Title: A Persistent Shadow (Chapter 22)
Pairing: Ryou Bakura x Yami Bakura, possible others
Rating: M
Summary: The Pharaoh uses a spell to force Yami Bakura out of Ryou's body, but unfortunately for Ryou it doesn't work quite as well as intended.
Ryou and the boy continued their slow, steady march toward the center of the village. The ghosts didn't rush them, seeming satisfied as long as they continued down along the path, however slowly they were actually doing it. The boy continued to cling to his arm, as though he thought that the closer he stayed to Ryou, the safer he would be.
After they'd been walking for an indeterminate amount of time, Ryou noticed the ghosts getting restless. It made him uneasy, but they seemed to be focused on something outside the semi-circle they'd formed around Ryou and the boy.
At one point, the wall of ghosts stopped moving entirely, all of them turning around to look at something on the other side, but all Ryou could make out was a basic human form. He wondered if it was someone he knew or another resident of the dream world. Ryou saw the form climb over a building on the side of the path, disappearing from his field of vision. Some of the ghosts broke away to follow it, leaving the wall a little thinner.
Ryou considered using the opportunity to try and get away, but he immediately discounted the idea. The wall was still big enough to stop them from getting past, and even if they made it to the other side, the ghosts were much faster than they were. It would only take one touch to send one or both of them back into an even more terrifying nightmare.
The wall resumed moving forward, forcing them to keep going down the path.
Soon they were within sight of the smoking remains of the village center. The air was too cloudy for Ryou to really make out what was going on, if anything, but he could tell that the smoke was simply hovering in the air now, not coming from any active source on the ground.
Ryou heard a sudden thud! to his side and spun around. The boy hid behind him, clearly fearful of whoever had just jumped down off the building and landed next to them.
"I should have known you would do something this foolish," the spirit said. The ghosts who had broken away earlier floated down to rejoin the wall, which had halted again.
"I'm doing the only thing I can do," Ryou protested, feeling very relieved to see the spirit again. Even if the spirit couldn't protect him from anything, Ryou was glad to know that he was... well, not alive, maybe, but at least not destroyed. He looked the spirit over, wanting to see if he'd been injured in any way, and he noticed something odd. "Why are you solid?" he asked, noting that the spirit was also more tan than he would have expected.
"Because this world isn't real," the spirit told him.
The boy chose that moment to peek out at the spirit from behind Ryou's arm. "What do you mean it's not real?"
"I mean exactly that," the spirit said, tone more menacing than Ryou thought it should be. "None of this is real. Not the village, not them," the spirit continued, waving at the ghosts, "and not you. We're trapped in a memory."
"I'm real!" the boy said, sounding upset.
Ryou patted his shoulder comfortingly, not sure what to say. As far as he knew, the spirit was right about the world they were in not being real, but he still didn't think the spirit should just declare that right in front of a little boy.
"Do you have any idea how we can get out of here?" Ryou asked, hoping the spirit's knowledge extended that far.
"I have an idea," the spirit said. "However you managed it, you were going in the right direction," he added. He grabbed Ryou's free arm, trying to pull him away from the boy. "Come on. We should get going. Just leave him here."
"No!" the boy cried out, clinging to Ryou for dear life.
"It's okay," Ryou assured him. "I'm not leaving you here." He glared at the spirit. He'd known the spirit was cold, but this was something else.
"He's not real, Landlord," the spirit said. "It doesn't matter what you do. When this nightmare ends, he'll disappear either way."
"I don't want to d-disappear!" the boy said, starting to cry again.
Ryou leaned down to hug him. "Don't say things like that!" Ryou told the spirit angrily. He might have been right about the boy disappearing when the dream was over – it certainly sounded logical – but he still didn't want the boy to hear it.
"It's important," the spirit said just as angrily. He was directing a disgusted expression at the boy, who fortunately couldn't see it with his face buried in Ryou's shirt. "If we're ever threatened by something, you can't be wasting time and energy protecting someone who doesn't matter."
