You find yourself deep inside a hollowed-out mountain.
Above you, a hole in the mountain’s surface has been worn through, allowing sunlight to stream in from the outside. The hole is a little too smooth and circular to be completely natural. It’s many, many feet above you, with no rock wall or column for you to climb to reach it. There are no other entrances into, or exits out of, the cave. You might have fallen in from the hole, but it’s easily forty, maybe fifty feet straight up, and yet, you’ve sustained no injury.
The cave’s walls have been similarly worn smooth from something other than time and the elements, to the point of being nearly glossy. The air is hot and humid; it rushes occasionally through the single room, but the wind is neither cool nor refreshing, and the air merely circulates itself in the cave rather than rush out and be replaced with cleaner, fresher outdoor air. The floor has been not only stamped smooth, but swept clean – at least, the parts of the stone floor that are visible. The cave is many, many lengths wide and long, and nearly all of it is submerged in a rolling layer of gold.
But not gold coins. Not in fabrics wreathed in gold; not in kitchenware plated with gold; not with decorative suits and armor of gold; not even with gold bars. You bend down and extend your hand, running your fingers through with appears to be gold chips – gold that had been filed down finer than nuggets, more akin to gravel. You scoop a handful of the stuff straight from the ground, letting the chips bounce along your open palm. Some are rounded and stumpy; some are more jagged and sharp. All of them have had some layer of polish applied, though some of them are due for another washing.
You look down into the divot of gold you had just dug out, and spot something discolored among the glittering pieces. Bronze, thick, with a rougher texture, but you can’t quite make out what it is. You dig some more, pushing the gold nuggets aside, cleaning the bronze thing of the mess. Whatever it is, it’s about the size of your chest. You tap at it with your knuckles. It’s solid like stone and warm to the touch, but it has a very different, granular texture to the walls around you.
The room grumbles. The gold mountain beneath your feet shifts, causing loose pebbles of gold to tumble and timber out of place, cascading like raindrops off the side of the building. The hot, stale air suddenly whooshes around you, billowing [pc.hasHair|through your hair|across your scalp] and around your effects.
You look down. The bronze thing flexes, with one edge bunching up against itself like folds of fat. It slides in one direction suddenly, and, beneath the bronze, there’s a single, silvery eye. Its dilated, unfocused pupil scans the cave’s ceiling before it spots you, and it narrows.