Black water flowed over the gigantic heart. Zha Kang and Zatanna stepped onto a bridge built from rotten bones. The light behind them vanished, and the passage closed at their backs. The stench of decay in the air instantly intensified dozens of times over, so acrid it stung their eyes shut.
Beyond that, both of them felt an intense thirst, enough to make them want to drop to the ground and drink deeply from the sludge below, even as all manner of monsters continuously crawled out along the shores of the small lake.
"The whole space moves with the heart's beating. It revels in the hunger of death." Zatanna glanced behind them. There was no way back now, so she could only keep pace with Constantine's rapid strides. "I heard Madame Xanadu say that Death was an ever-smiling maiden. I suspect she may have placed her darker side here."
"It isn't." Constantine sprinted toward the gigantic heart. The closer he got, the bigger it appeared; from several hundred meters away, it already looked like a skyscraper, pulsing nauseatingly. "Death has no distinction between light and darkness. She is one of the purest concepts there is; you can't view her from a human perspective. Death is both an end and a beginning. She has no emotions, nor does she need any."
Zatanna leaped over a broken stretch of bridge. The rotten bones beneath her feet were far from sturdy, and the decaying flesh made her soles slip. At the same time, she had to make sure the heels of her boots did not get caught in the gaps between the skeletons.
"Isn't that so? I thought a beating heart signified life, while everything rotting around it represented death. That makes it a cycle."
"Something that moves isn't necessarily alive, and something