Darkness swallowed them whole.
It was not silence not peace. The plunge was suffocating, crushing, alive with a hunger that had no beginning and no end. The Hollow did not collapse into emptiness; it descended into appetite, a starving abyss that stretched deeper than thought, deeper than creation itself. The storm of silver flame that had ravaged the cavern moments before gave way to something older, more terrible, a void that pulsed like the hollow chest of a god who had forgotten how to breathe. Every throb of that unseen heart was arrhythmic, wrong each beat like the final gasp of existence itself, as though the universe were choking on its own collapse. The darkness was not absence. It was will. It was weight. It was hunger made flesh.
