Gavriel stepped forward, looked down, and every muscle in his body locked.
A crater yawned beneath them, ten miles across if he was being generous with his spatial reasoning and conservative with his terror. The interior was carved into a colossal bowl of black obsidian, smooth and ancient and so impossibly deep that the bottom looked like it belonged in a different time.
Cooled lava ridges ringed the walls in concentric shelves, and the scale of the thing made him feel like a man standing on the lip of a soup bowl for the gods.
At its center sat a lake.
Black. Massive. Still as glass, except for the ice that was spider-webbing across its surface in real time, crystalline fractals racing outward from the center like the lake was freezing itself while they watched, sealing over with the slow, deliberate patience of something that wanted to be found before it finished closing.
Serena turned to him and flashed a grin. "Do you trust me?"
