Chapter 2: Uncovered and defiled

The sands of Darsah were hot to the touch – Lara made a note to maybe not go barefeet until the place cooled down, lest she end up roasting her own feet. Standing on the shore, she fished out a notebook. The island was very small, but the temple would still be hidden well. Good thing she had her fathers note’s.

“Hmmm, let me see…” she said, flipping the pages as Sam leaned her chin on Lara’s shoulder, peeking at the notes.

“Where’s that page I had bookmarked…”

“Uh, Lara?” said Sam, pointing. “I think your book’s not had a good time of it on the way here…”

Frowning, Lara looked at the old ink that was supposed to guide her way to the hidden temple. It had smudged badly, the old paper stained with water to the point where she couldn’t even read the words.

“Shit. I knew I should have laminated this old thing.”

“No, ''I'' said that, you wanted it ‘authentic’, remember?” teased Sam.

Lara pushed the smug face of her girlfriend away, before thinking. She went over to her backpack and whipped out a towel, before laying it down on the sand. Sam wandered over, curious.

“Weird time to go sunbathing.”

“Not for this it’s not,” said Lara, putting the book down on the towel. “Once the pages dry, I’ll know what we should be looking for. Besides…” The brunette plopped down on the towel. “I’d quite like this to dry up as well,” she added, pointing to her almost completely transparent shirt.

“Hm, this might be the first good idea you’ve had so far this whole trip,” said Sam, fishing her own towel out of her duffel bag and spreading it out next to Lara’s. Before lying down, she unlaced her shoes and put them down next to the towel, followed by her socks, her sports bra and her shorts.

“Uhm, what are you doing?” asked Lara as her now completely nude girlfriend lay down on her towel.

“They’ll dry faster this way. Besides, this is a desert island. It’s not like anybody’s gonna see.”

Seeing the logic in her friend’s words, Lara spread out her own clothes on the rocky shore. She kept her panties on, though. There were limits.

The sun made swift work of their wet gear, and barely an hour later the two girls stood ready to set off in search of the entrance of the tomb in their now dry and toasty warm clothes. Even the journal was vaguely legible again.

“Okay…” said Lara. “We’re supposed to walk north-northeast for about half a mile until we find a rock carved with a symbol of a bird… or a bull… it’s hard to tell. You know what? Just shout if you see any kind of carving.”

They walked on through the rocks and sand, the sun still high and impossibly bright in the cloudless sky. The two archeologists scanned every even vaguely important-looking rock along the way, looking for some sort of sign. After twenty minutes or so, after deciding to stay on the coast and move around a huge cliff, they spotted something.

“Sam, over here!”

Lara pointed to a rock jutting out of the bottom of the sheer cliff. It was slightly paler than the others. It also had what was very clearly the carving of a bull on it. They looked at each other, nodding excitedly as their sense of academic curiosity mingled with their lust for adventure. Lara squatted down and pressed on the rock. There was a subtle click, and then a stone trapdoor started to open just beneath her feet. Lara scrambled out the way as it opened up, revealing a long ladder downwards.

“Cripes, that would have been a hell of a fall, Lara…”

The brunette peered down into the hole, looking at the small square of floor down below that was illuminated by the sun, which was almost directly overhead.

“Eh, there aren’t even any spikes at the bottom. I’m almost disappointed.”

“Well, if you’re so confident, you can go first. Ten bucks says you walk into some kind of trap before the day’s done.”

“Alright,” said Lara with a smile, “I will take that bet.”

She started climbing down the ladder, followed soon after by her friend.

“Thanks for letting me go first, by the way; the view from down here is much better.”

Sam looked down between her legs, catching the British woman staring at her ass.

“By all means keep staring at it,” she grinned. “It’ll make it that much easier for me to win my ten bucks.”

Tempting as her current view might be, Lara decided to heed her friend’s words and look back down. After climbing a dozen or so rungs more, she stepped off the ladder and made space for Sam. They were in a narrow hallway, which led to an antechamber.

“While we don’t have much information about the land of Punt,” said Lara, “these murals seem to match the art style of the period we’re looking for.”

