But now, he had to rethink that theory; either that or she was strong enough to hit really, really hard.  He was in considerable pain, to say the very least. His shoulder was possibly broken and he was sailing high through the air at great speed with no idea where he was going to land.  It was everything he could do to hold on to his concentration and keep the blur active. He felt the crash, slamming hard into one of the many ancient stone columns that dotted the ruins before bouncing off and dropping to the ground like a rock.

He was dazed, hurting, but had his wits to wait until he came to almost a complete stop before dropping out of the blur. His head throbbed, his body ached, but he pushed up to try and get his bearings.  As all the sounds and colors and sensations were rotating around him in a hurricane of chaos, one sound was abundantly clear. One he knew he had to flee, bearings or no.

It was a deep throaty growl that chilled him to the bone, followed by a blood curdling roar so cacophonous it seemed to rattle the air itself.  Heavy pounding of footsteps followed next, the announcement of something big coming at him; big and certainly fast. He saw something glint far above him in the moonlight and instinctively vanished and reappeared a few feet to the right.  The very spot where he had been standing exploded in shards of rocks and dirt as the enormous curved blade swung down and crashed into the ground; tearing into the exact place he had been standing less than half a second ago.

His gigantic assailant, soulless black eyes alight with green flame raging from her shadowed visage, was already hefting the huge sword back up before he could blink twice. How could she swing something so big so easily? He decided not to stick around to learn, this time blurring to the top of nearby pillar, a leap of over six feet. He felt his inside burn; he was pushing too hard, but it was that or die. He leapt again from his perch to the next pillar, and up to the next.  Each new landing about three feet higher than the previous.

He was about to leap to the top of the very next column, another maybe four feet up he judged, when he turned and saw her bounding after him. She was taking each column in single leaps; her movements an incredible display of perfect balance, even grace.  It would have been quite a thing to watch and appreciate if her eyes had not been filled with murder, specifically his. He blurred from that column to the top of an ancient ruin just as the air where he had been standing was cleaved in two. The great blade carving through the air behind him, cutting into the wall as if the stone weren’t even there.  He couldn’t stop now, he had to push on. Fear was the only thing he had to drive him.

It was too much again--too soon. His entire body was on fire with pain. He was panting, out of breath. He could swear he’d blurred more today than almost this entire last year living in the desert. That was no small number; the desert was a dangerous place!  But something had gone wrong inside of him, he could feel it. As he slipped out of the last blur he hadn’t even stopped moving when the field collapsed. It was like being shot out of a cannon. He felt the heat of the air friction around him as it faded, and he hurled through the air tumbling end over end for several dozen feet.

Rabi bounced several times off the roof of the huge structure before finally skidding to a stop in a crumpled heap.  He dared to glance behind him in time to see her leap almost effortlessly up onto the building and land with a resounding thud.  The impact of her landing vibrated the stone underneath him even from such a distance. She continued sprinting toward him without breaking a single stride.  It was as if she simply didn’t tire.

He was running out of options. At her speed she would be on him in seconds.  She was fast too, and unlike him, with her long and powerful lycan legs, she was built for distance.  He desperately scanned the stone roof for anything that he could hide behind or crawl into. He’d never outrun her without blurring, and he might have one more in him without time to rest if he pushed.  Thirty feet away from him he saw a large dust covered dome rising just above the surface of the roof.

To most it would have been indistinguishable from the stone he was lying on, blending with everything around it.  Rabi though had a keen eye. Even at night he could see there was something different about it. In the few places where the dust was thinnest he could see the glinting of a shinier surface underneath, something very unlike the hard stone most of the building was made out of.  Something, against all hope, that might even provide a way inside. This was either going to be his only chance to escape or his quick but painful death. Either way he would deprive her of her meal! He had no wish to enter whatever “mouth” she put him in front of!

He tried to stagger to his feet to move toward the dome but his legs were wobbly.  He could barely limp. He could hear her heavy footsteps thundering closer as she closed the distance behind him with terrifying speed.  He would never make it at his normal speed. He had no choice but to see what he had left in him. He closed his eyes and concentrated and felt the world slow down once more… her footsteps became low peals of thunder several seconds apart and rolling through the air around him.  He felt the field starting to form around him..lifting him a bit, allowing him to weakly stand..but it never fully formed. It was flickering..unstable. He should have stopped and let it go.

