Kynes holds up his palm again, and the shard-cut answers. The blood-stained line kindles with a cold, judgmental light, like the vault is reading a verdict written in his skin.

The Hall of Welcome seals itself with a deep, grinding thud. Exits lock. The floor gives a low, stone-deep pulse, and the inert bedrock roots stiffen into a rigid web beneath the cracks.

Orven stares at the glow, then at Kynes's hand. "No. That mark was never a wound," he says. "It is the last authorization."

Bren steps in close, staff raised toward the sealed threshold, eyes wide with sudden recognition. The trap was planted back at the slight, back when House Xar let the shard fall and waited for blood to feed the lattice.

The red flicker in the floor gutters, then settles into a steady, locked pulse. The room is no longer opening, it is claiming Kynes as its final lock.

Kynes lays two fingers over the cold line in his palm and works the counter-phrase through clenched teeth. The red flicker in the floor dims, then threads inward, folding away from his skin.

A thin sting bites his hand as the last of the claim releases. The vault keeps its lockdown, but his mark goes quiet, no longer reading as the seal's open permission.

Kynes takes the counter-phrase into the seal like a key turned in a dry lock. The floor pulse shivers once, then smooths out, and the red flicker stops reading his hand as an open claim.

The shard-cut cools. Whatever had been hooking into his blood-mark folds back into the vault's own lattice, leaving only a faint, contained throb in the stone.

The sealed doorways do not budge. The bedrock roots remain locked, inert and absolute, while the Hall of Welcome settles into a brittle quiet.

Kynes plants his staff and throws the portal wide with a snap of silver-blue force. The air in front of the sealed hall warps, then tears open into cold surface night.

Beyond the ring, pale stars hang over Phandelver's dark roofline, and a strip of road waits outside the vault's reach. The contained pulse in the floor flickers once under the new draft.

Bren steps in close, one hand still on her staff, eyes cutting from the portal to Kynes's palm as if checking the hall has not found a new way to bite him.

The bedrock roots stay inert, boxed in by the vault's own silence, while the red flicker from the floor gives the portal edge a faint, uneasy sheen.

As the opening stabilizes, a thin wash of gold glints from Sella's side of the room, caught for an instant on the ledger's cradle before the light falls away into shadow.