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Himalayas, Nepal.
It was cold. That was the only thing she could think of while climbing the bloody mountain. Her arms and legs were tired and freezing, but she still had a mountain to climb and a treasure to find, so she keeps going with her axes in hand, breaking through the ice until she is finally at the top.
Lara is relieved to arrive and after taking a moment to breathe, she gets on her feet and stares ahead while she puts her axes on her sides. She is equally surprised and happy that she found what she has been looking for in the past few months. She can’t take a picture because her camera broke a few minutes ago when an avalanche attacked her while climbing, but she is sure that she isn’t going to forget the view soon.
She starts walking with a little difficulty through the snow, but she arrives at the handing and ancient bridge that it’s separating her from the monastery she had been looking for a few days in that cold mountain. Lara looks down for a moment when she is starting to cross and the fact that there are a river and a very long fall, makes her walk slowly because the bridge moves with the wind and the material looks ancient.
The wind is not her ally on this, but she still tries and after a few moments she is almost at the middle of the bridge. When she hears something that sounds like rope breaking, she looks behind to confirm that her weight made the bridge rip a little from the huge dragon-like pedestal at the beginning. Lara doesn’t lose any more time and starts to run.
While she is running to the other side the fastest, she can, she can hear the bridge breaking behind. She mumbles a few curses and when she is almost at the other side, she can feel that her feet are in the air. Lara falls and reaches the bridge to hang of it as her life depends on it. When the bridge completely breaks and it's now hanging beside the rocks like that Indiana Jones movie in India, she climbs, and it's not relieved to be alive until she is safe at the top, touching the stable rock.
She decides to get her snow glasses off and take a moment to breathe before continuing. Lara is used to that and other near-death experiences, but she is sure that she will never get used to them. She stays kneel on the snowed floor for a few moments until her breath is normal again. She stands up again and while her snow glasses hang from her neck, she observers around her.
Lara is at the top of a pair of stairs in what she is sure is the front yard of the monastery. The building is huge and majestic, kind of old and damaged by the snow, but it’s still a piece of art that Lara must admire for a few moments. With the wind, she can hear the Buddhist’s wheels and she can see the flags the monks put a lot of time ago.
It’s a wonderful view, she must accept, but she needs to move on if she wants to get out of the cold soon. She starts to walk to what she knows is the entrance but stops suddenly when she finds footprints in the snow. They are human and fresh, so that meant that she wasn’t the only one there. Lara touches the pistol she has on her right side and tries to hear something that can tell her that she is not alone, but when she hears, is too late.
Before she can do anything, she can feel the end of a gun on her head and she froze completely. How someone else knew about the things she was after? Lara doesn’t know but she hopes that it’s not Trinity...again.
“Hands up”, says a voice behind her. It was male with an American accent, and he was screaming because with the wind it was difficult to speak in a normal tone.
Lara did what she was told and after he took her gun, she turned around. She found a man, like she excepted, taller than her, with a green snow jacket, snow glasses on his head, and a gun pointing at her. It looked like he was alone, and he wasn’t of Trinity. She was sure that if he was one of them, he will have killed her already.
“Who are you?”, he asked, and she was making the same question on her head. His light eyes and face were somehow familiar to her.
Lara felt like she had seen him before, but she wasn’t sure because she read very little of the newspapers and seen even less of the news since, they started calling her crazy.
Maybe it was someone like her? No, he didn’t look like a scholar and if he will, she would have known.
“Someone looking for boring things”, she replies, and he looks at her without believing a thing.
“Name, darling”, he says, and she rolls her eyes.
“Why will you want my name? There is nowhere near to have a date”, her sassiness was getting the best of her, but she was mad. She came a long way to find what she was looking for in that monastery so an idiot could ruin the moment.
“Don’t get sassy with me, miss. I’m just making sure you aren’t one of those idiots that have been following me”, he says with what looks like a smirk, even when his words were kind of harsh.
Lara stops for a moment after he says that. Idiots following him? Maybe Trinity was after him too? Well, in that case, that meant that he was looking for the same thing she was. And that wasn’t good at all.
“Well, I can assure you, mister, that I’m not one of those idiots”, she replies, and she lows her arms. “I think that the proper name for those idiots is Trinity, I am right?”, he looks surprised for a moment, but he doesn’t lower his gun or returns her own.
