A week later.
The air in the cavern was still heavy, but with a different kind of weight. The stench of digestive fluids and superheated ozone had given way to a smell of cold ashes, wet stone, and dried blood. The voracious amber light was gone, replaced by the pallid glow of their oil lamps, which cast long, trembling shadows on the ravaged walls.
The scars of the battle were everywhere. Black, corrosive splatters streaked the rock. Fragments of whitish bone and desiccated flesh littered the floor, mingling with the shards of stone. In the center, where the heart of the abomination had pulsed, there was only a large burn mark, a vitrified, concave scar, as if the rock itself had been forced to remember the cataclysm.
And then there were their own.
