Lukas moved forward.
One step at a time — not because caution demanded it, but because the space ahead seemed to require that particular pace, the way certain environments impose themselves on the people moving through them without announcing that they are doing so. The chamber continued around him, the bone field extending in every direction, the darkness ahead pressing in at the edges of his perception with a quality that had shifted since he began walking north.
The temperature was falling.
He noticed it incrementally at first — the slight edge in the air that suggested the ambient warmth had decreased by a degree or two, the kind of change that registers at the back of the neck before the conscious mind has catalogued it. Then further. Then further still, each step north carrying him into air that was measurably, meaningfully colder than the step before it. By the time the full reality of it had assembled itself in his awareness, he was no longer walking through a cool cavern.
