The shimmering Envoy hangs in the Hall of Welcome, still searching, still half-lit by the portal Kynes opened. Its gaze keeps skittering past Bren and Sable, drawn to the room’s pulse like a moth to flame.

Kynes sees it now, the confusion is not emptiness. It is waiting.

The Envoy jerks upright. A thin strand of House Xar light wakes inside it, and Kynes’s own biometric echo flashes across its translucent face like a branded answer.

The fragment hooks onto the portal’s rim, trying to drink the wider network through Kynes’s trace. Sable steps forward, but the Envoy’s body begins to brighten with hunter-clean purpose, the confusion gone in a blink.

The Hall stays quiet, settled, and suddenly unsafe again, as House Xar’s retaliation finally shows its teeth.

Orven leans in from the passage, eyes narrowing at the hovering figure. His expression shifts from warning to recognition, then to weary disbelief.

The Envoy tilts toward Orven’s voice, as if testing a remembered channel. The faint red flicker on the table trembles once, then steadies.

Orven gives a short, bitter nod, then looks from Kynes to the Envoy with a guarded softness that had not been there before.

The Envoy shudders in the portal light, its rigid certainty loosening like wet sealant. Red script crawls across its outline, then breaks apart in thin flakes.

Orven goes still at the threshold, watching the shape pull inward on itself. The faint flicker on the table dims, as if it loses a hand on the thread.

The Envoy lifts, then settles, no longer hovering with borrowed purpose. Its posture turns inward, cautious and self-possessed, while the red script gutters out across the portal rim.

The room falls quiet again. The portal remains open, but the pressure behind it thins to a dead, empty hush. Sable watches Kynes, waiting to see whether he wants the next word.

Kynes points at the portal, and the envoy follows the gesture instead of the old command. The open threshold holds, but its light is now only a calm cut in the wall.

The envoy settles more squarely in its own shape, no longer twitching to an unseen hand. The red script on its outline flickers once, weak and far away.

Kynes drives the staff down as the Clerk holds the note in the air. The strike lands on the bedrock anchor with a dull, final crack, and the red script on the floor jerks hard in answer.

The pulse snaps apart. Thin red veins race, then break into scattered flickers, while the Envoy's body goes slack and weightless at the center of the hall.

A cold seam opens in the floor where the anchor was struck. The bedrock roots lie inert beneath it, dark and empty, and the last tether-script withers at their edges.

The Clerk-Under-Mask staggers back a step, translucent hands spread wide as the resonance dies in their grip. No fresh red chain forms, only a fading stain of script that cannot find Kynes anymore.