[b]Miriam
Chapter 30: Den of the beast[/b]

The hooting woke her up.
She felt the gravel, tasted it even. With a pained wince and exhaustive groan Miriam rolled her face out of the muddy floor. She let her arm fall limp off to her side and briefly recoiled at the pain in it. With forced determination she moved her aching body up and turned her stale neck to look around. Her hands were caked with mud and scraped with cuts and bruises but they still shone that strange white hue she'd been granted when Walter first took her here, she pushed her thick and wet hair away from her vision and looked around at the room she was now hosted. It looked similar to the rest of the ruined city: Its columns and walls were dark ruins plastered with sheets of ash and burnt soot but the pillars surrounded her in implication of where there might once have been a ceiling. The floor was covered in the same amount of soot and ash as the rest of the ruined city but Miriam noticed the many shards of glass that littered the floor around her. She sat up, letting out a grunt at the ache in her body from when the giant owl-monster had squeezed her and carried her away. She sat on a rug which ran thin and long through the center of the room and ended in a small regal staircase, which at the end of stood a large throne. Its frame was shaped round with jagged thorns jutting out of the top in a pattern which looked quite uncomfortable. Miriam gave the room a second scan, wiping some mud off of her face. The giant owl was nowhere to be seen which she was glad for but she'd no clue now how far it had carried her away from the wizard who was her only way back out of this infernal hellscape of a ruin she'd found herself in.
	"Terrific.." She mumbled quietly for herself. Too weak to be properly upset at the moment. Not that there was anyone around to be upset at either way. 
	"Hoo-hoot!" It sounded off in the short distance. Miriam walked toward the similar chirping of the owl, toward an old tapestry which pattern and design was lost to both time and fire for a long time. Miriam pushed the drapes aside and beneath them found the small gilded cage she'd been abducted by the wizard to get. Inside of it sat the ruffled owl whose echoes had spoken to her about blood, kings and treachery. Miriam sighed and picked up the cage, looking at the owl who looked back and sounded a tweet of general annoyance. It didn't echo in this building and somehow Miriam doubted it would even speak to her outside of that dome-building where she'd first gotten it. 
	"Hey there." She said regardless and carried the cage with her as she went back to the large round room more central. There were walls around them but they had fallen apart to reveal the ruined spires of the city and the noncoloured backdrop behind them. Miriam carried the cage inbetween her arms and by instinct walked toward the prominent throne that stood at the end of the room. It wouldn't be a way out but she might as well investigate. Halfway there she stumbled on something hidden by dust and nearly tripped over. Jumping on one foot she cursed and looked down at what had clinked. From what she could tell it was some sort of large manacle, attached to a link of sturdy chains. Miriam bent down and sat the cage next to her briefly to grab the dusty chains to pull on. They rose from the ground with her tug and she noticed they ran from this manacle to the other side of the rug in symmetry. Miriam assumed it was meant to cage or contain something very large. Maybe the owl that had stolen her away. With a tired sigh she got back up - picking the cage up with her - and headed for the throne. Walking up the steps she noticed the throne itself was strangely large. Larger than any man's butt would ever require, though she took that as just another sign that whoever had lived here once were as arrogant as they were opulent. Miriam sat the cage with the owl on the Obsidian throne just for the irony of it and smirked for herself. 
	"You're a king now, Birdie." She chuckled though the fowl only looked back at her with its predatory eyes. Miriam looked around idly.
	"Wonder who lived here...Oh." She noticed a large pile of bones lying just next to the throne, she'd been unable to see them before due to the angle but could now perfectly look at the human bones that lay in a desperate heap of old clothing. Miriam bent down to pick at the clothes. Raising the dusty cape to inspect and so on. The skeleton was larger than any man she'd seen and his clothes were a wasted hauberk of when dusted a little silver embroidery. Miriam turned and twisted the bones without much decency and inspected the supposed king's royal attire. Silver rings, crystal armbands and even a crown made of a deep gray metal. It seemed more a helmet than a crown as it covered the head and sides of the skeleton's large skull. The left hand seemed different though. Miriam lifted it to look closer. 
	"Hmmm?" She hummed as she inspected the large gauntlet. The hand gear was covering, strong and made of the same metal as the crown. Miriam was about to pry it off when she suddenly heard a gust of air strike through the room. She looked around and saw the outline of her bird-captor approach. 
	"Shit." She cursed and quickly left the dead king to hide behind his throne. Her own owl sat on the said throne, hooting its protest against the gusts that arose with the monster-bird's landing. Miriam peeked out from behind the throne. The bird had landed and was ruffling its four wings and chirping in shows of annoyance and frustration. From its massive beak it dropped a corpse of some kind. For a moment Miriam feared it might've been Walter though quickly noticed it was just another kind of monster. Looked like a swamp croc' to Miriam though it was hard to tell by this distance. The monster-bird pecked at its prey briefly and snipped a piece of it to gullet before it began looking around the room. Moving its large head in snappy and attentive motion just like any regular owl would. It let out a minor craw and then returned to eating out of its capture. Miriam looked around the room again from her cover and pondered. If she ever wanted to get back to her own world she needed to find Walter, and she needed to give him the owl she'd gotten and to do that she first had to get away from that monster. From what she could tell from her new vantage point the room had three exits: The first and most noticable was to her left where the wall had collapsed but she guessed that led to a drop since the owl undoubtedly lived high up. The second was to her right in a small arched doorway that stood slightly behind the drapes she had first found the cage at. The last was the large door just behind the monster which had blown open a long time ago and stood as the most prominent exit out of the throne-room. Miriam decided that the right exit would be her best bet. While the owl still fed she picked up the cage and its inhabitant who cooed a protest.