"He matters," Ryou said adamantly, wishing he could cover the boy's ears while they had this discussion, but finding he couldn't easily manage it in the position they were in.
"Really?" the spirit asked, tone full of contempt. "And just what do you intend to do with him?"
"What?" Ryou asked. "I intend to keep him safe," he said, thinking it should have been obvious.
"For how long?" the spirit demanded. "For the rest of his life?"
Ryou hadn't thought that far ahead. "I... I don't know. For as long as it's necessary. Until we can find someone to take care of him."
The spirit laughed bitterly. "No one is going to take care of him, Landlord. He's a pathetic orphan who claims his town was destroyed by the Pharaoh's men."
"But it was!" the boy sobbed, voice muffled by Ryou's chest.
"It doesn't matter," the spirit said. "Not a single person will ever believe you."
The boy's sobbing grew stronger.
Ryou hugged him more tightly. "I believe him," he said to the spirit.
The spirit looked at him silently for a few moments before responding. "What are you going to do? Raise him yourself?"
"Yes," Ryou decided, getting sick of the argument. "If there's no one else to take care of him, I'll do it myself." He ignored the fact that the boy might well not be able to come back with them for the moment. He'd find a way. He wasn't going to up and abandon a small child who'd just lost everything.
"So, what? You intend to simply take him back to your apartment and keep him there?" the spirit asked dubiously. "What about your father?"
"He probably wouldn't notice," Ryou said, thinking that he could probably run an entire orphanage out of their apartment without his father catching on. Ryou hadn't even told him about the hole in the wall yet. "He gives me enough money to feed two people."
"That's not... This is ridiculous," the spirit said. "You have no way of caring for him. You should let him go now so he can learn to fend for himself."
"No," Ryou said. He noticed that the ghost wall was moving again, albeit more slowly than it had before. "We need to get moving," he told the boy.
The boy turned his head to look at the ghosts, then nodded, still sniffling. He grabbed on to Ryou's arm and followed him forward. The spirit walked next to them.
"How did you find me?" Ryou asked. "Can you still hear my thoughts?"
"No," the spirit replied. "I followed the line of ghosts. I assumed you had gotten yourself into trouble yet again, and I was correct."
"How did you know I was in there?" Ryou protested. "It could have just been a part of the memory."
"Because there wasn't-" the spirit stopped whatever he'd been about to say. "It seemed out of place, and I'm well aware of how reckless you are."
"He's not reckless!" the boy said, glaring at the spirit from Ryou's side. "He's brave."
Ryou gave a small smile to his defender.
"What would you know about bravery?" the spirit demanded, tone full of disdain. "You didn't even try to help your family while they were being slaughtered."
Ryou looked at the spirit in shock as the boy started crying into his arm. "How could you say something like that?" He stroked the boy's hair awkwardly with his free hand. "It's okay..." he said softly. "There was nothing you could do."
"He could have tried," the spirit said.
"He's a little boy!" Ryou said, almost unable to believe what he was hearing. "They'd have killed him!"
"Then he could have died!"
The three stood frozen to the spot after the spirit's outburst, surrounded by ghostly laughter.
The boy was the first to speak up. "I didn't want to die," he sobbed. "I don't want to die..."
"You don't have to die," Ryou assured him. He picked the boy up, finding him to be lighter than he expected. The boy wrapped his arms around Ryou's neck, crying into his shoulder. Ryou glared at the spirit. "Stop saying things like that!"
"They're true," the spirit said, tone full of anger and loathing. "He could have died with the rest of his family, but he was too scared."
"Of course he was scared!" Ryou said. "So were all the people that died. It's not his fault!"
"He chose to run away," the spirit said. "He chose to hide under the stairs like the coward that he is. How is it not his fault that he's still breathing?"
"That-" Ryou started to object, then stopped, the spirit's words playing back in his head and sounding... off, somehow. "How did you know he was hiding under the stairs?"
The spirit's eyes widened almost imperceptibly in surprise for a second before returning to normal. He looked away, glaring at the smoke not so far in the distance. "I saw it in your mind."
