It started off normally enough, with a gorgeous cinnamon granite that reminded me of the giant we’d passed on the way here, sparkling with little flakes that caught the light from a line of torches on the walls as we walked by. The torches were needed as there were no windows here, unlike the rest of this place, which had felt airy and open to the elements. But this hallway closed around us, long and dark and gleaming with treasures.

But the wealth wasn’t displayed on plinths or glimpsed in storerooms; the treasure here was the walls themselves, and they were breathtaking.

Like when a huge stone visage suddenly pushed out from the granite, blinking sleepily at me. The fey I was hitchhiking with stopped and stood there, tapping his foot impatiently. The creature—because the face definitely belonged to one of the great stone creatures the fey made, just sans a body—did not get in a hurry. It yawned, so big and so long, that I could have stepped into the huge open mouth had I been there, and then blinked some more. There were no eyelashes on the huge eyes, but everything else, down to the pores in the “skin”, looked real.

A hand formed itself out of stone with a finger extended, to gently poke us. The fey sighed, but turned around, I guessed so that the head could get a full look at us. And could delicately relieve us of our weapons, despite the size of the hand doing it.

We completed the circle to find our weapons affixed to the wall, not held in place by the rock so much as partly buried within it, but the fey didn’t object. I supposed he’d get them back on the return trip. And that seemed to have been all the head had wanted, because it was already disappearing into the rock, with only the nose and lips still visible.

Until the wall swallowed them, too, and then smoothed back out, as glossy fine as if it had never been disturbed at all.

We walked on.

After the granite was a section of petrified wood, only off of the biggest tree I’d ever seen. Its heart curved over top of us, like the tunnels I’d seen carved through fallen sequoias, big enough to drive a semitruck through. But this tunnel had striations of amber, crimson and gold peeking past the brown and stabbing down towards the earth, like a wooden sunburst.

There must have been a skylight above it, because the colors were vibrant, almost boiling with light as if the tree was on fire. They shed multihued rays down on us as we walked underneath, so thick and so strong that I would have put out a hand to touch one, had I been able. I belatedly realized that the inclusions were opal that had infused the wood over time and had left it a piece of art.