Just when I thought I would never again write another one of these stories here I am doing so with piles of ‘other’ work slouching and nibbling with white sharp needle teeth at my elbow. Oh well. I blame Mr. X who keeps cranking out some of the most amazing ‘pulp-adventure’ stories of our time. Seriously, I know we are talking large breasted women here in skimpy outfits dealing every few pages with sanguine mutoids lacking in manners and etiquette to such an appalling degree that it makes the average Republican fundraiser look almost like human beings instead of hogs at the trough, but there really are some of the most incredible plots bubbling away over there at dangerbabecentral. And the one liner’s, the comic asides, the actual individual personalities he has come up with in his revamping of the personas of his comic universe are some of the best I have seen in ALL of comics lately. And yes that includes the mainstream of the moment. It is hard to watch such sure giddy genius and not feel the satyr’s mad pull at the ankles to begin to dance. So here I go to stagger and lurch and spin in place until I retch and collapse. No idea what the story will be I only know I have roughly three hours and then it’s back to the grindstone. Rook.

 

THE PILLARS OF HEAVEN

“You have of course heard of the tepuis of Venezuela? Towering sandstone mountains with sheer rugged sides rising thousands of feet above the forest floor and not capped in peaks but rather flat plateaus sprawling for hundreds of miles in the tattered ever-crying clouds.” The oily man in the white linen suit set down his bone china tea cup in its thin saucer and removed a pocket square to dab at his black mustache lips before replacing it with practiced care back in his inner breast pocket. When his hand returned from this task it bore a thin piece of folded paper which obviously had shared the silk handkerchiefs abode.

“It may come to you as a surprise that similar mountains have been recently discovered or I should say, re-discovered on a small island chain off the coast of the tip of South America well in the purvey of the Antarctic Ocean.” The short man unfolded his piece of paper and laid it down in front of him in the narrow space afforded on the small table and smoothed it out with a plump palm and his ringed short stubby fingers as he continued. “While the tepuis of Venezuela number in the hundreds and make up a true mountain range in all the classical definitions these number only two. They rise up one in the center of a large barren mass of black slate like rock of an island and the other a short distance away upon a second island where it runs along its western side tracing all along its edge. There are various other islands in the chain but really they are not more than a series of shoals that scarcely breach the surface of that cold raging gray sea. The only two that deserve the name island would be the two with the tepuis upon them. This… is a photo copy of a satellite image of the two islands taken several years back.”

The shadowy figure he was talking to emerged from the darkness of the rocking trains bench seat and half stood up and leaned over the small table twisting and bending to look at the paper the short man was stabbing a bejeweled sausage like finger at. “You can see in the photo that the islands are nothing but bare rock with vents of volcanic steam rising up and boiling the raging waters all around. But here, at the flat irregular tops of the two tepuis one can see…” the man cast a quick studied glance up at the face of his companion who was looking intently upon the white sheet of paper just inches from his own face. It was a woman of incredible beauty wearing sunglasses despite the train cars poor lighting and he watched the reflected mirrored images play upon the lenses of the glasses as he could just make out her large eyes narrowing slightly at the paper reflected so brilliantly upside down there in. The woman’s large naturally red pillow lips smiled slightly at the corner and for the first time in hours she spoke.

“Vegetation,” The beautiful young woman looked up from the paper with its images and several hand scrawled numbers and words written along its edges and looked over at the oily man’s face but he was no longer looking at her gorgeous face but was staring wide eyed and open mouth with trembling lips at her chest. She looked down at her own chest. It was full, huge, and spilling out of her half unbuttoned white silk blouse. Her enormous breasts hung in her bent over posture and swayed gently back and forth with the rocking of the train car’s clacking locomotion. “And what do they call these two… huge mountains?” She smirked at the man’s hypnotized gaze and did not expect an answer but was somewhat surprised when the unblinking sweating man whispered in a horse strained voice.

“The Pillows of Heaven.”

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The Pillars of Heaven, also called The Fangs of the Serpent, also called The Lost Ones, also called... it appeared that over the centuries a half dozen explorers or adventures or merchants had stumbled across the lone chain of barren black rock islands and given them a name of one sort or another describing the two large towering mountains that made up the focus of the small abrupt island chain. The various names had apparently not stuck as the islands themselves were worthless except as navigational hazards in the oceans sudden thick fogs. But they lay well out of any sea lane and there were few ships traversing a right angle path across the fringe of the Antarctic Ocean out into nowhere. So not even navigational buoys had been dropped in the area, though the low broad shoals surrounding the two main islands were indeed dangerous; her map, the most recent she could find, showed them a simply seven irregular shallows rather than as islands but the map was over ten years old. The live GPS handheld did not show them at all as a thick gray fog hung over all and her radar simply showed them as two large blips with sonar marking seven irregular blips as she climbed down from the transport ship into her rubber outboard well laden boat. The ship would be back for her in three weeks’ time. The approach was far too dangerous for the ship to get any nearer and she waved good-bye as her small flat bottom craft slammed across the large ocean swells to the black monolithic island the rose and fell in the rolling fog before her narrowed gaze.

