The golden tether tightens across the Hall of Welcome, humming like a drawn bowstring. Mara’s finger drags along the floor map, and the line answers by pulling toward the coast. Kynes feels the House Xar mark at his core tug back.

Bren shifts closer, blade ready, watching the tether as if it might bite. The wall-script flares, and the gold map of Kynes’s spirit coordinates sharpens into a route that bypasses every defense in the archive.

The tether jerks again, and the light crawls over Kynes’s staff and hand, seeking purchase. Mara snatches her hand back from the floor as the map flashes brighter, like a seal trying to finish a sentence.

Bren plants herself between Kynes and the glowing route, while the tether strains toward the coast with hungry certainty. The confrontation is clear now, House Xar has a line into Kynes, and severing it is the only way to keep from being carried away by it.

Kynes lets the shadow climb his arm. The black mass hardens into a jagged limb, wet with sea-dark light, and its teeth close on the golden tether.

The line splits with a sharp flare. Gold sprays across the wall-script, then gutters into thin sparks as the severed end recoils toward the coast.

Mara jerks back from the floor map as the route shudders and changes. Bren lowers her blade a fraction, eyes fixed on the far end of the tether, not the cut.

Where the light breaks, a new mark burns into the wall, a listening point far away, fixed on Kynes like an answering eye.

The shadow limb stays wrapped around the cut, hissing softly as the Hall of Welcome steadies around the severed strand. The coastal post now has Kynes's scent on it, and something there has noticed.

Kynes slips into the meditation chamber, where the stone drinks at stray magic like a thirsty wound. He lowers himself, staff across his knees, and lets the room take the charge from his breath.

He opens his will and feeds the gathered power into a single, vicious pattern. Fire gathers in tight rings around his focus, each loop brightening as the chamber answers.

The first burst strikes the tether’s distant target in his sight, and the answer comes back as a hard bloom of heat on the wall map. Gold cracks into orange, then white.

A swarm follows, layered and brutal, each globe finding the same far-off mark. The coastal post flares against the dark, and the burning route on the map spits ash-light across the stone.

When the last fireball fades, a blackened afterimage hangs in the chamber’s sightline. The wall map keeps a smoking scar where the coastal post was, and a fresh thread of gold script hardens into place, sharp and legible.