“Yes”, his tone is not a very sure one. “Do you know them?”, Lara wanted to tell him that she bloody knew them very well, but she decided to reply with something simple.
“Unfortunately,” she crosses her arms on her chest and puts her weight in one leg. “We have some history, but they are far behind. I left them with some false clues and that should keep them busy for a while”.
“Uh”, he says, like he doesn’t believe her. “Then, I suppose that you aren’t from Trinity neither?”
“I’m not with them”, she replies with a very serious tone because she was kind of offended. He looks at her for a few seconds in silence, like he is judging her, before lowering his gun.
“Alright then, miss. What are you doing here then?”, he puts his gun in a holster he has inside his jacket but doesn’t return her gun.
“It’s that relevant?”, he smirks a little while looking at the gun on his left hand.
“Well, if you don’t tell me it will look like you lied, and then I will have to shout at you, so please, tell me”, when he looks at her again, Lara is giving him a look. The one that Jonah is used to calling the ‘I’m not telling any shit until you do it’ look and the man appeared to understand it. He smiled and decide to give up.
“Okay don’t tell me. But at least tell me your name. I didn’t expect to find another person here. Thought the monastery was out of the maps and other things”, Lara looks at him for a moment, judging him and after a couple of moments, she decides to at least say something because the probability of them looking for the same thing was very high.
“I’m going to answer your question, mister”, she says, and he looks at her again. “I’m looking for some ancient scrolls in the monastery. That’s all”, he looks kind of surprised.
“Scrolls? Just like that? I thought you were looking for something more…sophisticated”, he smiles a little and she tries to not look confused.
She read everything she could about the place, and she is 100% sure that nothing in there was more important than ancient scrolls telling how to be immortal. Those scrolls were dangerous in the hands of Trinity and were also part of her father’s research about immortality. When she got across them in one of his notebooks, she decided to find them and destroy them but somehow Trinity knew, and they started following them.
So, if he wasn’t looking for the scrolls, what he was looking for?
Her train of thought was suddenly interrupted by him hanging her gun back. She took it, looking at her kind of suspicious.
“Either way, I don’t mind your company if you aren’t with Trinity”, he says, moving to pass her, to the ancient door behind her. “By the way, I saw you in the bridge, that was a close call”, he said smiling and she rolled her eyes before turning around again and putting her gun back in her holster.
“What are you exactly looking for?”, she asks, while she follows him.
“Ahh, something about a hidden treasure than a Chinese emperor put in the lower levels of the monastery”, he answered while he looked at the door. Lara stopped for a moment to think.
Hidden treasure? There wasn’t anything about a metallic treasure on her father’s notes or the books she read. But then again, her father was obsessed with immortality, he could skip anything that could talk about gold or material treasure because what he wanted wasn’t exactly gold. Still, the books didn’t mention anything, and Trinity wasn’t used to following simple things like that. Maybe the books skip that part too and maybe Trinity thought that he was looking the same as her, just like she thought he was after the scrolls. Lara got to accept that she was getting curious.
“What is your source?”, she asks suddenly, while the man looks at the door like he is trying to look for a way in.
“My what?”, she sighs tiredly.
“Your source. The thing that told you there was a treasure here. Did you get that from a book, a person?”
“Oh, that. Sorry, the wind is terrible here”, he says, and he laughs a little. He shakes her head and gets closer, not so close to invade his space. “I heard it from some legends in the city and some books that I found and a friend too. He is waiting for me in a village near here. Why? You got interested?”
“No. I’m simply curious. I read a lot of this lost monastery, like you said it doesn’t appear in maps or sources like that and the only things that I found were things about ancient scrolls with magic things written on them and other weird things but never an emperor’s treasure”.
“Well, according to the legends and my friend, the emperor didn’t tell a lot of people about the treasure anyway. And the monks agree to hide it in here just a few days before the monastery was burned by someone”, he explained. “But I found a soldier’s diary, who was in charge of moving it here, in Beijing that can confirm that the treasure was delivered and it’s still here”, he smiles at the end, like he is proud of that and Lara can just think that maybe this man is more like a child than a man.
“Alright”, she says and decides to drop the topic and concentrate on getting those scrolls before Trinity.
