Episode 2 -- Threshold

You hear a drawbridge before you understand it. That's the thing about a big mechanism — it announces itself in the low end first, a groan you feel in your sternum before your ears catch up. Chain over a windlass, iron on iron, each link surrendering to gravity in sequence. I counted them out of habit. Forty-one clicks of the pawl before the far edge kissed the lip of the crevice and the whole span settled with a boom that the granite threw back at us twice, flat and unforgiving. No absorption anywhere.