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Save Point: Simple Pit Trap

Unnamed Barrow-Style Tomb

The light gear is a simple suit of low-weight leather armour that always disconcerts her just a little when she wears it, because it reminds her of Kirstine N'marie and their oddly arousing little scrap literally millenia before. It's not that protective, because most of its strength is produced by the overlapping knap of many thin layers, but it's not supposed to be, because it's a deliberate sacrifice of armouring for speed and agility, not to mention slithering through tight places. The leather started off black but has worn to a more earthen tone.

It's suited for exploring more closely confined spaces, such as caves or underground tunnels or caverns, and this is a matter she takes seriously indeed because a large enough rockfall could in fact spell a permanent end even to an immortal like her. But unlike Kirstine, she's acknowledged the limits of her protection and hasn't tried to wrap every unflayed inch of skin from the scouring gaze of others. Besides, it can get quite hot in some of the more narrow descending passages and, although she can defer exposure to heat and burning, she still sweats like anyone else.

So, open-cleavage bodice with a little gap underneath in the middle to let the perspiration escape, and a narrow sinuous waveform of horizontal silver rivets underneath to support and uplift. Arm sleeves and thigh high angled leggings implemented as separate pieces, providing handy spaces to let her body breathe as she moves. A pair of thin but heavy steel bangles, rather than bracers, with the words flytja (to plead a case, or remove something) and kottr (a cat) carved into left and right respectively in simple angular runes that can drawn crisply with the corner of a burin, file or chisel. Her little joke, because in this outfit she is thief-cat rather than war-cat, likely to remove things that don't quite technically belong to her and steal your poorly protected grilled fish left so carelessly over the charcoal.

~*~

Today's target is your classic barrow tomb, ridiculously ancient but still youthful compared to her, likely to attract the generic ire of local families if they find out what she is doing even though they are in no way even distantly related to the persons interred there after all this time. Fortunately these are sometimes already open, if they were designed to house multiple generations of a single bloodline and sustain ongoing visits, or have been filled in only by sealing the main entrance-way, which tends to be conveniently marked by two large stones. Many of them are just so old they've simply been forgotten about and left in the middle of nowhere, as habits of occupation change and buildings are abandoned or reclaimed.

She holds the slender sheaf of vellum up to the light and compares landmarks, not that she really needs to, just to ensure that she's in the right place. It would be somewhat embarrassing to steal the contents of the wrong tomb. This one has been subject to some discreetly scholarly research, bards questioned and landscape features in old sagas correlated, so the odds are pretty good that there's still stuff in there and it hasn't been scoured completely clean. Of course the downside is that if no-one else has blundered in there, any traps may still be active, inconveniently unmarked by discarded bones and harrowing chalk-marks.

She unships her climbing axe and uses the hooked end to scrape away the moss and soil that has accumulated around the facing stones of the doorway. Good. Undisturbed, not cleverly recovered or concealed to, perhaps, lure in the greedy and thus reverse the gradient of treasure distribution in favour of the tomb-owners. She starts pulling out soil, lifting away the turf and stacking it to the side in an orderly manner, just in case she needs to conceal her own depredations in like manner.

~*~

Instead of the usual leather or mail apron at the waist designed to defeat upward weapon swings, the light gear reduces the weight and the likelihood of snagging with a simple stained linen cloth, which can trail after her as necessary, tear off more easily if it snags on something, and be used to clean stuff if necessary in a handy way when combined with a little liquid of any description. It's held up by a several lengths of fine chain about her waist that drape with a deceptively decorative lay over her outer hips, which are useful in a pinch for all sorts of purposes from garroting tool, to reaching distant objects or jamming mechanisms.

To avoid inconvenient flopping of the bodice when crawling through narrow spaces, especially if she has to compress her ribcage and slink across the dirt, she has two deceptively sturdy straps that look like the same leather as the rest but are in fact wrapped around the same chain, a lesson learned when the first attempt scooped up ancient dark soil with great efficiency and smeared it across her bared breasts continuously until she got back out and was able to clean it off skin and fur. The two straps connect to not so much a collar as a shoulder-supported necklace, consisting of many thin overlapping vertical metal plates adjacent to one another in the Khemitic style. It looks deceptively like decorative jewellery, especially after she's enamelled it in various suitably dark colours, deep-water blue, earth-ochre brown, deep-stone grey, but can take compressive hits to the layered segments from outside with great effectiveness, whilst still being able to tear apart outwards under her weight if it catches on something as she is falling.

