Cold daylight hits Kynes like a blade as he steps clear of the shaft mouth. Below, Phandelver sits in the valley, half-swallowed by a low, wrong fog.

Bren comes up beside him, hood lifted against the wind. She points toward a dark line on the slope, where spider silk glints once, then vanishes under snow.

Kynes spots it too, a faint thread leading from the rocks toward the valley road, exactly where Nezznar's network would feed and watch. The path is no longer a rumor, it is a route.

The fog shifts over Phandelver's roofs as if something inside it is breathing. Kynes and Bren move downhill, the town ahead now tied directly to the spider mark, and to Nezznar.