The chamber was dark when they crossed the threshold.
Not the darkness of the corridors above, where their lights cut reasonable distances and the walls were close enough to feel contained. This was a different category of dark entirely—the kind that existed before anyone had thought to push back against it, absolute and heavy and carrying the specific texture of a space that had been left alone for a very long time.
Their lights did nothing.
Zeph's first impression was size. Not visual size—he couldn't see anything—but the acoustic impression of vastness, the way their footsteps returned changed, delayed, arriving back at their ears with the evidence of enormous distance traveled. Whatever this place was, it was large in the way that stopped being architecture and started being geology.
