The group stepped through the door way, the dust of countless ages being disturbed by the air-flow. The hall had returned to the jet-black stone and connected lines of the earlier rooms, keeping light and visibility to a minimum as the stone seemed to absorb the light. If Kurtz ever moved to slowly, or turned his head to look backwards, one of the group would kick him, spurring him forward, their eagerness and anticipation growing as their patience diminished.

The hallway turned left and right, and at times seemed to spiral down, almost as if it were a staircase, the steps somehow smoothed away by the passage of time. After an hour of traversing the passage, a speck of light, the first that had not come from the torches, appeared ahead. As the group trudged forward, the doorway opened into a cavernous room, with the pathway continuing on a wide bridge of stone, and the floor hundreds of feet below them. the ceiling had giant censers suspended by chains, giving off the light that had been seen from the passage.

Ahead at the far end of the bridge was a platform with the base going down all the way to floor, all made of the black stone. Though the glow of the censers gave off light, Kurtz still needed the torches to provide enough light to make his way across the uneven and warped flagstones of the bridge that connected the passage leading back up to the platform ahead, which seemed to be the only other way to go.

The bridge was made of large blocks of solid, grey stone, and seemed to have been made after the rest of the tomb, as if someone had to fit it in after the fact. Dozens of feet wide and seemingly long without end, the bridge loomed out ahead of Kurtz, every footfall one step closer seemingly to his death. He shivered and felt terror wrack his body with every step, for either this tomb would most likely claim his life, or the bandits that have captured him would most likely kill him after they were done.

The thought of escape was brief and fleeting, as the tomb had so far led with a single, long path with one way forward and one way back. He’d have no chance to overpower his captures, and they seemed to have more knowledge of this place than he did. Despair gripped him, and he thought of Vahn and Lydia, his family. How he wished he’d never left, never given in to the wanderlust and traveled, to stay with Vahn in the stable and tend to the horses, and clean the pens, such a life would have been base and poor, but at least he would have been allowed to live out his natural span. He cursed his fate and fought through the tears as he was prodded and kicked forward on the bridge towards the ominous platform, and everything that that terrible place would hold for him.