Lion Head Mesa it's hardly sink or swim when all is well if the ticket sells

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 19 °F Clear Skies
Waning Crescent - Illumination: 9%
8 PM

if there was one thing qiao knew about life, it was that revenge took time.

she stood at the precipice of the great halls and studied their flooding. artifacts of all-consuming water scoured their once-smooth walls. mud everywhere. twigs lodged in places they should not be. 

though it had been cold these last few months, the scent of the dead smeared the canyon's every surface.

many times she'd walked the halls below as akashingo's once hemet. her paws traced the frozen garden established eons ago by herself and arsenio; now gone to wilt and rot.

a black garden for a black place.

she continued through the desolation, marking where khaba had driven her skull to the redstone. a bitter laugh suppressed in her throat to recall such memory. another came to her then: makono accusing her of treachery as she barred her egress through the red corridor. another memory: herself and senmut preparing ramesses' corpse, his face shriveled in one of permanent agony.

all these years, and qiao wondered: who?

but now the who was as inconsequential as the why, for all that remained in these halls were ghosts -- and ghosts rarely talked at all.

in the rubble of disturbed stones and silt, qiao picked up an object encased in frozen mud. brushing the flecks of snow and dirt from its surface, she saw it was a braided crown, the baubles once glittering in its settings dulled by damage. 

a smile all to herself as she stared at the ruination of akashingo and knew that this was the cost ramesses paid when he denied qiao her simple price.

she had been patient. reasonable even. she had explained the debt to makono, and then toula. it should come as no surprise both defected, same as their predecessor. qiao had never placed much faith in the promises of royalty.

and now both had nothing. qiao's most powerful haka had at last reached the overworld -- and the overworld delivered in the mighty tongue of cataclysmic flooding.

she threw the useless thing aside, sweeping up on stiff limbs as she continued combing through the murk. somewhere here among the ruins lay the soulbond to her greenbrier torc, and qiao was nothing if not experienced in the scavenging of recently razed kingdoms.