Nora von Velkaris
The darkness swallowed me whole the moment I crossed into the second trial.
It was not the gentle kind of dark, not the quiet absence of light that lets the mind wander. This was dense, suffocating, a void that pressed in from every direction at once.
For a heartbeat, I felt weightless, unanchored, as if I had stepped off the edge of the world and forgotten how to fall. Then the sensation twisted, reality lurching hard enough to make my stomach drop, and the void collapsed inward.
The world reassembled around me.
Stone walls rose out of the dark, close and oppressive, their surfaces rough and uneven beneath my fingertips when I instinctively reached out.
The air was stale, thick with the smell of rust, old oil, and dust that had been undisturbed for years.
No, decades.
Maybe longer.