Her landing would not be the first. There had been at least two documented landings upon both islands and six altogether rumored or unconfirmed accounts of such landings. However the most recent was over seventy years ago and the next one back was over a hundred and ten years ago! The remoteness and the utter barren condition of the rock islands combined with their dangerous jagged razor sharp reefs of black rock ringing them made any casual approach suicidal and no effort had been made to send a scientific team to explore the isolated outcroppings of blasted stone. As far as she knew no successful effort had been made to scale the sheer rock sides of the islands two tepuis. She would be the first to do that! She grinned wide at the thought.

The ocean spray was bitter cold and the fog was icy to the touch even through her insulated full bodied diving suit as she bounced up and down on the large cresting waves as her small craft plowed onwards to the appearing and then disappearing black vertical visual chasm that seemed to shamble back and forth through the wet grave yard cold fog. The landing was not an easy one. Even with her powerful outboard motor and the thick walled multi-chambered hull of her inflatable craft the ring of jagged rocks and the gray rough sea tossed her heavy laden boat this way and that with jarring crashing shuddering thuds. It took several attempts and she was frozen to the bone and near exhausted before she finial breached the outer circle of shoals and found herself riding the swells up and onto the inner churned surge. There was no real, ‘beach’ or even a real sloping gradient rise to the base of the tepuis. Instead the great sheer cliff rose out of a circle of pools of rock and water. A sort of ring after ring of ice cold gray ocean tide pools of chaotic angry smashing surf through which she dragged and hauled and timed the crashing surge until her vessel was as far from the open sea and as near to the base of the cliff as she could manage it where she finally secured it by no less than four stout lines to rocks with deep driven spikes.

She then bailed out her craft the best she could and wrapped herself in a silver solar blanket and with teeth still chattering radioed the ship and told her she had made a successful landing. It was already dark out and she had no desire to start her climb of the gnarled mass of black and gray stone at night so she opened a thermos of hot soup and sat shivering in the constant icy spray of the turbulent Antarctic sea. ‘Thank the goddess it had been a calm day!’ she moaned as the fog reddened her raw face and numbed her nose and cheeks.

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She awoke from twisted dark nightmares to the methodic chimes of her wrist watch/compass/communicator and set about in the still foggy darkness to get ready for her ascent of the tepuis. She changed into her climbing shoes and gloves and fastened on her climbing back pack and dragged her ascent pack to the rugged irregular base of the cliff. She radioed the ship reporting in and it relayed a weather report that was surprisingly favorable; the icy fog would be breaking up in another hour or so and it should be a somewhat pleasant day hitting a high of almost forty degrees. She laughed at that and pictured the large vessel steadily churning its way away from her and her small barren rock world.

The climb would not be a steady one. She would advance up the rock securing points and then use an electric hoist to haul up her equipment to that point. She knew she would have to retrace her steps back down the rock facing several times in order to bring up her equipment so she would in fact be climbing and re-climbing the rock wall several times before she actually reached its loft summit. As such when the fog dissipated as much as it was ever going to do so and the thin rays of the sun came boiling down she was actually back at the base of the tepuis re-securing a new load of equipment to haul up to one of her staging platforms that hung along the rock walls sheer face. She did not sleep up on the rock wall but made her way back down leaving her equipment in their various staging points along its surface and slept another wet freezing night in her open boat. In all it took her three days of scaling and rescaling the thousand feet of sheer rock before she reached the top and then another one day to get all the leap frogging equipment up upon its surface. A crew of ten could have done it in a single ascent but she preferred working alone; less bodies to carry back that way.

The view should have been astounding except for the ever present fog was extra thick that day and she spent the better part of that first night upon the tepuis proper securing her base camp and setting up her equipment. She radioed in her successful climb and the setting up of the camp and got cheers from the distant ship which said it was cracking open the champagne as they spoke.

The fog lingered thick as smoke until almost ten am when it bleed thin enough for her to walk along the uneven footing of the tepuis top without tapping a climbing axe in front of her like a blind man. Only to reveal that she was not actually at the top of the tepuis but rather on a flat spur about a hundred feet from the true top. Still the camp was on solid ground and the equipment set up and the steady wind with its occasional deafening surges was unable to tug a line free from any of the tarps or tents so she was okay with her base camp being a short climb from the top. A twenty minute jaunt from her goal and blocked on three sides by a rock wall from any gale force storm winds was nothing to purse ones pillow lips at. They would just have to crack open another case of champagne in an hour or two and she was certain that sailors would be upset about that.

