"Where are we?" he asked, and Warja didn't try to hide the huge grin that threatened to overwhelm her features. She was beyond tickled with his reaction, and what she liked best about it? That they weren't even to the most amazing part yet. This? This was just an empty space underground; a void where there shouldn't be one. What was coming next would blow him away, she was sure of it.
"We," she stated grandly, "Are so far underground that if the earth above us caved in we'd get smashed flat, killed instantly." This, to her, was a fascinating notion. "We're so far underground that many creatures who fall in never make it out." They'd passed a couple corpses in various states of decomposition but very soon that number would double, possibly triple. "Before us is a maze that has so many possibilities I once spent four days trying to find a way out." She knew the way now, but that information, for the thrill of it, wasn't going to be shared unless he asked for it.
The weight of this place, the sheer terror it could instill, the despair, it was awe-inspiring. Not because she wanted to see these emotions in others, because she didn't (okay, well, she did want to see Kismet ruffled), but because it had her respect. She respected things that scared her. Their power over her and her natural understanding of it was an amazing thing. It challenged her and she loved every second of it.
Finally she would answer his question. "I don't know what it's called, but this whole thing showed up after that earthquake. You should have seen it! I saw it open up and," she shook her head in remembered awe, "It was amazing. No words I can think of do it justice." The terror that had lanced through her as the ground began to shake and scream, and then the feeling after it, when she was so beyond terrified at seeing a mouth split the ground open and belch dust were hard to explain. "This huge hole, the one we came through, suddenly appeared and then there was an awful roar followed by an enormous cloud of dust that filled the sky for hours. It was amazing," she finished breathlessly, having rushed through the words in her excitement.
"Speech"
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