She looks up to the door but finds that it's closed and too heavy to be moved. There is nothing on the walls that can help them open it, so Lara goes back and tries to look for a way up.
“You didn’t tell me your name, even if I have a vague idea of who you may be”, he said beside her while she looks at the building. She thinks that she can climb up to the roof and enter through the inside yard that, according to her readings, the place has.
“Really?”, she asks, with a sarcastic tone. He chuckles again.
“Yes. Your face looks kind of familiar. Maybe I have seen it in newspapers with a thing saying that you survive something on the Devil Triangle”, she stops suddenly again and looks at him seriously.
“Maybe”, she replies, and they look at each other for a few moments.
“Lara Croft isn’t?”, he asks stretching his hand to shake hers.
“Indeed”, Lara shakes his hand, which is gloved and bloody cold like she is feeling right then. “And you are?”, he looks kind of offended for a few moments, until he smiles again.
“Nathan Drake”, he answers, and she understands why he looked familiar.
“Oh, the Nathan Drake? The one who found the Shambala Stone?”, her tone is kind of excited. She had read a lot about him in the newspapers, even when a lot of people didn’t believe him because he didn’t have any proof of his supposed discoveries.
“Yes, that Nathan Drake”, he says, and he smiles again. That is the only thing he does. Or at least, likes to do. “And before you say that I don’t have any proof, I invite you to walk a little in the snow and search for the thing itself, of course, since we are in the same god-awful place”, he winks at her and she finds herself smirking even if the comment was somehow harsh. He had a way of seeing things like that in a whole different tone.
After that they decide to climb the old unsteady walls of the monastery until they are at the top, the wind is unbearable, and they can see part of the village he mentions before down the mountain. They drop on the interior yard of the monastery and take a few breaths. Both are relieved to not feel the wind anymore, but some corners are dark, so Nathan turns on a torch with his lighter and after that a few others that are still (somehow) humid.
When all the interior yard is illuminated, Nathan and Lara can see how huge the building looks from the floor and that they got a few floors to explore and doors to open.
“Well, I need to go down”, Nathan says suddenly, after he gets out a very bad drawing of the monastery that he probably made. “I made this after the descriptions in the soldier’s diary, so I hope I’m going the right way”, he smiles again, like he is trying to be positive about it. He takes a torch and walks to the only door in the monastery that went downstairs.
“Good luck then”, Lara finds herself saying and Nathan looks at her for a moment before smirking.
“Thanks, princess. Good luck to you too”, he says and when he is leaving again, she rolls her eyes. He came up with that nickname just when they were climbing and she said something about Sir Francis Drake not having children and he responded with ‘Oh please, c’mon princess, you know he went to a lot of places’ to make fun of her too.
She turns around and looks above her.
“I’m going to need it”.
Lara didn’t know how much time she spends exploring through the monastery. She only knows that she was cold and tired when she finally found the library she was looking for. She knew it was the library because it had a lot of parchments and scrolls and early books that none other room in the monastery had.
She looks around using one of her red flares while the floor cracks with every move she does. She discovers that the library is one of the many rooms that are visibly damaged from the fire Nathan mention a while ago. Lara can see burned wood, burned walls, and parchments, and skeletons between the ashes.
She read about that fire. The books didn’t tell who causes it or why, but she thinks that it was because a lot of people were traveling there to look for ancient and dangerous knowledge, so maybe one of the monks decided that the best way of stopping it, was burning it down. It worked because people soon forgot about the magic and the secrets the monastery hid and the place became a legend and was erased from maps and books, mostly.
Lara stopped looking when she found a few undamaged scrolls on the shelves. That caught her attention because they appeared unmoved, while the others were all burned in a pile like someone took them and put them together to burn them, so no one could find them ever again.
She left the flare in what looked like a wooden desk and took the scroll carefully. She unfolds it and got close to the light. Lara didn’t know exactly what it said, because it was written in an ancient language that somehow looked like Sanskrit, but she wasn’t sure. She recognized a few words and she deduced that the scroll talked about a natural remedy against a rare disease. She read the other one and it didn’t say anything about immortality.