The wind ripped the wet stinging clouds away now and again as at this height it was a little foolish to keep calling it fog. And after a quick survey of her immediate surroundings the young woman slipped back into her tent and emerged a few minutes later in new apparel.  Gone were the snug full body insulated neoprene diving suit and the pull over neoprene head cowl and gone where the climbing gloves and climbing shoes. Now the young shapely woman wore heavy soled boots on her feet and a pair of khaki cargo pants with strapped on knee pads and a tight tank top with a khaki open shirt thrown over it and open finger gloves replaced her full finger climbing gloves and she wore her hair pulled back in a single long braid to keep the wind from whipping it in her face and back again were her round sunglasses which she had not worn during her climb from her boat. She walked carefully to the base of the rock wall leading up to the remainder of the tepuis half dragging a small back pack at her heels and stopped dropping it to stand with her hands on her firm full round hips stretching her back. It would not be a difficult climb as all three of the encasing walls of her base camp were well cragged and riven with crevasses providing many hand holds and foot holds, but the rock was not sandstone and its black edges were razor sharp so it would not be a pleasant ascent however easy and short.

The young woman looked around her again through the tattered clouds that were already dampening her clothes and the chill wind that piped and howled and kept her large puffy nipples hard under her tight shirt and frowned. “No birds,” she mumbled to herself and the frown turned to a scowl. She had not reported that yet but it weighed uneasy on her mind. If you planted a telephone pole in the ocean, dug a hole in the water and set it up right, by the time you started to shovel the water back in the hole around it a bird would already be sitting on its cross bar and squawking at you to get gone. If you tossed a diner plate on the sea that would never sink before you could turn and set a fork on it a seal would be there giving birth and eyeing you with the utmost disdain. The world of the sea was vast but the places where its creatures could live and breed where shrinking fast. When the young girl had approached the crashing thrumming shores of the island she had expected to be greeted with the shrill bloody cries of hundreds of thousands of birds but had found none. When she had shimmied up the wall of the cliff she had expected to find every single crack and crevice to be chocked full of nests and furious murderous avian parents, but there had not been a single bird or a nest anywhere. The tide pools surrounding the cliff should have been cast full of the bitter dark seas occupants but all she had found were a multitude of crabs and a few tiny fish and brine shrimp. Nothing else one would expect to have seen in wild rampant abundance was anywhere to be seen in the frothy black rimmed ponds.

The crabs however where everywhere, even as she had climbed she had found them hundreds of feet up on the cliff face staring at her from deep crevices and snapping angrily at her axe or hand. Obviously some of these cracks fell back in twists and turns to the ocean bellow but it was still an odd sight to be climbing up a rock wall and have a large crab snapping at your fingers. The crabs themselves where unique as well she was certain that they were an undocumented species in the pools and rock walls around the island. They were nothing like crabs she had seen before and it excited her to think that from the second her boat had slammed angrily ashore she had stumbled across a new species variation already!

Everywhere were steam vents. The whole island was riddled with vents of volcanic activity and some of the tide pools, though it was silly to call some of them pools when they were the size of lakes, were bubbling and boiling from the volcanic heat. Strange white crustacean crawled and swam in jetting spurts under the oily roiling surface amongst even stranger spouts of tubular clusters. But none of that explained the loss of birds or the more ready common sea creatures one would expect to see in abundance.

There was no vegetation on the shoals bellow only black bare rock and here on this bare lip of slightly angled irregular stone with its own pools of standing water and deep fissures and cracks a few which spewed forth the white plumes of water heated to gas and warned of other invisible gases deadly to the lungs to be skirted around and avoided at all costs there was no sign of green foliage as was hinted at by the satellite photograph. The steam vents and the churning pools of water did send almost visible warped columns of heat into the icy air so that the young girl alternated from shivering to sweating simply depending upon the twisting gust of the wind blowing over the lip or across the harp of the sonorous pockmarked plateau of her base camp.

“No birds,” she looked up into the thin blue sky and out across the walls of clouds charging in and shielded her eyes against the glints of diamond beaded drops that speckled her sun glasses and then turned back to the rock wall while shouldering her back.

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The final ascent took less than fifteen minutes as she rapidly scaled the wall but it did reveal several of the crab like creatures who rapidly scurried like ants across the vertical surface with tremendous ease. She found that a number of them sat back in niches covered in slimy eggs glued to the surface of the cracks and realized how very strange and different these crabs were and perhaps that WAS the reason there were no birds on this island. These strange omnivorous crab creatures with their accordion pleated rocky shells and powerful ball socketed legs ending in sharp tripod grasping toes and deadly scissoring pincher arms were the lords and masters of these appendicular towers of black stone. What bird could nest here that would not become a feast to one of these armored beasts.

She made the last few meters with something of a shudder and some anxiousness as several of the helmeted creatures had aggressively began to pursue her and in fact followed her over the ledge of the cliff face where she met them with full swings of her climbers axe and several steel toed boot kicks to send them spinning off into the either. She caught her breath and made several mental notes not to sleep upon the ground in the open or with her tent flap unsecured again.

