Chapter 25 - A Key to the Past
Lara had to stifle a laugh as she watched Riley's eyes bulge like a fish. His breath caught in his throat, and he made a small gurgling sound like the tail-end of a sob. He stretched out his hand tentatively, gently touching the glimmering gold of the Leviathan's key. Lara observed as he ran two thin fingers across the solid surface, his face a mixture of unintelligible emotions. When he got to the tip of the key where it separated into equally serrated edges, he whipped his hand back against his chest as though he had been burned.
"Lara," he whispered, small beads of sweat standing out on his pale forehead. "Lara, this is impossible... this can't be!" Lara stooped on her haunches next to him, her face close to his. He gazed into her eyes, and for a moment she thought she glimpsed terror.
"What is it, Riley? What the hell is this thing?" she asked, her heart racing. He looked at her, dropped his gaze, shook his head like a dog out of water.
"You wouldn't believe me even if I told you."
"Trust me, Riley. After what I went through to retrieve it, I think I'd pretty much believe anything you told me."
He stood up and began pacing the worn cement floor of the factory. He rubbed absently at the back of his neck where his hair was cut short. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, lighting up with trembling hands. The smoke wavered in his tremors as he pulled deep drags, one after the other.
"I thought you never smoked in your own home, Riley."
"Fuck my mother. She's dead and I'm a mess." He continued to pace, saying nothing for nearly five minutes. "I'm not entirely sure, Lara, but I think it may be the key to the Serpent's Gate," he finally chirped, his voice cracking as he stubbed out the cigarette.
"I've heard something about that somewhere. Greek myth, right?"
"Close. Roman. Ancient Roman. As in, the beginning."
"The beginning of what?"
"Of the entire Roman empire! Or at least the beginning of what it was to become," Riley nearly screeched, lighting up another cigarette. "The Serpent's Gate was one of the first oral myths to be actually be circulated amongst the Roman peoples. Unlike most of their culture, they didn't 'borrow' the tale of the Serpent's Gate from anyone else. It was pure Romanesque." Lara stood up, rubbing at the small of her back as it creaked in protest.
"So it was a Roman myth. What about it? What does the myth have to do with this key? If it even is a key."
"Oh, it's a key alright," Riley mumbled as he stomped the second cigarette out. "A little too big for your average doorknob, but then it was never meant for a knob."
"Then would you mind terribly telling me what it was meant for Riley? That's kind of why I'm here." Riley looked at her blankly for a moment, and nodded as if finally pulling himself back to earth.
"Right. Umm... over here, at my worktable." The two of them moved to the large metal table in the corner of Riley's makeshift flat. He looked about for a moment, his eyes settling on a large, leather-bound tome that looked positively ancient. He smirked, grabbing the book delicately and opening it on the surface of the table. He sifted quickly but gently through the pages, mumbling to himself as he went. Lara watched, her nose tickled by floating dust motes disturbed by the turning pages. The smell of dry rot and old binding reminded her briefly of her father's library, the one he had when she was a girl. It was impossibly small and stuffed from ceiling to floor with every title one could think of. She would sit there as a child and watch the dust flitter about in what seemed to her a microscopic dance in the sunlight.
"Here we go!" Riley shouted, slapping a pointed index finger onto a beautifully painted picture in the book. "The Serpent's Gate." Lara looked carefully at it, straining her eyes against the age and wear of the page. The picture was of a large green gate, marbled in white and grey. She supposed that meant it was jade. It was thick and heavy looking, even in two dimensions. The gate was made of two halves, each carved to look like a coiling serpent. The lashing tongues joined and became a large alcove in the center of the gate. Inside the alcove was a hole meant for a large key, and a round depression Lara estimated to be about a foot in diameter. The depression was carved above the keyhole, and the keyhole carved above the large handles that were created from the serpent's twisted tails.
"This is the Serpent's Gate? Is it supposed to be jade?"
"Yeah," Riley replied, his nerves noticeably more settled. "The legend says the gate was made of jade. And not today's processed stuff, either. It was pure, taken straight from volcanic mountains and the rich clay beneath them."
"Okay, that's interesting. But what exactly is the legend, Riley?" Riley sat back on a torn and weathered bar-stool next to the table. His shoulders slumped as he resisted the urge to light another cigarette.
"The Serpent's Gate was said to have been constructed as a portal between this plane and the next."
"Plane? What do you mean? Like an alternate reality or something?"
"No, more like a different... level, I guess you could say. A plane is a physical or spiritual world bound by its own rules and kept by its own inhabitants. The life we know, you and me... that's one plane. But there are said to be many planes in the existence of consciousness. Take heaven and hell for example. Whether you believe in such places or not, they are separate planes from earth. That does not mean they are apart from earth and from us humans. Every plane in this universe is connected to the life on this planet. What we see as reality and what we live as our lives... those are only one part of a large whole. Heaven is a different plane, and so is hell. But they are both a part of the life on this planet. They are part of what makes up life, if you will."
"Okay, that makes enough sense for the time being. Why would anyone build something to separate two pieces of the universe? They can't possibly be visible?"
