The weight of the Necropolis settled on Maxwell's shoulders like wet earth.
He knew Domains. He had one. Every Immortal-ranker did, and every Immortal-ranker learned, sooner or later, that a Domain was a quarrel with the world about how it worked. You won the quarrel inside your own walls. Outside them, someone else's rules applied.
This one was not the boy's. That was the first thing Maxwell understood, and it steadied him. The Necropolis had the Lich's taste in it: old, dry, patient, the long cold memory of something that had been dead a very long time and had stopped minding. The boy walked through it the way a guest walks through a friend's house, at ease but careful.
So the Domain belonged to his summon. And a summon that could open a Domain at all was not a summon Maxwell had any category for.
He filed that away. There would be time to be impressed later.
What mattered was simple. A Domain could be answered with a Domain.
He began to build his own.