"You said you can't hear my thoughts anymore," Ryou replied, mind spinning to try and figure out how the spirit really knew.
"I was lying," the spirit told him.
"What number am I thinking of right now?" Ryou asked, not even bothering to come up with one.
"This is absurd," the spirit said, crossing his arms. "What does it matter how I knew?"
Ryou stared at the spirit, the question only making him more curious about what the spirit was hiding. Maybe he'd come across the boy first and had simply left him there? But the boy hadn't recognized him, and Ryou couldn't see the spirit really caring if Ryou knew that had happened. Ryou's mind scrambled to fit the pieces together. How did the spirit know so much about the village? How could he know what was going on in other parts of the... memory...?
"Oh," Ryou breathed, not sure he could believe it. He glanced back and forth between the spirit and the boy in his arms. The hair, the skin... He fixed his gaze on the spirit. "He... You're him, aren't you? And he's you. This all happened to you," Ryou said, horrified.
The ghosts around them laughed even louder than before.
"Landlord..." the spirit said through gritted teeth.
"Your whole family," Ryou continued, horror growing the more he thought about it, especially considering what the spirit had just been saying to the boy. "And you were here all alone..."
"What are you talking about?" the boy sniffled up at him, confused.
"Don't worry about it," Ryou said, stroking his hair. He looked at the spirit again, feeling a sympathy he never imagined he could have for him. "No wonder you wanted to kill the Pharaoh."
"I still intend to kill him," the spirit said.
Ryou shook his head, but he found he couldn't bring himself to argue against the idea at the moment. "How did you survive without anyone around to help you?" Ryou asked, realizing he wouldn't have been around to get the spirit out of the crawl space or clean him up.
The spirit didn't say anything at first, glowering at everything around them. "They forced me to come out," he said finally, gesturing at the ghosts. "I went to the site of the cursed ritual and received the power to defeat the Pharaoh. Then I followed the High Priest as he crawled to the nearest village and claimed he'd been attacked by bandits."
"The power to defeat the Pharaoh?" Ryou asked.
"Yes. Though I wouldn't be able to use it for over a decade," the spirit replied.
"But you haven't defeated the Pharaoh," Ryou pointed out, moving forward again as he felt the ghosts closing in on them.
"Not yet," the spirit replied softly.
The ghosts drove them to the top of a stairway leading down into the ground. Ryou couldn't see where it led. "Is it safe to go down there?" he asked the spirit.
"Of course not," the spirit replied, walking down the steps anyway.
Ryou looked from the ghosts to the stairs, quickly deciding that he'd rather deal with the unknown, especially if staying above ground meant being separated from the spirit again. He began carrying the boy carefully down the steps, but the boy stopped him, sliding out of his arms to stand on the ground himself. He looked up at Ryou. "You said I'm him."
"Um..." Ryou said, not sure what to tell the boy. He hadn't liked hearing the spirit say he wasn't real.
"I don't want to be him," the boy said. "He's mean."
"You don't have to be him," Ryou said, but he wondered if they really had any way of changing how things turned out. It was a memory, after all, not reality. He had a bit of hope, though, since he knew the boy would have been alone originally. Maybe being there could make a difference, even if it was only in a dream.
They walked down the stairs.
The journey to the bottom seemed to take forever, but it was probably only a few minutes in reality. Ryou and the boy quickly caught up with the spirit, and they continued their descent in silence. The oppressive smell permeating the village grew worse as they went lower. There was only the occasional torch on the wall to light the way, making it difficult to see. The only really positive thing was that the ghosts didn't seem to be following them, though Ryou was sure if they went back up the stairs that they'd find them there, waiting for them.
The boy stayed close to his side, holding his hand as they walked. Ryou found it difficult to think of the boy as a younger version of the spirit, and he kept comparing the two in his mind, struggling to figure out how he could have gone from such an affectionate boy to... what he was then. There was the obvious, of course, but the boy next to him had just gone through that as well, and if anything he seemed to be desperate for someone to be kind to him and take care of him.
