Time  ~  Gyrax

Gyrax expired; the air shimmered with the heat of her breath.   For several moments an eerie silence spread o’er the glade, punctuated by the furtive scuttling of a small foraging rodent.   He’d strayed unwittingly over the periphery of the kill zone.   He spotted a fat worm dancing invitingly just beyond his reach.

He closed rapidly, locking onto it with sharp gnawing teeth, seeking to tease it from its hole.   Unaware of the approach of others either side.   The lure slipped out of his grasp and retreated once again tantalisingly just out of reach.   His small mind failed to register danger and he licked the thick sticky sweet worms slime from his whiskers and paws before continuing his assault.   The normally timid wary creature followed its prey and its position became even more precarious.   Slimy tentacles closed in all around him, like a nest.   Through blurred vision he just registered the once slender worm had now grown much fatter flattening like a paddle.   The nerve agent occurred naturally in the sticky mucous on the tentacles and was doing its deadly work.   At the very last instant he realised his predicament, but too late to do anything about it.   His limbs were tired and sluggish, he could feel the tendrils wrapping about him, dragging him towards the central pit – the maw of the Gyrax.   Unconscious but still alive he was taken into the dark foetid womb like tunnel of her gullet.   Down, down he went unable to struggle, into the larder of the oldest creature still living, the last of her kind in the universe.  

Gyrax expired.   She was delighted by the tiny spark of terror, in the rodents mind, but there was other larger game out there and it was coming closer by the second.   The air shimmered, for several minutes.   Closer, closer…

 

Continues see Acolyte/...