It wasn't a cave. Trafalgar had understood that at the threshold, but understanding it and walking into it were two different things.
What Caelvyrn had hollowed out of the mountain was a castle. An enormous one, grown up out of the living rock the way a thing grows that has had thousands of years to become itself, spires and vaulted halls and long colonnades running back into the dark, bridges of pale stone arching over drops with no bottom the eye could find, staircases that climbed and climbed toward galleries lost somewhere far overhead.
Mana lit it in place of the sun, a soft cold glow that clung to the stone and left the deepest parts in shadow. And everywhere, folded into the grey immensity of it, there were gardens. Green things growing under a mountain that had never seen a sunrise, whole terraces of them, quiet and impossible and perfectly kept.
