Anx Ma'at

The sky was obscured by a dense arboreal canopy; the stars and full moon, in turn, were largely obscured by thick cloud cover.

Beneath it all she lay. Still. Ears imagined as twin vessels into which liquid sound would pour. The soundscape clicked and popped with the rustle of foliage and howled with the frigid winds. Beasts stalked prey; the insects sang paeans to would-be mates. Alien noises in an alien place.

The soft rasp of slumbering bodies also could be heard, plaintive and oddly comforting.

The darkness was receding now, and she turned her head, peering over at the Mitran. He had promised to be up for the final watch, a promise now as ethereal as his dreams. Not that it mattered. Unused to the nighttime cacophony of the Cimmerian lowlands, Axun had laid awake for most of the night, drifting in and out of fitful slumber. She had woken the bald pale-skin at one point, only to find him sound asleep again when next she woke.

The river’s gentle pulse very nearly drowns out the small clacking of the prayer beads. Tk-tk-tk, they are chiding.  The Mitran – Cleric, more technically – intently regards the archer bathing there in shallows. She has gone under thrice now and for a third time she rises up from the water, head flung back and then forward, sunrays catching silver strands of riverwater thrown in lazy parabolas from her cropped dark hair.

The dark of the basement Maps-Works is broken as the doors are thrown open.  A shaft of light advances across the earthen floor.  Illuminated particles of dust are agitated into motion by this intrusion of light and life.  The air is dead and stings the nostrils with a chorus of affronts: cat urine, bird droppings, the fading, near-cloying stench of some long-dead vermin.