~*~

She wipes the sweat off the ridge of her muzzle as she tears at the turf, feeling the oils in her fur streak off onto the back of her hand. The weather's cool but she's never been that fond of digging, core military activity though it may be. She was made, all unwitting, to charge and roar and fight, not to dig ditches for people, and so it's an activity she tries to avoid except for a very little orderly gardening where possible. Preferably someplace there are no bees.

The final layer tears away cleanly, pale tangle of fine-woven roots like capillaries backed up onto an inpenetrable surface in the face of a flat-chiseled stone door. Careful not to marr the surface, she peels it back and downwards leaving it all of a piece, to inspect the exposed doorway, tapping on the surface. Halfway down there is a different sound, and she gets to work.

~*~

Providing additional protection to her all-essential skull, and thoughts thus contained, she wears a sort of stainless steel not-quite-skullcap or headband, like a reverse tiara, that slots just in front of her hairline across her upper brow-ridge and tucks inside her ears in either side. In polished steel it neatly matches the bangles, but is also her improvement on the Eye of Re sun-disc that she wore ever so very long ago during the fall and afterwards, when she was venerated as a goddess in the land of Khem. She's eventually realised that, for her purposes and her unique eyes, a little light scattered in all directions is far more effective than a single glorious beam, not to mention far less noticeable, and much less likely to give away her position. A faint shimmer of flame in the right place and she can see in the pitch darkness, whilst still knowing where the shadows are so she can hide in them.

Strapped about the light gear to complete it are various belts and flat pouches, containing such useful tools as take up the least space and award the most benefit. There's the slender foldable climbing pickaxe, built to a stripped-down design that will not be invented again for centuries, a metal flask with a lethal distilled alcohol extracted from barley spirits, a roll of various stimulants and poisons in small concise phials, and a set of lockpicks that are super-effective against the very poor state of security currently prevailing. Assorted other tools include a small brace of knives, a folded stash of pounded dried meat and an old water-skin, all wrapped around at strategic points to increase her profile by less than an inch, even carrying everything she could possibly need.

The whole look is clean but streamlined, and she likes the way she looks, so sometimes she wears it even when she doesn't need to, to visit taverns or go dancing and invite her servicing.

~*~

"Ow, godsdammit, my cunt!" she snarls on an ever-ascending note as she is abruptly lifted into the air by the trap.

For someone less limber and lacking her ludicrous pussy-skills, this would probably have been a painful end, but the trap seems to have been designed for someone much shorter than herself, not surprising in an age where full nutrition is only an option for the wealthiest and fiercest percent or two of the population. What it's supposed to do, when you step on the plate, is use a simple system of mechanical displacement (these guys still don't have the precision machining skills yet to do decent gears) to convert the downward motion of the platform as a whole into the upwards motion of a thick chunky wooden spike lubed with pine tar, concentrating the same amount of force to a point over a considerably longer distance.

Certain mechanical considerations mean the attack is less effective the further it extends, which is why someone expert in the mechanics of impalement has designed it to be just long enough to punch through the normal pelvic girdle. Which would fatally perforate the viscera, causing certain death to any average individual in this primitive environment, by way of secondary infection if nothing else. Because most armour has a weak point at the groin that is usually compensated for by vertically hanging plates or chainmail, this is a definite game changer even to the most well-equipped. At least it doesn't seem to be poisoned.

It is also, Cleo concludes as her inner muscles clench tightly in a hot, abraded ring about the rough-grained wood, carefully sized to be just slightly too thick to be inserted or pulled out without some additional mechanical force. She's seen plenty of impalements in the more vicious corners of the world and could practically cite the dimensions.

She blames herself, really. It's been far too long since she's had to exercise full combat alertness, even though she was trained long ago to recognize and avoid all these types of simple improvised trap, and so she's gotten a bit blase about it all. Which is why she now has her feet dangling several inches off the ground and her entire body weight will be resting on a point in her cervix the instant she loses her concentration.

And to think there are people who like this sort of thing. Girls who yearn to stand on tiptoe atop punishment posts that are just a little too long, knowing that as their arched ankle-tendons tire out, their own weight will force it deeper than they could ever bring themselves to do. Girls who fantasize about slowly being spit-roasted over an open flame to be food for something bigger and hungrier than themselves.

She knows this, because she's been paid exorbitantly in the past to help such women realize their fantasies whilst still alive, as only an ithyphallic leonine deity can. Running gentle flames across their bodies as they struggle with themselves. Bathing them in solar fire.