Blurring like this was not a good idea. Without protection from his own momentum and the friction of the air he would likely burst into flame and then slam into the ground face first at several hundred feet per second.  Then he opened his eyes and saw the huge blade in her hand arcing toward him. Death is death. He took the chance. He tensed his muscles, aimed at a spot in midair halfway between himself and the center of the dome and released.  

He regretted his choice instantly; with the field barely formed around him he definitely felt a good deal of the forces from his instant acceleration the moment he let it go.  But just as he thought his his skin was going to peel off and spontaneously combust, he cut the field entirely. He had only blurred for a flicker of an instant and was now sailing through the air at a very high rate of speed, but not even a fraction of how fast he usually went. As he sailed toward the center of the dome he smiled grimly to himself that he had gotten the aim correctly.  For better or worse he was headed for exactly where he had aimed. He just needed her aim to be just as good.

Narreyel was furious with herself.  She was cursing herself, the moon, the Wastes, her clan-mother, and most of all him.  No prey had ever gotten away from her once she had caught them. No prey she had stalked had ever failed to be caught!  And she would be thrice damned for a fool before she would let that cocky little Bunuboi be the first!  Before he even bounced off the stone column she had sent him sailing towards she was after him. She had grabbed her Vaya’aashar, her heartsword, and was on her feet to chase.  Her blood thundered loud in her ears and her vision was narrow and focused as she bore down on her quarry. She no longer wanted to eat him or use him or interact with him in any other way except to lick his warm sticky blood and steaming entrails from her ancestral blade.  

She saw him hit the ground in a crumpled heap over forty  feet from her and and it spurred her forward even faster. He was slowly staggering to his feet.  She couldn’t give him a millisecond to rebuild his strength. She let out a growl and then bellowed her rage as she leapt forward,  swinging her blade in a high vertical arc aiming precisely at the spot he was standing. In flash of heat he was gone again..the titanic blade colliding with the hard stone with a resounding clang. She knew he was gone before it even hit.  She swept her eyes left and right scanning for his new position, saw him leaping from the top of a pillar to another one higher up and then another.

She was no longer thinking at all.  Her mind was white with rage. How dare he!.  SHE was the mighty predator, proud Orasha warrior, scourge of the Wastes.. He was just.. a prey..a lowly Bunuboi..her lunch, by the Huntress!  It was his destiny to boil in her belly and whether he did it alive and whole or diced into chunks, he was NOT going to escape it! She leapt the columns behind him easily..closing the space between them in seconds, swinging her sword wildy each time she got within striking distance.  She would not stop, she would not relent. He would slip up eventually, and when he did he would be hers.. once and for all!

He vanished away from her again..this time onto the top of the large ruin she had been paid to discover the entrance to.  Now what was he up to? Did the little sikara know a secret way inside..was he holding out on her? She launched herself into the air behind him and landed without breaking a stride. She spied him in the distance, shaky and staggering to his feet.  By some miracle he had put so much distance between them! Was he blurring so far now that he could put half of the roof between them? But it didn't matter. Forty feet or so was only a few seconds to her, less even. Her long, powerful legs pounding into the stone roof; all of her body’s efforts focused on speed.  She closed the distance in no time. He was clearly weakened, spent, and making no effort to run away. She knew what he was trying to do, his eyes closed as he concentrated.. He was trying to vanish one more time, but there was nowhere to run to anymore. She spurred herself forward and swung the blade, not even expecting him to be there, just to force his hand too soon before he was ready. No matter where he went it wouldn’t be far and that would surely be his last.  She had him!

As she had expected his form began to blur, but even she could tell something was wrong.. He didn’t vanish..He shot through the air..in a low arc ahead of her.. She heard the woosh and felt the rush of air as he rocketed off.  Her blade missed of course, but her quick eyes were able to follow him the entire time, and so did the rest of her..She bounded after him without losing even a fraction of her speed. She watched the tiny Bunuboi missile reach the apex of his arc about even with her eye level,  then start to curve back down toward the center of a large low dome, maybe half her height at the center. She took three large bounding strides and then launched herself high in the air behind him as he collided with the surface of the dome in a motionless heap. It was clear he was done. He was hers. She didn’t even need her sword, she adjusted her stance midair.  She would simply land on him, just let her titanic weight crush him instantly.

