The Domini saga

The Harbor Master skids to the pier’s edge, black water foaming below him. Fog swallows the harbor lights, and the rings on Kynes and Bren give one weak violet throb after another. Beyond the masts, a lantern signal answers from somewhere deeper in the district.

He jerks a hand toward the piers, where three dockside silhouettes peel out of the mist, cloaks dark with salt. One carries a hooked staff marked in red wax, and another is already moving to cut off the quay.

The Harbor Master’s face tightens with fear, not triumph. He shoves a ringed key toward Kynes, then backpedals as if the water itself might save him. The nearest silhouette calls out a name that is not meant for sailors, but for the Architects beneath Phandelver.

Now the path is plain, the hunted and the hunters are both here, and the harbor has become the next threshold in the same buried chain.

Kynes clamps the air with a snap of will, and the quay answers. The Harbor Master lurches off the boards first, then all three silhouettes jerk free of the mist as if hooked by invisible chains.

Boots scrape timber. Cloaks whip hard. The hooked staff twists from one silhouette’s grip and skitters across the pier toward Kynes.

He spills the words while being dragged, fear cracking clean through his throat. The nearest lantern swings wildly, throwing the fog into broken gold bands.

Kynes’s pull overshoots the pier and yanks the group in close, dumping their secrets into the open. A wax-sealed token drops from one silhouette’s sleeve and clacks at his feet, stamped with a crab in red wax.

Bren shifts to cover Kynes, while the fog parts just enough to show the warehouse door yawning open beside the kelp stacks.

Kynes closes his fist and the harbor turns ugly and quiet. Bone cracks under the pressure, bodies drop hard onto wet boards, and the fog swallows the last of their struggle.

The Hooded Caller hits the pier on one knee, one hand clawing for balance. Bren shifts in front of Kynes, blade high, as the lantern swings and paints the crab token in a flash of red.

Kynes rips the sickness out of the fallen in a single sweep of sight and will. Thin red script flickers across sleeve seams and throat marks, then peels free into his shadowed palm.

The Harbor Master goes still beside the mooring posts, fear gone blank at last. One of the silhouettes twitches once, then lies open to the fog.

Bren leans in, eyes sharp, while the warehouse door hangs open under the kelp stacks like an invitation that was never meant to be safe.

The crab token gives off a faint warm pulse in Kynes’s hand, and beneath it the sickly violet glow from the rings answers once, as if something farther in the harbor has noticed the kill.