Bren lunges to the witness-marked path and plants her palm on the tilting stone, bracing the shift before it can throw anyone off balance. The crimson script snaps and hisses above the fissure.

Vetta keeps her blade up, eyes fixed on the pulsing red letters as the floor grinds beneath them. Cold vapor spills from the black crack in a thin white column.

Kynes drives his staff down into the seam and calls the archive back into rhythm. Silver letters flare, then drag the crimson script into line.

The chamber shudders, then steadies. Gold script reroutes around the fissure, and the floor stops its tilt, holding the group above the abyss by a trembling breath.

As the floor settles, the gold script ripples outward from the fissure, no longer merely rerouting but expanding into a vast, luminous web. The archive begins to bleed names from its seams, not one by one, but in a cascading torrent of silver and gold that fills the chamber with the weight of thousands of forgotten lives.

The names of the erased pulse in the air, a dense constellation of identities that House Domini had sought to bury beneath the void.

The silver script flickers and dims, the names dissolving into cold, grey ash before they can take form. Each signature fades into nothingness, confirming that the witnesses Kynes seeks have long since passed into the void.

A single, stubborn spark of violet light persists within the settling ash, refusing to be extinguished by the archive's decay. It pulses with a rhythmic, living warmth that defies the surrounding silence.

The violet light flickers once, then abruptly dies, leaving only the cold, inert dust of a spent memory. It is not a living thing, but merely a final, fading echo of the archive's long-dead history.

Beneath the layer of grey soot, a faint, rhythmic pulse of violet light begins to throb against the stone. The archive is not empty, for the witness remains anchored deep within the foundation.

The violet pulse intensifies, tearing through the stone to project a series of jagged, overlapping memories onto the chamber walls. Kynes watches as the images resolve into the faces of his kin, their flesh translucent and weeping ink as they willingly merge their souls with the void-fed entities.

The archive shudders, its walls vibrating with the weight of this horrific ambition, as the ledger confirms that the living Domini have successfully anchored their consciousness into the void-fed lattice.

The ledger script beneath Kynes's feet rearranges itself, the gold lines snapping into a jagged, cruel geometry that mirrors the faces on the wall. A single, crystalline name emerges from the chaos, Nerin Domini, and the archive's pulse synchronizes with the rhythm of a soul being forcibly unmade to fuel the house's immortality.

The silver name of Nerin Domini pulses with a rhythmic, necrotic hunger that defies the natural cycle of death. As Kynes traces the geometry, the archive reveals the true nature of the Domini pact, showing the transition from mortal flesh to a state of suspended, void-fueled undeath.