His body had made a low, hollow, resounding  “thunk” noise when it hit and bounced once, a sound that was not at all like stone...and it was too melodic and not clangy enough  to be metal. As she swooped down on his crumpled form, sword poised just in case, like some enormous blue furred lupine bird of prey..just as her feet were about to land on him, she finally placed the sound.  

The half second before she landed, she cursed herself again.  She was thrice damned for a fool.  She had let her pride, her anger get the better of her--had let him get under her skin somehow. She hadn’t been thinking clearly, had run headlong blinded by bloodlust… blinded by a singular goal , following instinctively to take him without a thought to the dangers.  She had forsaken the Precepts of the Huntress... and now she was watching the consequences unfold before her. Her rage had lead her right into his trap. The sound he had made as his little body had bounced off the dome--It was exactly the sound you would expect to hear-

if you bounced a  Bunuboi off a large pane of glass.

The dome literally exploded, sending golden shards of thick leaded glass out across the roof in all directions. He had blurred.. one final time,  just as she came down..only inches..to a spot safely between her feet. Relatively safe, because she had not landed on him, crushing him immediately, but not literally safe, because his now unconscious tiny form was just below hers as they both plummeted downward into the darkness below.

Plummeting of any distance is not a natural state for an Orasha.  To be doing it suddenly, without warning, into unknown darkness was more than just a little disconcerting for Narreyel, but she steeled herself for the landing she knew was coming.  The glass was shattered instantly into millions of pieces that were raining down around her like sparkling gold. The building was just under three times her height. Even as heavy as she was she could take a drop that far with little difficulty.

She braced herself for the impact, but instead of landing on a stone floor as she expected or crashing through something less substantial and then hitting the stone floor,  she went THROUGH the floor entirely. And then past another, and another..picking up speed as she fell. The floors were very dimly with a ghostly blue-green light. She had a sense she was plummeting through large concentric openings in the middle of each floor, and as she passed the 4th one, over a 100 feet down, she saw something below the hole in the 5th that caused her blood to freeze.  It was the reflective surface of a large pool of water.

Her eyes went wide, muscles tensing.  Water, a massive pool of water, was flying up to meet her.  No… she was falling to hit it. It was coming too quickly, she reached for a handhold, a line, anything to halt or even slow her fall.  It was too late. She couldn’t grab even a ledge, and fell through the final floor into a huge chamber before slamming right into the surface of the dark water.  The shock snapped her head back, her vision going white as she sank beneath the massive splash. She panicked, scrambling to try and push back to the surface, blindly thrashing to reach safety… but she only sank.  Quickly dropping under the surface and sinking into the murk, vanishing into darkness.

She couldn’t breath, couldn’t see, her whole body numb.  Orasha couldn’t swim. Their mineral heavy bodies were far too dense, they sank like stones if stones were weighted with lead.  She clawed at the water, kicked, thrashed, but she sank so quickly that any attempt to swim was fruitless.  Her lungs were already burning. She felt the bottom slam into her back and found for a split second a sort of emptiness inside of her. There was no air, only water pushing on her from every direction.

And then, she felt the burn.  Her lungs ached, her skin hurt, her fur compressed into her.  She pushed off the bottom, scrambling to try and gain any traction, but was pulled back down again as if she was in chains..  She gritted her teeth, bubbles floating up from her mouth as she struggled, a panic welling in her like a growing storm. She slammed her fist into the silt at the bottom, and pushed again, but immediately sank right back to the bottom.  She just stared up, the burn becoming an empty numbness. It was so far away, everything. She reached up with a hand, feeling her eyesight begin to blur. This couldn’t be it, like this? To fall into an underground pool, sink, and never be found?  Doomed to be part of the silt and slime of the bottom?

It was one of the worst deaths an Orasha could ever suffer.  She wouldn’t even leave bones behind..her mineral form would dissolve away completely over time. That was no end for an Orashan huntress… but here she was.  She was on her knees, reaching up, feeling the darkness closing in. She thought about her companion, Keliana. Young, too young to be on her own. She thought about her clan, how she had failed them when she did not conceive after her hunt.  She remembered her mother, her sisters as they grew, and trained. This was her fate… Narreyel, the huntress that drowned. This was to be her doom, not in battle or in the hunt, but with her life drained like the air that was slowly running out.

