The door to the prison looked, in many ways, like an open mouth. A maw, one that had swallowed darkness for millennia and pooled with that darkness now. To step inside would be to enter into its shadows.

It held an ominous silence, as though no lessers ventured here. No life at all. Sound echoed; the slightest scuff of paw on rock would send a ricochet of clattering sound cascading through the ruins.

It felt like nightmares and terrible memories. It smelled of fear and death. But perhaps that was just Bacchus's sort of place.

_________

These ruins hold a grim and gruesome past. Readers should be aware of this before moving on from this point.

The purpose of the claustrophobic cubicles ahead was elusive. The first was fenced with metal bars that had all but crumbled to dust, as though it were some sort of trap or initial barricade. Beyond, long, dark hallways plunged into the stone. A feline could pick their way through the rubble, over piles of long-fallen stone and through thick sheets of cobweb. A diurnal creature, without a light, would have quickly gotten lost. Each corridor was large enough for a monster. The darkness made it feel yawning, vast, as though anything might be lurking; yet the closeness and silence left it feeling as though the walls were pressing in.

To either side of these maze-like halls were doors into square rooms. Heavy barred doors still blocked some; others had crumbled and fallen. The backs of these rooms were pitched in full darkness, with no light sources remaining. Bacchus could catch only the barest glimpses, now and then: a broken stone slab against a wall. Another in the center of a room, covered in ancient, dark stains. A chrysalis in another, shattered, whatever had been within now gone.

Some rooms were empty. One was larger than the rest, at corner of a junction of corridors. This one's massive, black marble table was half steeped in shadow, but what was visible were myriad rusted metal implements: things with handles and sweeping edges, others with curved or serrated blades. They were ancient enough to crumble at a touch, should he attempt it, but their purpose was still clear enough. Despite the ages that had passed, perhaps due to the room's isolation, old mummified fragments remained here: fur or skin that had long since become one with the stone. Here, too, dark stains had colored the floor.

Onward.

Without a source of light, the darkness was near complete a hundred yards in: the brush of whiskers along walls might guide Bacchus onward.

Step, step. Further into the dark, blindly now. Farther and farther until the light behind had been swallowed up, and only his memory could guide him.

He could turn back, and find a light: the better to explore the details of this place. Or he could push forward, following his dreams.

It was best, though, not to become lost. This place felt like the sort that would gather his dying screams, and add it to a thousand ghostly echoes.

It might have felt as though he blindly groped through the hall for hours. Longer. Interminable. Step after step after step after step, lost to the dust and the dark. Now and then the air around him changed. There was never a breeze, nothing fresh; but the echoes altered, as though he were passing vast rooms and other corridors. His whiskers felt wall, then gap, then wall, then gap, some longer than others: doorways, halls, unknown and unseen.

When at first the distant pinprick of voidlight touched his eyes, it would be easy to dismiss as hallucination. The mind started to pick things from nothing, did it not? Steal the senses, and they will create their own entertainment... but no. This was very real, if very faint. And a sound: the faintest, lightest thud, thud, thud from somewhere in that room, like drops of water hitting fur.

The room was not all that large, but large enough, perhaps fifteen meters in any given direction. A rectangle of ancient stone took up the central half of that room, three feet high, but only a foot thick, its center instead filled with old soil. Above, inlaid flat into the wall, was an odd voidlit crystal that left the room sickly pale in color.

The planter below was filled to overflowing; half of the plants were in a constant process of dying, or being dead, collapsing to feed the earth below. Water dripped through a deliberate crack above, sliding along the crystal light before dripping into the dirt.

These plants had spilled out to usurp the entirety of the room: tangled vines and grasses pushing up whever they could grasp at light. This ended before the doorway, where the shadows reclaimed the hall. It would be difficult, without a light source, to pick out the true colors of the plants in Voidlight: for now they all looked as pale as the black walls. But in true light, their darker hues would become apparent. Clusters of black-leaved plants, or twisted vines with wicked spines and thorns. Blazing red flowers and sharp, dull grass. Bushes that held small, black berries that smelled of death.

It would take time to uncover the nature of each plant. Perhaps he could find someone who knew, or knew their names, or how to care for them; or perhaps he'd find out himself, through trial-and-error, and grant them his own personal names.

Where the other instruments had rusted and fallen away, these had clung to life. These, at least, Bacchus might find some use for.

Bacchus has discovered a Voidlit Garden. The following plants can be found growing there:

Blackleaf - A leafy plant with broad, black leaves. Ingestion causes severe, nightmarish hallucinations, enough to--in smaller creatures with weaker hearts--cause it to enter its chrysalis (or, in Gemless lessers, death). These hallucinations last minutes to hours, depending on the dose ingested. Distillation into an oil (translucent and dark) intensifies the effects.

Rotvine - A long, twisting vine with small leaves and spines along its length. Handle with care or the spines can embed in the flesh, and sting. Its main use, however, is the sap within the vine, which causes rapidly spreading necrosis on contact with flesh. Can easily be washed or rubbed off, but on an immobile victim, kills within an hour or two. Extremely painful to experience.

Fireflower - A relatively pretty, dark green and bushy plant with reddish flowers that have five, pointed petals edged in gold. These flowers and their pollen cause a harmless but agonizing severe, burnlike sensation on contact with skin.

Poison Thorn - A hardy, woody, thick vine with long, pointed thorns and bushy, dark green foliage. The vines carry trace amounts of a potent paralytic, but only trace; hollow tips in the thorns are where the toxin is stored. A prick from a thorn can numb an area. Careful harvest of a few dozen thorns will provide enough venom to paralyze a creature of medium dog size or below for approximately an hour if taken into the body, ex. by ingestion or injection.

Deathgrass - Long, stiff blades of dark grey-green grass that are laced with deadly poison. Brushing them can cause cuts that quickly numb; harvesting the grass and processing it by gathering its liquid (by pressing or the like) will yield a deadly, painful poison. Death by Deathgrass poison was long-dreaded in the prisons, a horrible demise that took hours of agony as it rapidly killed internal organs. However, it takes several plants' worth of toxin to use in this manner. It also inhibits the gemstone's ability to chrysalise, making death rather than chrysalis more likely.

Drownberry Bush - Large, purple-black leaves clustered in bushes. These are beautiful plants, on an ornamental level, but their small, black berries hold a horrific toxin: one that, when ingested, causes the lungs to fill with fluid. The victim will begin to cough and choke, eventually drowning in the fluid in their lungs. Drownberry, like Deathgrass, was a dreaded form of death, but resulted in chrysalis more often than a true demise--making it a prime plant to use in tormenting a captive victim over and over again.