The Domini saga

Mist clings to the magistrate’s district, beading on damp wood and iron. The factor’s office sits half-open, lanternlight trembling inside. Clerk Vance is at the desk, feeding ledgers into a brazier too fast to read them.

Bren slips to one side of the doorway, eyes hard on the exits. Kaelen steps in behind Kynes, hand already on his warrant, as ash curls from the brazier.

The brazier spits. One half-burned page shows a crest mark, then crumples into black flakes. Another ledger lies open on the desk, its entries tied to the same route sigils Kynes has seen before, the path leading beyond Phandelver.

Vance freezes, one hand still over the flames. The hall behind them murmurs with distant shock as guards gather at the door, and the conspiracy’s paper trail narrows to this room.

Kynes jerks the air with a sharp motion of his staff, and Vance slams backward from the desk as if an unseen hand has seized his chest. Papers skid, ash jumps, and the ledger half in the brazier wrenches free of the flame.

The book lands hard against the desk edge, still smoking, while another charred ledger slides out beside it, blackened but intact. The brazier hisses on spilled embers.

Vance strains against the force pinning him, palms spread and useless, his chair scraping the floor behind him. The open ledger lies in Kynes’s reach now, its route sigils clear through the smoke.

Outside the annex, boots gather in a roughening knot at the threshold. Inside, the burning stack is gone from Vance’s hands, and the evidence sits with Kynes instead, singed but saved.