It didn't take very long for Felidae to get through the barricade. Her power armour's enhanced strength was more than adequate for shifting rocks, and the tunnel was soon strewn with castoffs.

The chamber on the other side was cavernous, filled with damaged and destroyed buildings and littered with the bones of the dead. The floor was seafloor mud, baked hard as stone, and the interior was noticeably warm. The walls of ice dripped constantly, the air near them filled with swirling mist. The mist quickly thinned towards the centre of the chamber, the devestation getting more and more pronounced. It was as though the cavern had formed around the epicentre of a great explosion, carved out by forces of air and fire. In the middle, under the high domed ceiling, the remains of the buildings had been scythed down to their foundations, the fragments of stone mixed with chunks of blackened crystal. A great heap of crystal, black shot through with purple, sprouted from the ground like a palace of knives. It was dead and cold, a dark splotch on Anika's preysense goggles. A smaller chunk of crystal, this one bright electric blue, hissed with energy a short distance away. This was the source of the chamber's heat.

"Don't touch that," Pytho warned, eyes screwed shut. "The big pieces are dead, the warp only barely clinging to them, but that one still flickers with unholy fire."