The moment Jake's fingers closed around the fragment, the fortress decided it was done.
The first sign was sound—a deep structural groan that came from everywhere simultaneously, the kind of noise that buildings made when the thing holding them together stopped holding. Then the floor beneath them shifted, a subtle tilt that became less subtle in the two seconds following it, and dust fell from the ceiling in thin curtains that thickened rapidly into something more substantial.
"Out," Jake said.
"Now!"
Nobody needed the instruction twice.
They ran through the marble room's far exit and into the corridor beyond, and the corridor was already different from how it had been on the descent—hairline cracks tracing the walls in branching patterns, the ceiling dropping small debris that clattered off their shoulders and heads as they moved.
The dungeon was not collapsing in sections.
