Noah's eyes stayed fixed on the woman's neck. He didn't move for a long moment, the rest of the chamber, the bodies, the dust still settling from the fight, all of it falling out of focus around the one detail his brain refused to let go of.
He stepped closer to the carving, close enough that his breath fogged faintly against the cold stone, and looked again, half expecting the image to resolve into something else now that he was paying it proper attention. A trick of the light. A flaw in the relief he'd mistaken for shape. The golden glow filtering down through whatever natural prism this hollowed mountain had formed over however many centuries cast everything in a slightly unreliable haze, the kind of light that made you doubt your own eyes if you stared too long.
It didn't resolve into anything else. It was exactly what it looked like.
