The moment they crossed the threshold, the world outside ceased to exist. The opening sealed behind them with a whisper of shifting stone, plunging them into an absolute blackness that was deeper and more complete than any night. The silence here was not an absence, but a presence—a physical force that pressed against their eardrums, their skin, their very souls. It was the silence at the end of all things, the silence the Architect coveted.
For a long moment, they stood frozen, blind and deaf, the memory of their shattered Chord a painful ghost limb. The unity they had forged was gone, replaced by the stark, terrifying isolation of their individual heartbeads, loud and frantic in the suffocating dark.
Then, light bloomed.
