The sorceress trembled visibly as the door ground open. Beyond the portal was a large chamber that all but dripped with greenery. Its human origins were clear, in the center stood a column carved with strange mythological scenes which showed men in archaic armor speaking with strange creatures with many arms. In early panels they traded and exchanged knowledge, but as the column rose the panels became increasingly violent. Bas-relief axes split strange heads, and many armed figures used odd wavy knives to strike down their opponents. A stair wound four times around the tapering monolith before reaching its point, from which shone a jewel of clear silver moonlight. If the frieze told a coherent story, it was lost in the odd vegetation that obscured nearly every inch of stonework. Pale green moss grew on the column, across the floor of the chamber grew trees with soft purple leaves with opalescent bark. Fruits hung from their branches, deep black but oily looking and reflective. The soft buzz of unfamiliar insects polluted the night. The trees grew so thickly and the ropey intestine like vines which linked them hung in such profusion, that the walls of the chamber were all but invisible, save for the arabesque windows through which the light of the nearly full moon shone. Around these stone wrought openings the vegetation glowed with more than moonlight, seeming to pulse and throb with an internal phosphorescence which faded a few feet beyond the reach of the light.

 

“What magic is this,” Amal breathed as he stepped across the threshold. Sythemis stood frozen beneath the door arch, her mouth slightly agog. The first sign of true shock she had thus far shown.

“Come on woman, it was you who told me we must hurry,” Amal hissed. His words seemed to snap her back to reality and she stepped through in his wake, her face filled with an eager hunger that any man would die to see on the face of a courtesan. They moved across the moss, brushing passed the strange foliage. Each touch seemed to puff perfume into the air, an odd scent like cinnamon on the verge of burning, or the desert before a storm.

 

It came out of the trees without so much as a whisper of air to precede it. A vast black shape that arched through the air in eerie silence. It struck Sythemis and sent her crashing into the undergrowth with a flash of claws and a spray of blood. It landed and rounded on Amal, quick as a serpent. It was a vast black catlike beast, with membraneous flesh stretched between its forepaws and its mid section. Its face was a mass of scar tissue where six eyes had been gouged or burned with hot irons. Its four nostrils projected far forward like the snout of a vole and then quivered and flexed with fine hairs. Blind it might be, but it could clearly sense its surroundings by more than natural means. The thing was the size of a small bear for all the lethal stealth with which it moved. Blood dripped from its forepaws as it opened its mouth, revealing four rows of needle sharp teeth, none of which quite aligned with the others. Letting out a soundless roar that Amal felt in his stomach, it launched itself towards the thief, its jaw hyperextending.