The counting house groans around the firelight, beams blackened, floorboards split, ash drifting through the wreckage. At the threshold, the old hermit stands between Kynes and the street, while the crest-marked seal on the floor still throbs like a buried heart.
Old Hermit
You keep cutting, and the wound keeps answering. One more severance, Kynes, and you either free it or feed it.
Bren
Stay with me. Do not let them steer your hand again.
A red pulse crawls up the broken walls, threading through the ruin in thin, hateful lines. Outside, the gathered townsfolk hold back in a tense ring of torchlight, watching the smoke pour upward.
Kynes
The seal is still live. The source is below, or beyond the floor.
The Crystal Mechanism
Command is unstable. The lattice seeks a host. The host seeks a choice.
The old hermit’s skin splits with glowing script for a heartbeat, then steadies into a thin, waiting grin. Bren shifts nearer to Kynes, staff ready, eyes fixed on the breach as the red pulse swells.
“I stab the pulse, the hermit and then the Crystal Mechanism”
SUCCESS (Mediocre Melee Combat, rolled +1)
Kynes drives the staff and blade down through the seam. The buried pulse shudders, then breaks into a thin, red spray of light that gutters across the boards and dies.
The old hermit jerks as the strike catches him too, his waiting grin collapsing into a blank, splitting shell of script and smoke. He folds backward toward the threshold, unmade by the blow.
Kynes follows through without hesitation, and the Crystal Mechanism is next, its surface flashing once before the blow bites deep. The fading voice in the room cuts off mid-breath.
The Crystal Mechanism
Command... received...
A crack runs through the mechanism’s glow, and it slumps into stillness. The cost lands at once, a hot sting in Kynes’s forearm where the broken floor bites him, and blood marks the ash.
Bren
It is done. Move, before the room decides to fall with them.
Outside, the torch-ring wavers as the red lines fade from the walls. The dropped seal lies dark amid embers, and the counting house finally goes quiet.
Dust drifted through the ruined counting house as the red pulse died away.
Bren
Come on. You have done enough here. Move.
Kynes
I am moving. Just not alone.
Bren took his arm and guided him through the broken threshold, leaving the dark seal behind.
The counting house stood hollow and wounded, its lattice silence settling over broken stone and ash. Kynes left bloodied but unbound, and the town outside held its breath as the last of the red light faded. What he had shattered could not be made whole again, only survived.