She should be angry, enraged, cry out to the sky that this was not her destiny, but she just collapsed back, her arms falling down, sinking quickly to hit at her sides.  This was it. The water had her. She could barely move now. Just waiting, letting the darkness take her. She gritted her teeth, but cold was beginning to reach her bones.  This was it, she had failed yet again. Failed her people, her clan… herself. Even mercenary work left her in the depths… left her cold, alone, and in the dark. She opened her mouth, and a rush of air floated from it, all she had left.  Her eyes began to roll up, and she tipped backward into the murk on her back.

“Narreyel”

A voice.  Narreyel’s eyes burst open, but there was no one there, just her and the remains of the dome and the black moss. But then she heard it again..inside her..as if the water or the shadows themselves were speaking to her..

“This is not your grave.”

Her vision was fading. Her strength was ebbing.  She didn’t understand. Nothing about her situation had changed.

“You are the Huntress.”  the voice continued. “Hunt your life..”

“I am the huntress?”  she thought to herself.  Her mind turned to The Huntress..the Spirit all Orasha revered, their creator and protector.  She remembered the sacred teachings.. the Precepts..the ones she had ignored in her blind rage and wild chase, much to her obvious detriment.

“No blade is sharper than the calmest of minds.”

She centered herself in the calmness of the deep, let her mind be still..and felt the hard stone beneath the moss under her. She looked around her. Bluish green light was filtering down through the water.  She could just make out the sheer mossy side of the pool, possibly fifteen feet from where she lay. Her eyes followed it up to the water’s surface. She wasn’t as deep as she had first thought..it was maybe twice her own height?

“You body is your arrow and your will is your bow”

Yes. Of course..she always liked that Precept. It was your will that drove you.. moved you forward. Her people were known as much for their unstoppable will as they were for their physical size and strength. And right now it was her will that she not be on the bottom of this pool anymore. She rolled forward on to her hind paws, crouching, eying the edge of the pool.

“A wise huntress knows when to crouch, and when to spring, but when you spring, it must be with your whole being.”

She snarled, pushing her paws into the silt and muck.  She gathered herself, gathered her very soul it felt like, and drove her legs down with force that would sunder a mountain.  The water burst away from her, muck and slime exploding beneath her as she roared up, like an arrow fired at the sun she flew up, bursting from the surface of the water and arcing into the air.  She hit the stone, rolling and tumbling to a haphazard halt on the damp stone surface. She punched her fist down into the rocks, crumbling the stone under it as she spasmed, heaving, and finally opened her mouth as water poured from her gullet.  It splashed on the stone below her as she threw it up, coughing and sputtering until it finally went from a stream to drips. Her longs finally clear and emptied, her strength gave, and she collapsed to her chest, breathing gulps of stale, but beautiful air.  

She felt the darkness trying to close in again, but she refused.  She snarled and pushed her leg up and forced her paw to the ground under her, and with that she rose.  She stood tall, and dripping, and triumphant as she looked over the surface of the huge pool. Water… one of the few things any Orasha feared.  It was their bane, and she had overcome it. More, she’d done what most of her teachers had warned her to never do, sink. She had sunk, and now she was on dry rock, wet but alive.

Her gaze moved down, and she saw the Bunuboi lying wet and limp on the edge of the pool.  She raised an eyebrow and took a shaky step forward toward her prey and then, without warning,  her eyes rolled up, and she collapsed unconscious only an arm’s length away from him. The force of her impact sent shocks through the huge chamber, ripples through the pool, and bounced little Rabi up and back down right where he lay.

The ground moved and Rabi awoke slowly.  His fur was soaking and he felt like somebody had been chewing on him .with intent.  He took a quick physical inventory, moving his limbs one by one. Everything hurt, but also seemed to be intact and not broken.  He remembered waking up falling..seeing the water rising up at him. Looking up to see her over him and deciding that he did not want to be between her legs when she hit that water.

