'What is this impossible weight!!!'
Noah thought as he struggled to breathe.
It pressed down from everywhere at once, not from above, not from any direction he could point to and name. It came from the space itself, from the air and the stone beneath his feet and the darkness overhead that swallowed the ceiling entirely. The chamber exhaled it the way a wound exhales heat. Something enormous had died here and hadn't quite finished dying, and standing inside that fact was doing something to his lungs that had nothing to do with the air quality.
He'd felt strong auras before. Ego in the castle. Kruel on Sirius Prime. The particular oppressive density of a four-horn Harbinger whose presence alone had dropped trained soldiers to their knees before it threw a single punch. He knew what it felt like to stand near something so far above him on the scale of living things that his body registered it as a geological event rather than a threat.