"Well, that depends. Spiritual manifests, such as a priest or a pastor or a divine member of the occult, have the ability to see other planes. Maybe not always with their eyes, but they have the power nonetheless. The Serpent's Gate was erected on unholy ground. It was said great evil fell through the countless planes above ours and landed on that spot. Many religions view this story differently. For Spiritualists, it's the place where humanity committed the first crime against Nature, thus throwing us ever out of alignment with our planet. For the Christians, it's where Lucifer landed after God threw him out of the heavenly realm. For some other, older religions, it's where the first evil swelled up from the bowels of the earth and began devouring people's souls. Either way, it's bad joojoo. And the Serpent's Gate was built to keep the bad joojoo and the good joojoo away from each other."
"You said something about rules and inhabitants. What do those have to do with the Serpent's Gate?"
"The gate was constructed to, as I explained, separate good from evil. Dark Planes are inhabited by creatures of Darkness. They have no light, and are therefore doomed to a life of half-existence. They can never become truly whole, like humans. Others are the deeply Pure beings. Angels, spirits of light, faeries, whatever. You get the picture."
"And the creatures of Darkness?"
"Your usual. Demons, shape shifters, poltergeists, incarnated Beasts from realms beyond our own. All that good stuff."
"Once again, this all only makes enough sense as it has to."
"Lara, sometimes you have to take things at face-value, even if you're not sure if you should believe any of it or not. And most of the time, these sorts of things never make any more sense than is required."
"You learn that from being an exorcist?"
"No. Boy Scouts." Lara gave him the finger, and he grinned.
"Enough with the tomfoolery. What else can you tell me?"
"Well, let me give you the Reader's Digest version. A long, long time ago, some really old Roman dudes built the Serpent's Gate to separate a place of terrible evil from the realm of the living. It was locked with two keys. They were hidden from mankind for a long, long time. You get the gist."
"Same old, same old."
"Right. Anywhoo, the story goes that both keys were lost to time and wars and plagues and all that good stuff. Eventually, they were hunted down and recovered by an ancient religious sect - "
"Let me guess... the Shankai priests?"
"How the hell did you know that?"
"Riley, please. I'm Lara Croft." Riley paused a moment, a small grin twitching at the corners of his mouth.
"Right. Must have forgotten about that. Anyways, yeah, that's right. The Shankai priests recovered the keys and hid them in a secret valley somewhere near the Jordan River. At least, that's what the legend says. After the disaster with the Shankai in the Nile Delta region, they were lost again. Some thought they were spirited away by Roman troops. Others thought they had finally been destroyed. However, according to written accounts in the early centuries before the fall of Rome, the keys were found by a mysterious ruler and hidden in two very secret places. They were never seen again. Some offshoots of the legend say that the keys will unlock the gate, which is hidden somewhere deep underneath the original site. They were practically destroyed during war, and civilization simply grew up around them, forgetting them completely."
"What's behind the gate?"
"That still remains a mystery. No one really knows for sure. Some say that going through the gate takes you to another plane, where terrible demons with great power reside in exile. Others say that it leads to a source of great evil, or spiritual power. But there are a few who say that behind the gates lies the shrine where - "
"The Amulet of Immortality is hidden," Lara whispered, staring into space. Riley nodded, as if he expected her to know all along.
"That's the myth. I was never one to believe in the stories about the Amulet of Immortality, but I always try to put a little stock in everything. Once you've seen a warrior demon claw its way out of a little old lady, you start wondering." Riley gazed at Lara as she nibbled slightly on her thumbnail. He touched her arm and felt her jump a little.
"Lara... Tell me that's not what you're after." When she didn't look him in the eye, his head dropped. Lara felt his grip tighten on her forearm. "Lara, you can't. You have no idea what you're dealing with."
Lara only looked at him, her heart swelling with the unexpected onslaught of faded memories. They flooded her heart and mind like a savage rainfall. She saw them, the two of them, together once more as teenagers. They had been free together once, unburdened by the weight the world adds with age. They had discovered so much in those summers tromping the globe with Von Croy and company. Why did it end the way it did? Why had things happened the way they had? What went wrong, and why couldn't they have back those simpler times?
"Lara, listen. You may think sometimes that you have nothing to lose. That the loss of your mother and father has left you with nothing but your own emptiness. You may believe that the business with Von Croy was all your fault, and it wasn't. Even the second time around." Lara whipped around, her face full of surprise. "Yeah, I read about what happened in Paris." Lara's eyes drifted to the leather field notebook lying on the table near her elbow.
Just like Von Croy's. In fact, I think Von Croy gave it to him. Yeah, he did. For his seventeenth birthday. We were in India doing some work with ancient artifacts. Von Croy never gave gifts. But he gave him that notebook on his birthday. Riley was supposed to be his protégée, his successor. Funny how things worked out...
"Lara... You can't keep going around playing super hero all the time. You're what, thirty now? And you still run about looking for things that don't want to be found."
"Riley please! You have no idea! And you're one to talk! Look at what you do for a living! Is ridding the greater Los Angeles area of demonic presence really any safer than tomb raiding?"
"Lara, all I'm saying is that I care, and that in my opinion you shouldn't be going after something as ill-reputed as the Amulet of Immortality. Talk about bad joojoo..."