Ryou thought about what the spirit had said about there being no one willing to take the boy in, and imagined him being rejected over and over again by everyone he came across, people scorning him for telling the truth about what had happened to his family. He thought about the boy telling himself the same things the spirit had been telling him earlier, torturing himself for years. He imagined the boy waiting all alone under those stairs, harassed by the ghosts of his family and friends, only with no one to come and rescue him...
When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Ryou scooped the boy up into a hug, feeling the strong urge to pour as much affection on him as he possibly could. The boy eagerly returned the hug, but the spirit glowered at them from a few feet away, as though he knew what Ryou was thinking despite not being able to read his mind. Ryou only looked back at him, feeling the beginnings of an urge to hug him, too, but knowing it wouldn't be welcome just then.
"Are you finished, Landlord?" the spirit asked impatiently.
Ryou let go of the boy, knowing they had to keep going. He looked at the area they were standing in, seeing a short hallway that ended with a doorway on the left side. "Is it safe for him to come with us?" Ryou asked, though he was aware that he wasn't asking the most helpful or unbiased person for an opinion on the matter. It still felt like he had to say something.
The spirit walked toward the doorway. "Not unless you want him to see what's left of everyone he ever knew," he said, his tone almost completely emotionless. Ryou couldn't see his face.
The boy made a soft, pained noise, but didn't say anything. Ryou looked down at his fearful, uncertain face and tried to figure out what to do. Ryou finally decided to bring the boy closer to the doorway, but not let go through it until he'd checked it out himself. He joined the spirit at the end of the hallway, making sure to keep the boy from seeing anything in the next room.
The spirit was already there, glaring at the room. "This is not how it should be."
"What do you mean?" Ryou asked, looking through the opening at the gory remains of the spell. The cauldron sat partially tipped over next to a giant rock on the floor. The rock had shapes carved into it that Ryou recognized as being the same as the Millennium Items, though the items themselves were nowhere in sight. There was an upsetting amount of leftover... liquid in the cauldron, as well as some that had spilled over onto the rock. It was horrible, but he couldn't say any of it was unexpected.
"This doesn't match my memory," the spirit told him.
"Which part of it doesn't match?" Ryou asked.
"Zorc isn't here."
"Who or what is Zorc?" Ryou asked, getting annoyed at the way the spirit was refusing to simply tell him straightforwardly.
"He's the entity that was summoned by the creation of the items," the spirit told him, walking into the room to get a better look around. "Or as you like to think of him, the purple thing."
Ryou's eyes widened as he remembered what they'd inadvertently summoned all those months ago. "That thing was here?" he asked. "You had to meet that thing when you were...?" Ryou trailed off.
The spirit turned to scowl at him. "Stop being so... sympathetic," he said, disgusted. "And yes, I met him then." He walked over to the rock. "Part of him was hovering here."
"Only part?" Ryou asked. He put the boy next to the door and rubbed his arms. "Stay here. I won't go far," he told him.
The boy looked scared of the idea of being separated, but he nodded.
Ryou walked through the door to take a closer look at the rock. He tried to avoid looking at the globs of gold mixed with flesh, but they were spattered all over the place, making it difficult. Looking around the room, he saw more dead soldiers scattered around the floor, clearly having been attempting to flee something – presumably Zorc, as the spirit had called him. "Why was only part of him here?" Ryou asked again. "Did the spell fail?"
"Not exactly," the spirit replied. "The spell needed to complete the Millennium Items was successful. That fool of a High Priest managed to begin the spell needed to summon Zorc purely by accident, but he didn't fully complete it."
Ryou shuddered, looking at the damage the entity had caused while only partially summoned. "What would have happened if he'd been fully summoned?"
"The end of the world," the spirit said, sounding unconcerned by the possibility.
Ryou wasn't that surprised by the answer, but he still felt horrified by the image of the destroyed village expanding to encompass the whole world. "How did the priest accidentally summon him?" Ryou asked, wondering if there was something he should be taking care to avoid doing.
"He united the items in the stone," the spirit replied. "That was enough for Zorc to appear, but fortunately the High Priest was enough of a power-hungry idiot that he wouldn't leave without taking the items with him."