His final blur had helped him time it.  Within the field it seemed to take ages for them to fall..still surrounded by jagged shards of heavy golden glass seemingly suspended in midair.  He wanted the field to be up when he hit the water, to help cushion the blow, and he didn’t need to go far, just few feet to anywhere but where he was, plus up diagonally didn't hurt, so she would hit first. He remembered releasing inches above the water. There was a thunderous boom as the Orasha split the glassy surface,  which erupted in a massive wave that picked him up and threw him right onto the edge of the pool. He remembered landing face first on the stone under under the deluge and then everything had gone black.

He smelled a familiar scent in his nose.. A sort of acrid metallic, but also strangely sweet and musky smell.  His eyes flew open to see he was staring in to the huge Orasha’s open maw, not a foot away from him. Panicked, he tried to backpedal on his side and almost scooted himself off the ledge and back into the pool before realized there was something odd.  Her lips were slack. Her tongue lolled downward. unmoving to the left side of her mouth near the cold stone floor they both lay on. He froze in place. But she didn’t stir.

Moving had been a mistake.  Now his muscles were on fire.  He looked to her chest as she lay on her side facing him and saw the steady rise and fall of of her rather considerable heaving breasts beneath the soaked melon colored upper wrap. One side had been forced down and a  fat puffy purplish nipple bigger than his entire eyeball was poking out over the cloth. He felt his face burn as he suddenly became hyper aware of her strange female anatomy, of the fact she was wearing nothing to cover her bottom part and.. her second mouth.

He thanked whatever spirits governed this abandoned place that her legs were together for the most part and her other maw just barely peeking out from between them.  He was sure he’d seen enough of that for several lifetimes! Then he looked down and cursed himself for the runt of the litter. His member apparently disagreed. He sighed, exasperated as he realized was still completely naked and all his clothes were in her bag somewhere who knows how many feet above them in the ruins.

Well, if he didn’t want to see her alien anatomy again..up close.. and from the inside, he had to get out of here.  Knowing what little he did about her, he guessed she would be up herself sooner, rather than later. So he had no time to waste.  He first rolled from his side to his bottom and looked around to see where he was, take stock of the situation. . He was on the edge of an enormous hexagonal stone pool in some kind of huge chamber.  The entire thing was strangely well lit for a place that was as ancient and presumably abandoned as this. Weird tongues of bluish green flame were flickering all over the place from various sources, wall sconces, hanging braziers, tall torch poles, even fire pits, bathing everything in an eerie light while somehow increasing the shadows that obscured much of the details.  

There were six straight  canals, one for each side of the vast chamber that were feeding into  the central pool. The water in both the canals and the pool appeared black and impenetrable, but Rabi figured that was more to do with the slimy black moss that covered everything below the waterline than the clearness of the water. He picked up a piece of rock and dropped it over the side into the pool.  Sure enough he could see it sink quite a ways before it disappeared into the shadows near the bottom of the pool. He could hear the water flowing all around him, echoing off the ancient walls. It was such a strange sound to be hearing in the desert, but not strange to him. Bunuboi had perfected the art of long distance irrigation as part of the endless quest to increase production and yields from the various crops and produce they grew on their enormous colony farms.

He grimaced at the thought. Rabi hated those farms.  The endless drudgery and routine..of doing the same thing every day.. only varying with the cycles of the crops themselves. Plow..seed, water, hoe, harvest, repeat. No, even being stuck down here, far below the surface of an ancient ruin in the desert with a murderous amazon who wanted to eat him with either of her TWO mouths was preferable to hoeing another row of sweet orab beans.

Speaking of amazons.. she shifted slightly next to him, and a low growl emanated from somewhere deep within her. Rabi wouldn’t have been surprised at all if it had come from her second mouth. It was definitely time to go, but where? Water was always a good pathfinder, especially when it was moving in a continuous stream.  It didn’t just exist..it flowed. It came from somewhere and went somewhere. All you had to do was follow the flow, one way or the other. Downstream lead to the big pool, and presumably some underwater drain or submerged tunnel, seeing as how the water level never changed, but upstream had promise, so off he went, still naked, following the channel cut into the stone through the eerie bluish green mix of light and shadows.

