As Kynes crosses the threshold, the brass and bone construct shudders again, exactly as before. Its inner gears grind like a crowd of whispering mouths, and the chamber answers with a harsher crimson pulse.
The shell splits its calm apart. Calcified plates flex open, not as a machine waking, but as a prison failing. Something old and hateful blinks from within, one eye opening in the dark.
Bren
Kynes, that is not a guardian. It is holding something in.
Kynes
The chamber was built to keep it asleep.
The crimson light floods the throat behind them, and the shadow-mark on Kynes's palm twitches in answer. For a heartbeat, the hidden pressure under his skin feels like a hand on a leash.
Venom
It knows your mark. It remembers the chain.
The eye inside the shell narrows, and the containment vessel creaks under a slow, deliberate awakening. Kynes stands at the threshold as the seal around the construct starts to fail.
“I think to Bren using the wedding rings and to Venom because he apart of me, " here's the plan, we release it, give it a choice...if it choose to kill us then it sucks for him. Sound good?"”
SUCCESS (Legendary Willpower, rolled +1)
Kynes
We let it speak. We give it a choice. If it chooses to kill us, then it proves what it is.
Bren
That is your plan, then. Open the cage and stare down what crawls out.
Venom
Choice is a blade. Offer it, and see what bleeds first.
Kynes lowers the staff a fraction, and the wedding rings at his hand catch the crimson glare. The construct’s inner eye does not blink. It waits, as if listening.
The Brass and Bone Construct
Vessel... voice... familiar chain. You come to bargain with a lock?
Kynes
It knows me.
Bren shifts closer at Kynes’s shoulder, blade still raised, but her stance eases by a breath. The chamber’s pulse thumps once, deep below the floor, and the seal lines spit red sparks into the air.
Quest Complete
Confront the source of the pulse
New Gift: Pulse-Reader's Arcane Insight