She stood up and readjusted her shoulder straps of her back pack which dug in deeply around her full chest and gave her some almost comic over the top cleavage despite her two shirts and re-enforced sports bra. “I could keep half the contents of my purse in there,” she half laughed into her own swelling firm cleavage as she gave her bra a few disciplinary tugs. She turned to survey the true top, she hoped, of the tepuis just as a large cloud was breaking up across its surface so that it was like a white veil was slowly torn apart like strands of cotton candy in all directions at once revealing a momentary clear picture of the vista before her widening eyes.

It was not the open flat plateau she had expected. Rather it was a vast warren of strange twisting boulders and spires of rock some jutting up hundreds of feet in odd arabesque twisting shapes. An utterly alien landscape of mutated wet dripping melted looking rock spewing geysers of steam as far as the eye could see. And then the clouds retook the sight and left her standing there in a gray wet haze where she could barely make out the hand holding her climbing axe in front of her face. She stood stock still for several minutes waiting for the white mist to part but it only seemed to shift in layers of thickness no matter how savage the wind rushed and this shifting was in a swirling tumbling that only hinted at revealing anything of any depth or substance and then only in small gaps and holes that closed before one was sure they were even there. She grimaced and cautiously moved forward away from the lip of the base camp edge and further in amongst the strange ‘streets’ of rock shapes. Again and again she stopped up short at the sudden swarming blur of an almost animalistic shadowy form that lurched up suddenly buffalo humped before her only to turn out to be the rounded form of a wet glistening smooth butte of rock still several steps away.  The further away from the edge she moved and the deeper into the maze of oddly molded juts and walls of rock she wandered the less the wind followed her and the higher the temperature rose. Icy cold pools of water gave way to warm hot springs that purred and hissed at her soaked booted ankles and wet clinging khaki thighs. Soon there seemed to be no wind at all just a dead empty hanging silence and the shattered clouds gave way to more a feeling again of a true ground fog which soon became so thick and heavy as she advanced that it fell in a band around her knees and left a clear open space from her thighs to a few meters above her where higher up she could see the clouds streaming above the boney fingers of the rocks all around her diminutive form.

She climbed up on a small low dome of rock that brought her entire body up out of the thick now sweltering mist and with sweat dripping from her brow and body removed her pack from her back and set it down to rummage through it. Her wrist watch began to chime; her wristband/watch communicator was not reaching the ship anymore and the electric compass built into it was just spinning in place no doubt do to a large amount of lode stone nearby and the GPS satellite feed was also down. She removed a much larger unit from her back pack and she opened up a small dish antenna placing it on the rock next to her and started typing on its military grade key pad. The signal from the satellite was weak and she only got a quick conformation of her position before it passed out of reach. It would be several hours before it would be over head again and she could get another bearing but it was enough for her to remove the laminated maps from her thigh pouch and make some estimations which she entered in to her backpack small laptop journal recorder using the type pad and stylus and microphone.

According to her best guess she was still on the very lip of the large almost sixty mile square tepuis which sat in the center of the island. Its sister could or would almost be visible to her extreme right if she could get an open view and a cloudless day. It would take another few hours of walking at this snail pace before she would be at the vegetation field proper of this tepuis according to her map and the satellite. Also according to the satellite she was moving steadily downwards; the tepuis was bowl shaped?

The young woman put her equipment back into the back pack and zipped it close again and stood up, she wiped the back of her wrist across her sweating forehead and removed her water vapor beaded sunglasses from her face and tried to wipe them clear on her soaked shirt. “It’s no good.” She breathed heavily in the cloying saturated air. “I am just not use to wearing this much clothing and this heat is damn near killing me!” She gasped and tiredly removed her boots and took off her thick wool socks and waded her socks up, unzipped her back pack, and tossed them into her back pack. Next she shimmied out of her khaki cargo pants and rolled those up and pushed them deep into the back pack. Then she slipped out of her khaki shirt and balled it up and shoved it into the back pack. Then she pulled off her skin tight tank top and rolled it up into a ball and shoved it down deep into the pack as well.  “Ah, that’s better now at least I can breathe again.” The young woman took several deep breathes in the hot steamy air as if to prove the fact and then slipped back on her boots and placed her sunglasses in her back pack and sealed that shut. She slipped her climbing axe into its snap loop on the side of the back pack and put her back pack back on her shoulders. She stood there now smiling her long wet hair hanging down her back in its thick braided pony tail and her boots and her tiny thong bikini bottoms and her sports bra all wet and glistening and looking fresh and new and winked. “Alright you bastard let’s see what you got?” she stepped off the round rock and splashed up to her knees in tepid water. “Ugh. Great.”

