Chapter 14: Round Three—Seraveth's Haunted Ballroom

The shift came without warning, as they all had.

One moment the neutral hub's featureless passages surrounded them—that antiseptic non-space that tasted of nowhere and nothing—and then the floor dropped three inches and the air changed, and Mira had time to register cold, genuine cold, before the world assembled itself around them with the deliberate unhurry of something that had done this before and enjoyed it.

Stone materialized underfoot. Black stone, polished to a mirror finish that reflected nothing accurately—it gave back distorted versions of its occupants, elongated and wrong in ways that took a moment to identify. The distortion was not random. Every reflection was slightly older.