Pilgrimage (Pt III)(White Crane Spreads Its Wings)

Disclaimer: See Pt. 1
AN[1]: Feedback appreciated as always.
AN[2]: Not a lot of character interaction. That'll be in the next part.

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Stumbling from the train into a chilly late afternoon, small bags in hand, Willow stood on the platform for a moment breathing in the fresh mountain air. It had been a long trip to Luz St. Sauveur from London, even excluding her initial journey from Cleveland to Westbury to meet with the coven. She'd been traveling for several days and by this point Willow was looking forward to the simple pleasures of a good night's sleep and fabled provincial French food.

When they'd started researching the prophecy, they'd had no real idea of how long it would take to find the shrine. Starting to deal with a potential apocalypse more than a year before they expected it to happen had been a new experience for Willow and Buffy. Giving in to Buffy's reluctance to involve either Xander or Giles had been scary in the beginning.

Looking at it logically, and assuming that the shrine wouldn't be impossible to find, Willow had planned for a minimum of two weeks in the area, three tops. If it took any longer, she knew she would have more assistance arriving than she'd agreed to with Buffy. And the coven wouldn't be very happy with her flaunting the rules they expected her to follow.

In the morning she could start on the initial stage of 'The Expedition to the Shrine'. She giggled to herself thinking about the pompous sounding title Buffy had given this part of her pilgrimage when they'd started planning it more than a month ago. She'd understood Buffy's need to make it sound important and romantic, unlike the stressful and dangerous trips Buffy and Faith tended to be sent on by Giles for the Council. Willow thought it was one of those post-Sunnydale coping mechanisms she'd seen Buffy develop, though Dawn claimed she'd been just as irreverent before becoming a slayer.

She expected to spend the first few days exploring the immediate area and had already signed up for a series of guided hiking tours. She'd had to promise Kennedy a return trip to the area after this was all over as a consolation prize for being left behind. She could almost hear a husky voice in her ear, telling her all of the things Kennedy would want to do, the places she would want to share with her when they came back. Although she could be prickly and bratty on occasion, Willow already missed her slayer more than she'd expected she would so soon into her trip.

She tried to focus on other things as she left the station. She suspected the shrine was heavily defended against outsiders, especially ones who dabbled in the darker aspects of magic such as herself. The hikes would hopefully help her absorb enough of the latent energy of the area to disguise her presence from any wards guarding the shrine while she searched for it. She'd discovered while researching the subject that most ancient Wiccan shrines employed passive wards to shield them from unwelcome attention. But that didn't mean she would be able to just put on a happy face and walk up to it and through the door.

She looked around the small town as she trudged towards her hotel. She was looking forward to exploring it later, but for now she was going to get something to eat, call Kennedy, and go to bed. Anything else could wait for the morning. All she really needed before that was some place that would let her plug in her laptop so she could check her e-mail.

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Without Kennedy to provide her usual distraction, Willow had found the guided walking tours fascinating, if a little too organized even for her own taste. Five days in the Pyrenees, combined with the mental exercises her coven Guide had briefly shown her, had left her feeling physically tired but mentally refreshed.

She was looking forward to being on her own so she could really explore the area and find the hidden shrine. The tour had served more than one useful purpose, however. Not only had it acclimated her to the area, but not detecting anything even remotely magical in any of the areas it covered, she'd crossed the areas she'd already walked off her list.

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Waking early the next morning following the last tour, Willow quickly dressed, packing what she thought she would need for her first solo day hike into the mountains surrounding the village. She'd carefully observed everything the hiking guides had done and felt she had a good idea what was required. Leaving her hotel in search of some place to eat breakfast, she spotted a small sidewalk cafe and grabbed a seat before inflicting her high school French on the waiter who appeared at her side.

Several cups of thick, hot coffee and a warm croissant later, Willow felt ready to face the day. Swinging her bag jauntily across a shoulder, she confidently strode off in the direction of the nearby hills, not unaware of the appreciative glances of the locals she passed. She could just hear the comments Buffy would have made, though she was sure Kennedy would not have been as amused by the attention she was getting.

An hour and several miles later she was beginning to regret traveling on foot. She'd been spoiled by the guided tour and its well planned outings into the mountains. Now that she was on her own, she would have to find some other way to get to the places she wanted to explore unless she wanted to become exhausted before even beginning.

