Sweeping his gaze over the terrain, there's a deliberate lethargy in Marius' cautious gaze, like one trying to keep cover in the woods at night, or one in an opium den trying to recall how to run from a fire.  This is not how the soldiers liked things; they didn't like to be in the thick of something that outmassed or out numbered them, didn't like being surrounded.  It doesn't bother Marius; he knows it is the same if you are in the reach of the lion's maw or if it is far away, if the fight was inevitable.  Distance is a luxury he's long abandoned.<br/><br/>A war-drum stroke, a command stroke, a heartbeat and brain-shackle droning, thick pulse.<br/><br/>When surrounded, Marius has been taught to seek one of two ways out-- head and sword first, or feet-first on a shield.  But he's learned others.  He can't fly, but he once sank in the mud like a beetle beneath the onslaught of shredding cavalry and tidal-fancy arrows, and that was not the only time he's spent underground...<br/><br/>The sound resonates in his chest, deep in his breastbone, like a broken note of some ancient thunder lost on the plains.<br/><br/>The smell, the reek of it dries the swamp air, brings heat like desert wind sapping the tongue dry, chilling and feasting at once.  The cicadas, frogs, and horn-bugs stop their droning.  Marius skirts the massive, mummified-bone colored obelisk, watches as a bloated swamp-dweller's corpse bubbles and twitches in the spreading, greasy pool that won't mingle with the bog-water, like the waste-oil of a cook-pot.  Even now, there are flickers at the black surface where curious glistening black insects and bug-eyed, white fish sip hungrily at the bog-dweller's leeching waste and fluids.<br/><br/>The sound again.  Louder, if conceivable.<br/><br/>Heat-- oppressive, tangible.  Marius grits his teeth, locks eyes with Amara-- if only he could drink off that fear, consume it from her skin before it permeates her further, be her sybiotic parasite, her second skin...  the thought of her skin sends him somewhere, threatens to open some dark well deep inside him, where a black shape bubbles, tendrils snaking from the edges like oily smoke-- discipline.  He averts his eyes from hers before he can think of what her sweat-slicked skin would taste like-- fixes his eyes to the stranger, Thorius-- the autumn-blood of her hair, the stern set of soft lips--<br/><br/>The pulse, again.  The beasts in his heart and the drum's agree that there's killing to be done.<br/><br/>Marius's head snaps away so fast that there's an audible popping sound in his neck.  His gaze rests on the glyphs again.  "You men did well--"  he doesn't need to look for the scouts to know.  "We'll find our way back, report what you've seen."  Unspoken is 'lest it be lost with our deaths'.<br/><br/>But staring at the impossible structure-- the angular scars and veinous crevices of that bronze-black, lichen-mottled whorls in its surface reading him as he stares stupidly at them-- he doesn't know what he's seen, really.  But there's a creeping chill of awareness, climbing his spine like quicksilver, that whispers that what he's seen so far is paltry in the face of what comes.