Enough fantasies. She saw what happened to her friend Mitzi, what real vore looks like, and has no intention of beginning her participation in it here, as a feast for cave-dwelling rats, however impressively large they may be.

Very, very carefully, she bends forward at the waist, grabs the pole with both hands just under the point at which it's forced its way past her breechcloth, and then slowly, ever so slowly, turns her whole body into an uncoiling spring, a sort of forward roll become handstand. She draws on memories of all manner of ancient gymnastics manouvres learned while cheering for the team in innocent viciousness and then, much later, dancing against a stripper pole with calculated love.

Really, it's all too easy, just a matter of leverage and thrust. She pries herself off the pointed spike, leaving a thin smear of fresh red blood on the long-congealed pine tar as it scrapes abrasively against her not-so-tender insides, then goes into a full handstand for a second or two as she assesses her immediate surroudings for further hazards. The post creaks under her weight and the platform rises a tiny bit, despite the catches and additional counterweights designed to keep the point going all the way to to full extension once triggered and prevent it from being cleverly disarmed.

Splayed to the sky, her translucently thin-stretched pussy lips breathe a bloody sigh of relief. Then she lets herself fall with a thud onto the nearest adjacent patch of honest stone and lies still, taking deep breaths, and contemplating what she's just avoided. What an ironic way to go out that would have been.

Sure, she could have flamed the pole. All that tar would have gone up like the blazes, and the heat of the flames couldn't have hurt her. But if she'd given in to impulse and the burn was uneven, she'd have ended up with a snatchful of flame-hardened splinters driven up into her guts. And that was what she was really trying to avoid thinking about, as she contemplated all those things, because with her powers, thought can also be an action.

Once she's pulled herself together, literally - it takes a while for her strained clit and abused pussy-hole to meet once again as they normally do - she gets up, swigs some of the alcohol she keeps in the small flat flask, and continues to explore the tomb. Fore-warned is fore-armed, and she expects nothing less than trip-wires, pit-falls and rising floors that try to slam you into the ceiling from the very competant designer who put this trap together.

But first, she feels obliged to get her own back - so she kneels gracefully and licks her own blood off the spike, with a long curl of tongue like a cat giving a blowjob. The taste of ancient pine tar is just plain nasty, and there's absolutely no-one here to ever see or know, but she will.

"Coming to get you," she mutters with cheerful malice at the deep shadows of the grave. They do not answer back.

~*~

The burial chamber itself is nothing much, old stone and a little mould, a very clean skeleton picked fleshless by time in early bronze armour rendered beyond useless by the weight of ages, as is the elaborate full shield and huge heavy axe clutched in the two dead hands. She finds a few small offerings left to the side of the remains, a small handful of gold, some unfinished gems of no particular spectacle polished smooth by the icy waters of mountain streams.

But what she is here for is the amulet, not buried barrow-trove. And the amulet is remarkably ancient, clearly to her eye an artifact of paleolithic age or greater, carved from bone by some early shaman with a flowing pattern of vividly leaping and sinuous reindeer. Vesta running and leaping under the moon, in an age where they still worshipped the white mother, the lunar goddess of blood and sacred fertility.

There are legends about the amulet, but they're from a later age, and she knows them for the lies they are. Nonetheless, it gives her a thrill to know that she is holding something vastly older than herself, and she would like to imagine that she might take its blessing, even if it isn't real. The original bone has been decorated with two fine bands of gold and hangs from a leather thong around its previous owners neck, designed to swing from the topmost of a series of holes bored through it. It might have started off as flute, long ago, before wear and tear claimed the extremity of either end. She barely even has to pull and the leather simply crumbles in her grasp.

~*~

It is only as she finally leaves, confident in her success, that she triggers the final deception. The innermost tomb door opens outward, a variation from the general design which she pondered at great length before testing and probing it with the set of slender lengths of flattened metal forged in secret, designed for picking locks.

There were other doors at regular intervals on the way down, each designed to lock once with a simple irreversible one-way mechanism when closed behind the last ever visitor on the way out. She was able to easily reopen then with just a little effort by cracking the locking rod, much easier than being forced to break down the whole door in a long and time-consuming struggle, as seems to have been the original intent, whereupon they swung inwards and jammed open.

The innermost door was not locked and clearly swung outward, but the door itself was harmless and nothing happened when she carefully and slowly pulled it open with a long narrow rope. She even chocked it carefully behind her with a small wooden wedge designed to keep a few inches open between the door and frame, because you should always wedge the door.

