Editing Chapter 2 (section)

==At about that time...==

...Selara and Yao Ye had finally reached the shrine.  Searching at night had been practically useless, but neither woman had been willing to give in to darkness.  Chance at last revealed the entrance.  Sure enough, there was sign of a recent rock fall at the end of a narrow gully.  The two dismounted and approached the dark entrance carefully.

Selara leaned in close to a hole barely large enough for a grown man to wriggle through.  “There’s light inside... it must still be here.”

Ye clenched her fist before her.  “We’ve tracked it to its lair!  Now we must slay it in battle glorious!”

“We didn’t track it, we stumbled around in the dark for hours until you accidentally fell in a ditch.  And I thought you said we needed the spirit’s help?”

Yao Ye tossed her shockpike into the hole and dropped to her stomach.  “You’re ruining my first kill!  Hurry it up.”

“Wait, Ye, I’m in charge of this mission!”  She dropped down and tried to snatch at the girl’s legs, but she was too quick.  Selara dove down on her own stomach and tried to push through the rubble, but she couldn’t fit through the aperture in her gunzosha armor.  Quickly she began throwing stones out of her path as quickly as she could.

Yao Ye found herself in hall dimly lit by a pale green light.  She knelt and picked up her shock pike loosely in one hand.  In a low crouch she crept down the passage, stepping gingerly over flagstones a yard across, deeply pitted by age.  There was no ornamentation, no writing, no frieze or sign of habitation.

Ye whispered faintly, “Selara, I’m going to check ahead, just tell me if you want me to wait here.”

Stealthily she approached the end of the hallway, which seemed to lead out into a broader chamber.  When she reached the end she found stairs leading down to a green pool, the source of the faint light.  In the center of the pool was a dais with a long sarcophagus of green jade, covered loosely in green silk, disks of gold, and boxes of cedar, ebony, and jade.  Ye stepped silently down the stairs to the walkway surrounding the pool, moving with catlike caution.  She tiptoed past two great stone liondogs flanking the path, until she reached the waters.

“Hmm... it must be in that big box!”  She tested the water with her pike for depth, then waded in.  Standing in the water waist deep, with her pike over her head, she began to walk slowly out to the dais.

Just as she was scrambling up the damp stones, she heard the faintest sound of pebbles falling.  She shouted, “Don’t worry Selara, I think...”

“More graverobbers!”  A voice like thunder filled the room.  Ye turned and raised her shockpike, warned by the call of essence in her blood, as a massive shadow fell over her.

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