This feels like another world.
Lukas muttered the words quietly, not really intending them for anyone — they simply escaped, the way certain observations escape when the mind encounters something it wasn't prepared for and reaches for language before the conscious self has given permission. He kept moving as he said it, deeper into the dim corridor, one careful step at a time.
Then the walls opened.
It happened gradually rather than all at once — the tight, enclosed geometry of the corridor widening by degrees, the ceiling lifting, the pressing closeness of the stone retreating on both sides until it had retreated far enough that the space it had been containing could finally reveal itself. The cavern that spread out before him was enormous — nearly double the volume of the space he had left behind, the kind of scale that the body registers before the eyes have finished measuring it, a low, instinctive response to suddenly being very small in a very large place.
