Renn wanted the second junction sealed. Voss wanted it watched. By the third hour of arguing, Sion had stopped listening to either of them and started watching the room instead — who nodded at whom, who avoided whose eyes, who hadn't spoken at all.
Fayrius hadn't spoken either. He didn't need to. His silence sat in the chamber like a held breath, and every argument the Guardians threw at each other only proved his earlier point louder than he ever could have.
"A creature that used to be a person," Daryan said finally, cutting through the noise. "That's what we're not talking about. We keep arguing about walls and watchmen, and no one's asked the only question that matters — who was it?"
The room went quiet in the wrong way. Not thoughtful. Guilty.
"There are records," Voss said carefully. "Every Guardian who's entered the second junction in the past year is logged."
"Then pull them," Sion said.
Renn's jaw tightened. "That would mean accusing—"
"It would mean knowing," Elara said. "Which is more than we've managed all morning."
Fayrius smiled — small, unhurried, the smile of a man watching exactly the argument he'd hoped to start. Sion caught it and filed it away with the others: the handprint in the corridor, the too-convenient knowledge, the way every answer he gave only widened the cracks already forming in the room.
The records took until evening to gather. Sion sat with Elara in the archive wing, black ice glowing faintly along the shelf edges, casting the names in cold light.
"Fourteen Guardians," Elara read. "In and out of the second junction over the last year. Most of them routine patrols."
"Most."
She didn't answer right away. Her finger stopped on one name, and something in her stillness told Sion before she said it.
"Renn," she said quietly. "Three visits. All unlogged reasons."
Sion felt the words land somewhere colder than surprise. "He's the one pushing hardest to seal it."
"Guilty men often are." Elara set the record down, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Outside, the black frost crept along the window in slow, deliberate lines, the way it always did when the Path dreamed heavier than usual.
"We don't accuse him yet," Sion said. "Not with Fayrius watching for exactly this."
"No." Elara looked at him — really looked, the way she rarely allowed herself to in front of others. "But you should know something. Whoever it is, they're not doing this for the Nakith. No one betrays their own people for a monster. They're doing it for a reason that made sense to them once." She paused. "I'd rather find that reason than just find the man."
It was such a small thing — a sentence, nothing more — but it was the first time in days Sion remembered why he trusted her judgment over his own instinct to simply fight whatever stood in front of him.
The alarm came at midnight.
Not a Nakith this time — a scream, human, cut short, somewhere near the eastern archive. By the time Sion and Elara reached it, Guardians already stood in a loose circle around a body that had not quite finished dying.
It was Renn.
His chest had been opened by something with claws far larger than any Nakith Sion had fought before, and the black frost around him had already begun creeping into the wound, sealing it, preserving it — the Path's way of keeping its evidence.
Daryan crouched beside the body, expression unreadable. "If he was the traitor," he said, "someone silenced him before we could prove it."
"Or he wasn't," Sion said. "And someone made sure we'd think he was."
Fayrius arrived last, drawn by the commotion, and stood at the edge of the circle with an expression of polite, distant concern that didn't reach his eyes. He looked down at Renn's body the way a man looks at a chess piece removed from the board — acknowledged, then already forgotten.
"A tragedy," he said. "Though I imagine it answers your question rather conveniently."
Sion's hand went to his sword before he'd decided to move it. Elara's touch on his arm stopped him — not a warning, just a fact, quiet and certain: not here, not yet.
Fayrius noticed anyway, and did not smile this time. That, more than anything, told Sion the game had changed.