Ryou couldn't imagine sticking around to pull the items out of the stone while people were dying all around him, but then he couldn't imagine slaughtering an entire village to create powerful artifacts, either. "So he removed the items from the stone, and that stopped Zorc from being fully summoned?"
"Yes," the spirit said, walking around the stone as though expecting to find what he was looking for if only he stood in the right place. "And then Zorc was stuck here, partially summoned. He should be here now."
"Maybe we're too early?" Ryou suggested. "If you stayed in your hiding place longer the first time..." he found himself unable to continue under the spirit's furious glare.
"He was stuck here," the spirit said angrily. "However long I took to get here, he couldn't have gone anywhere else. That's why he needed me."
"Needed you?" Ryou asked, not liking the sound of that.
"He needed someone in our world to summon him back," the spirit said.
Ryou took a moment to process what the spirit was saying. When he realized what that meant, he ran over to the spirit and grabbed the front of his shirt. "Is that what you were trying to do with the items?"
The spirit grabbed his hands and tried to shove them away, but Ryou was too determined to hold on. "Yes, that is what I was trying to do with the items," he said, face unreadable.
"Why?" Ryou asked.
"For revenge against the Pharaoh," the spirit said, letting go of Ryou's hands and simply letting him hold on to his shirt.
"That's not just the Pharaoh!" Ryou protested. "That's everyone!"
"As far as I was concerned, everyone had already been destroyed," the spirit said, the undercurrent of rage starting to become visible on his face. "I came here and was promised a way to get revenge on the Pharaoh, in exchange for my own promise to summon Zorc back into the world."
"But..." Ryou looked over at the doorway, but he couldn't see the boy from where he was standing. Ryou just couldn't imagine him making a deal like that. "Why? Why would you make a deal with something summoned by the slaughter of your whole family?" If anything, Ryou thought, the spirit should have hated Zorc just as much as the Pharaoh. It didn't make sense to him at all.
"My whole family, as you put it, was in favor of the deal," the spirit told him, gesturing toward the doorway and the stairs on the other side of the wall. "And I was too weak and pitiful to do anything against the Pharaoh on my own."
Ryou remembered the way the ghosts had pushed them here and realized the spirit was right. His family had not only been in favor of the deal, they'd all but forced him into it. He looked up at the spirit's face, unable to find the right words to say.
The spirit started to look uncomfortable under his gaze. "Stop looking at me like that," he said, unsuccessfully trying to hide his discomfort with an angry tone. He shoved Ryou away, harder this time.
Ryou fell to the ground, then scrambled back up immediately, frantically checking his body to make sure he hadn't gotten any of the liquid spattered all over the area on himself. Fortunately, all he'd gotten on himself was dirt and grime. He turned to say something to the spirit when the boy ran into the room, hiding behind him.
"There's someone coming down the stairs," the boy whispered.
Ryou pressed the boy's head against his shirt, hoping he hadn't seen too much. "Did someone come down here originally?" he asked the spirit.
"No, I was the only one," the spirit replied, moving to stand next to the doorway. Ryou walked to a point a few feet behind him, using him as a shield much the way the boy was using him.
After a few moments, Ryou heard footsteps coming from the stairwell. They grew louder and louder, until whoever it was paused at the bottom of the steps. Ryou's mind raced. It couldn't be Zorc – somehow he didn't imagine Zorc having such normal-sounding footsteps, if he even needed to walk at all. He wondered if it was Yugi... or the Pharaoh. The boy clung to him.
The person resumed their walk toward the door, footsteps echoing around the hallway. Ryou saw someone wander into the room, looking toward the cauldron, then surveying the rest of the room. "Ah!" the person shouted when he saw the spirit standing right next to him. "Gah. Don't do things like that. You almost scared me to death."
"Marik?" Ryou asked, looking out from behind the spirit.
"You know him?" the boy asked.
"Yeah, I know him," Ryou said. "He's safe," he assured the boy.
"Who's that?" Marik asked, looking at the boy curiously.
