By morning, the frozen handprint had already spread — not physically, but as rumor. Sion never said a word about it, and yet somehow half the Hall knew there had been something in the eastern corridor. He suspected Renn. He suspected the walls themselves, honestly; nothing stayed buried in a place built from other people's memories.
The Council reconvened before noon, and the air in the chamber had changed overnight — colder in a way that had nothing to do with the frost.
"Fayrius's information checked out," Renn announced, before Sion had even taken his seat. "The third missing Guardian did enter through the second junction. Exactly where he said."
"That proves he knows the Path," Daryan said. "Not that he's innocent of using that knowledge."
"It proves he's useful," said Guardian Voss, an older woman who had never much liked Sion or his opinions. "Which is more than I can say for half this room lately."
The comment landed exactly where it was aimed. Sion felt Elara stiffen beside him — not at the insult, but at what it signaled: the Council was no longer united even in appearance. Voss's faction had already decided to trust the stranger. Renn's hadn't. And somewhere between them, smaller loyalties were quietly picking sides.
"We are arguing about a man's usefulness," Elara said, "while a Guardian is still missing. Has anyone gone after him?"
Silence answered her. That, more than anything Fayrius had said, told Sion how far they'd already drifted from the point.
"I'll go," Sion said.
"Alone?" Daryan raised an eyebrow, though it wasn't really a question — more a warning dressed as one.
"I won't be alone." Sion looked at Elara, who was already moving, and then, briefly, at the empty space by the door where Eldon liked to stand and never quite entered. Not this time, apparently.
They found the second junction quieter than Sion remembered it — not the heavy, watchful quiet of a place holding its breath, but an emptied quiet, the kind that came after something had already fed.
The frost here grew wrong. Not in sheets, but in long claw-like fingers, reaching up from the ground as if something beneath it had tried, and failed, to climb out.
"He came through here," Elara said, crouching by a torn strip of Guardian's uniform, half-fused into the black ice. "Recently."
"Or he never left." Sion's voice came out flatter than he meant it to. He'd known the missing Guardian — not well, but well enough to remember his laugh.
A sound broke the stillness: not a growl, not quite a voice. Something in between, dragging itself out of syllables it no longer fully remembered how to shape. Sion turned in time to see it — low to the ground, limbs too long for its body, moving with the particular hunger of something that used to be someone.
"Nakith," Elara breathed.
It didn't charge. It watched them instead, head tilting with an almost human curiosity, and for one terrible second Sion thought it was about to speak.
Then it lunged, and thought became irrelevant.
Sion's blade met it halfway, frost sparking where memory-forged steel bit into whatever passed for its flesh. It screamed — not in pain, Sion realized too late, but in recognition, as if his strike had reminded it of something. It reared back, and where his sword had cut, faint golden threads unraveled from the wound like unspooling thread: memory, leaking out of a thing that shouldn't have had any left to lose.
Elara moved in fast, precise, no wasted motion, and drove her own blade through what might have been its throat. The creature didn't fall so much as forget how to stand, collapsing inward until only black frost and a scattering of gold dust remained.
They stood over the remains, breathing hard, saying nothing for a moment.
"That wasn't the missing Guardian," Elara said finally.
"No." Sion crouched, running two fingers through the last of the gold dust before it dissolved. "But it used to be someone. Recently enough that it still remembered how to look surprised when it died."
Neither of them said what they were both thinking — that somewhere beneath the second junction, a seed was ripening faster than anyone in that Council chamber wanted to admit, and that whatever Fayrius knew about this place, he had known it long before he ever offered to share.
They walked back toward the Hall in silence, and behind them, the black frost began, slowly, to grow back over the place where the creature had died — as if the Path itself were already forgetting it had ever been stopped.