The rising waters aided her efforts, without them she would not have possessed the strength to lift up a full grown man by his hair. But lift him she did, and as his body lay across the sandy shelf, the eldritch light he carried illuminated their small hideaway. The low ceiling was covered with creatures hanging upside down, suspended by their feet. She had often watched these stealthy night hunters circling soundlessly around her tower. Their sight had always given her a shiver.
When one of the animals let go of its ceiling perch and glided towards them on thin, noiseless flying membranes, Ainea could not quite suppress a shriek as it swept over her, fearing that this creature of the night would become entangled in her dripping wet hair. The noise thus created stirred up the whole colony in a wave of motion, with sounds not quite audible to the human ear, yet sensed and all the more disturbing.
As Ainea shied back she stumbled into a net of spider webs, disrupting the careful creations of hundreds of diligent spiders. While a child of nature, Ainea still had a woman's aversion to bats and spiders, not to be denied. Yet, she wondered, "If this little refuge is as isolated as it seems, what are the spiders catching in their webs, and how do the bats exit this place to hunt, as they surely must to survive?"
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