It is only when she more incautiously and casually pushes it open ahead of her on the way out that she realizes just what it is supposed to do. The room is airtight, thus pushing the door open suddenly and abruptly creates a small vacuum behind it that cracks open a slender panel behind her in the far wall, not just decoration as she had thought but a single super-fine sheet of lamellar mica. She tries to run on reflex, but this is far more subtle than that.

The carbon monoxide and fine powdered dust of ancient smoke is no heavier than air and mixes just as well, so as soon as the slender wafer of stone that is holding it back collapses, it wells out silently into the room and displaces the thin but still breathable atmosphere. She is overcome by a sudden wave of air that has no actual air in it, which would probably collapse a normal human being right then and there, but her lungs are far better designed and start trying to intelligently filter out what they can. Nonetheless, the timer has started and if she doesn't get out of here soon, she will be joining the amulets previous owner in the grave.

~*~

....and yeah, she was right. Damn. Whoever trapped the tomb was brilliantly insidious. As she tries to find her way out, based purely on her memory of the passages running in, her vision gradually hazes over with darkness, as though ash or grit was collecting steadily on the surfaces of her eyes, and the corners of her vision are slowly being stained red as tiny blood vessels give way. She can feel herself steadily weakening as the quality of the air steadily decreases.

She has plenty of time as she staggers, crawls, gets up again and keeps going, to reconstruct how it must have worked, after they completed the burial, some considerable span of time ago.

Once the laying out was complete, the fires were started, slow burning, perhaps with poisonous plants of some sort used as the fuel, consuming the oxygen from the hidden level, spreading a fine powder of toxic dust and smoke, replacing the air with carbon monoxide. She can easily name a few candidate bushes and barks, she's picked up a little of the local herblore for purely practical reasons, cures and dressings and the like, and she recites them to herself to try and stay focused, listing poisons and their effect against the deadening of her ears and dimming of her vision....

~*~

She almost collapses, pauses, comes to a halt for a second but then keeps going, not running but patiently trying to outdistance the degredation of the air as the unseen poisons slowly mingle with the breathable content. The exciting combination of poisoning and asphyxiation is slowly stealing the strength from her limbs. As her visual field incrementally becomes more and more dirtied by the toxic particles and lack of oxygen she tries to raise flames in her free hand, a trick that wouldn't work with real fire because there's nothing here for it to feed on, trying to make her surroundings bright enough to see.

The defect is in her eyes, however, rather than the air, and adding progressively more and more light has steadily less effect. She can feel the pupils of her eyes dilated wide open and glazing over as the integrated software tries to clean up the image, with ever more patchy results. And this tomb is huge, a sprawling complex extended on several levels and through parts of a natural cave system. If she could close the secondary doors she could prevent the bad air from spreading outward, but that seems to be the very reason they were designed to fail inward.

She can barely see at all when she finally reaches the uppermost level, climbs a short ladder so very slowly it is as though the amulet weighs several times what she does, staggers along a brief corridor that barely deserves the name, and then back outside, tripping over the half folded-back root mass. Everything is still dark and gritty even though she must surely now be out in the open air, and she is seized by a sudden moment of terror that everything might look like this for the rest of her life, amulet-blessing turned into a terrible curse, until she shudderingly takes a deep breath and realizes that it's started to get dark outside while she was exploring the barrow. The light hasn't come back yet because it's nearly sunset, and the pervasive tinge of red to everything she sees is just the long light over the horizon.

She lies on her back in the long moist grass outside the tomb entrance for a while, letting the dew-damp blades brush against the side of her face. Slowly her vision starts to clear, as the outer surfaces of her eyes repair, and the fine membranes in her lungs scrub themselves clean, but it'll be a while before the stains remove themselves completely.

After a while she is able to get up, spit, lean again a dolmen with hole bored through it chased by the last faint remnants of gilt silver grained into the rock, and pull out the long flat strapped-on packet with its array of tiny vials of various restoratives. Once again the light gear has proven its merit, she concludes as she mixes several substances with the last of the vile alcohol in the flask, swigs it down, and then, thoughtfully, places the amulet in one of three empty slots representing a previously expended vial.

There's really no need to encourage bandits to believe that she has something valuable. They can go look for themselves once the air clears, and be amazed at the lack of anything worthwhile.

~*~

She already has her client for the amulet, a member of a sort of wolf-lodge of sword-companions that includes wolf-cultists, animal-totem worshippers, shamans and a decent number of actual werewolves in an incestuous testosterone-laced mix that extends even to its few female members. The artifact is very deeply sacred to them as a symbol of the hunt and they are prepared to pay handsomely.

