The silence that followed was not silence at all.
It was a hollowing an unraveling of the very fabric of sound, a stripping away of all that should remain after a battle's end. It was the kind of quiet that did not soothe but devoured, a silence that pressed in on every breath, every heartbeat, until even existence itself seemed fragile. The chamber did not rest. It trembled, suspended between ruin and rebirth, as though the world itself hesitated to draw breath. Each jagged stone of the cavern walls pulsed faintly, as if it carried within it a brittle heartbeat, a fragile drum echoing in rhythm with the fractured veins of silver light bleeding from above.