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By the time she reached the edge where the vegetation was supposed to be growing the young woman already had her climbing axe back out and caring it in her hand in front of her crouched body. She had ‘bumped’ into several of the new species of crabs she had already seen on the island but these were the larger stronger more pissed off inner-city brothers to the tide pool and cliff dwelling kin. She had seen a half dozen who were about two feet in width and one of those had savagely attacked her for no reason whatsoever. She had killed it but it had not been an easy fight the rock like shells were rock like thick! Thank the goddess for her climbing axe! She doubted a hand pistol would have been of much worth against the beasts. And just before reaching the area marked on her map as containing the vegetation growth she had stumbled upon two six foot diameter monster crabs, but luckily they were locked in a death struggle with one another and she was able to slip past the hissing beasts though there had been a moment when they had crashed and lumbered almost into her and she had stepped on the rearing back of one to launch herself up onto  and over a nearby rock wall looking all the world like a pipe organ in some ancient church from which issued the terrible stench of sulfur.

Reaching the area of the vegetation was also the next satellite check in point showing how painfully slow her progress through the maze of twisted rocks sudden fishers and crevasses and fog had been as it was rapidly approaching nightfall and she had an eerie sense that the crepuscular species of the tepuis was not something she cared to bump into with nothing but a rock axe to offer them for hospitality. She had half expected the satellite thermal reading of vegetation to prove to be a lake of pond scum or several inches of lichen but as she broke free around and over a series of jagged high fluted rock formations she found much to her astonishment the swaying fronds of green ferns and a multitude of thick moss covered short trees?

Having no time to take in the oddly almost florescent green glowing view with any real detail she quickly shed her pack and set up the large satellite receiver and punched in the codes just as her watch chimed. This time she got a good signal for a full fifteen minutes before it faded out. Not only a clear positioning report but she managed to get a good relay of a live image of the area around her for several miles. It seemed that the tepuis she was on continued to slope down gradually to its center where there appeared to be a large lake. None of this, as interesting as it was, really mattered to her now. The light was fading fast and she needed to find some kind of shelter and set up a camp before darkness took her completely. She was very tired after her ordeal in the sweltering sauna of the rock maze and the goal of reaching the vegetation rim had kept her staggering on. Now that she was here she could feel the tired buzz of her warm limbs and the coolness of the air around her despite the several nearby steam vents and bubbling pool here and there rimmed in odd colored mosses. Where to set up camp? Something ‘up’ off the immediate ground but considering these crab like creatures could easily climb a sheer rock wall with little effort and their aggressive demeanor and omnivorous appetite she doubted there would be anyplace in the rocky alcoves or rocky purchase around her that would prove truly safe.

It wasn’t just the various new specious of crabs she had seen either for she had caught glimpses of all sorts of strange new shelled creatures armored like samurai warriors that moved rapidly on stalked legs over the rocks as well as hinted at swarms of insect like creatures who snapped mandibles making waves and waves of brittle clacking sounds much like crickets chirping their legs from the shadowy burbling pools of the rocks behind her and there was no way of telling what wandered those glades of odd ferns that grew up to her shoulders in height and were as thick as a lawn of a Republican golf course. Still it would be dark very soon and she did not wish to be pushing ahead into unknown footing. She put her satellite equipment back into her back pack as well as her mini-laptop and took out a flash light lantern as well as her sunglasses which she placed on her face as the sunglasses had special lenses built into them that allowed her to see with a low level night vision in the dark and using both the lantern and the sunglasses to see into the already inky blackness of her back pack she dug out and removed a plastic wrapped heavy bundle. “I had thought this might be an adventure where I had no need for these as there was no possible chance of meeting any men here, but…” she undid the straps and unfolded the plastic and removed two holsters and the two .45 caliber pistols they contained. Standing up in the well of the lantern light she quickly strapped on her costume made fire arms to either hip, smiling at the deep tug of the straps across her naked flesh. She undid the snap straps over each pistol and practiced yanking them both out a few times before sliding them back in to their holsters and returning to rummage through the heavy duty pack. “I usually keep hollow points in the left one and standard rounds in the right one but considering everything on this rock is packing armor…” she dug down into the pack and removed her extra clips and started filling them with full metal jacket armor piercing rounds. And then she swapped out the clips with the ones already in her hand guns and then removed and replaced those two clips with armored rounds until all the box of armor rounds were empty and she finished the clips with standard rounds and placed the two back-up clips in the extra clip snap pouches on her hip holsters.

“Well that is about the best I can do.” She tapped the reassuring weight snug on her hips and thought of the high powered riffle with its powerful sniper scope and the explosive charges back in her tent as well as the extra boxes of ammo and bit her lip. “Now time to find some kind of shelter until day break. Not that I think I will be getting much sleep this night.”

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The young woman did not get much sleep that night. She climbed up on a smooth arch of stone and then made a rope sling from which she hung down several feet below the arch and about twenty feet above the ground. In her sling/hammock she spent the dark hours nodding off now and then only to be awakened by the sound of rustling to see some glowing eye stalks below her flickering this way and that with loud snapping sounds and then suddenly disappearing into the dark apparently finding her just out of reach of their deadly sheering grasp.