Consciousness came quickly to Narreyel, it was as if one second she felt herself toppling and the next she woke up on her side, lying on the hard stone, still dripping, but starting to dry. She opened her eyes with a snarl and before her blurry vision had even resolved she reached out to where her elusive prey had been when all had gone dark,  but there was nothing there. She snarled again and sat up straight. Then her belly snarled. She patted it as if to assure it that it would be full soon. The bunuboi had woken before her, but he couldn’t be far. She could just see the faint heat signature he’d left where he had been laying. his higher temp bunuboi body had warmed the stone under him, but she couldn't see where he had gone.  

She looked around.  The giant chamber was lit from multiple and varied sources flickering with a ghostly bluish green flame, a flame she noticed was not giving off any heat whatsoever itself.  That had to be either supernatural or magical in nature. The flames reflected off the glassy surface of the huge six-sided pool to her right. So much water close by was making her nervous, though a little less now that she knew she could overcome it. That is, as long as the bottom was hard and it wasn’t too deep. She’d heard stories of  incredibly deep bodies of water as vast as the Wastes themselves. She doubted those came with hard bottoms or sheer walls at the edges and made a resolution not to go anywhere near one of those if she could help it!

She put forth a knee and rose first on to one foot,  and then the other, taking a brief second to fix her top, which had apparently gotten twisted during her battle with water..  Standing upright felt good but strange. She felt heavy, a fact she logically understood and acknowledged to be true, but had never PERSONALLY experienced before.  Normally Narreyel (despite the fact that she weighed as much as a fully armored warhorse) felt light on her feet, exceedingly nimble, able to crouch and spring, or leap high through the air with little difficulty.  But now she felt slow, sluggish, like her body was delaying its responses to all her commands by least a quarter of a second or more.

She also felt..for lack of a better word.. Soft?  Was it something to do with water? She had very little experience with the stuff.  It was almost non existent in the Wastes, and most Orasha could go days and days on a single sip.  She had never been immersed in it before. Orasha didn’t follow the bizarre human habit of cleaning themselves by covering themselves with water. Closest she had ever come were freak rainstorms that she encountered on occasion  when missions took her to the border lands that rimmed the wastes.

She needed to focus.  Once again she had multiple goals to reach.  Her stomach rumbled again to remind her. Catch and consume her little Bunuboi snack, find a way back to the first floor of this ruin, and fulfill her contract by finding and opening the surface entrance so her fellow mercenaries could enter and find whatever secret thing they were looking for that they had decided she didn’t need to know about. Narreyel knew when not to ask questions.  That happened often as a merc, and frankly she had no problem with it. She had bigger prey to pounce after all...or.. smaller. Smaller worked too. Was that him? The tiny speck of heat not thirty feet or more from her.. busily fussing with something at the top of a large gate? She crouched low and carefully and quietly made her way toward him, trying to keep to the shadows as much as possible.

Her padded feet made no sound at all as she slunk quickly from shadow to shadow. Staying close to the many large hexagonal columns that ran from the floor to the 40 foot ceiling overhead.  She knew his sensitive ears would pick up ANY sound at all, even her breathing, which she was purposely controlling. She could see them now atop his tiny head, up, alert, and swishing back and forth as he worked, obviously scanning and identifying all sounds in his environment. They suddenly swiveled in her direction as she slipped behind a column not  twenty feet from the gate and she froze in place..peering straight at him from the shadows where she was pressed against the column on its dark side. He never turned or looked or in anyway signaled that he was aware of her presence. Though from this close she could see why. Perhaps he felt pretty secure from threats in his perch at the very top of the large metal gate, nearly 25 ft in the air with 5 ft wide stream of water of undetermined depth directly underneath him.

“Know where your prey will run, and let them come to you.”

The Precept came to her mind unbidden. She knew it of course. It was one of her favorites. Narreyel loved outsmarting both her opponents and her prey..and when she did, the former often became the latter. But where exactly would a tiny Bunuboi clinging to a metal gate 25 feet off the ground “run” to? She studied the gate for a few seconds, and then she knew the answer. She carefully searched the ground for what she was looking for. Searching for just the perfect size, not too big, but not too small either. It didn’t take her long.  

