How were they still alive?

Laurel stared with wide eyes at the rest of the party, which were all walking ahead of him.
The Hound was trotting ahead of them all, her nose down, eyes forwards, fur standing on end as she snuffled around. The Apothecary glided after her, its looming figure cutting through the odd stagnation of the air with an absolutely careless stride, its companion leaving slime in its wake. Jonas was the only one walking alongside him, but he was doing his damnedest not to hear their latest scheme or idea about paying him. He was definitely starting to get the feeling that he wasn't going to get the payment he had been promised back up on the surface.

His ears flicked as he turned his head, looking behind them for a long minute before looking ahead. It'd been about... oh, fifteen or twenty minutes since their run in with the books. But it almost felt like days at this point. It might as well have been. He was resenting the fact he hadn't been able to look around more after the book attack. He probably could have found a lot of valuable information in the books they had knocked out of the air, but he hadn't stopped to look at any of them due to Jonas' wailing about his coat of arms. And then The Apothecary had, kind of just, left when the new doors opened without really stopping to consider what lay beyond. And sure, nothing had happened to them so far, and it seemed to have some sort of uncanny knowledge of what lay ahead, but that only made Laurel feel more concerned than comforted.

"How much further do we have to go?" Jonas whined, asking aloud the question Laurel had been thinking in his head. 

The Apothecary's narrow head lifted and cocked, one of its milky white pupils pinning him with an unsettlingly jerky movement. "Not long now.  Be patient." Its voice hissed out of its lungs, filling the air with a  strange sense of dread as the word hung dead in the air.

Laurel shuddered as he pushed past Jonas to walk alongside The Apothecary, somehow narrowly avoiding stepping on the green slime that followed in its step. "How do you know that? You are beginning to be quite suspicious, I'll have you know." His ears dipped against his skull as he stared uncertainly at the back of The Apothecary's head. "There is no-"

"Hush now. The dungeon wakes."

The Apothecary's voice shuddered through the air as a blast of icy cold air shot up from between the stonework beneath its hooves.

There was a distant clink, and then the sound of stone grinding against stone filled the area around them. Hound yelped and leapt back, staring down with slowly widening eyes as gaps between the stones slowly grew wider and wider. Both Jonas and Laurel were forced to jump back onto unmoving stones as the floor opened up into floating steps leading down into a frozen void below them. The Apothecary slowly walked down the unevenly placed steps, eventually pausing on the last step visible to the others. 

"There is no way in this wonderful world that I will be going down there. Thank you very much." Jonas whirled and started heading back towards the mage's study. He quickly came shuffling back after he got about twenty feet away, realizing that the blast of cold air had made every single one of their lights go out. "Actually... I've decided to sit near the hole. But I will not be going down in there. Apothy, dearest, please don't make me go down there. It feels..." Jonas paused and wrinkled his muzzle before shivering. "It feels wrong, and frankly, dear, I will not be touching it with a million-mile-long pole."

Hound was snuffling about the edge of the stones, ears perked as she peered into the dark. 

Laurel just stared.
He still hadn't gotten over whether or not The Apothecary knew what it was talking about, and now this? He blinked, once, then twice, then three times, each time the hole in the floor reappearing each time he opened his eyes once more. "I.. I don't believe it." He looked over at Jonas then at Hound. "Neither of you move. We really, really shouldn't go stepping into mysterious voids. Even if they do open up before our feet." He paused and glared down in the hole to where The Apothecary stood, the strange visage of the green courser staring him dead in the eye as it stood there. "You're kidding me, right? You'd not ask us to go down there, would you?"

The Apothecary stared back.

"Yes."

"O-oh." Laurel's voice shattered. "Great."
There was no way he was going to get paid for this.