Chapter 10

Contemplations and Complications

Tick-tock, Lara. Tick-tock, you stupid, clumsy fool. How much time did I have now? Six hours? Six and a half? For some reason, such an expanse of time seemed like nothing at all. A mere blink. Odd, don't you think, how a six hour drive can feel like an eternity...while a six hour race against time itself can feel like the cold hand of fate pressing all the life from your limbs? The very thought made my hands shake. Rising spirals of panic snarled and snapped at my heels as I pressed on, as I wove my way swiftly through tall green hedges that glittered with Labyrinthian magic. How could I have been so stupid? Had I simply stuck with my goblin guide, none of this would have happened. One action. One simple second of idiocy had cost me so dearly. Three precious hours sacrificed on the altar of damned curiosity. Poof. Vanished. Just like that. Needless to say, I wasn't my biggest fan right at that moment...

I squinted up at the castle, trying to estimate the distance between myself and it. Whether it seemed nearer or not was difficult to judge, and the fact brought me little comfort. I could only hope that Callie and Alec were being treated well... The darkest parts of my mind kept whispering in sinister undertones, saying that they would probably have to get used to such a living situation...the castle beyond the Goblin City might just be their new home. But no. I could never allow that to happen. There was a chance that I might lose, yes, a larger chance than I wanted to admit...but perhaps that didn't have to mean that the children would be lost. I needed a Plan B. If I could arrange something to secure their freedom...a bargain? Or a trade? I shuddered, not daring to imagine what such a trade might entail. No. Don't give up, Lara. Not yet. Not until your very last second ticks away...

It helped to try and shift my attention to the simple task of moving, to focus on the pleasant sensation of lightness that accompanied my freedom from the claustrophobic damp of the Oubliette. The sun was warm against my face and a gentle breeze brushed soothingly through my admittedly disheveled hair. The air, so fresh and clean, was alive and almost humming with comforting summer smells of earth and thriving greenery, and there was a stately resolution that permeated the hedges, stone arches, and sculptures that I drifted past, managing to lend a sense of playful mystery to the atmosphere which I found deeply appealing.

He didn't even take me all the way back to the beginning... Damn. There he was again, that haughty face swimming to the fore of my thoughts. Try as I might, I just couldn't keep my focus from drifting back to dwell on the peculiar behavior of a certain Goblin King. That last little encounter of ours had been...confusing. Confusing and more than a little troubling.

To begin with, I already gathered a lingering dread from my little foray into the dark. Implications of deepest importance and gravity thrummed about the edges of my understanding, though I felt that true comprehension of all that had happened eluded me and would continue to elude me. What I did know was that I had just suffered a genuinely terrifying and (I did not doubt) very nearly fatal experience. The horrors I had witnessed were beyond anything I could have imagined, so horrid that I was having a hard time remembering exactly what it was that I had seen, almost as if my mind was trying to block out all the hideousness. But I could remember the fear. Oh, yes, I could remember the fear that had paralyzed me, rendering me helpless. Fear that pooled hot and smothered black and filled my eyes and ears until there was nothing else...nothing left...until he arrived.

The Goblin King. My enemy. My rescuer. Perhaps that was the thing that troubled me most. He had saved me... He had put himself in harm's way to free me from danger, but did he stop there? No. He had saved me, he had healed me, and strangest of all, he had allowed me to continue running the Labyrinth. Why? By rights, he could have just let me die. Whether that Dark Place was part of his Labyrinth or no, he could have claimed easy victory and secured two delightful children to his care simply by doing nothing. And yet, he did not. And here I was...alive, well, and actively opposing him again. I could see no reason at all for his actions and—to my own underlying shame—I certainly had not been kind enough to deserve them.

Irritation at myself aside, my curiosity about that strange and smirking monarch sparked brighter now than ever and my head was a swirl of questions. I found myself wondering not just about his motives, but his character. What exactly did the king do when he wasn't busy abducting children or tormenting frustrated Laras? I wondered about his past, his daily routines, the demands on his time. I wondered how he governed his kingdom, what the political was system like. Was there only the Labyrinth? Or were there perhaps other kingdoms of this kind in the Underground? If so, did he have any friends? Enemies? Did he have any siblings? I wondered about the mother he had mentioned after our duel on the Labyrinth walls…and for that matter, who had taught him to duel so well? And what if his recent behavior toward me had not been born entirely of malicious intent? I thought of the strange expressions that had flickered behind his eyes...how troubled they'd been at the discovery of what he'd referred to as the Rift...the way they had widened in something like concern when he'd realized my wrist was broken. Could it be possible that his cruel exterior was only that? An exterior? Surely there was more to him than pure malice. And what if... What if indeed?

I rubbed absentmindedly at my newly restored wrist, opening and closing my fingers in residual wonderment.

