The chamber was buried deep beneath stone and silence.
No torches lined its walls. No windows offered air or light. The only illumination came from a faint, pulsing glow at the center of the room - a dull crimson sigil etched into the floor, its lines jagged and uneven as though carved in haste.
The air was thick.
Heavy.
Not with dust.
But with something older.
Something wrong.
A young man stood just outside the circle of the sigil, his figure half-consumed by shadow. His posture was relaxed... deceptively so... hands clasped loosely behind his back as though he were merely passing time.
He was not.
Before him, rising from the center of the rune, was a shape made of shifting black energy.
It did not possess a fixed form.
Sometimes it resembled smoke curling upward from unseen embers. Sometimes it stretched taller, broader, like a cloaked silhouette trying to remember what it meant to have bones.
Its edges never stopped moving.
Its presence felt like pressure.