Sitting down on a large flat rock, Willow removed her small handheld GPS receiver from her bag to check her location. Looking at her coordinates and thinking about how long it had taken her to travel so far, it looked like she was approximately an hour from the bottom of La Brèche de Roland, a small pass near Circe de Gavarnie. She's noticed the night before that it was just south of Lourdes and had wondered if the shrine had any connection to that Christian holy site.

Grabbing an energy bar out of her bag, Willow soaked up the sun while she reviewed her plans for finding the shrine. Even with the basic knowledge she now had of the area, she still expected it to take her at least a week to find the shrine. And that was the easy part. She then had to find a way into it, find what she was looking for, and get out. All without attracting attention by the locals and any tourists. And without dying in the process.

What little information she had been able to find about the shrine dripped with unusual warnings about the spells and traps protecting it. Too many people would be extremely angry with her if she died this early in the pilgrimage for her to take those warnings lightly. What she really needed was one of those treasure hunters that the Council sometimes used. But, as far as she could tell, none of them would have passed muster with the coven or the shrine's patron goddess.

Brushing the crumbs from her hiking treat into the grass for the ants, Willow put away her GPS and looked at her watch. She was glad she'd grabbed several sandwiches from a local shop on her way out of town. She would be at her destination just in time for lunch. She was going to have to thank Kennedy when she got home for all of those weekend hikes she'd insisted on taking over the past two years. If it hadn't been for that she wouldn't have been even remotely able to handle this part of the trip. Maybe they really would take a return trip here.

As she walked, her mind kept going over the prophecy and Buffy's dreams, still trying to find any possible connections between them. Although they'd spent a lot of time researching the prophecy, she had the feeling they'd missed something vitally important. Hopefully, whatever she found in the shrine would provide enough information to make things clearer.

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She ate lunch besides a cold stream. It was tempting but she knew enough to not drink the water, no matter how inviting it appeared. Looking around, she reached out and tried to feel for anything out of the ordinary in the area's magical aura. Too many things had been going on around her the previous week to do it then. Now was really the first time she was truly alone in the mountains.

All she felt at first was ordinary background magic when suddenly her mind brush up against something that didn't quite belong further up the path. Curious, she packed up the remains of her lunch and headed in that direction, occasionally stopping to look for any physical evidence of what she was psychically sensing.

After searching the area for a number of minutes, Willow accidentally stumbled upon the object she'd been searching for. Carved into a sheltered edge of a large boulder was a small sigil that glowed when she prodded it with her mind. The symbol resembled something she'd seen on the stone posts marking the outer borders of the coven's sanctuary near Westbury.

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A week of exploring hadn't gotten her as far as she'd hoped. While she now had a collection of coordinates for over twenty of the unknown markers scattered around the pass and the Circe de Gavarnie, Willow hadn't been able to figure out what they meant. If they pointed in the direction of shrine they did it in some way she didn't understand. If they represented some key to finding it that wasn't obvious either. Some had been so weathered that she'd barely discovered them while others looked like they'd just been carved into the stone.

Leaning back against the small couch in her hotel room, she scowled at her laptop in frustration. She'd placed all of the markers on a map of the area. She'd rotated it in every direction she could think of. Compared the position of each marker, alone and in combination with the others, against star maps for the past thousand years. Added in the alignment of the moon over the same period. Nothing obvious had jumped out at her.

She was allowed to use some magic on her quest but if she were going to do this correctly, as the coven Elders had insisted, it hadn't seemed appropriate to use it for anything other than finding the markers themselves. Once she found the shrine she expected to need some amount of magic to enter it safely. It was part of the test. But for now, she was supposed to be able to figure it out without magic.

She was ready to strangle the Elders. She knew they had a very good idea where the shrine was. It wasn't the kind of thing you really lost. She also knew why they weren't about to tell her where it was. It was just the opening salvo in the series of tasks she needed to successfully accomplish during her pilgrimage. And, like a lot of secret societies, they were all about the tasks. She was really going to have to talk with Ginny when she got back and see if she had gone through something similar before the coven had allowed her to join the Council or if it was just the coven's way of trying to make her feel humble, by giving her an seemingly impossible task.

And on top of that she was having to deal with the occasional strange message from London or Cleveland. She knew they were just keeping her in the loop so she would know what was going on but it was really getting too distracting. It was great that Ginny was fitting in so well and starting to apply her very different magical experience to Council issues, and that Kennedy was starting to behave normally again with her gone and no longer annoying Buffy, but there wasn't much she could do from where she was.

