"Let's take a breath before we go down," Trafalgar said. "We need to think about how we do this."
He kept his eyes on the far end of the cavern while he said it. "That's not Prime rank. And it isn't an Ascend either. It's something above that, and I'd rather not learn what it is the hard way."
The two of them stood at the lip of the core chamber and looked down into it, and from up here they could take in the whole of the thing. The cavern fell away beneath them into a vault of blue-violet light, pillars of raw crystal taller than houses climbing up into the dark, the whole of it gnawed and cracked where the brood had eaten the mountain hollow from the inside. The reek of the nest rolled up to meet them, thick and animal, riding a cold that owed nothing to the season.