“Any hints as to where we’re supposed to go?” asked Sam, indicating the three hallways in front of them.

“Let me see… burial rituals… highlights of king Parahu and queen Ati’s reign… something about a curse to ward off grave robbers…”

“You mean like us?”

“''No'', I ''don’t'' mean like us. We are not some run-of-the-mill tomb raiders.”

“Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night, babe.”

Lara gave her an annoyed look over her shoulder before returning to the murals.

“Besides, all this curse stuff is just superstitious nonsense anyway.”

“You ''do'' remember that time when the spirit of a long-dead Japanese queen tried to possess my body, right?”

“That was an exception.”

“''Sure'' it was. Fine, don’t come crying to me if you end up with some horrible curse. Now, anything on there about directions?”

“Nnnnnope, doesn’t look like it. Let’s go in the left one.”

“Any reason?”

“It’s as good as any of the others?”

“Ugh, why do I keep letting you talk me into coming on these trips?”

“Because you love me?”

“Oh yeah, there’s that.”

Sam gave Lara a quick kiss.

“Go on then, miss ‘''I’m not a tomb raider''’, lead the way,” said Sam, giving her girlfriend a firm smack on the ass.

Lara didn’t bother to hide the giddy smile on her face as she stepped into the tunnel.

The tunnel halls darkened as the two adventurers proceeded into the tomb. Luckily, unlit torches were on hand, and after producing a lighter from their gear, Lara and Sam were bathed in the glow of a fresh fire. Lara was used to the sense of claustrophobia by now at least, but it sure felt nice to have a friendly hand to hold as she went further in. They walked slowly and cautiously, looking for traps, but it was all very…

“Too quiet” said Lara, aloud.

“Yeah,” agreed Sam. “''Too'' too quiet.”

Lara felt a gentle squeeze on her hand, which she reciprocated. She felt a certain weight of responsibility to keep Sam safe on this trip; she scanned every square inch of the halls as they went, but there wasn’t even a hint of danger so far, which just put her more on edge. These trips never went well, after all. Eventually, they came to a large set of metal double doors. They both nodded at each other, and each took one side of the door. It was much heavier than it looked, as they both struggled to make any headway.

Eventually though, a crack formed, getting wide enough to see through. Lara slowly peered through it and gasped.

“What is it?”

“Sam… I think we found where king Parahu was buried…”

The two girls kept pushing, widening the crack just far enough to be able to squeeze through sideways. Lara studied the sarcophagus for a few minutes, examining the elaborate paintings the covered the outside. In many places the artwork was covered in gilt leaf. She took her phone out of her backpack, taking several photos.

“Just in case,” she said, looking up at Sam. “In my experience, tombs like this have a tendency to… crumble apart.”

“It’s as if they don’t like you or something.”

Lara rolled her eyes and stood up.

“Come on,” she said, pushing her hands against the side of the sarcophagus’ lid, “help me push this thing open.”

Sam joined her and together they braced themselves, pushing against the heavy stone slab. Like the door, progress was slow, but they persisted and soon enough they had shifted the lid enough to open up a little gap in the corner. As soon as they did, a cloud of purplish dust blew out, hitting the two girls right in the face, giving both of them a coughing fit.

“Yuck,” sputtered Sam once they had calmed down a little and wiped the tears out of their eyes, “not exactly minty fresh, is it?”

“Well, at least you can say you’ve gotten a smell of what life was like in ancient Somalia.”

“Yeah, and a taste,” replied the half-asian girl before trying to spit out some of the dust.

“Alright, all good? Let’s continue then.”

They pushed the lid all the way off, and it clattered to the floor with a loud, dull thud. Both of them peered into the contents within. Laying there was a single human skeleton, grinning up at the two of them as if it had been waiting for them. Its hands were clutching at something round and golden. Lara reached a hand down and grabbed hold of the object, lifting it upwards as the bony hands still clung to it.

“This must have been his crown…” she said, reverently.

Sam took hold of the crown with one hand and yanked hard. The skeleton’s hands promptly collapsed into bone and dust, and Sam fell backwards onto her rear, clutching her prize.