She punched her pillow in frustration, her fist making a big dent in the soft object. And stared at it as something suddenly occurred to her. Other than trying to map them against the moon and stars, all of her attempts to understand the markers had been two dimensional. Looking at the coordinates, she realized that what she really had was something laid out in three dimensions.

Pulling up a different view of the markers, she decided to feed the coordinates into a program she'd been experimenting with. While magic and computers didn't always mix very well, Willow had started trying to find a way to combine her two skills. This, so far, was the result, a program that used magic to create 3D images based on just a small sample of numbers. She intended to eventually use it to generate images of demons based on the sketchy information reported by slayers.

Several minutes later, she stared at the astonishing results. She hadn't expected to get anything remotely useful from this. Her program was still fairly primitive. But rotating on the screen in front of her was a large image of the symbol she suspected represented the shrine. And, after overlaying the map with the image, it seemed to be pointing towards a small valley several dozen kilometers from her hotel.

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It was late afternoon when she reached the clearing. It was in the center of the small valley where her calculations indicated the shrine should be. Willow stared around in confusion. It wasn't what she'd been expecting. At one end of the clearing was a smooth, featureless stone wall, going up several dozen feet, stopping just below the tree line. The path she'd been following ended in front of the wall.

Off to one side she spotted a small depression. Examining it from a safe distance, she thought it looked like the remains of a small fire.
Stretching out her senses, she detected another small sigil at the base of the wall. Something related to the shrine was definitely nearby. Wandering closer to the old fire-pit, she noticed a small pile of deadwood at the near edge of the clearing.

Putting down her bag near the fire-pit, she wandered over to the wall to examine it more closely. Reaching the wall she sensed a series of protection spells woven into its surface. Not wanting to set them off, she refrained from touching the wall.

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The moonlight shone across the clearing. From her position sitting in front of the wall, Willow watched its' light slowly creep up the rock face. As it reached eye level, a large silver symbol that resembled the sigil lower down on the wall started to appear. It was the same symbol she'd spent the last few days searching the surrounding area for.

Something about the scene gave her a brief feeling of déjà vu. Dredging through her memories, she couldn't recall what it reminded her of for a minute.

"Shoot." Willow laughed involuntarily. "Someone must have been a Tolkien fan. Wait'll Dawn hears about this." She sobered after expressing her thoughts out loud. "As long as this is the only part like that. Don't really want to go traipsing through someone else's interpretation of the mines of Moria."

She ran her fingers along the symbol. From the lack of any sort of writing visible on the wall, she assumed that there was going to be no 'open sesame' or other magical words in some forgotten language that would open the door. But if this was the entrance and not a trap,
she knew there was some way to get inside. Some way that only a member of the coven or a worthy wiccan could use.

She rose to her feet. Turning silently in a circle, Willow looked for some clue, any clue. Not seeing anything obvious, and feeling the chilly night air, she decided to make herself more comfortable while waiting for something to happen. It only took her several minutes to get a fire going in the small ash filled pit.

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Willow watched the wall through the night, occasionally throwing wood on the small fire. In some ways, finding the shrine had been too easy. She'd managed to do it without using much magic. But now she need a way in. There had to be some way past the solid looking wall. She wondered about the spells she'd sensed protecting it. The symbol continued to glow with a silver light, like liquid moonlight, even with the moon now covered up by clouds.

She wasn't a wizard like Gandalf with a sidekick hobbit hanging about to point out the obvious. But she knew the coven wouldn't have sent her if it weren't possible to enter the shrine.

She had to continually remind herself that this was only the beginning of her journey. Somewhere in the shrine was something that would lead them to what they really needed. Of course, it would have been helpful to know what she needed to look for or even what their eventual goal was. She disliked having such a vague task ahead of her. Focusing on the shrine helped only a little.

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She woke up with a start, feeling the warmth of the early morning sun on her face. Feeling stiff from maintaining her position in front of the wall all night, she rose to her feet and stretched. Looking at the wall she watched in amazement at the beams of sunlight shining on the wall, turning the symbol to a deep gold as they reached it.

She wasn't a musical person, going out of her way to avoid any chance of singing. But something called out to her from the shrine entrance and she found herself humming an unfamiliar tune. At the edge of her consciousness she could almost hear solemn words being sung, like a benediction to the Goddess. Something compelled her to hum louder.

As she hummed she could feel a response from her surroundings. Something seemed to be building in the air near the wall. Willow watched in amazement as a large ornate door appeared in the stone wall. Nervously, she stopped humming, sighing in relief when it remained.