There was difficulty, now, in hating him just as much as I had before. And it was...distressing. One naturally wants to be able to freely hate one's enemy, but that wretched sense of gratitude I felt towards mine for my deliverance from such terror simply would not be denied. I couldn't dislodge the shadow of admiration that teased at the edges of his image in my head. The shadow of respect. Was that all part of his plan? It would be a relief if it was because it meant that I could go back to hating him again. Perhaps he meant to play with my stupid human emotions by allowing me to be terrorized and then swooping in as my savior. Perhaps it was his way of gaining the psychological upper hand. Forcing my gratitude so I might feel indebted or even endeared to him. Forced Stockholm Syndrome. Or was he simply mocking me? Exercising his superiority by implying that I'd never have survived without his intervention?

Unbidden, his voice curled like smoke from the depths of my imagination, cruel and belittling.

Look at you, Lara...nothing more than a clumsy child. You don't even know what you've gotten yourself into, do you? You haven't the foggiest. How can you expect to solve something so ancient and sophisticated as the Labyrinth? You, of all people? You thought you were a match for me? You thought you could make it all on your own? Well. You are very lucky that I happened to give a damn. That I happened to care enough to save your ungrateful skin. And you want me to care, don't you? Silly little girl—

I broke off the imaginary admonition immediately. It was neither helpful, nor productive, and it served only to feed my anxiety. I took a long, shaky breath and tried to rouse myself out of such a crippling frame of mind.

Never mind, Lara. I thought. He is a king, after all. And you...well, look at you. There's no way he could actually think of you as anything more than a scruffy little pain in the neck. You're certainly not his equal. There's no way that he could ever...that he would ever... I froze, stopping dead in my tracks. Was that a flicker of disappointment? My God, was I blushing?!

"Oh, hell-god-baby-damn, no!" I cried aloud, palms flying up to clap over my eyes in shame. Great, what now?! We really do get to add possible Stockholm Syndrome to my growing list of mental disturbances?! I tried to conjure a more fitting image of him in my head, one in which he was monstrous, dangerous, disagreeable, hateful... It would have been far easier if he didn't look so much like a certain rockstar for whom I had a very particular fondness. How dare he?

I dropped my hands from my face and began pacing in a tight circle, trying to shake off a scarlet charge of embarrassment that made me want to crawl into the nearest hole and die. Enough of this. This was ridiculous. If the king's intention had been merely to cause me grief, he was proving quite successful. So far as I knew, nothing could please him more than the idea of manipulating my poor simple mind into tripping and tangling itself up into such a wild net of confusion that I would break, go mad, give up, or just run out of time entirely and leave him easy victor. He had stolen (Not stolen, Lara. Bought and paid for. Be fair.) three of my hours, had he not? Time was still key... And my presence of mind even more so.

"Right then, Lara. Pull yourself together. You mustn't let him get inside your head like this. Onward now. That's all you can afford to focus on. Just get to that bloody castle."

I drew in a long shaky breath and looked around me, bending my attention entirely upon the Labyrinth. There were three stone arches lining the hedge just opposite me, each identical to the other, and each doubtlessly leading on to some new conundrum. Decisions... Too many decisions. I exhaled and chose the rightmost arch. All I could really do now was walk (run when I had energy for it) and trust. Trust my head. Trust my gut. Trust my feet.

Tick-tock, Lara...

—x—

Clutch was getting pretty tired of all this running. Of course, it was hardly a deviation from the norm as he spent the majority of his free time running for some reason or other...but rarely had he ever done so with such great purpose. His aching feet hurried over yards and yards of damp, slippery stone, propelling him swiftly through the dark Oubliette tunnels. The great steel blade of the sword he gripped to his chest clanged and clattered along behind him, throwing the occasional spark as it slid and scraped against rock, making an awful racket.

Get to tha surface, Clutchy...gotta get to tha surface, gotta give Miss Lady her sword back... Panting heavily, the little goblin readjusted his grip on the slippery wooden handle and ran on.

What a terrible shock it had been all those long minutes ago when he had looked over his shoulder to find that the Lara-girl was no longer with him. He thought his heart might hammer a hole through his chest as fast as it had beat, and he was still trying to shake the horrid dizziness that had accompanied his panic. His own voice still echoed in his ears from calling her name...and the silence that had answered him had been deafening. Frantically, he had searched for her, and for one blissful moment a sense of relief whooshed through Clutch's little goblin heart when there, a few dozen yards back along the tunnel, he had seen the dim yellow glow of flame light. Unfortunately, Clutch's elation died before it even had the proper chance to live, for when he drew near enough to the glow to see its source, it was not the Lara-girl he found there. It was his master.

The Goblin King had been standing still and rigid as a statue, his gaze fixed intently on the damp tunnel wall in front of him. Shadow and light cast from the abandoned torch on the tunnel floor danced across his stony face, glinting in distant eyes and throwing dark elements of mystery over a mouth pressed thin as a pencil line.