"Riley, I have a lot of work that needs to be done. I need you to tell me what I need to know about this key. First of all, how do you know it pertains to the Serpent's Gate?" Riley huffed in frustration, his eyes clouded over.
"The symbol on the head you showed me. It's two entangled snake's heads. The symbol of the Serpent's Gate."
"Fine, that's good. What about it's location? Where can I find the gate?"
"First of all, even if you could find the gate, you wouldn't get very far without the second key. There were two keys made, remember? The circular depression carved above the keyhole? That's it."
"Another key? Shit... Fine, lay it on me."
"I really don't have that much to tell you. Legend says it was a shield of purity, an emblem of immortal power. As to the resting place, you've got me. The last people to have it - in legend - were the Shankai." Lara perked up as he finished talking.
"That's it! You said an emblem of immortal power. The Shankai were believed to have immortal power. They were known in religious circles as the Immortals. They took full responsibility for creation of the Amulet and its storage from the eyes of man."
"That's right. But even so, where does that put the key?"
"Well, it only stands to reason that it would be hidden in their temple in the Nile Delta, where the Amulet was rumored to be stored. But that makes little logical sense. Why would they keep two such powerful items in one convenient place?" Riley suddenly smiled, his eyes brightening.
"They didn't. I'll bet it's in the second temple!"
"Riley, legend says there was only one temple."
"Right, but that was the temple of the Shankai. The Shankai weren't the ones who created the Amulet. Hathor the sorceress was. And she had a temple in the East, where the first of the Shankai were trained!"
"That's right! There was another temple! And the legend of the Serpent's Gate outdates the legend of the Amulet of Immortality. It could be that both keys were kept there for safe-keeping under the watchful eye of the first Shankai. One was stolen by Xavier, the Unknown Emperor, who thought there was only one key. The second must still be hidden in the original temple!"
"Whoa, Lara... hold up there. You're jumping to way too many conclusions all at once. First of all, there are no written records of the keys being stored anywhere. Second, the Temple of Hathor is nothing but ruins now. Even if it had been there by some chance, it would be impossible to find it without an incredible amount of manpower and advanced archeological equipment. Thirdly... who the hell is Xavier?"
Lara was already up and running about, gathering her things. She carefully wrapped the key back in the soft cloth, placing it in her briefcase. "First of all, you don't need written records to try out a hypothesis, especially when you have bureau-buddies who can clear massive amounts of red tape for you and get you into the temple for an archeological dig. Second, I do have massive amounts of manpower and advanced archeological equipment at my disposal, so thank you very much. And thirdly, you don't need to worry about Xavier. He's ancient history."
Riley watched as she gathered her things, making a beeline for the large metal door that led to the alleyway. His heart sank as he realized she was rushing out of his life again, and he would have to continue with the knowledge that she may not ever come back.
"Lara... thanks for coming. I... I guess..." She stopped, looking at him with somber eyes. Her hands were full of papers and the briefcase, and she set them down on the floor by her feet. She walked towards him, her face glistening in the excitement of discovery.
"Riley, don't. I'm sorry I've been away for so long. Things were hectic for a while after Von Croy's... death. And now with this new expedition... well, I won't be home for a while. But I promise, once things settle, I'm coming over here for a good long stay. You'll have to show me the sights and treat me to a night on the town. We'll be solid friends again, and not just ships passing in the night. I mean that." Riley took her hands in his, feeling her racing pulse beneath the slight and pearly skin across her wrists. His heart ached for the first time in what seemed a century. It yearned for the days when they had been carefree kids, with nothing to worry about except Von Croy catching them sneaking his Russian cigars out of his tent and smoking them in the brush beyond the camp site. It yearned for the shorter, happier Lara whose face didn't seem so tired. It yearned for the child he used to be, the innocence of it all...
"I love you Lara. I always have. Even after all these years, you are still my sister. Joined to my heart like you were then. I would die if anything happened to you. I didn't mind losing Von Croy. After what he did... well, I was a little sorry I couldn't kill him myself. But you... You I love. Promise me you'll take care of yourself." Lara leaned in closer, planting a soft kiss on his pale cheek. He watched as a single, defiant tear rolled quietly down the side of her face.
"I love you too, Riley. You were the brother I never had. The confidant I always needed. You are one of the only people who really knows who I truly am. The real Lara. The Lara that existed before that whole mess with Von Croy. And for that understanding, I will always keep you close to my heart. And yes, I will take care. I promise."
They hugged each other quickly and fiercely, and Riley found himself afraid to let go. Lara pulled away, the stubborn tear gone and her resolve set like stone. She let herself out into the alley, and Riley watched her as she walked away through the crack in the door. He heard her on her cell phone before she disappeared...
"Alex, it's Lara. Brief Mason. Get everyone ready to leave. We're going to Egypt." Tears began to fall as she crossed the street and out of site, leaving him behind in the shadows. As he walked back to his untidy cot, he realized with a sort of sad understanding that Lara Croft left everyone in the shadows. Even the ones she loved.
"Especially the ones she loves," Riley whispered, and began to weep.