Grabbing her bag, she stepped up to the door. She grinned when it opened at the slightest touch. Barely two steps into the entrance, she felt a change in air pressure as the large door closed behind her. Turning around, she aimed her flashlight back at the wall. It went up seamlessly, several dozen feet above her head. Shivering in the damp, cave-like air, Willow fought off the beginnings of claustrophobia as she searched for some sign of the way she'd come in.

Reaching out with her mind, she attempted to find the door using the magic she'd sensed in the area earlier. The only magic she could sense was her own. Frowning in thought, she reached over and started to run her hands along the stone.

"Ouch!" She pulled her hands away in shock. She gingerly touched the wall again, this time with just a finger, confirming her suspicions as she yanked it away just as quickly. The wall wasn't just a shield. It actively absorbed magic from anything that touched it. She swore under her breath at the realization. Although she had access to the inherent magic within her body, it regenerated slower than she normally used it. A large portion of her power came from her ability to absorb and magnify the magic in her environment.

"Gonna have to be stingy with the mojo." she mumbled to herself. Sighing, she turned around and picked up her bag from where she'd dropped it. She was going to have to search the shrine the hard way.

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Lara carefully approached the small, smoking fire near the edge of the small clearing. It was too close to where she expected to find the main entrance to the ancient temple to be an accident. She wondered which of her more larcenous current competitors had managed to figure out her destination. She'd given up trying to maintain absolute secrecy years ago but she didn't normally broadcast where she was going.

Someone must have been watching her closer than normal to arrive before she did. Unless the coven had decided to increase their chances of success by sending someone else. She'd seen too much during her years of tomb raiding to be completely surprised if it were true. But she would rather not believe it unless forced to. The wiccans who'd come to her had seemed honest.

From the condition of the fire, they'd been gone for several hours, either into the temple or back to where they'd come from.

The information she'd gotten from the coven indicated there were only two entrances to the ancient temple. The main ceremonial entrance could only be opened by a member of the coven but how they turned what looked like a featureless wall into a door wasn't mentioned. At least a kilometer further down the wall, in a different clearing, was a smaller entrance. The reason for its existence or why it was so far from this one had not been explained.

Having carefully studied everything the coven had given her, Lara believed getting into the temple to be the more difficult of the challenges involved. Once she made it past the door, the temple was like many other ancient monuments she'd run across in her travels. A lot of stone walls and secret passages. But unlike most tombs she explored, the interior of the temple wasn't designed to trap visitors once they entered.

It was the age of the temple that should be the real danger here. But it was nothing she couldn't handle. Resettling her knapsack on her shoulders, Lara stepped around the smoking fire and out of the clearing, following the very faint path towards the other clearing.

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Looking down at the thick coat of dust covering the stone floor inside the entrance, Lara frowned. It had been too easy. Her training room at the manor was a bigger challenge. Pulling a small smokeless flare out of her pack, Lara ignited it and tossed it out into the room, revealing a large featureless chamber with a curved ceiling. In the dim light she could make out two passageways leading off in different directions.

Cautiously picking her way across the room, she headed towards the one to her right. The map she'd memorized had indicated that this one eventually led to the inner chamber that was her goal. The other one seemed to have some other destination that wasn't marked on the map. Picking up her flare, she entered the passageway. Now suspicious of her supposed insider information from the coven, Lara carefully searched for traps.

An hour later, she'd traveled several hundred feet into the temple without finding anything resembling a trap. And not so much as a single artifact. Lara was beginning to wonder if she were in the right temple. Or if the coven had sent her here for some other reason. It was certainly not living up to her expectations.

Coming to an intersection that wasn't on her map, Lara saw a dim glow coming from the side passage, too far away to make out any details. Curious, she headed towards it.

The glow seemed to be coming from a small torch lying in a pile of rubble from a collapsed wall. From the thin cloud of dust hovering in the still air above it, she thought the wall couldn't have fallen more than an hour ago. This answered her question about the fire near the other entrance. Whomever had managed to enter there had obviously not had as easy a time getting to this part of the temple.

Grimacing, she looked around. This kind of accident, whether caused intentionally or not, could be very messy. Stone tended to do a lot of damage when it fell on someone. Off to one side she spotted a small pack similar to her own. Picking it up, she examined it quickly looking for clues. None of the zippers and buckles would yield to her prying. Putting it back down, Lara started searching for its owner. They couldn't have gone far if the torch and pack were still there.

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TBC in "Brush Knee"
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