“Ooft!”

“Sam, be more careful!” scolded Lara lightly, looking down at her girlfriend as she layed spread-eagled on the ground in front of her.

“Not that I mind that pose, usually. Just feels… inappropriate here.”

“I doubt he minds.”

“Remember Himiko?”

“Ghost possession lightning won’t strike twice, right?” laughed Sam, getting to her feet. Then she gasped.

“Oh shit, the doors!”

She pointed at the metal doors, which had at some point had started to swing shut with surprising speed. The two girls sprinted over, but the gap was too small for them to squeeze through.

“Hurry, pull it open before it closes!”

“I’m trying!”

It was no good. The doors slammed shut, leaving the entrance – and their planned exit, for that matter – closed to them.

Both girls started scanning around for another exit, having no intention of joining the king in his eternal slumber. There didn’t appear to be any.

“Start pushing against the wall,” suggested Lara. “Many of these tombs had some kind of hidden emergency exit in case the builders got stuck.”

Running their hands all over the paintings on the walls, they started inching around the room. Lara had searched every inch of one of the four walls and most of another when her fingers touched the figure of a man in a white skirt holding a hammer and pushed it into the wall a fraction of an inch.

“A builder,” said Lara to herself. “Makes sense.”

With another low rumble, a small section of the wall near the floor sank down, creating a rectangular tunnel about two feet wide and a foot and a half high.

“Hope you don’t have claustrophobia,” said Lara, shrugging off her backpack. “I’ll go first to see if this leads anywhere. If it does, I’ll shout back to you and you can push my pack and your bag in front of you as you go.”

“Sounds good, go for it.”

The brunette lay down on the ground and started worming herself into the narrow passage, crawling forwards using her elbows. It was Sam’s turn to get a good look at the other girl’s ass, and she didn’t mind the view in the slightest. It wasn’t long before Lara’s ass disappeared into the wall, followed by her shapely bare legs.

“I’m through!” Sam heard her girlfriend call out. “You can follow me!”

Mimicking her friend’s movements, Sam started crawling through the tunnel too, pushing their bags in front of her. Once she had gotten far enough, Lara pulled them through to the other side before giving Sam a hand.

Dusting herself off and pulling her shorts back up - her scurrying along the ground had almost pulled them down far enough to expose her clit - Sam looked around. They were in a bigger room now, which only had one exit.

“You owe me ten bucks,” she said. “That was totally a trap.”

“You walked into it too, so it doesn’t count.”

“What? Bullshit. We never said anything about ''me'', just about ''you'' walking into a trap.”

“It was implied that I would be the only one.”

“Oh, fine. I’m sure it won’t take us too long to find another one. Speaking of which, let’s get going. You get to go first.”

Lara grumbled, but it was more for show than out of genuine annoyance. She was happy to take point, confident in her ability to detect traps and other dangers to keep Sam safe.

They found themselves in a narrow corridor, surrounded by dusty sand-coloured stone in a passageway barely big enough to go single file in. The two of them pressed onwards.

“You keeping an eye out for traps, Lara?” asked Sam, trying to keep their spirits up. “I don’t want a repeat of Mozambique.”

“That was ''not'' my fault, Sam!” laughed Lara, turning her head briefly. “That tiger was very well hidden… hey, at least I’m actually looking for traps and not just at the hottest arse in the area.”

“Not a single thing you just said is true.”

“Is so! Sam, you are such a–”

There was a subtle, yet distinct, clicking sound as Lara stepped forward. She was still looking at Sam when something shot out of the wall beside her…

A large blade swung out from a barely perceptible groove in the wall. Sam opened her mouth in an attempt to shout a warning at her friend, but before she was able to utter so much as a single syllable it struck Lara in the nape of her neck, slicing through it like a hot knife through butter. Sam’s mouth fell open in shock as she watched her lover’s head arc down the corridor, trailing a thin stream of blood as it sailed through the air. The brunette’s body instantly collapsed to the floor in a tangle of limbs.

Lara went from looking at her friend, who was just beginning to form a look of surprise on her face, to suddenly having her point of view spin like crazy.

