Sibba crept through the viney rubble of the Ushik-bin ghost city, the blowgun ready in one hand, and her sharp knife in the other, the pouch of darts at her waist carefully half-cinched.  She was sure the usha-boar had come through this way, limping and slowing from the poison of her earlier dart, but the vines in these ancient, abandoned cities shifted themselves sometimes and made tracking difficult.  Sibba paused, holding still to listen.  The liquid calls of a pair of li’ush birds dripped from somewhere overhead, location obscured by distance, or maybe just by the pink riot of bougainvillea flowers vining everywhere up the walls of the ruin, choking out the native kishtan moss-vine that otherwise would’ve outlined every arch and hollow in tiny blood-red blossoms.  As it was, the deep red glimmered in only the most shadowed corners, the pink of the bougainvillea blazing everywhere sunlight cut in from overhead, past the crumbled old towers and the highest boughs of the trees of the forest, standing sentinel.  The usha-boar must be here somewhere, Sibba was sure of it.

At the base of a wall mostly collapsed into rubble, Sibba paused again, searching the undergrowth, listening.  This time she was watching when the vines shifted, curling around and twining sideways like serpents, right near her ankles so that she leapt nimbly to the side and over them.  And there was a shushing sound as they moved, pink flowers rustling.  When Sibba looked up again, it was to step back suddenly, in alarm.  A pink curtain of vines had also drawn away from the wall, revealing an undamaged niche, bricked into a delicate arch and holding a great, cracked stone bowl ringed all around with the red-flowered kishtan moss-vine, pouring down the cracked sides like blood.  But it was the pile of bones that had startled Sibba, heaped high within the bowl, bleached white, and a skull staring out at her, some sort of animal.  As she stared, something shifted in the shadows of the bones, something brindled grey, and Sibba realized she’d found the usha-boar.  It had climbed into the bowl of bones and lay collapsed there on its side, visible behind the jumbled white bones only by its rapid breathing.  The boar was unconscious already, near death.  Even as Sibba watched, more red kishtan tendrils crept up the sides of the bowl, toward the dying boar, and another pink vine of the bougainvillea drew back from the wall, giving way.

Sibba turned, then, and fled.  The Ushik-bin ghosts were stirring.  She must bring the shaman quickly, to try to speak with them.

---

This has been your fly-by-story, starting from the prompt: Bougainvillea, Blowgun, Bone