The coffin stood much taller than Alex, an ornate black structure that asserted its presence even within the pitch darkness surrounding it.
Its material appeared to have been carved from stone or bone, yet carried a quality that neither possessed, something living in it, something that remembered being alive and had not entirely finished.
A malevolent aura radiated outward from its surface. Not wild or angry, rather it was calm and absolute.
The darkness around it visibly responded, stretching and twisting at its edges, warping in the way that existence warps when something fundamentally wrong with it is introduced into its presence.
The void seemed to almost groan, straining against the proximity of the coffin the way a living thing strains against a grip it cannot break, held in place not by force but by inevitability.
"That thing." Leviathan's voice had changed.
