When she drew near enough to release him from his impatience, he turned to lead the way again.

Focusing on him, she did not notice her surroundings until she heard or felt Liand’s sharp intake of breath, sensed the whispered exclamations of the Giants. Involuntarily, as if she had no will or strength that was not provided by her companions, she lifted her head to look at the high chamber which formed the entrance hall to the Lost Deep.

The sight shocked her like a tectonic shift; a grinding of the Earth’s bones so deeply buried that its tremors might take hours or even days to be felt on the surface.

She could not think of the chamber as a cavern, although it seemed as huge as the enclosure of the Banefire in Revelstone long ago. It stretched past the limits of her senses ahead and above her. And every handspan of its walls and vaulted ceiling and floor had been burnished to a lambent sheen, flawless and glowing. Indeed, the shaped rock was the source of the Deep’s illumination. Every line and curve, plane and arc of the chamber emitted an eerie lucence composed of commingled and constantly shifting hues. With each beat of her heart, Linden encountered a different blend of the most pastel vermillion, the palest azure; the merest suggestions of charlock and viridian and lime.

In itself, the chamber was immense and wondrous. Yet it did not cause her sense of shock.

Apparently the entire space had been shaped for no other purpose than to house something that must have been a work of art; the making of beauty and wonder—Beyond question, the chamber was filled with loveliness.

Entering here, Linden and her companions had already walked partway into the ramified outlines of an elaborate castle rich in beauty and imaginative largesse. The structure was not solid. Instead it was composed only of outlines like strokes drawn on blank air; sweeps and delineations of—of bone? opaque crystal? smooth travertine shafts? If it had not looked entirely complete as it was, it might have been a model for an edifice which the Viles had once intended to build; a sketch done in three dimensions and mother-of-pearl. Yet no detail had been neglected. Flying buttresses radiated outward from the shape of a central keep, linking the keep to an elegant circle of turrets. Balconies and ramparts articulated what would have been the rounded walls of the keep, the supernal circles of the turrets. Bartizans and crenellations expressed the crowns of the turrets. Low walls explained the ramparts and balconies, the airy buttresses. In the base of the keep, a lowered drawbridge implied an entrance into a space filled with rooms and curving stairways: a faery dwelling without walls, barriers, substance.