The Hall of Welcome holds its breath. The floor script lies dead and blank, but the old lockdown still hums in the stones. Above, the surface portal shivers with cold night air.

Bren stands near Kynes, staff raised, eyes on the doorway. Clerk-Under-Mask lingers by the ledger cradle, wary but steady. Orven watches the threshold, tense as a drawn wire.

A pulse of red light washes through the entrance. House Xar’s biometric hunt has found the hall again, not with a person, but with a claim riding on Kynes’s own stolen shape.

The portal yawns wider, showing the dark surface beyond Phandelver, wet stone and wind. The hall can hold for a moment, but the chase will not stop on its own.

Kynes leaves Hall of Welcome behind and arrives at Surface.

Cold grass swallows Kynes’s boots as the portal’s glow snaps behind him. The night air tastes of wet stone and iron, and the hill ahead slopes away in a shallow, deliberate dip.

At the bottom of that dip, the surface shows a fresher line than the rest of the field, a clawed seam pressed into the turf as if something heavy dragged through and turned.

Kynes follows the trace with his eyes. The sign is not random, it narrows, then hooks, cutting toward the dark between the stones.

Behind him, the portal dims to a tight, wounded shimmer. Ahead, the fresh descent line lies open in the grass, waiting for a choice that the night will not make for him.

Red light bled at the portal, then broke as Kynes, Bren, and Orven stepped onto the surface. Grass bent under a fresh clawed trail, crossed hard over Mara's path.

Kynes chose the trail, and the night took that choice into itself. House Xar's stolen mark no longer led them by command alone; now it led into a silence where fear could be met and broken. Behind him, the portal held its pale wound of light, and before him the grass lay trampled toward Mara's shadow.