The groan didn't come again. Mahkir's ears settled back after a long moment of listening, and the chamber stayed quiet.
The pale glint had looked like bone from across the chamber, one more piece of the collection scattered over the floor. Ant crossed to it anyway, boots scuffing through drifts of ash that still smelled faintly of scorched stone.
He didn't reach it in a straight line. The chamber pulled his attention sideways twice before he got there. First to a scatter of bone half-swallowed by the grey drift, then to a curved outline further along the wall that resolved, on a second look, into the rusted edge of a shield with no structural integrity left to speak of. He crouched over that one anyway, out of the same habit that had made him check every doorway in the district for years, and focused the appraisal on it.
Common Shield — Damaged.