She woke slowly, consciousness crawling back up from drug induced oblivion to a shattered body, raging pain in her back from a protracted sleep on a stone slab, the cold leeching all the way into her spine as she grimaced, rolling from the altar in the remains of a torn, shredded dress. Flashes of bright hot memory burst through her mental fog as she threw up over the stony ground, searing pain burned her throat as she dry heaved whatever noxious laced food had surrendered her to this oblivion.
Arms drawn in tight, cradling her ribs she stared bleary eyed into the cold darkness of the underground chamber, spying little detail other than the raised stone dais, the carved tunnels leading two and from the chamber, thought as to which was which she had no idea. Placing one shaky foot in front of the other she chose one of the two branching passages, placing her hand against the rough muddy earthen walls, partly to stabilise her shaking legs and partly to keep hold of something solid as she slowly crept her way into the hungering darkness.
Time lost meaning as she stumbled through the dark dank earthen passages, branching deeper and deeper into the mouldy labyrinth. More than once she came to an abrupt halt in the darkness, a slithering echo heralded by a knotting pit of dread in her aching stomach, she shrank back against the fetid wall, fingers gripping for purchase, perhaps to try a stone loose from the moss to defend herself. Her fingers sank into the cold dank mud, slick, slimy. She froze there for an eternity, straining to hear the slither again over the growling of her own stomach.