The Domini saga

The black seam in the Hall of Welcome’s floor widens again, the same wound Kynes marked beneath the district hall now split open to the house above. Cold breath spills out of it, and the boards around the gap tremble.

Void-entities claw up through the fissure, flickering like dying embers. They are not many, but they are real, and they are getting in.

Bren moves to his side, blade up, body angled toward the rupture as the first shape spills onto the floorboards.

The Soul-Cutter hums hard in Kynes’s hand, answering the void beneath the foundation. The seam pulses wider, as if something deep below is still forcing it open.

Kynes closes his hand around the Soul-Cutter and lets the hungry pressure in the seam answer him. The cold surge rushes into his palm, then turns, caught in the parasite’s grasp.

Red-black veins flash across his stained hand as he transmute-binds the flow, stripping its edge and forcing the current to unravel.

The fissure’s breath thins. One last spawn claws upward, then the pull breaks and the shape sloughs backward into the dark.

A low pulse runs through the boards, then fades. Dust settles over the papers on the table, and the black seam shrinks to a narrow, ugly crack.

Kynes presses his stained palm to the crack and lets the red script rise into him. The parasite within him catches it at once, snarling through the flow like a hooked thing finding meat.

The red sheen in the boards thins to a pale pulse as he strips the corruption apart. Beneath his hand, the floor answers with a slow, steady warmth.

The crack knits at the edges. Splinters settle. A tired groan moves through the nearest beam, then eases as the pressure comes off the hall.

Dust lifts from the table papers in a soft sigh and slides back into stillness. The residual glow under the boards turns gold, no longer hungry.

Bren keeps her blade low and watches Kynes’s hand, because the stain there still pulses once, like something alive deciding whether to sleep.

The gold pulse does not vanish. It trails, thin as thread, from the crack and into the floorboards by the wall.

Kynes lowers his stained hand and follows that thread with his eyes, then with his staff, tracing the line where dust has sunk in a narrow seam.

The boards answer with a faint, hollow tick. Not collapse, not yet. A hidden panel shifts under the pressure of his gaze.

Bren turns at once, blade lifting a fraction. Her watch snaps from Kynes to the seam.

Kynes presses the staff tip to the seam. The hidden panel slides aside just enough to show a dark shaft, old stone, and the faintest wash of gold below.

The source is plain now. The void entities came up from beneath the Hall, through a service drop lined with the same sickly script, and it still hums.