The threshold flexed wider, abyssal stone groaning along its frame as something on the other side stopped trying to fit through politely and started insisting. The seal shimmered hard. The frame bowed. And what came through it came through slow.
The first thing across was the shoulder.
A single shoulder, dark-plated and ridged with mountain-born bone, that did not belong to any creature the probe wave had introduced.
The frame of the gate widened to admit it, the dungeon's own architecture giving up a fraction of its natural clearance because what was insisting on coming through had decided that the architecture would adjust rather than the body. The shoulder cleared.
Then the second one. Then the chest behind them, scaled in plating that ate the ambient glow of the Cavern and gave back nothing, ribs the size of structural beams moving once with breath that had not been moving when the gate first strained.
