The wet air around him continues almost silent: dripping, trickling, a slow and throbbing pulsation beneath it all. Like the chambers of a vast and dying heart, a long way away. Unresponsive, it might be easy to think.

But this place listens, this place is, and the rot shifts and changes and responds. Slowly, slowly, the veins in his forearm begin to writhe and curl into new shapes, driving their thick black ichor into ragged lines beneath the skin:

AND?

There is no change in the walls, in the pulsing heat of the air, but there is a shift in the atmosphere: a stillness like arrested growth, an anticipation, a blood-dark and acidic malice. Something nearby is watching; but something, here, can be nothing but nearby. A consciousness that thrums and itches within the walls like a tortured nerve.