"Majesty?"

The king did not acknowledge him. He was holding something, Clutch realized, gripping something very tightly in gloved hands. The goblin squinted in the gloom and scuttled closer. It was the Lara-girl's sword. The belt was still tied around the rugged blade, though Clutch could see that the leather had been severed cleanly at the buckle. The sight of such a thing sent a pang of fear through Clutch's chest. Had something terrible happened to her? Was it all his fault? Was his master going to toss him into the Bog for being so careless?

"M-M-Majesty?" he asked again.

The king rounded on him suddenly, startling the little goblin so badly that he fell over his own feet and landed in a heap on the cold floor.

"Clutch. Get up and take this," the king said, holding the great blade out to the goblin. "Give it to the girl when you reach the surface. She will thank you for it."

Clutch was stammering as he took the sword from his master, closing his little fists around the ancient wooden hilt. "B-B-Boss, Girl vanish, Boss! Clutchy never see! He doesn't know—"

"I know," the king said. His voice seemed very far away...and devoid of the malice that Clutch had come to expect. That in itself terrified the little goblin more than anything.

"Where is she, Boss?" Clutch sounded so small in the darkness. He didn't want the Lara-girl to be dead...

The king had not offered an answer. After a few tense seconds, during which His Majesty's eyes had never left the blank tunnel wall, he said, "If...if I find her, I will take her to the Eleventh Fountain. Go there."

Without another word, the king pressed his palm against the wall and vanished without a trace.

And so Clutch ran. Before long, he found a ladder and scrambled up it as swiftly as he could with only one hand free. Without slipping even once, he reached the top and popped his little head out of the mouth of a great urn somewhere in the Labyrinth's hedges. The sunlight made him blink and the air smelled so much better up here, but this was not time for resting. Clutch took a flying leap down from the urn, landed hard with a clatter and a grunt, and continued running, worrying about the Lara-girl, puzzling over the unfamiliar behavior exhibited by his master, and wishing like mad that he could remember where the Eleventh Fountain was...

—x—

Time was so precious…so bloody precious and I could feel it slipping away from me, the awareness so painfully acute that I could practically hear the invasive, rhythmic ticking of a clock in the back of my mind, worsening all the time. And there I was...wasting it all by arguing, audibly and angrily with a plant.

Let me reiterate the situation with a little more clarity, shall I?

After several long minutes of weaving my way through the hedge maze, I had found myself in something of a dead end, though it wasn't truly a dead end because before me was a stone archway through which I was determined to go. The reason for my inability to pass through said archway came in the form of a gigantic plant, a sort of obscurely sourced tangle of dark green vines that grew up and around the arch, flowering here and there with pale red blossoms the size of my open hand.

Big deal, Lara, you might say. What's so intimidating about a plant? Well, I'll have you know that this was unlike any plant I had ever encountered before. It was sentient. Anthropomorphic. It had consciousness. While it possessed neither eyes, ears, or any other distinguishing features to indicate that it was aware of what was going on around it, the plant was able to react to my efforts to get through the archway with speed, ease, and apparent intelligence, snaking its vines across the opening to bar my way in almost childlike determination and even petulance.

"Hey," I said impatiently, trying to duck the vines and carry on. "Cut it out."

The plant, evidently determined that I should not pass, rewarded me with a smart smack on the back of the hand with one of its vines before weaving itself impassibly across the opening, stubbornly reducing my options to retracing my steps unless I could find a way forward.

"Get out of the way, plant!" I snapped grumpily.

The plant wagged a leafy vine at me in an obviously negative response, almost like a reprimand. I was so bloody frustrated with the whole ridiculous situation, but I was prevented from turning on my heel to try my luck elsewhere by a strange and irresistible gut feeling that insisted that I go this way.

I scowled deeply, and squared my stance. "I'm going this way whether you like it or not."

Another wag of the vine, Nope.

I sighed deeply. If I had my sword...but no. It was probably better that I didn't have it in the long run, else I might have tried to hack this poor plant to pieces for simply doing its job. Brain over Brawn, Lara. Come on, now... Doing my best to regain my composure, I said, "Well. At least you appear to understand English... What do I have to do to get through here, eh?"

The plant, seeming pleased by my change in demeanor, swept at the ground in front of it with a vine, clearing away scattered earth and a number of dead leaves. A game board was etched into the pale flagstones there. I counted the squares, nineteen by nineteen. Even as I looked on, a second vine snaked out and wrapped itself gently around my hand drawing me toward the cleared patch of paving stones. Somehow, I knew not to struggle, but allowed it to lead me along like a child guided by its mother.

"Listen, Groot, I don't have the time to indulge your strange, plant-y behavior, so..."

