The air was thick, cloying with the scent of metal, moss, and something fouler, something that carried the coppery tang of blood mixed with the sterile cold of surgical instruments. The walls were not dead stone, but something in between: rough and ridged like flesh petrified in mid-growth.
They pulsed with faint bioluminescent veins that writhed just beneath the surface, glowing in slow, rhythmic waves of green and blue. The light they gave off was just enough to cast the long, shifting shadows of two intruders who had gone too far, and now stood in the presence of something the world had deliberately forgotten.
At the chamber's heart was the coffin.
It did not rest like an object placed, but stood like a monument born from the floor itself, raised on a dais of dark stone veined with metal filigree and fossilized bone. The coffin was tall, its edges unnaturally sharp, its surface impossibly smooth and forged from a single piece of opaque black glass.
