The Domini saga

The Hall of Welcome opens into Phandelver's heart, but the reeves' doors gape wide and untouched. No clerks wait. No line forms. Even the nearest townsfolk keep to the walls, eyes lowered, as if the doorway itself bites.

Bren slows beside Kynes, her gaze fixed on the empty office. The silence feels arranged, not abandoned.

The reeves are gone. This was a ward, not a desk.

A shiver runs through the floor under Kynes's boots, faint but familiar. The void-current recognizes him, the way a lock knows a key that once fed it.

The truth lands hard. Kynes is not just being tracked through Phandelver, he is the town's living anchor, and someone has just pulled the wardens away from the wound.

Kynes steps into the empty office and lets the silence answer first. A ledger rack sits untouched, dust undisturbed, but the desk drawers hang open as if searched in haste.

He checks the floor, then the threshold. Mud is tracked in from the hall, but the prints stop short of the back wall, broken by deliberate scuffing and a dragged chair.

Beneath the paperwork, Kynes finds the real clue, a wax seal split cleanly from its cord, stamped with the reeves' mark and pressed into a crack behind the desk.

The crack is not a crack. It is a narrow service slit, wide enough for documents, fingers, or a hidden hand to pass through without using the door.

Kynes pulls the seal free. The slit exhales a stale draft and a thread of old ink smell, and somewhere beyond the wall a gold pulse answers once, steady and cold.

The reeves are not merely gone. Their office has been hollowed out on purpose, and Phandelver's order now sits open to whoever knows the hidden way in.

Kynes lowers his staff tip to the slit and studies the seam without touching it. The opening is edged with fresh scrape-marks, and the wood around it bears a faint smear of wax and thumb-grease.

He angles his gaze into the gap. Inside lies a narrow void between wall and frame, with a shallow shelf cut into the stone, and a folded strip of clerk-paper pinned beneath a chip of sealwax.

Kynes hooks the paper free with two fingers. The fold carries a cramped inventory hand, names crossed out in clean strokes, then recast beside a transit mark that points beneath the Hall.

No trap springs. No latch bites. The slit is a deliberate handoff, and it has been used recently, with the wall swallowing the evidence afterward.

A steady gold pulse answers from deeper in the structure, calm as a heartbeat, while the hidden paper shows the reeves were not simply absent, they were processed through the hall and into something below it.

Bren's eyes fix on the recovered strip, her posture hardening. 'This is a route, not a mistake,' she says, keeping her voice low.

Kynes lifts the clerk-paper into the gold pulse and unfolds it flat. The cramped hand is not a tally, but a transfer list, names struck through beside transit marks that point below the Hall and then onward again.

A second line, written in a different ink, marks the reeves as withdrawn from office and entered as holdings, then rerouted with the same clean stroke used to erase them.

The route does not read like arrest or flight. It reads like processing, a clerical hand turning people into inventory and passing them through a hidden channel beneath the Hall.

Bren leans in, her face hardening as she catches the lower notation. The paper names the Hall as a vault face and the town above as temporarily stable, pending replacement oversight.

The gold pulse under the wall steadies, as if confirming the paper’s claim. Whatever took the reeves did not hide them, it filed them somewhere that still answers to the Hall.