The Yaaxil guardians and the Mayan prophecy — the catastrophe that Lara's theft set in motion being described in cosmological terms, the divine curse actually being the consequence of human action reaching past what the human world can contain. The curse is the mechanism by which the ancient cultures encoded the warning: this far and no further, and if you go further this is what follows.

Reaching too far is the explorer's original sin and the Tomb Raider trilogy's ongoing argument with its own premise. Every dagger taken, every artifact removed, every hidden city entered — the reaching is the game, and the reaching has consequences that the game has been refusing to look at directly until this entry.