Lara keeps searching for something related and she is almost losing hope when she finds something that looks like is written in a very, very ancient language that she only can recognize the word ‘magic’ and ‘spell’. It has drawings, so thanks to that she thinks it's related to Shangri-La and the mythical lake that makes people immortal that the city has. She decides that she needs to burn it and she is about to when she hears a sound that looks like something exploding.
Lara stops suddenly and stays quiet to see if she can hear something. Voices break the silence and she can only think of one thing: Trinity.
“Damn it”, she mutters to herself and she decides that she can burn the scroll later, so she folds it again and puts it inside her jacket. When she is going out, she hears the bomb sound again and thinks of how or when they found her, but she doesn’t stop to think about that any further because she is sure it's Trinity and she needs to get out fast.
Lara is about to climb up again, so she can go out when she remembers that she is not alone. She stops again and looks down (because she is on the fifth floor) to where Nathan disappeared earlier.
Lara wasn’t one for teamwork. She prefers to do things alone because having a partner in her line of work usually means splitting the treasure and the glory and most of the time, she doesn’t want to do that. So, she is okay with traveling alone, wondering in dark and dangerous places like is just a walk in the park or dealing with the guilt and a huge weight on her shoulders when something goes very wrong. Truly, she is okay with that, she is used to it and in some way, she likes it, even when it can be lonely or insane.
But, even if Nathan looked like an American idiot (no pun intended), and she heard a few times that he never took things seriously or that he was a loser because he never finds what he looks for, she doesn’t dare to leave him behind when motherfucking Trinity was knocking at the door (literally). So, after cursing again, she decides to go down and look for him and a way out together. If they found one because she was sure that there wasn’t a way out on those low grounds.
She takes the stairs that he took, and she thank him in her head when the way was lighted by the torches. Lara goes down almost running, clearly without observing what was around her or that the stairs kept going down like a snail shell. While she goes, she hears the bombing noises further and she doesn’t stop until she arrives at the end of the stairs.
Lara looks around for a moment and follows the open door that has the light torch because they were two more, but she followed her intuition. She runs through a hall and doesn’t stop until she runs across another door and faces a chamber bathed in light.
She stops suddenly, observing around with almost an open mouth. The place wasn’t huge, but it got a lot of things that can be considered a treasure. She could see golden and platinum armor, books and texts written in Sanskrit, Chinese inventions, Chinese statues of dragons and lions, and most of all she could see chests full of coins. It was a treasure and she must give Nathan some credit for it, even if he had to leave most of it.
“Well, looks like you came after all”, says a voice and when she looks its way, she finds him looking back at her with a grin.
“I think I owe you an apology”, she says, still looking around. “This is truly a treasure”, she smiles a little, something that she doesn’t do often and means a lot because of that.
“I told you”, he says, and she can hear him moving a few ceramics.
She looks at him inspecting the Chinese ceramic, but then she remembers why she came.
“Drake, we must go”, her tone sounds alarmed and that is the exact thing that makes him look at her at the same time he puts the ceramic on the floor.
“Why?”, he asks confused, while she takes him by the wrist.
“Trinity is here. They were breaking the door when I came. We need to go. Now”, she starts to drag him and is almost out of the room when soldiers appear from the nothing pointing guns at them.
Lara and Nathan then must go back to their steps with their hands on the air.
“Crap”, she can hear him say behind her.
“They are too many”, Lara says, contemplating the idea of fighting back.
“I have to deal with more, miss”, Nathan replies, and maybe that it’s enough.
When they are almost in the middle of the room, parallel to some columns and the soldiers stop in front of them, Lara and Nathan exchange a look, and three seconds later, they are running to hide behind said columns and opening fire.
The soldiers counterattack, but because they don’t have a proper place to hide, they are soon dead on the floor.
“Croft!”, Nathan yells and she runs to the exit after him. Nathan hurries and closes the chamber’s door and they both run through the hall until they are at the other door.
They stop suddenly there because they find more soldiers. They are going down the stairs and they are about to shout to them, and Lara was going to respond, but Nathan takes her left hand and makes her move.
“Forget about them and run!”, he yells and Lara, for once in her life, listens.
She doesn’t know where they are going, but she trusts this stranger. Lara just knows that maybe they took one of the other two doors she found when she was going down and she hoped that that was the exit because she doesn’t want to die in the hands of Trinity.
