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Lara lowered her head against a gust of wind, holding a colourful shawl close to her face, and continued her little ascent to the top of a dune. She took a glance at her smaller companion, but Chania was close behind, her feet practised and steady on the slippery sand.
They both reached the peak in a short time, and from their new vantage point they had a clear view of the human-made shapes far on the horizon. The very, very recognizable triangular shapes.
Lara breathed out slowly, trying to make sense of her turbulent emotions that assaulted her as her eyes landed on the pyramids. It was the first time she was seeing them since she had almost died in the depths of the largest of them.
Fear, desperation, anger. Sadness, hope, relief.
Pain. Physical and mental both.
Her body had healed from the ordeal by now, leaving nothing but scars and some of her skills a bit rustier than since she was a teenager, but it was coming back to her and she was learning new combat techniques with the Bantiwa still. The phantom pain though, it came back at this view as if her body was still weak and broken.
She averted her face at another gust of wind, and when she looked back at the pyramids, her emotions no less strong but easier for her to parse through them, to tentatively accept them to try to give them less power over her, another memory reared its ugly head.
Something Lara really hadn’t though about since then, but what really should have bothered her more, now that her focus had turned to it: The reason she had been in the pyramid in the first place, carrying heavy pieces of golden armour and one small artefact that was the key to it all.
She had tried to summon Horus, to stop Seth’s evil spreading over the land. And… she had failed. Seth had interrupted the summoning, crashing down onto the pedestal and facing Lara face to face, god to human. Despite her tiredness, despite all her efforts at collecting the armour having been in vain, the fight had never left her, there hadn’t been a cell within her body willing to give up.
But fighting a god was something even she considered a bad idea rather than an adventurous escapade, so she had decided to run instead, using the ankh to close the gate-like trapdoor to lock the only entrance into the area.
But was it? Was it the only way in and out? She hadn’t had time to search the place for every nook and cranny, and even if she had, how could she have known if there weren’t exits impossible to open for a human, but all too easy for deities like Seth? How could she know she had truly sealed the evil to never terrorize humanity again, not unless another irresponsible human released him once more?
Lara unwittingly glanced up at the sky, noting the clear blue colour with a few stray white clouds, none of the ominous red of Seth’s coming reign.
Maybe he was biding his time. Maybe he was being more subtle. Maybe it took time for him to escape, but he was coming, and any day now the disasters would be striking again, one after another, and this time Lara would have no plan to stop him. Had she been living carefree these few months without realizing how temporary, how doomed everything was? And it was her fault, her carelessness that had started it all, her-
“Sashima?”
Lara reacted to her temporary name as well as to the one she had been given at birth, and torn from her spiralling thoughts, she realized she had nearly stopped breathing. Inhaling the hot desert air, Lara forced herself to calm down and smiled down at Chania in thanks and reassurance.
It had been months. If Seth was indeed biding his time, she would deal with any catastrophes when it came to that. Not having a plan had never stopped her before. So maybe it hadn’t ended yet, maybe it was unsure when it would ever end, the consequences of her sticky-fingered hubris, but she would help no-one, least of all herself, if she worried over it now.
With one last glance at the pyramids, Lara and Chania made their way back down to their camels that would take them back to their tribe.