The silence that followed the slamming of the portcullis was not empty. It was pressurized. The air in the antechamber felt like it had been replaced by water, heavy and resistant to movement. The dust from the ceiling drifted down in slow, lazy spirals, settling on the shoulders of the entity that blocked their path.
Vane stood twenty feet away. He held his spear in a loose, deceptive guard, the tip resting just inches from the black ice of the floor. His breath misted in the freezing air, but his heart rate remained artificially steady. He forced his biology to submit to his logic. Panic was a luxury for the dead.
The figure did not roar. It did not posture or beat its chest like the Grain-Maws. It simply stood there, a towering monolith of rusted iron and grave-dirt, holding the massive spade like a quill. The blue slit of its mask burned with a cold, necrotic intelligence. It was studying them. It was calculating the most efficient way to remove the weeds from its garden.