She enjoys being allowed to participate in their secret rituals occasionally, very sexy, very bestial. She remembers with pride the pissing contest that she won, wolves staring enviously at her pussy as she beat them cold on both height and distance from a standing start. The prize was barbequed dogmeat on a stick and plenty of beer to replace the prodigious spray she'd just used up, although she could've had rat instead if she'd wanted. It was quite the showing for the female members of the lodge, and that night they all walked about tall with slinky gaits, swaying their hips, dancing with calculated salaciousness to indicate that they weren't about to be overlooked.

The meeting place is, how predictable, another cave, this one under a natural rock formation that makes for a natural landmark, sort of the opposite of the earlier barrow. They have just the sort of things in there you'd expect, an unnecessarily huge shallow chalice-bowl for mixing the blood and wine, comfortable padded doggy-beds filled with rag-and-reed stuffing for fucking on, tidy votive niches for their treasures. The official residence is a long-house nearby but this is where they do their secret stuff with knives and dead animals, their pillow-biting wolf-lair.

The hand-off is good and she takes payment in bounty notes, a sort of primitive equivalent of the cash economy, each of which indicates that the holder has been confirmed as having completed a specific service and is now owed their payment in precious metals or other equivalent currency. The brothers and sisters of the lodge tend to accumulate the notes, due to their mercenary line of work, and since it's far easier just to carry around the notes themselves than actually cash them, they have become widely accepted in the region and are handy to have.

Some of them are for strange and extremely specific amounts, such as 'the value of a fat boar' or the irrational numbers calculated as the fractional price of recovered stolen goods. The challenge is mostly finding someone who can make change.

A small ceremony is held, wherein the paleolithic flute is placed reverently in its chosen niche. It will become part of their shamanistic rituals, and she's intriugued to find out how they're going to incorporate it over future months and years. It's a most potent moon-symbol, so they'll probably tie it in somehow to the cycle of the lunar calendar.

In thanks for the recovery, hospitality is extended and she is asked to tell of her adventures over a bowl of ale or two in the longhouse, which is a carefully maintained contrast to the wolf-cave, a well-lit symbol of order where the support-posts of the walls are regularly scoured like the decks of a ship. She edits the tale a little to remove her embarassing near-impalement and makes it all about the poisonous vapours, which are much suited to elaborate kennings comparing them with all manner of terrifying silent death.

Dry-land-drowning. Stealer-of-breath. Killing-curse-touch.

The food, as is usual around here, is heavy on hunted meat and dairy cheese, but not milk, which is seen as something for children, as compared to the almost uniformly alcoholic but mostly safe-to-drink brewed beverages always laid on for those who are fully grown. If you're poor the meals are more vegetarian, with lentils, bread and oats cropping up in all sorts of variations. The wolves are not poor, and show it with lavish feasting on flesh.

Cleo manages to get her favourite, a regional specialty that introduces almost-fresh, only slightly aged cheese at a late stage into the cooking process of a thin meat and mushroom stew. The newly added cheese clumps together, clarifying the sauce and removing any large particles, but clinging to the meat and mushrooms to create a delicious and easily manageable mixture you can eat with your fingers before slurping the sauce from the bowl. The trick to it is all in the timing, the cheese going in when it's only just still warm enough to melt and be stirred through.

She stays the night, as is her guest-right, and is assigned a bed-bitch to use for her pleasure at the end of the evening, as is expected. Since there are about four of them sharing the bed in total, it's less of an abuse and more of a friendly all-in, everyone else having also gambled their sleeping arrangements to determine who exactly gets who. The wagering can get quite exciting when you make up for your losses with your body and there's no privacy allowed.

It smells nice, breathing in their second-hand breath and the rich mixing of unwashed sex smells. The wolves are deeply attuned to scent and like to keep their home properly musky, a gesture that she appreciates as she warms her toes up against her consolation prize, who seemingly enjoyed herself and fell asleep nuzzling at the arches of Cleo's feet. She wouldn't dream of denying the girl what she wants and needs, and it's nice to have her foot-pads serviced and massaged so well out here in such a remote place. She smiles at the sleeping wolfess.

In the morning she lets her bitch lick her feet again as she gets all her gear back on, affectionately pushes her down with a foot on her face, then once she's made clear she's in charge, gets the girl off with one big toe pressed firmly against her clit. The rest of the wolves are impressed and she can almost see the bitch going down several rungs in social status, to exactly where she secretly wishes she was. Tonight she'll be everyones toe-licking little plaything and she'll love it.

She waves the wolves goodbye affectionately as she departs.