Shymar'da - The eye of the serpent

The air crashes down around you the very instant your boots take the first step down the rim. The scorching, dry heat of the desert is violently wrenched away, replaced by a cool, damp chill that bites at your exposed skin, carrying an unfamiliar, pungent scent of profound wrongness. It's the sharp, metallic tang of a lightning strike, mingling with a sickly sweet, almost cloying scent of decaying, stomach-turning vegetation that clogs the back of your throat. This isn't the familiar scent of broken and dead things; it's something fundamentally wrong, a cloying, broken essence that seeps into your lungs. Each breath feels heavier, thicker, a struggle to inhale, the air gritty with a fine, almost invisible dust. And above all, a faint, high-pitched, almost subliminal hum, too low to be an insect, too pervasive to be anything but the crater itself, drills subtly against your eardrum, a ceaseless, maddening prelude to the dangers yet to come.   Sunlight, the supreme ruler of the desert surface, is a hesitant, dying guest here. It struggles through the broken rim, not in beams of scorching heat, but as diffused, fractured luminescence, painting the depths in bruised purples and sickly greens. The crater lies in eternal twilight, a perpetual, unnerving gloom where shadows dance and writhe across the crater's overgrown floor. But the shadows are not still; they pulse and shift with an unnatural, hungry life, elongating and retracting as if reaching, giving the unnerving impression that the very ground beneath your feet is subtly, menacingly alive, breathing. What greets you at the crater's splintered edge isn't barren rock or scattered growth, but an abrupt, towering wall —an endless, undulating sea of strange, alien vegetation. It begins with startling suddenness, a verdant, glowing curtain that plunges into the depths, so impossibly dense that the crater floor beyond is almost entirely obscured in a suffocating, verdant mystery. This isn't nature; at least, not in any sense a sane mind would think of. It's living, breathing—and it does not suffer fools.