Just before all ten hunters met up.
*******
Sawn walked in . She was first met with a long corridor. Something of a passage way. Except no doors.
The entrance opened into a corridor that didn't end.
That was Sawn's first line assessment, standing at the threshold with the portcullis grinding shut behind her. The passage stretched forward into a dim that the torchlight couldn't fully reach — stone walls, stone floor, stone ceiling, all of it the same shade of grey that dungeons used when they weren't trying to be anything other than what they were. A place designed to move things from one point of death to another.
She took three steps in and stopped.
Counted.
Five mages at the far end. Spread in a loose semicircle, robed, their hands already moving in the slow deliberate patterns of pre-cast preparation. They had known she was coming — or known *someone* was coming, which amounted to the same thing. The portcullis had been the announcement.
