The floor slides away beneath Kynes and Bren, and a steep spiral opens in the bedrock. Violet light from the relics crawls over warning glyphs on the walls.

Above them, the tower groans hard enough to shake dust loose. The stairway below stays whole, a narrow promise of escape.

Kynes steps onto the cold stone, the glass key and metal seal pulsing together in his hands and against his vest.

The relic-light strikes an older mark ahead, a foundation sigil half-buried in grime. The path leads straight toward the tower's heart, and whatever still waits below it.

Kynes focuses his arcane sight on the foundation sigil, but the ancient script remains a chaotic, shifting blur of jagged lines that defy all logic.

The violet light from the relics flares, then dies down, leaving the glyphs as cold and indecipherable as the stone they are carved into.

As Kynes holds the glass key over the sigil, the jagged lines snap into a coherent, ancient dialect that reveals a hidden sequence of pressure plates.

Kynes rises from the sigil and sets one boot on the first marked stone. It sinks with a soft, certain click. Dust trickles from the ceiling above him.

He follows the sequence without hesitation, crossing the landing in measured steps. Each plate answers in turn, a low violet pulse rippling through the runes beneath his feet.

The hidden seam in the far wall loosens with a stone-on-stone groan. Cold air spills out from the gap, carrying the scent of wet earth and deeper dark.

More grit rains down as the landing shudders, but the passage ahead is open now, waiting beyond the flicker of the fading light.