The Domini saga

Sable bursts through the warehouse doors, frame rattling, and the air goes tight. Their voice comes fast: the Hall of Welcome ledger is bleeding ink into the shape of the harbor floor plan.

The warehouse floor answers too. A line of cracks spiders out from Kynes's boots, and the salt-damp boards groan as if the room is being pulled somewhere else.

Bren moves to Kynes's side, blade up, eyes on the widening fractures. The air tastes of ink, brine, and old stone.

Far below the floor, a dull pulse beats once, then twice, like something in the depths has noticed the Architects tugging at its leash. Kynes stands at the center of the strain, with the path of the attack now clear.

Kynes draws Soul-Cutter in one smooth motion. The blade catches the seam of the spell, and the false bridge flickers into view as a line of red script stretched between warehouse boards and distant stone.

He cuts only the crossing, not the places themselves. The line snaps with a dry, papery crack, and both ends recoil, severed but intact.

Bren shifts with him, blade angled toward the crack as if waiting for a second thread to crawl free. The floor stops splitting in that direction, though the boards keep shuddering with trapped force.

For a breath, the warehouse and the Hall of Welcome overlap in Kynes's sight, then separate. Deep below Phandelver, the same dull pulse returns, patient and angry, while the cracked floor waits for his next choice.

Kynes leaves Neverwinter harbor warehouse behind and arrives at Phandelver.

Phandelver greets Kynes with a low, stone-deep throb, the kind that lives in teeth and ribs. Above him, the street lamps tremble once, then hold.

The air tastes of dust and rain on old masonry. In Kynes's palm, the hungry pressure wakes to the pulse below, answering like a lock finding its key.

Beneath the square, the void-well flashes in his mind as a mirror-sheen, then tears open into depth. A vertical seam of dark light unfurls at the edge of the market stones.

Kynes steps into the opening he makes, and the seam widens around him without resistance. Red script flickers along its rim, then falls away in strips like shed skin.

Inside the breach, the Hall of Welcome overlays the street in a ghostly double image, floorboards over cobbles, hearthlight over moonlight. Something below shifts its attention and the pulse turns sharp.

Kynes leaves Phandelver behind and arrives at Hall of Welcome.

The Hall of Welcome hits Kynes like a held breath, its wards humming under his boots while the floor still remembers the strain below.

He steps through the threshold with Soul-Cutter ready, and the stone answers him, the distant pulse from Phandelver turning thin and trapped.

Bren shifts to cover the room, blade angled toward the seams, while the hearthlight steadies across the warped boards.

Kynes drives his staff into the floor and the last of the traveling pressure drains off the hall, snapping the phantom overlap of street and warehouse apart.

A thin red thread spills out of the split-floor vision and dies in the dust, leaving one clean, sealed line beneath the hall and a faint tug still buried deeper below.