You both manage to keep your balance as the basket drags against the wall of the shaft. A few pokes of Ylarum’s sheathed sword help tremendously as you finally break into the area which was briefly described to you earlier: a very large circular room a hundred feet in diameter with walls made of polished sandstone.
As you reach the large dais which occupies the center of the room, you first notice three visible light sources: octagonal lanterns hanging from the ceilings of three corridors leading to the chamber you are in. The first lantern, to the north, burns with a red light; the second lantern, to the east, burns with yellow hue that somehow seems more intense than your own; the third, to the west, burns with a strange, deep blue light with violet undertones.
Under each lantern, you see a pedestal, and on each pedestal, a large five-foot wide urn covered with a little octagonal roof curving up to a little flame carved from same metal at its top.
All around you, painted on the walls of the chamber, you can see large frescos depicting epic scenes you cannot quite make out yet. In front of each fresco (to the north-earth, north-west, south-east and south-west), there is a large curved stone trough. One of them, to the north-east, seems to have been shattered on its eastern corner with great force. All around it on the floor, there seems to be some substance that spread all around the yellow lantern, then to the south of your position. There is even some of that substance near the indigo lantern to the west.
Everywhere on the floor around the dais, there are bits and pieces of mattresses, some chests still intact (three actually, one to the north, one to the east and one to the south – see map), some bits of laundry, pieces of paper and so on. Probably some of the possessions the monks brought down with them as they explored the place.
The last detail you notice in the surrounding penumbra is this twenty-foot wide spherical shape in the southern wall, between two of the gigantic frescos: this seems to be some sort of mirror, judging by its refractive properties, but its surface looks like some sort of liquid, or fluid. If that were so, the contents of this strange vertical vase should have poured onto the floor immediately, but they are staying in place, as the gravitational forces were somehow changed in that particular spot of the room.
You get off the basket. There is a thin dust in the air, just like there was as you went down the shaft. You hear droplets of water fall at random into the distance. And a deaf, thumping sound, maybe to the east, that seems much more regular, but not mechanically so. Thump. Thump. … Thump-thump.
You send the basket back for a second run. What do you do?