Kynes steps into the transfer passage, and the gold pulse rolls over the floor like a counting heartbeat. The reeves sit in their niches, still and watchful, each blink landing in time with the light.
The Lead Reeve
Not prisoners. Active components. We wait for the next ledger entry.
Kynes
It is a clerk’s corridor. A holding ledger. Nothing more.
The light brightens at Kynes’s feet, and thin gold lines creep from the floor toward his boots, tasting for purchase. The reeves do not rise, but the passage feels ready to file him away.
The Lead Reeve
Stand where you are, and the record will accept you.
Kynes lifts his staff and studies the niches, the pulse, the seams in the stone. The pattern is tidy, deliberate, and wrong, a public ledger written over something deeper and hungry.
He sees the truth of the route at last, this is not a harmless office crawl. It is the next link in House Xar’s chain, and the gold glow is the lock that carries him toward their core.
Break the reeves' conditioning