"He's nothing but a figment of a memory," the spirit said, glaring at Ryou as though to warn him off of saying anything more specific.
"I don't think I've ever seen this many people with that color hair in the same room at the same time," Marik commented, coming over to take a closer look at the boy.
The boy avoided his gaze, moving so that Ryou was between him and Marik again, just barely peeking out from his hiding place. Ryou rubbed the boy's hand where it clung to his shirt. "It's okay, he won't hurt you."
Marik looked at Ryou in concern. "Did he see...?"
"Yeah. That was his family," Ryou said, unable to help a pained look at the spirit.
Marik noticed his glance and looked back forth between the spirit and the boy, then at Ryou for confirmation. Ryou nodded. Marik gaped. "Oh."
"Yes, it's all very tragic," the spirit said irritably, avoiding either Marik or Ryou's eyes. He turned his glare on the boy, who glared back at him fearfully. "But it has nothing to do with getting us out of this mess."
"Are you sure about that?" Ryou asked. "We don't even know why we're here. What if Zorc wants something from you?"
"Zorc?" Marik asked, perplexed.
"Oh. Right." Seeing that the spirit wasn't going to say anything, Ryou explained what he'd just been told about Zorc and the items.
"If Zorc were summoned here, would it effect the real world?" Marik asked the spirit.
"Yes," the spirit replied. "Particularly as the items are all together in the real world right now. I had been working on a plan that involved a similar world, back when I still intended to summon him myself."
"Why did you change your mind?" Ryou asked. He hadn't thought about it before, but while the spirit's reasoning behind wanting to summon Zorc didn't make that much sense, it didn't seem like that had anything to do with why he no longer wanted to do it. He'd said not that long ago that he still intended to get revenge on the Pharaoh.
The spirit scowled, but didn't reply.
"Well?" Marik asked.
"I discovered that he'd put a fragment of himself inside me," the spirit said reluctantly.
"What?" Ryou and Marik said simultaneously.
"You mean the fragment that was in the ring?" Ryou asked, pieces fitting together in his mind.
"Yes," the spirit said, clearly still furious about it. "Only it wasn't always inside the ring. It was originally inside me. I agreed to help him rain destruction down upon my enemies – I did not agree to be possessed."
Ryou felt a twinge of annoyance at the spirit's anger at being possessed, but he'd already known the spirit was a hypocrite. The annoyance was quickly drowned out by distress at the thought of the boy next to him being possessed by the entity. "Wait, so he possessed you the way you possessed me?" he asked the spirit while stroking the boy's hair.
"Not quite," the spirit said. "He never fully took control of me the way I did you. But I can see now how he may have been... influencing my mind."
"Your mind?" Ryou repeated softly. In it's own way the idea was worse than what the spirit had done to him – at least his mind had remained his own, untouched, while the spirit roamed around in his body. Even if the spirit could hear his every thought, he'd never been able to do anything to his mind directly.
"Yes," the spirit said, crossing his arms. "My mind. Preventing me from considering actions that would have benefit me, but not him. Taking thoughts and feelings that were useful to him and making them stronger."
"Like strengthening an obsession with having the items?" Ryou asked, thinking about someone other than the spirit just then.
"Precisely," the spirit said.
"I..." Ryou wasn't sure he should voice the thought he'd just had. "I think the Pharaoh may have been possessed. Yugi said it was like someone took all his bad qualities and made them even worse..."
"Yugi? When were you talking to Yugi?" Marik asked.
"Er..." Ryou sheepishly explained his encounter with Yugi.
"You could have said something about this earlier, Landlord," the spirit complained.
"Hey, there's been a lot going on. And it's not like you don't keep things from me," Ryou replied, head still spinning at all the things he'd found out about the spirit that day. "But is it possible? Could the Pharaoh be possessed?"
"Yes, it's possible," the spirit said. "Given what happened during the ritual, I would even say it's likely."
"But how?" Ryou asked. "When did it happen?"
"Maybe it was when the Pharaoh took over Yugi's body," Marik said. "Wasn't that around the time Shadi told you the items had been 'stolen'?"