Rabi was still wrestling with the mechanism inside the box. It was incredibly complicated, full of tiny gears and levers and cantilevers. He was disadvantaged without his tools, which were hopefully still waiting for him on the surface, but he was making do with tiny bits of metal he had managed to collect from various sources along the way as he followed the water to this large gate.  His advantage was his small size. His hands could reach into the smallest spaces, feel the workings, let him build a mental picture in his mind of how it all fit together. He had quickly determined that this was not a lock as he had first thought. It was more akin to a trigger mechanism, a fairly complicated one, that if not disarmed before opening the gate, set off multiple other devices (6 so far) of unknown origin, most likely traps and probably all deadly.

He had managed to disconnect the main trigger, so the door could now be opened, but he had used up all his metal bits jamming the secondary fallback levers and the only thing right now holding the main mechanism from slamming closed and setting off all the connected devices was his left hand. His finger were tightly gripping the lever inside and holding it back in the safe position, but his hand was starting to hurt.  

He had been working for the last several minutes with his free hand to remove a spring catch that he had previously rendered useless.  It was the perfect size to block the lever from closing but he couldn’t seem to get it to come loose on the backside. Something was blocking it from sliding up over the pin and the angle was awkward to reach even for him.  If he had his tools it would have been a cinch, but as it was he was stuck. He had just about decided to give up on one of the fall backs and just let whatever device it triggered trigger when he heard a deep rumbling gurgling sound behind and below him. He froze.  He recognized the sound instantly. The amazon that wanted to eat him.. and gods knew what else.. was behind him.

“FFFKKKKK.. FFFKKKKK..FFFFFFFFKKKKK”  he cursed to himself. Now was not a good time.  He was perched precariously at the top of the gate completely exposed, with his hand being the only thing that was preventing all hell from breaking loose presumably.  He could drop and blur before he hit the ground, just long enough to stop all his momentum, but then it would be off to the races against her again in a dark closed in unknown space, and one wrong turn would lead him straight into that second mouth again. There was also the matter of EVERYTHING going off at once the second he let go, and he was pretty sure at least one of those traps HAD to be aimed at whoever was tampering with the mechanism.

Any further deliberation on his part was cut short when he looked behind himself and  saw her step out of the shadow of the column she was hiding behind less than twenty feet away and hurl something at him, hard.  The roughly round but jagged rock was bigger than his entire head and she had hurled it with pinpoint accuracy straight AT his head.  His blur was instinctive and reflexive. He didn’t even think, which was good because he would have been dead otherwise.

One second he was clinging to the large metal box he was tinkering with and a quarter of second later he was suddenly 5ft straight out in midair and.. falling.  As he fell he heard the low peal of loud resounding gong that seemed to come from everywhere. His ears could hear mechanisms moving and clicking throughout the chamber.  Wires being released, levers switching, gears turning. Things shifting and sliding into place. Smaller mechanisms activating larger ones, several loud clanks in close succession from near the ceiling in all 6 corners of the room..and then..he looked down and saw her.

When Narreyel threw the rock she knew it wouldn’t hit him. She knew no matter how hard she threw it, no matter how fast it went, he simply wouldn’t be there when it struck. But she didn’t need it to hit him.

The Bunuboi blur instinct was exactly that, an instinct. Millions of years of evolution had honed it to be the ultimate escape mechanism, and for most Bunuboi that's all it was. An instinctive ability to just not be there when you tried to grab one or strike one. Clearly Rabi had pushed it beyond this, being somehow able to blur on command, with full control of how and where, and even use it to launch himself recklessly for long distances, but for all his ability, he was still controlling a primal instinct. And instincts could be triggered. Given any time at all, even just a second to prepare, the gods only knew what the cunning little Bunuboi might have done. But with no warning whatsoever, his reflexes took over and chose the route she expected him take, blindly backward, for the normal 4 to 5 ft distance they usually covered. All she had to do was take a single step forward, straddle the stream, look up, and open her mouth.

She watched his eyes go wide as he stared into her open  jaws. Watched him try in vain to blur again and then just like that, her mouth was overflowing with warm delicious naked bunuboi. She snapped her jaws shut quickly but carefully, just enough to hold him in place. Her razor sharp teeth were grazing his collarbones and neck uncomfortably from in front and behind. She could have bitten his head off easily without even trying and swallowed the rest of him in a single gulp, but instead she held him, uncomfortable and immobilized but unharmed.

