior copy, little Kaiba, the empty echo of the most powerful priest to ever grace Egypt's grand dynasties. That man should have been pharaoh. This one should never have existed."
Seto slipped. Ground his teeth. His shoulders creaked under the weight; his whole frame trembled.
The imposter stepped out of the darkness before him. Seto couldn't lift his head to see the priest's face, but he didn't need to; his gaudy ankle bracelets were smug enough.
Then a hand pressed against the back of his skull, fingers tangled in his hair.
"You couldn't even put out an eye," Seth purred, "but I'll cut off your head all the same."
Seto couldn't move. Any moment, his trembling arms would collapse. It was over. And he recognized the irony, of course, the irony of how he'd destroyed Ra, the greatest of the god cards, with a mirror, and how he would now be destroyed by the same.
He closed his eyes.
And he breathed out.
But in that breath, everything vanished. The weight was gone, the hand against his head; he blinked and found himself still in the darkness, but not alone.
Yuugi was crouched before him, the puzzle around his neck glowing softly against its chain.
And he looked somehow different. A little older, a little more worn.
He held out a hand.
But Seto could only stare.
"You're not the only one," Yuugi said, "afraid of the past."
Seto remembered a vision where every priest bowed.
"Tell me you're not a . . . pharaoh," he rasped. "You can't be."
"I think the worst part is not what I was but what I did." Yuugi shook his head. "Maybe I'll never make up for it, and maybe I don't care. If we have something to protect here and now, isn't that enough?"
Seto swallowed hard.
And then he grabbed the pharaoh's hand.
A flood of images crashed through his mind: Priest Seth and all his ambitions, all his work and study and leveraging to be anointed a priest, and then that fateful day when he lifted the Millennium Rod from a golden box as the hollow eye stared into him with a heat he felt all the way to his soul.
And his ears awakened to the roar of the shadows.
The howling wind cut off abruptly, leaving a ringing silence in its wake. Anzu lifted her head, sending a cascade of rough red sand sliding down her hair to her shoulders; she shivered as she felt a trickle of it inside her collar.
"Everyone alright?" Tristan asked. His voice had a strange echo over the ringing.
The duel snapped back into motion like someone had pressed play, and Anzu jumped at the shriek of Marik's phoenix as it completed its dive, at the even louder scream as it shattered into rays of shining light. Marik's lifepoints scrolled to zero, and the referee declared Seto Kaiba the winner of the duel as if nothing strange had ever happened, even though the roof looked like a half-finished, bloody beach.
Marik and Kaiba stared at each other, and Marik was trembling like a butterfly, like he was waiting to have his wings pinned. In his hand, the glow of the rod sputtered like a dying engine.
"Mokuba," Kaiba said quietly, turning away.
Mokuba scrambled to his feet, slipped on sand, caught himself, and rushed forward into his big brother's arms.
The guard climbed more slowly to his feet. He even offered Anzu a hand, which was sweet. She let him pull her up, and then she helped Ishizu. Tristan and Mai were already lifting Odion; Serenity was buried in Duke's arms, and Joey held one of her hands so tight, she would probably lose fingers if he wasn't careful.
So Anzu stepped to the pharaoh. And she stuck out a hand. He looked at it with something of an ironic smile, then took the offer.
"What was that?" she asked. Her voice was raw in her throat.
"I never know what anything is," the pharaoh said, running his fingers through his spikes to shake the sand out. "I just ride the waves."
"Impressive show, priest." Marik's voice wavered. "What now?"
"Stay away from me and my brother," Kaiba snarled, already stepping off the field.
"You won't—" Ishizu stumbled forward, hand extended to stop him. "You won't claim the rod? Please, if you won, you must—"
"Not interested." Kaiba brushed past her and practically crushed the elevator button under a fist.
Anzu's newly risen hope fell, and she looked at the monster.
Only to see a slow smile creep across his face, inching from one ear to the other. He ran his tongue across his teeth.
And when he looked at her, she saw nothing of Marik in the gaze.
Note: It's been a while since we've had a roller coaster chapter like this! I enjoy writing them so much. I love when multiple characters are all struggling and helping each other. I hope it's enjoyable to read.
Also, it's that time of story again. We're nearing the end of Part Two, which means a special chapter to come. Please submit questions for the Q&A section. (And let me know if there's anything specific you'd like to see in the special chapter.) I look forward to it!