"It was," Ryou agreed. "But I think that was just because the Pharaoh had taken over Yugi's body for good. Yugi said the Pharaoh had been acting weird since..." Ryou put a hand to his face, feeling stupid. "...since we accidentally called Zorc out." A sudden shock ran through him. "I... When he came out of the ring, I knocked the bowl of water over, and it all went on the Pharaoh. Could that have...?"
Ryou's shock was mirrored in Marik's face. "It might have," he said quietly.
"This is all my fault," Ryou said, falling to his knees and hiding his face in his hands.
He felt a small pair of arms wrap around his shoulders. "It's not your fault," the boy said.
"How would you know?" the spirit demanded. "You don't even know what we're talking about."
"It doesn't matter," the boy said stubbornly, hugging Ryou more tightly.
Ryou felt another hand on his arm and looked up to see Marik standing next to him. "We can't know it was your fault, and even if it was, you still had to stop him from whatever damage he might have done then."
Ryou nodded, though he still terrible about it. "I suppose."
"None of this matters," the spirit said impatiently. "We have to deal with the problem we have now."
Ryou found he could agree with that. "What does Zorc have to do to resurrect himself?"
"He'll have to find all the items and bring them here," the spirit replied. "Then he'll require a sacrifice."
"How can he do that if he hasn't been fully revived yet?" Marik wondered. "Do you think he still has control of the Pharaoh?"
"He resisted far more during the ritual today than during the first one," the spirit said. "He may have been able to keep himself within the Pharaoh's soul as he was cast out."
Ryou was unhappy to hear that, especially now that he knew it was probably his fault, but there was something else bothering him just then. "You said he would need a sacrifice..." he said, fearing what that might mean.
"Yes, but it can't be someone he kills himself," the spirit said. "It must be a willing murder or suicide on the part of someone else."
Ryou shivered, wondering how the spirit had intended to fulfill that part of the spell. Had he planned to kill the Pharaoh and use that as the murder? Had he planned to kill someone else and watch the Pharaoh suffer through the end of the world? Or had he been planning on the suicide option? Before that day, Ryou would have never thought the spirit could consider something like that, but now he wasn't so sure. He thought it better not to ask, though.
"So he'll have to get the items," he said instead. "You said the High Priest took them, right? So we should try to get to him first."
"But what if he already has the items?" Marik pointed out. "He'd come here to put them in the stone, and we wouldn't be around to stop him."
Ryou had to admit he had a point. "But if we wait here, we're leaving it to the last possible moment to stop him."
"Well..." Marik looked thoughtful. "We could split up?" he suggested, not looking very thrilled by his own idea.
"No," the spirit said. "I have a better idea," he added, walking to the stairs without further comment.
"I guess we should follow him?" Marik said, walking after the spirit, but waiting for Ryou before starting on the stairs.
Ryou nodded. "We have to see what he's doing, if nothing else." He stood back up, unwrapping the boy's arms and taking his hand. He joined Marik in the stairway. The boy walked between them, seeming to have decided that Marik was safe be around.
They climbed the stairs to the top in short order, everyone relieved to be above ground when they were finished.
The spirit was waiting for them when they got there. "Took you long enough."
"You still haven't said what you intend to do," Ryou said. He saw the ghosts lined up around the entrance, blocking their only way out.
The spirit turned to address the ghosts. "We are going after the Pharaoh." The ghosts started laughing uproariously, faces twisted in unearthly grins. "If he comes here before we get to him, keep him trapped for us. Don't let him go down there."
For a moment, Ryou was certain the spirit's idea wasn't going to work, but then the ghosts cleared a path for them. The four of them walked through the opening, which quickly closed once they were on the other side. "Which way should we go?" Ryou asked.
"That way," the spirit said, pointing in a seemingly random direction. "The High Priest should be crawling in that direction right about now."
Ryou squinted off into the direction the spirit had pointed. He thought he could see tracks in the sand that disappeared behind a building, but his mind may have been playing tricks on him. He sighed. "Let's go."
The four walked off into the distance.
