They had smelled it before they saw it.
The corruption in the air thickened gradually over the final miles of approach, developing layers that went beyond the general wrongness of the Depths into something more specific and concentrated. Like the difference between standing in a room where something has gone bad and standing directly beside the source of the rot.
Then they crested an elevated formation of blackened rock and saw it.
The spire rose from the corrupted landscape like a wound that had calcified into permanence. Ancient stone — or what had once been stone before the malice finished with it — stretched upward perhaps three hundred feet, its surface completely consumed by black moss that pulsed with faint bioluminescence the color of bruised flesh.
