Outside it was still silent. Malabeth was not used to this silence. Inside the temple it made sense. There were thick walls and especially where she slept, there should have been no one awake. Outside it was different. Sure, the city was asleep, but it shouldn't be that silent. Something was always going on, and this night should not have been any different. Only her second glance revealed, that more than just sounds were amiss. All around the buildings were shattered and sundered, deep cracks ran through the ground. They were too far away to make out any details, for the temple was built onto a plateau of stone which rested slightly higher than the rest of the city, but the destruction was obvious even from here.

Some of the smaller buildings had collapsed. When? Malabeth did not know. There should have been great rumbling sounds and screams, shouldn't there? Cities don't collapse on the wim of a moment. Sure, there had been that rumbling sound, but.... the temple? Malabeth turned around once more. No, the temple was still standing. There were cracks all over it, sure, but it was standing.

She stepped forward slowly, taking her time to look around. The silence around her was eerie. She felt alone and naked all of a sudden. The veil she wore, a cloak wrapped around her shoulders and held in front of her chest did cover her body, but it did not really hide her form.

Wind made it flutter every now and then, exposing her naked front for eventual viewers, only that there seemed to be no one around to admire the soft forms of her breasts, her muscles visible as tender curves under her skin or the hints of bones underneath dark flesh. No hard edges, no overblown muscle-structures threatened her softly predatory beauty. But what use would a preador be, if there was nothing to hunt around?

Even if the cloak was closed, the fabric was not nearly thick enough to hide her soft curves underneath. Step after step Malabeth moved forward. Her hips only swayed a little, matching in movement the amount of sensuality she emanated. She was not a perfect model on a catwalk, but at the moment a young priestess, feeling very exposed, alone and lost.

Before her lay a stone plaza, nothing was built in the vincinity of the temple, neither were there any statues or other types of structures, that would divert the eye from the massive, looming building behind the young priestess. A temple to the Demonspider should loom over the whole city, and this was achieved not only through size, but also through this empty space all around.
The predator would devour anything around it and would tolerate nothing nearby.

The symbolism of nearly perfect emptyness, a void around the center of the drow world, was destroyed though, not only through cracks on the ground and slight damages to the temple, but also through boulder which had fallen to the surface every here and there. The usually perfectly empty space seemed cluttered even with only these handful, but huge stones in sight.



The next thing Malabeth percieved, was a dampened thundering sound. She stopped and looked around and above. "What is this?" Her own voice shivered with fear, as she was still trying to grasp, what was happening around her. This sound, had anything moved? There it was again, and no, nothing was moving, no stones breaking loose, no collapsing structures, and sure not another earthquake.

As she heard it the third time, it was clear: The sound did not describe breaking rocks or crumbling buildings. It was a clean, well formed tone, a reappearing, "unified" thunder, each like the other. Like a very slow and massive heartbeat it sounded in her ears, echoed through the cavern the city was built into. It was hard to pinpoint the origin. The sound was so low, it resounded not only in Malabeth's ears, but in her stomach as well, causing a feeling of slight nausea.

The plateau around the temple looked still empty. Malabeth walked towards the end now, where a series of steps led down into the rest of the city. Down the steps and onto the street.