To break the body is Conzaad, to “shatter the soul”.

She had forgotten this teaching in her blind Blood Rage earlier.  Prey was to be swallowed whole and intact and ALIVE if possible to assure the  proper elevation of the prey’s soul. Narreyel was sure the Huntress had punished her for forgetting her sacred duty by sending her into that pool. And she was just as sure that she had been spared her watery grave so she could properly devour little Rabi whole and alive and bring his soul with hers into the afterlife when she Returned to the Sands.  She was his destiny, whether he liked it or not, a duty she would not take lightly again.

But, if she had had time to think about it fully and be completely honest with herself, she might also have admitted that she simply didn’t want to end him just yet.  Maybe it was because it felt too easy? Or because whatever he had done had caused all sorts of mayhem to erupt around her. Keeping him close and alive so he would suffer any fate he meant for her was the best way to get him to give up any information he had that might save her life!  Or maybe she just liked the way he tasted and wanted to prolong his swallowing as long as possible.  If she had time, she might have admitted to all these things, but in fact she did not, because whatever had started happening when he blurred away from the big box in the gate was very bent on continuing to happen, even now that he was in her mouth.  

There was a loud roar from above and she looked up as six huge jets of flame converged on the very spot where he had been. She had to shield her face and eyes from the intense heat as they bathed the metal box above her in white hot flame for several seconds.  When they finally sputtered out, their mystery sources exhausted, the metal box and the closely spaced bars of the gate were glowing red hot. Then the ground shook as loud rumbling noises thundered from every corner of the huge room, far away in the darkness. Dust and small rocks fell from the ceiling as everything tembled. Six massive booms shook the room as six huge stone columns slightly shorter but nearly identical to the ones supporting the ceiling came crashing down hanging from large chains.

Narreyel leapt the rest of the way across the channel and jerked her head around, back toward the center of the room. There was an ear splitting noise as the six columns on each corner of the large hexagonal pool suddenly shattered  and splintered revealing the huge chains that had apparently been concealed inside them identical to the chains in the corners of the room. The chains flew upward into the ceiling and a large dome of water rose upward out of the pool as a massive section of marble , some 20 feet or more across and at least 2 feet thick, was heaved by the chains up out of the pool and suspended in mid air, water cascading and streaming  from its mossy surface into the pool below. And then.. finally, aside from the sound of water steadily dripping from the huge hexagonal slab, everything was eerily silent.

Narreyel  crept carefully to the edge of the pool to get a better look at what was happening. She still held Rabi firmly in her jaws.  So far he had not struggled at all or tried to escape, though she could feel his feet planted firmly just inside her teeth on either side of her tongue in a desperate attempt to prevent any further progress into her throat.  Suddenly he tensed and his ears stood straight up, straining toward the pool. He was picking up something. Something even her sensitive ears couldn’t hear.

Deep below the surface, near the bottom she could just make out the edges of a newly revealed shaft leading down into darkness. The ground started to vibrate.  The water in the center of the pool started to swirl and eddy at first, then to boil and churn above the hole. Something was coming up the shaft, something big, and it was moving fast. She could see just make out shadowy movement in the depths.  

Narreyel  reached for her Heartsword on her back reflexively,  but grasped only air. Her mind flashed back to when she had first plummeted from above, her sword still in her hand.  She must have dropped it when she hit the water. She stared hard at the bottom and then she saw it, glinting in the strange blue-green light,  lying there on the bottom in the moss, just as hundreds of long oily black tendrils, like liquid midnight, snaked upward out of the hole and began to  reach out into the open water..

Narreyel turned to one side and spit the saliva soaked, very alarmed and now surprised  Bunuboi out on the ground with a wet plop. He quickly rolled to his feet, shaking his little frame rapidly  to clear her excess drool from his fur.

“We can discuss dinner later.” Narreyel snarled looking down into the water,  a low growl emanated from her throat. ”Get it’s attention while I go for my sword!”  

And then, before the now even more confused bunuboi could do anything or even protest the fact that the amazon who only moments ago was trying to eat him was now issuing him orders,  she did something no Orasha had ever done or would ever even think of doing.

She dove in.