She woke to the sound of gravel being poured on a tin roof and puzzled at the source of the sound. It came from behind her past the lip of vegetation back in the maze of foggy sweltering rocks. Some new creature or group of them welcoming the sun; this places notion of a roster. She had a stiff neck and her left leg was pin and needles a sleep in Charlie horse agony but she hadn’t been eaten and nothing had crawled into her hair to lay eggs in her ears or eyes so she let the stiff neck pass without a complaint.

Back on solid ground and with everything loaded up and her back pack on her shoulders she set off into the emerald swaying ocean of fronds that quickly surrounded her as surely as if she had stepped into a crashing surf. She began swinging her thus far superfluous machete hacking a sweltering path through the swaying green as angry buzzing insects bounced against her in surprise. A few fat toads and the strange hairy covered trees were rampant with blind wiggling insects and fat brightly colored frogs who lapped them up in a steady rhythmic burble was all she saw until the ferns gave way to taller and taller walls of trees of a different type that blotted out the sky and made the ground under foot thick with moss and smaller ferns and layers of layers of rotting fronds covered in webs of thousands of small spiders and the split husks of seeds of all shapes and sizes. Still the going was easier if not a bit squeamish at times as foot long poisonous centipedes crunched under squelching foot. The outer circle of trees had seemed almost like palm trees built up out of thick round hairy trunks with no limbs but these trees were had thousands of limbs in fact roots and limbs seemed almost interchangeable and they sewed themselves through the earth so they grew outwards almost as far as they grew upwards. She found herself climbing up into the maze of roots as often as trying to go around their sudden walls and the going was slow indeed but less energetic than it had been through the walls of green fronds and the fog here was more of a slow creeping mist so it was easier to move compared to the often blind steps of the maze of rocks.

The soil was black and wet and looked like used coffee grounds and had a musty pungent smell to it that cloyed the nostrils and weaved with the stifled hot air so that the ears rang even without the buzz of millions of clouding gnats. She was glad to find herself out of the thick wood and at the edge of the swamp that slowly bleed into the large central lake. Here were constant rings patterning the mirrored surface and yet she was certain that no fish swam in its scum fringed waters. Every now and then a large splash echoed flatly upon the wooded bowled shores and she felt uneasy as if many eyes were watching her with steady unblinking gazes.

Mists moved with the sightless tread of ghosts over the large vast surface of the motionless waters and she climbed up on a fallen shattered tree stump/trunk to warily drop her back pack and pull out her maps. “If the legend is true then there should be some kind of small slanted stone rising up from the lake bed. I should be able to see it if it exists from the shore. If it exists and has not fallen into ruin over the course of almost a hundred years or been buried by the water or…” she looked out over the lake which glinted in the noonday sun and reached into her back pack and produced a pair of waterproof binoculars and began scanning the lake in slow steady arcs. “It is a one in million chance. The last expedition to touch these shores found the remains of a several men on the rocks at the base of the tepuis. And upon them a crude map showing a green forest upon its top with a lake with a temple in its center and several sketches of a gold idol of a winged god along the edges of the parchment. So here is the forest and the lake now where is that temple? Please don’t tell me I got the wrong damn tepuis? Ugh. No what are the likelihood of the second tepuis being covered in a green forest and a lake and a... temple” She lowered her binoculars from her wide staring eyes and then raised them quickly again. There in the middle of the irregular shaped lake was a small black mound with a jutting slanted large protruding rock rising up out of its surface. “Bingo!”

Suddenly a black shadow flashed over her and she jerked back instinctively but there was nothing there. She eyed the still unblinking water suspiciously and then the air around her, “a cloud does not move that fast.” Another loud splash from behind the jutting finger of green trees and fronds and scum that hid much of the lake from her in its many folded fingered shore line and she scowled at the depthless water and pursed her pillow lips. “Now how do I get to that temple?”

She would have to go back of course and get the rest of her equipment from the base camp which included a much smaller inflatable raft and the high powered riffle might be useful considering those medieval banquette table sized renaissance fair crabs but the idea of hauling that sixty pound rubber raft with its inflate canister through that maze of rocks and then through that wall of forest was a bit daunting. And she was running out of days before the ship would swing back to pick her up. She didn’t want to miss that rendezvous as it might be months before another arrangement could be made? She eyed the mirrored surface of the water whose bright sky shimmer hid everything underneath its singular gaze. She had been wandering along the shore line of roots and tangles and ferns and swamp muck getting as close as she could to the temple until she found herself directly across from it on a jutting spur of rock. She could make it out easily with her naked eye and under the scrutiny of the binoculars it showed itself to be a large jutting slab of blue-gray rock that rose up at a jaunty angle and in whose shadow she could just make out the manmade structure of slabs of stone set up in a post and lintel crude form.

