Under

Venom swipes something off the wall; a candle spurts into flame, roaring randomly alongside their regular breathing.  Blink notices her ease, the wooden features around them becoming stone, and something else.
“I smell like cow shit.”
“You need to wash.”
He suppresses the urge to wobble his head in ridiculous mimicry of the eminent spokesperson for stating the bleeding obvious.  She shamelessly taunts him.
“But will you believe that we have water for washing and that it’s safe?”
Score minus one.

Venom allows Blink to follow her along a narrowing tunnel, lighting their vicinity with the swaying flame.  He touches the rock wall, finding it pleasantly smooth and dry.
“This leads to a maze of caverns, tunnels and shafts.  I’ve barely explored,” she divulges.  The shrinking tunnel presses them down to hunching and then crawling.  He smells dampness.  Impossible.
“Be aware how far you’ve travelled,” she prompts.
“I have to count my wriggles?”  His claustrophobia comes out curtly.  She frowns involuntarily then realises he can’t see her expression.  Hopefully he can barely see her arse.
“I’m frowning.  At you.”
“Is this the latest form your OCD is taking?”  He snipes, then integrates his perceptions, “I feel reptilian.”
Venom lets out a ha of laughter.
“Maybe a necessary regression.”

With an emotional inspiration of breath, Blink senses the walls parting as he slithers into a ten feet diameter cavern.  He takes in the faint, flickering, unfamiliar scene the only way he can: with wry mockery.  The glistening, dark rock bulges with yellowy, bluey-white froth.  Nice description.  Nice?!  Venom leans toward bulge after bulge without touching but sniffing lightly.  She breathes satisfaction.  The ant thing becomes manifest to him: she actually does harvest fungus for her and Sticks’ nutrition.  It’s more insidious than just particle contamination.  She must expect that they won’t have daylight and thus the possibility of green plants for much longer.

Blink delivers his facetious verdict.
“Was it therapeutic, sculpting this colossal model of your yeast-infected intimates?”
Venom gazes around with a smirk and a new perspective.
“’Welcome to my parlour’, said the spider to the fly.  Are you ready for rebirthing?”
Blink expires, finished by his own metaphor: the twisted exit tunnel.
“Oh.”

“I need to make the access easier,” Venom voices her thoughts to cover the threateningly loud shuffling and scraping.  Blink keeps his: where are the ants?  And where’s the water?  She twitters inanely on, pretending it’s to relieve his vulnerability.  The repetitive sound and motion pulls him into a trance.
Oh, shit, I’m falling to my death and I never—   Fuck!  That’s cold water!
Venom’s candle waveringly approaches as she descends the safe way, revealing Blink thrashing ineffectually in a pool the size of a hot tub.  But less hot.  Before he gets his breath back, she makes her defence.
“I did warn you.  Twice. ”
He swipes viciously toward her and catches his hand on an edge.  He fires out a scorching invective.  She allows him to empty his lungs before continuing her excuse.
“I said ‘keep right’ and even before that I asked if you were ready for—“
“Sadistic witch,” he shrieks, finding his illustrative arm movements restricted by the water.
“You did need a wash.”  She is unrepentant although she steps back.  He flaps and thwacks most gracelessly on to her shelf, like the fish that didn’t make it, before the evolutionary step to amphibians.

The candle goes out.  In sudden, total dark Blink barely wonders whether it was deliberate.
“What the fuck?!”
Venom’s tone is cruel and calculating.
“Are you aware how far you’ve travelled?”
She hears a sudden swish of clothes: he’s lunging at her again.  Silently she steps away.  Perhaps he needs a shock to get him thinking again.
“Don’t think of talking your way out of this,” she hints.
He notices she’s moving away, poisonous toad.