The Sunning Chamber

Read to Players

The passage opens into a chamber so large it takes a moment to understand the scale of it.

The room is roughly one hundred and fifty feet across and nearly as wide. The ceiling rises close to a hundred feet above, and high in the vaulted stone, a set of large iron grates covers a hole that opens to the sky above. Dim light filters through in shifting columns, moving slowly as the clouds pass.

A ten-foot walkway runs the full perimeter of the room, the floor dropping sharply away from its inner edge to a lower pit some twenty feet below. Across the chamber, the walkway extends outward in a narrow platform — fifteen feet over the pit like a diving board, hanging in the open air. Behind it, mounted to the far wall, a ten-foot iron serpent head looms in the darkness. Its mouth is open. The fangs are steel — long, curved, and catching the thin light from the grates above.

But the floor of the pit is what stops you.

It is patterned. A dark stripe runs across the stone in long curves, spiraling inward toward the center of the pit, the pattern tightening as it nears the middle. Every other room in this place has been plain cut stone. This floor is different.

And as the light shifts through the grates above, the pattern shifts too — just barely, just at the edge of what you can make out from up here.