The blood drained from Sam’s face as she stood rooted to the ground, unable to move for several long, agonizing seconds. A small series of thuds as Lara’s head hit the floor and rolled to a stop about 15 feet down the corridor snapped her out of her stupor. Dropping her bag, she rushed forward, sinking down to her knees as she cradled her friend’s body.

Lara felt a few bumps as her head rolled along the ground, until it lay in the darkness ahead. She saw a headless body drop a lit torch and collapse like a sack of potatoes, with Sam watching on. Actually, Lara recognized that body; it was her own. She had been decapitated, and was now about to die. Her thoughts swam, muddled and confused and wrought with a mixture of numbness and emotion that made it difficult to fully process anything. The young adventurer’s mouth opened and closed silently, trying to speak, but without any lungs no words came out.

‘''Sam… I’m sorry…''’ was all she could think before everything started to go dark.

Even though Sam had always known on an abstract level that it would probably end like this given the lifestyle they led, seeing it happen was something else entirely. As the initial shock wore off, she could feel tears welling up in her eyes at the realization that her girlfriend was dead.

All of a sudden Lara was sitting up, taking a deep breath like she was waking from a falling dream. She looked down at herself; naked, but very much alive. And this musky old tomb definetely wasn’t the afterlife. If it was, she must have ''really'' pissed off some deity or other… getting up off the floor, she realized she had awoken next to the old resting place of King Parahu, his long-dead remains still inside. Dead… suddenly, it all came back to her.

Sam could feel her throat close up in anticipation of a bout of uncontrollable sobbing when she was suddenly startled by a very familiar voice behind her.

“Woah! What the ''fuck''?”

Sam’s head snapped round to the sound.

“Lara?” she managed to choke out, a glimmer of hope in her voice.

“Sam? Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

She let go of Lara body and scrambled back towards the exit of the small tunnel, towards the source of the voice.

“What just happened?”

“You… you died,” said Sam, trying to peer through the tunnel to see her friend.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too. Except I’m still here.”

“Lara, could you come over here? I’d ''really'' like to see you right now.”

“Sure, just give me a sec.”

The brunette knelt down before lowering herself onto the floor and crawling into the narrow shaft. The journey through was somewhat less comfortable now that she was naked, the rough stonework rubbing against her nipples and labia. As soon as she was through and was starting to get back up, she was knocked back down to the ground by a tackle-hug from her friend, who held her in a death grip for a good minute before she calmed herself and pulled back, allowing the two girls to look each other in the eye.

“Oh Lara, thank the spirits you’re still alive…”

Her eyes shifted downward.

“And you’re naked.”

“I’ve felt sexier,” admitted Lara, seeing a shape out of the corner of her eyes that she knew she had to look at. The two looked down at what was, indisputably, Lara Croft’s headless corpse. They had seen strange, impossible things in their lives, but nothing quite like this… Lara knelt down and put her hand on the neck, just below the stump.

“Uh, no need to feel for a pulse, doc.”

“No, no, I just… wanted to touch myself.”

“You do that all the time.”

“Sam, not ''everything'' is a sexy innuendo,” grunted Lara as she moved her hand across her former body, digits trailing down the still-warm skin. She thought about how this could be possible.

“The smoke.”

“Huh?”

“When we opened the sarcophagus. I thought that dust or smoke or whatever it was had a funny color. Maybe it’s some form of magic.”

“Or a curse. Like Tutankhamun’s curse?”

“That was just trumped up by the media. Besides, if you wanted to curse grave robbers, wouldn’t you want them to die instead of coming back to life?”

“Hm, I suppose I would…”

“Still, we have no idea if this was a one-time thing or not, so let’s be even more careful from now on, okay?”

“Yeah, let’s. I almost lost you once today; let’s not try and make it stick.”

“Ill try my best,” Lara laughed. “But before we go, give me a minute to get dressed.”

She straightened out her dead body a bit and started pulling off her tank top.

“Sam? Could you take off my pants?”

“I-huh?”

Sam looked over at her friend, unsure she had heard her friend right. Lara continued to calmly strip her own corpse, pulling off her tank top right over where the head should have been. The brunette noticed that Sam was staring and shrugged.