“Awe… fuck it.” The young girl took off her back pack and set it on the stone she stood on and put her sunglasses into the bag along with her twin pistols, harnesses, boots, thong panties, sports bra, and wristwatch communicator and removed a scuba knife which she strapped to the ankle of her right leg. Then she walked to the edge of the stone and dove gracefully into the still lake.

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The water was surprisingly cold and she swam in broad deep cutting strokes as rapidly as possible to the small little stone island. At every second she expected to be attacked by sharp claws and torn to bloody pieces and it was with some relief and a panicky loud splashing rush she plunged ashore ahead of all the horrors her fertile imagination had populated the pool with as she yanked out her knife from its sheath and brandished all around her shivering form. She eyed the silent lake behind her as she gasped for breath and only with some reluctance re-sheathed her knife and turned her full attention on the crude temple built under the overhang of the large slab of jutting rock.

The entire little island seemed much smaller than she had guessed and the overhanging rock though of a massive large size was still not as large as she had thought it to be through her binoculars. The temple was of simple large slabs of rough stone which must have been levered into place with considerable strength. It consisted simply of two enormous side posts and a cross piece with a few slabs lain on top of each other inside this simple construct acting as steps up to a short squat stone upon which sat a winged figure. The cyclopean construction belayed the real mastery of setting such enormous stones upright and positioning them so they would remain as such considering there was no sign of any mortar or joints and in fact the stones themselves did not appear to have been altered from their natural form in any way as to make their positioning any easier for the construction workers immense task.

The most outstanding thing which was of a sublime nature as to be overwhelmingly obvious once noticed but of such that only a highly skilled archeologist would see it so readily was that the entire stones of the temple were composed of slabs of white rock. She had seen nothing but black rock since she had arrived at the island. Where had these large slabs of rock come from and how had they been brought here and set up? It was the kind of questions that stagger a learned mind but the young girl kept her focus on the birdman within and quickly but warily moved up the steps of the small shallow temple to better eye her prize.

The light under the overhang was poor enough but inside the small temple it was almost non-existent and the young woman cursed not having her lamp or special polarized low light sunglasses with her to better see any possible traps.  In fact she could only make out the small sculpted figure at all due to its dark shape against the otherwise white walls of the temple. It was with some surprise then that when she finally reached the sculpture she found it not to be a winged man at all but rather a simple black two foot wide crab creature. It wasn’t even stone it was a once live processed crab that now mummified held a large diamond before it in its outstretched claws?

The girl paused and frowned and then breathed a puzzled half laugh. No golden statue of a winged man god, but instead a large cut diamond. The gem was as large as both her fists put side by side and had been cut by a master of the art and was undoubtedly priceless but still...” she frowned and then carefully removed the gem with some effort from the lacquered pinchers. She jumped back with the heavy gem in her hands but the crab did not suddenly come to life and attack her and the temple did not instantly collapse upon her and she looked over her shoulders suddenly and no army of crabs or a giant crab came lurching up out of the water to devour her. “Huh,” she moved carefully back out of the temple and away from the overhang so she could better see the gem in the sunlight. It glistened in her hands as she held it up before her as only diamonds can do as if it was somehow slowing time its self and turning existence into a pudding for it to eat latter.

The young girl continued to hold the gem up and turning it slowly in wonder as in the back of her mind she mulled over how she would swim back across the lake with it… back stroke with it held between her breasts? When suddenly something fell from the sky with a loud splash into the water some distance from her and she lowered the gem slightly so she could squint her eyes against the glittering lake surface and peer out as to what was making all those loud splashing noises all day. At first there was nothing to be seen as she couldn’t even be sure where the object had fallen and then the water erupted again and there was a winged man carrying a large crab up into the air. He tore at the crab with his fangs and talons and devoured it as he rose and behind him she could suddenly make out more golden skinned winged men soaring about upon great leathery wings and splashing down into the water and emerging a few seconds later with a large crab in their long arms. But they weren’t men at all she could see one swoop a bit closer and she could see they were some kind of leathery creature with long narrow skulls and huge eyes and no nose and fangs for teeth and long, long arms that ended in three fingers heavily clawed and they had skinny narrow bodies with small chests that were thin in breadth but deep in depth with short stumpy legs and clawed feet and huge bat like wings and they had all caught the slow almost light house calling glimmer of the large diamond she was holding up in her hands and they were racing toward her in screeching furry.