The plant tugged twice on my hand and began drawing me downward whilst another of its vines patted the stones on my side of the board, as if indicating for me to sit. The plant then produced two boxes, placing them on either side of the game surface and opening them with a flourish. One contained a number of small black stones in the shape of buttons. The other contained the same, but in white.

"You...you want to play a game?"

The plant made an affirmative gesture and tugged on my hand again.

"I don't have time for games…"

The plant snapped its vines lightly through the air, and gestured toward the archway, as if it were a salesman making a pitch. Like it or not, Lara…that's the way you need to go. Frowning, I knelt opposite the plant.

"Do I get to go through if I win?"

Affirmative.

"And if I lose?"

The plant made a nonchalant gesture in the direction from which I had come.

"So... So if I lose I have to make like a plant...and leaf?" I'm really not proud of how hard I laughed at my own lame ass joke. Sometimes I think I might not be quite right in the head...

The plant, seeming unamused by my cackling (though I can't imagine why,) tapped the board impatiently.

I did my best to regain control of myself, scrutinizing the board thoughtfully. "What are we playing, anyway? Is there some kind of rule book or..."

The plant just tapped the board again. I sighed.

"Alright, then...this had better not take too long. Who's on first?"

The plant waved a vine at me so I reached into my box, produced a white stone, and placed it on one of the intersecting lines in the center of the board. The way I saw it, this game could be one of three: Go, Gomoku, or Pente. I hoped to God that it was Pente...the rules of which at least I was familiar with as it was an absolute favorite of my board game-obsessed Dad's. Go and Gomoku I knew only by reputation... I played defensively, buying myself some time whilst observing the plant's playing tactics. Judging by the way it was laying its stones, this wasn't traditional Go... Gomoku then? No. There went two of my own stones, captured and removed from the board by a rather smug looking plant.

Okay... Pente it is, then. That meant that to win I would either have to be the first one to get five stones in a row or the first to capture ten of my opponent's stones.

The plant was good. A quick and decisive player, but focused mainly on building its row of five. This inspired me to change tactics and abandon the pursuit of building my five in a row. If I played offensively, utilizing my predatory human instincts to hunt, trap, and capture my opponent, then I might just stand a chance... I chased the plant around the board, capturing what I could, but mostly keeping it distracted until I could form a line of my own. Until...

"Tessera," I said, placing a fourth stone in an open ended row. Tessera, being Pente speak for "check mate." The plant jolted and hovered its vines over the board, obviously scanning for some plan of action with which to thwart my victory. There was none. The plant could block one end if of my row if it wished, but I could easily place a fifth stone on the free end. Either way, the game was won.

The plant drooped dramatically when it reached that conclusion, and I grinned in my triumph. "That was fun! I'd forgotten how much I actually enjoy that game..."

The plant ignored me and simply gathered up the stones in a petulant manner, flinging them into their respective boxes and slamming the lids aggressively.

"No hard feelings, eh, plant?"

It snapped its vines, whiplike and angry, probably accusing me of cheating. I just shrugged, got to my feet, and dusted off the knees of my trousers. "Sorry for your loss. A deal's a deal though..." I nodded toward the still barricaded archway. "Pay up."

Grudgingly, the plant began to unravel itself from across my path, revealing its promised set of stone steps descending casually down through the hedges and around a corner.

I smiled and walked forward, granting the bundle of vines a cheeky salute as I moved under the archway. "Hasta la vista, Groot."

Just as I put my foot out to begin my casual descent, the plant snaked one of its vines out to snare it, yanking it out from under me and sending me careening forward for the most humiliating display of clumsiness I have ever given in my life. Who knew plants were such sore losers?

Author's Note: Right then… I'll try not to drown you in words, but I would like to make a handful of statements and acknowledgements. As you can see, I have returned, but I will not jinx my progress by making any promises regarding things like "consistency" or "future posts." I've learned my lesson. I am an undisciplined pretender and it's a good thing that writing is not my day job…yet.

Be at ease. This chapter is dull, but it is only a filler…I felt I owed poor Lara a moment to process all that's happened to her. I've put her through a lot of crap lately, and I fear I'm not about to stop there! There will be more action and intrigue to come, if that interests any of you…

Also, in my hiatus I've made a few quality adjustments to all of my previous chapters…adjustments that I am particularly pleased with, so I would implore any of you who have been following this silly story of mine from the beginning to please go back and take a chance on receding it. I promise you won't be disappointed!

Finally, I wish to thank you all for your persistence, patience, and interest. Your kind words and lovely reviews never fail to lift my heart and add a bit of brightness to these dark days. Dark, dark days… Bless you all, my Readers. Stay strong. Have faith. We are all warriors, now…and together we can beat back the Darkness.

Peace be with you,

FireDancer

P.S. On a lighter note, points to any who got the Bowie references. I can't seem to stop making them ;)