Dust hangs in the chamber like ash. Rows of petrified scrolls line the walls, and the central clerk-line throbs with a slow, buried pulse.

The pulsating line brightens when Kynes steps closer, as if tasting his blood-mark and the unauthorized changes he has already made.

The clerk-line shudders under the ledger’s distant glow. Fine script crawls across the nearest scrolls, then stalls, waiting for a new claim to settle over the lattice.

Kynes reaches the conduit as the chamber holds its breath. One wrong touch could expose him, one right move could turn House Xar’s own law against them.

The clerk-line answers Kynes at once, its pulse tightening to his heartbeat. Golden light from the ledger below steadies the chamber while the nearest scrolls twitch, then go still.

Kynes lays his hand to the conduit. The blood-mark draws a pale reply across the floor, and the script on the scrolls starts rewriting itself away from Xar's claim.

The chamber gives a low, buried shudder. Xar's leverage peels loose from the conduit, and the hidden passage beyond the Hall no longer feels keyed to that claim.

Kynes drags his mark along the conduit’s seam. House Xar’s script peels free in a neat strip, then gutters out across the floor like ash in water.

The conduit answers with a sharp, dry pulse, and the hidden passage loses its old claim entirely. Its threshold no longer recognizes Xar at all.

The chamber shivers once, deeper than before. Above the ledger’s gold wash, the red script flickers and thins, as if the room itself is deciding whether to keep breathing.

The line is still alive, but the claim is gone.

Kynes lets the question hang, then threads raw arcana through the conduit’s seam. The remaining claim-script tightens, answers, and then splits cleanly away from the stone.

The hidden passage shudders open of its own accord, no longer hooked to Xar’s name. A narrow vein of red light peels off the wall and gutters into dust before it can reach the floor.

The chamber answers with one hard pulse, and the ledger’s gold glow steadies the room instead of feeding the flicker. Kynes’s cut hand burns cold, then quiets.

In the seam’s wake, a second mark appears, a simple bearing sigil hidden under the old claim, showing where the rewrite source feeds from below.

The bearing sigil pulses with a rhythmic, subterranean thrum that matches the beat of Kynes's own heart. It does not merely point downward, but maps a direct, vertical descent through the foundation of the Hall of Welcome into a deeper, forgotten stratum of the vault.

The red pulse under the floor stutters against the ledger's steadier gold, while the fractures lie like thin veins between two competing loyalties.

The ledger's golden light suddenly dims, and the floor beneath the Hall of Welcome groans as the foundation begins to buckle under the strain of the severed script.

The ledger pulses once, a weak and fading heartbeat of gold, before its light vanishes entirely into the encroaching gloom. It lacks the inherent strength to anchor the shifting stone, and the foundation continues its slow, grinding collapse.

The chamber lurches as Orven points low, where pale lines still ghost the cracked floor. Fresh fissures crawl outward, but the hidden bearing sigil is now plain in the broken light.

Kynes catches the pattern at once, a map of pressure and permission. The parasite is rooted deeper than the hall, tied into the coastal shelf beneath the vault.

A faint red flicker answers from the floor, and the chamber’s pulse stutters against Kynes’s heartbeat, waiting for his next move.

Kynes speaks the shape of the claim into the sigil, not as a plea but as a cut. The pale lines split into layers of meaning, and the floor answers with a dry crack as one script peels free from another.

Under the broken stone, the bearing sigil turns inside out. House Xar's claim sloughs away first, then the deeper leash beneath it, exposing a raw foundation mark that has been feeding on the hall.

The chamber jerks hard, then steadies. For a breath, the void below stops surging upward, and the red flicker at the cracks thins to a trembling thread.

A sting runs across Kynes's hand where the crystal shard cut still burns, and the heartbeat pulse in the chamber knocks once, then twice, against the new silence.

The bearing mark stays open, stripped bare, but the room gives a low shudder that warns how much pressure the cut has released all at once.

The bedrock parasite is fully exposed, yet its roots are woven into the very marrow of the foundation, making it impossible to excise without shattering the entire chamber.

Kynes plants his staff and drags his blood-mark through the air. The Grand Arcane blooms around the exposed roots, a hard ring of intent and old authority. The chant leaves his teeth like iron.

The parasite answers, but not with a lunge. Its pulses slow under the circle, as if the words catch every hook it has into the hall and pry them loose.

House Xar’s claims peel away first, then the feeding, the command, the transmission, the binding. The roots keep their shape, but their hunger goes still.

The chamber shudders, then settles. The dark lattice remains in the foundation, inert now, bearing weight with no will behind it. The red flicker at the cracks fades to a thin ember.

Bren eases one step back from the open floor, still watching the roots. The Hall of Welcome holds. For the moment, the trap is a support, and the conduit has nowhere left to run.