The Domini saga

Ash drifts through the ruined counting house. The magistrate’s seal still pulses where it lies half-buried in charred boards, red light beating like a buried heart. Bren freezes beside Kynes, her gaze locking on the seal as the whole room answers with a low, hungry thrum.

Kynes reaches for the seal, and the red glow climbs his hand. The magistrate’s broken desk splits open with a dry crack, revealing hidden channels of script beneath the wood, all of them pulsing in the same rhythm.

The seal turns under Kynes’s touch, and the script flares brighter. For one sharp instant, the burned walls answer with matching lines, as if the counting house were only one face of a larger mechanism buried under Phandelver.

From somewhere beneath the floor, the red pulse spreads outward in a slow, measured wave. The hidden conversion has begun, and the ruin around them feels suddenly less like a broken room, and more like an unlocked door.

Kynes drives the Soul-Cutter down through ash-black planks. Red script snaps under the blade, then gutters out in a thin, angry hiss.

The floor jolts once. Hidden channels along the boards go dull in a chain, their pulse cut clean at the source.

Bren recoils a step, staring at the darkened lines as smoke curls into the gaps the magic leaves behind.

The magistrate’s seal drops free and skitters across the boards, its red glow fading to a stubborn ember.

For a heartbeat, the ruined office looks normal again, only the smoldering embers and the faintly glowing scrap of crest-stamped paper keep twitching at the edge of the dark.