The floor gives way where the “inert” roots should be, dropping Kynes and the others into a damp crawlspace. Blue-white blueprint lines from the ledger spill over the chamber, and the supposed bedrock parasite pulses like a living wire.

Kynes faces the central root. It is not a support at all, but a naked conduit, slick with old clay and running with sickly light. The pulse matches his own mark.

The ledger jerks in the Clerk-Under-Mask’s hands, its projected lines locking onto the root. Hidden channels bloom beneath the floor, a clerk-line exposed at last, and the pattern resolves into House Xar’s hunting path.

The root’s glow brightens in answer, and far above, the Hall of Welcome seems to hold its breath. The trap is older and cleaner than anyone guessed, and it has been awake the whole time.

Kynes lowers himself to the slick stone and settles beside the conduit, staff laid across his knees. The blue-white lines from the ledger tremble around his hands as he breathes into the rhythm of the root instead of fighting it.

He reaches through the Gran, not with force, but with a clean listening touch. The hidden clerk-line answers, and the sickly glow thins where his attention presses.

Beneath the floor, the exposed channels dim in sequence, one after another, as if a hand is drawing ink out of a wound. The root stops broadcasting Kynes's mark and begins to go dull, its light collapsing inward.

The crawlspace falls into a colder hush. The clerk-line remains exposed, but the bright hunting thread through it dies, leaving only the dormant residue and a dead channel where the beacon used to be.

Above them, the Hall of Welcome does not answer with a flare or a shudder. It stays still, sealed in silence, while the last trace of the conduit goes dark under Kynes's hand.

Kynes shifts his palm over the dormant line and lets the Gran thread through the stone. Old script answers first, faint and stubborn, then bends aside as his sight finds the seam beneath it.

A buried House Xar overlay comes into view, not a live signal but a cached path, folded into the clerk-line like a message hidden inside a scar.

Kynes traces the edge of it, and the hidden script opens under his attention, revealing a narrow route keyed to Domini authority and mirror-signature contact.

The clerk-line stays dead, but the back door remains legible, a dormant channel waiting for the right claim to wake it.

Kynes shifts his weight and commits to the seam. The dormant line parts under his touch, and the hidden back door yields with a dry click of old stone against old claim.

A narrow threshold opens in the clerk-line, black-bright with dust and sealing grit. The route does not flare to life, it simply accepts him, as if it has been waiting for a bearer who knows how to refuse a trap.

Kynes slides through first, staff angled low, the hidden passage swallowing his shoulders before the room can react.

Bren follows close behind, one hand lifted for balance, eyes cutting back toward the opening as if expecting the hall to bite shut behind them.

The chamber behind them stays silent, but deep in the wall the dormant script gives one faint, answering twitch, as though something farther inside has noticed their entry.