Deciding that there is no turning back now and compelled in no small part by curiosity, the group decides to descend.
Borric stands astride over the steeply pitched stairs that plummet into darkness. He holds a torch aloft and looks down, noticing that the stairs are heavily weathered and "dished" in the middle, as if they've been worn smooth by thousands of footfalls over centuries (or maybe longer). Tentatively he places one foot on the first step and tests half of his weight on it. It seems as solid and real as any other step, and so he takes another. After three steps down his head drops below the threshold of the opening and the guttering torchlight dances on the boughs of the dead tree that overhangs the portal. To everyone's great relief, nothing at all horrifying or otherwise terrible happens and one by one you step into the long, dark stairwell.
The descent seems interminable and at times it feels as though you aren't moving at all. Occasionally you look back, but see only darkness. When the torch is hidden, the pinprick of light you perceived at the end of the stairwell doesn't appear to have grown any larger. You can't even use the burning torch as a measure of time, because it doesn't appear to have burned down at all. Uneasy, but undaunted you continue.
Much, much later . . .
You continue descending the smooth steps, set into the tunnel that never seems to end. All sense of time has fled from you as a pervasive stillness has surrounded you that makes every step seem to echo far too loudly, and every whispered word ring in your ears. Without warning you look up and the pinprick of light at the bottom of the tunnel seems to have grown. A hundred steps more and you reach the source.
The stairwell opens up into a small chamber about 20 feet wide and 30 feet long. Two curving stairways hug the walls to either side of you, terminating in a candlelit mezzanine where a small apse lies just behind an heavily carved column of dark stone. Straight ahead and below the mezzanine, a tunnel continues on, terminating in a 'T' about 50 feet further on. All around you and in the tunnel, human skulls are heaped against the walls and fluted columns.