“Well, I’m not bloody well going on naked, am I? The body’s fucked, but the clothes are still intact. Chop chop.”

“Lara, that’s a terrible thing to say, considering.”

“Oh, relax” replied Lara, looking like she was already getting a good handle on the whole ‘being killed’ thing.

Sam bit her lip as she turned her attention to Lara’s brown shorts, the ones she herself had given Lara earlier that day. She hooked her fingers down the front and pulled downwards. She really couldn’t help herself from staring at Lara’s cunt, which was technically dead, as she pulled it down. Sam noticed that Lara was busy putting her top on. Acting on insinct, she pressed her nose against those gorgeous, if slightly pale-looking lips, and flicked out a ligtning-quick tongue. It was shockingly normal to her, but Sam still had to repress a squeal and an erotic shudder as she pulled off those shorts. It felt so taboo, but… oh wow, she really was kinda messed up, huh?

She slid the two items of clothing down the corpse’s legs, unlacing the pulling off her friend’s boots when she reached them.

“Here you go,” she said, tossing the items next to her bottomless friend, who turned and continued getting dressed. This left her with her back turned to her decapitated former body, giving Sam a moment of privacy with the now naked cadaver. She licked her lips. There was something she’d always wanted to try with Lara, but hadn’t dared to suggest yet. Thanks to her sheltered upbringing, the girl had a lot of catching up to do in the bedroom. Sure, she was eager enough and Sam was more than willing to be her guide on that journey, but it would be a while yet before she would be totally comfortable with some of the freakier stuff, such as fisting.

But now that she had access to perfect copy of her girlfriend’s body that wasn’t going to freak if she shoved her whole hand up her cunt. Seizing the opportunity, Sam give her fingers a quick lick before thrusting three of them between the corpse’s folds. Adding her pinky wasn’t too difficult, but the thumb took more work. The British girl was one of the tightest girlfriends she’d ever had, and she had to put some serious effort into wriggling her last finger inside. She grinned when the first digit sank in, casting a glance at the brunette. She’d pulled on her panties and shorts and was just about to start on the first boot. She had some time, but she would have to hurry.

Her hand started to move backwards and forwards as Sam tried to force that last digit inside. Her heart almost stopped when Lara spoke up.

“Urgh, stupid things are always so tight…”

“W–what?” said Sam, freezing up with her hand halfway inside Lara’s former twat.

“These boots…” muttered Lara, having not looked up from her task.

Sam chuckled, relieved, before returning to fisting the headless corpse. When she finally managed the trick, her first curling into a tight ball and well inside the now stretched-out vagina, Sam looked up again, and gasped as she saw Lara tying up her second boot. Sam withdrew her hand, making a sort of ''schlorp'' sound as she went, and stood up with her now soaking wet hand clasped behind her back, whistling innocenty. Lara seemed not to notice anything as she stood up.

“Well, that feels better.” said the English girl, brushing her clothes down.

As Lara made to continue on, Sam stopped her.

“Um, should we… I don’t know… bury you? It seems wrong to just leave your body lying here.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the only sarcophagus around here is back that way,” said Lara, pointing over her shoulder, “and it’s occupied. Besides, I doubt anyone else is going to come by any time soon to see it.”

Sam shrugged.

“Okay, it’s your body. Or, uhm… ex-body I suppose.”

The two girls left the sprawled-out body where it lay and started walking down the corridor, carefully checking the walls for other grooves. After a number of yards, they encountered Lara’s chopped-off head. The former owner picked it up, holding it up in front of her with both hands.

“Huh. It’s uncanny.”

“Well, as they say: two heads are better than one, right?”

“Double the pleasure, triple the fun,” Lara laughed.

Sam rolled her eyes.

“What?” asked Lara.

“Come on, you dork, let’s continue our ‘excellent adventure’.”

“Sure thing. But let’s be careful, okay?”

She gently set the head back down on its neck stump and caught up to Sam, casting her eyes all around as they continued on. She wasn’t going to be taken by surprise a second time…