Kavala was used to leathers. Everyone in Riverfall wore them. The man, as pale as he was, was dressed somewhat differently. She didn't recognize the badge nor would she have understood it had she seen it as a sign of an office. Kavala wasn't used to officials that weren't dressed in leather and towering over her. The man before her seemed somewhat diminished in the light of their presence. He was smaller, fine of bone, and to her almost delicate. There was something about him too that made her uneasy, though she couldn't put her finger on it. Kavala was a stranger to Nuits, having never really encountered many at all.
In fact, she was a stranger to folks stepping aside and gesturing and so she took the move at face value and walked forward. Her riding boots rang on the cobbles as she came to the door and halted. She peered at its face, then the edges, and noted it seemed to be attached to nothing, freestanding in the middle of the path. Of course, its position left no room to bypass it. It only left the person wanting to pass with two choices.
Turn around and detour around or open the door. Curious, yet part of her warning herself it was likely a bad idea, the Konti reached out and touched the handle. She gave it a yank and the door clicked, pulling forward and opening towards them. The way it opened left the Konti particularly sheltered by the weight of the wood making up its face. It didn't matter though.
As soon as the door swung open, some force began its pull and Kavala and her unknown companion felt a dragging sensation and then they were through it. Standing alone yet together on the cliff where the Bluevein River poured out of the Sea of Grass and plunged over the edge.
Only Riverfall was gone. There was no city where the falls dropped off the tectonic plate of the continent. Instead they stood inside a skull.... an enormous skull half the size of the city. Where the city walls normally stood, ribs thrust into the sky - wind worn and weathered. The river bypassed a great corpse or at least the skeleton of one. It stretched almost a full tenth of a mile in both directions, smaller bones scattered off into the distance. A pelvis had tilted into the topsoil, perhaps sunken as the rains in the spring had pelted it and then softened the soil.
Kavala stepped forward confused. The door stood as it had in Riverfall, behind them now and open showing the narrow little side street they used to be standing on. But all around them was change.
The Konti's mouth dropped open she turned a full circle. Something crunched under her boots and she reached down and picked up a gemstone. There were hundreds upon thousands of them around. And she realized as she stared at the skeleton, her mind automatically trying to reflesh its bones, that the gems were from inside the bones. Curious, as only a healer and researcher could be, she moved closer, walking out of the skull through a huge foramen - most likely where a huge nerve had passed from the spine to the brain - and out onto the spine itself.
She knelt by the Atlas and ran her hand across the Axis vertebra... clawing at the worn bone to expose what would on a normal animal be marrow. Instead of being hollow and rotted out leaving only a webbing of bone inside, this skull had gemstone where bone marrow should have been.
Kavala turned, glanced at her companion, and raised an eyebrow. "What is this? I've never seen anything so large in my life. I've heard stories, of course.... the Drykas tell them... but I've never seen anything like this first hand." The Konti said, drawing a dagger and inverting it in her hand. She gave the 'marrow' a few hard knocks and broke off a piece of what looked almost like emerald.
Holding it up to the light, the Konti frowned, and studied the gemstone a moment. Then, she turned to study the stranger with equal scrutany and see what his thoughts were.