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She had turned to run not sure in that first great stride if she was heading toward the water or back under the overhang by the second stride she had been scooped up and was in an instant a good forty feet above the lake in cold iron gripping hands, the fingers were scaly and there was a powerful stench of carrion that almost made her nauseas despite the shock and horror of her predicament. She thought to drop the heavy gem stone and see if they would drop her in turn but the creature had on long clawed three finger hand clasped tightly over her hand holding onto the gem so she could not open it and release the gem. It had another long fingered grip around the back of her throat squeezing so hard her whole upper body was clenched and arced. It had its two short leg feet clasping her thighs and she could hear its savage loud howl deafening her ears. All around her she could hear and catch brief glimpses of other winged creatures careening around her and she could tell they were trying to tare her lose from her captor! The earth and sky danced bellow above to the either rolling side as she was rushed along in spiraling violent swoops and plunges and every second she expected the fanged mouth to rip into the top or back of her skull! But the lethal bite did not come and she pondered this even as her spinning state kept her from formulating any plans and kept her from being able to figure out her position in relation to the ground.

The creature’s intention became instantly known to her when she felt the unmistakable pressure of an erect penis begin rubbing against her imprisoned exposed sex. The size of the thing was enormous the head alone must have been the size of a soft ball and she whimpered despite herself at the thought of being helpless raped in her non-stop trapeze performance. There was a fish oil stench as the head oozed a slick pre-cum as it pushed and shoved again and again trying to gain entrance to her cherished secret garden. Only the continued racking pawing attacks of its brethren kept the manic humping creature from penetrating her now own slick wet mound. But it was only a matter of time before it would force an entrance and she would be impaled on that massive thorny skinned spear.

Suddenly her free left hand which had been ineffectually pummeling at the scaled claws grasping her neck and limbs and swatting at the large penis rubbing her crotch into an overheated slather suddenly came into contact with her right thigh and then just as suddenly her right ankle and then the scuba knife was in her hand and she was driving it backwards with all her might into the thick of the cock she was now riding almost like a broomstick and there was a heavy syrupy wetness all over her back and she was falling amidst shrieks and then an impact so hard she was sure she had landed upon stone but it had been the lake water and she was swimming to the shore and there was her rock with her back pack but even as she came ashore there was a foul creature half the size of the one who had tried to rape her pulling and tarring at her bag and she raced up the rock and lunged at it with her knife and it leapt back into the air in fear and flew away.

But it did not go far and soon it was back with the others swooping down on her but now her pistols were in her hands and she let them have it both barrels smoking death as first one and then another fell like stones into the still water and the others howled and cackled and swung off to disappear into the mist of the lake and its distant shore. She breathed hard as she watched them go both her weapons empty the backup clips empty too lying amidst the empty casing shells on the rock next to the large diamond that glittered at her feet and she collapsed to her knees and tried to catch her breath.

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The return journey was fraught with terrible danger as the winged creatures seemed determined to recover either their gem or her womb. She did not know which but it was a sleepless tired exhausted young woman who naked and battered and bruised made her way back to her base camp only to have the foul creatures tare it to shreds even as she drove them off with the last few rounds she possessed. They had been smart enough to find her ammo and the riffle and maybe by scent or cunning or mirthful accident dumped it all over the side of the cliff. She had no weapon now, her hand pistols devoid of ammunition sat impotent in their holsters, and her scuba knife stuck in some crab creatures eye stalk back in the maze of rocks. The cold winds were numbing up her naked body and only a few provisions were left in the devastated camp. She would never be able to climb down the side of the tepuis with those creatures attacking her helpless body and she had no clothes left in the camp and her own garments she had stripped out of before plunging into the lake had been shredded by that young bird man before she had drove him off. The back pack was gone stolen by the bird men as she fought them off in the gray fogs of the rock mazes in fact the only thing she had left was the diamond still clutched in her hand and her holsters with her two empty pistols. She searched the camp as she shuddered before the icy blasts of the gusting wind. A storm was blowing in and she could see the bird men did not much care for all this cold wind. Some of them had already disappeared back into the warm mists and fog no doubt returning to their lake. But three, then two, then one still grimly circled eyeing her with malevolent intent.

And worse than all of this the ship was here! She could just make it out through the gathering storm clouds. There was no way she could climb down in time to reach it and no way to radio it to tell them she was still alive. She felt like crying when suddenly she eyed the storage crates all smashed and splintered and saw something that put a cold thin smile upon her face.

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The captain of the freighter scanned the foaming shore line of the crashing rocks of the island and listened as the radio operator replied in negative for the second straight day since their arrival. “We can’t wait. We are low on fuel as it is. Prepare to set course.”

“Captain Look!” it was the first mate and he was pointing not down into the raging sea but up into the air. There swooping in on a brightly colored parasail was a naked woman with a large diamond strapped between her boobs. She landed gently on the railing directly in front of the startled Captain instantly severing her harness with a buckle snap allowing the parasail to drift off and with her hands on her hips and her untrimmed bush just inches from his white bearded face smiled and said, “Permission to come aboard, Captain.”

The Captain threw back his head and howled with laughter, “permission granted Sara Kraft!” And the first mate helped her down as orders were barked for course and the dark towers of the Pillars of Heaven fell behind them into the churning storm as a lone dark unobserved shape slide silently over the waters following in their wake.

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