“Where are we going?!”, Nathan is still leading the way and he is still holding her left hand while they are running from the soldiers that were shouting at them from behind.
“I hope you are as strong as you look like, princess!”, he answers, and she looks at him confused for a moment before ducking a bullet and responding with a few of her own.
“Why you say it?!”, he doesn’t answer, and they suddenly stop. Nathan had to grab her by the waist because she went too far ahead and almost drop from the stairs they found.
“What the bloody fuck?”, she asks looking at him, but he simply smiles.
“C’mon”, he rushes, and she doesn’t have time for more, because he is taking her down a short stair and running with her again through a door. When they cross it, she can see the river she saw from the hanging bridge in front of them and feel the cold air around her again.
“It's that…?”, the shouting interrupts her stupid question and makes her turn around to help Nathan close the door.
“That will buy us some time, but we need to cross the river if we want to lose them definitely”, she looks at her like he just said something insane.
“Cross the river?! In this cold?! Have you gone bloody mad?!”, he looks at her with both an amused and mad look.
“Well, miss Croft, do you have a better idea?”, he asks sarcastically, and she looks around thinking. “We have Trinity behind and in top of us”, he says pointing to said places while he puts his gun in his holster. “We are just lucky that I discovered this exit because then we would be dead by now”, she looks at him scoffing, trying to think, but she can’t. The cold is not helping and the shouting at the other side neither.
“Okay. Let’s do it”, he nods and after she puts her gun on her holster again, she follows him.
The river in front of them is moving fast and it has a few solid pieces of ice traveling by it that they could use so they don’t touch the water. But Lara isn’t too sure of it until she hears the door open behind them. Nathan jumps in the ice first and turns around to stretch his hand so she can hold it.
“C’mon!”, he yells and when she hears the shouting, Lara doesn’t lose any more time and runs before jumping at the moving ice Nathan is at. The man catches her by the hand and with the other, he shouts a few soldiers.
When the weight is too much, they jump in another one and they keep doing that until they arrive at the other side of the river. They run for their lives when they touch land until they lost Trinity completely. They follow the river from the land until they arrive at a waterfall that makes them took an unstable passage through the edge of the mountain that takes them safely to the ground below the waterfall (partial thanks to Lara’s axes).
Once they are safely on land, the first thing Lara does is checking that the scroll is still on her jacket. She let out a sigh of relief when she finds that he is still where she left it.
“I hope you found what you were looking for”, he says, resting beside a tree because he is out of breath.
“Yes, I have it”, she replies, putting it back in place. “What about you?”, she is also out of breath, but she is now resting on her knees.
“Yes. Well, I hope so”, he says and searches for a moment on his pants before getting out what looks like to be a jade necklace. She is a hell of confused.
“You took that?”, he looks at her surprised.
“Yeah. Why you ask?”
“Though you will get something more valuable”.
“Well, I know of a couple of museums that will kill for this and I got a few coins, so I’m not empty-handed”, he says with a smirk while he secures the necklace in his pocket again. When he touched his other pocket, she heard coins and she simply shakes her head with a little smile on her face.
When they catch their breaths, they decide to walk together again the mountain below. Nathan suggests her to go to the village where he said his friend was staying, but she declines to say that she had an airplane waiting for her not so far.
“Alright then. I think we part ways here”, Nathan says when they arrive mountain below.
“I believe so”, she says, and they face each other for a few seconds. Nathan has a wide smile on his face and Lara is smiling a little.
“It was a pleasure to met you, miss Croft”, he says and when she looks in front of her, his hand is stretched so she can shake it. She takes it without thinking it twice.
“The pleasure was all mine, mister Drake”, they both smile while shaking hands and once they separate, she is the first one to leave.
After that, she finds her airplane, arrives at Katmandu, and stays there for a while deciphering the scroll. She goes back to London and a few months pass after that. In those months she resolves to burn the scroll after learning a lot from it and putting an end to Trinity following her, but besides that, it didn’t happen anything exciting. At least, not until she received an e-mail from a certain Nathan Drake.
She opened it immediately just to find a newspaper photo about a jade necklace that the Beijing Museum added to its Chinese collection. She smiled when she read it and she laughs when she read the note, he writes for it.
Told you so.
-N.D.