	"Shhh!" Miriam hushed and clutched the cage closer to her chest. She looked over to see if the monster had noticed. Not yet, it was still nipping its bloody beak into the reptilian prey. Miriam sneaked her way down the stairs and with quick, quiet steps headed for the right side of the room. Then the monster looked up, flicking its predatory eyes to Miriam and let out a large roar of a bird noise. Miriam let out a pathetic "Eep!" And sprinted into action. Running straight for the closest exit behind the drapes. The bird reacted quickly as well, leaping across its current prey and spreading its set of smaller wings while approaching with deadly speed. Miriam didn't look over her shoulder as she slipped in behind the drapes and through the exit, she turned once she'd passed through the arch, looked back at the monster and quickly fell down a flight of stairs.
	"Ah! OPH. OWOWoowow!" Shoulder first she fell into the spiral staircase that descended quickly into the darkness beneath her feet. She rolled over her own back and lost her grip on the cage which went spiraling down the stairs at its own pace. The owl at least had some kind of protection while Miriam tumbled down the staircase with all the momentum she'd had from running away from the monster. She stopped after it felt she'd broken her arm at least five times more and opened an eye, looking up into the darkness. She could still hear the monster squawk and roar from above her, it seemed like it couldn't reach her here.
	"Ow..." She complained and with some sliding down the stairs made to rise. Her body hurt and bumped with aching pains and her butt which had acted as her final cushion felt broken entirely. With some ragged stumbling Miriam followed the chirping complaints of the caged owl down the steps, finding the bird at the end of the staircase. It looked beat up just like her but the cage it was held within seemed as pristine as it had when she first picked it up.
	"I hope Freda and Ellie are having it real cozy someplace right about now." Miriam complained while narrowing her eyes to adjust them to the darkness of this new hallway. 

The hall was slim compared to the throne-room above it. Miriam hadn't been in any castles before but it reminded her of some of the fancier estates she'd come across during her travels. The walls were lined with paintings and drapery but they were just as burnt as the ones above and Miriam couldn't make out what they were supposed to depict. Instead she carried on through the hallway with the cage in arms, walking at a slow pace to test her bruised joints and bopped head. She traversed another set of stairs down another level and found that the similar hallway had had its wall collapsed. She peeked out through the hole and looked out over the ruins of the city far below her. To her disappointment she couldn't spot the dome shaped building where she'd last seen Walter or anything else she could recognize either. Her vision was suddenly overtaken by a brown feathery flash which caused her to both yelp and take a cautionary step back. Watching the monster-bird pass by her and the hole in the wall Miriam halted her breathing. The fowl had flown by so fast it couldn't possible have seen her but better safe than sorry Miriam kept on through the hallway past the hole to get out of sight again. She heard the monster screech out there and her growing anxiety was hardly settled knowing that it was now circling the spire. Miriam pressed on through the ashen halls and ruined estate of the spire, heading downward always through rooms of leisure, service and living. They seemed endless and they were all as equally ruined as the houses outside had been. Lit by Miriam's unnatural shine the pathways linked together with the staircases in strange and illogical ways just like Miriam noticed the walls changed from bricks, to cobblestone and to metal fluidly. She started to doubt she was even descending at all when one of the stairs took her to a room far different than the rest. It had only one door which she had come through and the walls were lined with bookshelves. The center of the room stacked with tables and strange baubles of alchemy and science. The room was strangely enough not burnt like everything else was but still held many layers of dust and aged crust. Miriam walked to the center and noticed something strange in the dust on the floor. Footprints. She bent down to inspect them. 
	"Footprints? Shoes. Large but with heels... A woman? Not particularly fresh. Hmm." Miriam trailed the prints to a very prominent desk. Upon the desk stood a small wooden altar which looked like it ought to hold a book of some sort though now there was none. "Dust here is disturbed too." Miriam explained to her bird companion who had taken to nurturing its own bruises while being carried around by Miriam. "Someone's been here." She concluded. Miriam looked around once more and noticed another skeleton. 
	"Oh. Didn't see you there." She told it and approached the large skeletal body which sat in one of the chair by the desks with its skull planted against the wood. Miriam pushed it back to inspect. The skeleton was large and as old as the one upstairs but this one was dressed in robes of some kind. Miriam spotted that the skeleton had been lying untop of a book. She pushed it aside and took the tome. It was written in a language she'd never seen before. "Typical." She murmured and lay it back on the table without further concern. She picked up the cage once more and left the strange library. It was another great amount of staircases before Miriam reached what she believed to be the bottom floor. There was a large doorway at least and a courtyard which to Miriam seemed typical of castles. There were more skeletons here. They lay scattered and broken on the ashen ground and since they were so seperated and busted Miriam could not count of many there were exactly though they were a lot. She passed by them with as much respect for crunching noises as she could bother with and then headed through a smaller archway that stood next to the large entrance. Finally she'd made it to the bottom of the spire and exited. Looking around she stood on a courtyard surrounded by similar large buildings that like previously meshed together into a melted shape of gray and black and seemed to imply housing more than it actually was housing. Behind her the spire stretched far into the colorless sky and Miriam assumed she'd started at the very top of it. There was no sight of the monster-bird for now so Miriam gripped her cage tighter, chose her path forward and carried on!