At the Shroud, two former members of Sunus Pyktis's polytia speak through Immunis Ghrelin and explain why Pyktis had once seemed almost saintly among the augurs. They describe augury as group work performed in three-person polytia inside dead titans, and they say Pyktis was brilliant but emotionally unreachable, offering facts about himself without ever becoming truly knowable. The only time they saw his private feelings break through was during the Shroud's days of remembrance, when Pyktis wept intensely and revealed that his father expected him to die there.

The augurs say Pyktis then began vanishing for stretches inside the vast citadel and returning cold, distant, and increasingly unstable. They explain that augury damages the mind over its three-year term, much as the ancient Khanum were said to become brilliant but incomprehensible and dangerous. Because of Pyktis's disappearances, erratic mood, and the strain of his final year, the pair came to suspect that he was considering suicide.

They recount the moment that shaped this belief: they followed Pyktis and found him standing in a high window as if preparing to jump. Pyktis hid a small silver metal object in his pocket when he noticed them, and afterward relations within the polytia became tense. When Pyktis later died in the supposed accident with the marrow, the male augur came to suspect that Pyktis had intentionally arranged his own death, while the female augur insists it was still an accident born of mental decline. They both note that Pyktis had asked other augurs, not his own polytia, to accompany him to the marrow that day, which now makes them wonder whether he was trying to spare them.

Din then makes the same leap he made earlier in the Mineti Sujedo case: a man seen at a high window may not be preparing to jump, but preparing to disappear. Pressed by Din, the augurs admit they later solved Pyktis's route and discovered that the window led downward into a forgotten, contamination-sealed section of the Shroud. Hidden there was the place where Pyktis had really been going during his disappearances: a secret shrine decorated with lamps, bowls, ribbons, and paper flowers.

The augurs show Din three wooden totems taken from the shrine, carved as ancient crowned kings with outstretched arms meant to hold some missing object. Din recognizes them as matching Yarrow's ancestral figures and, combining that with Pyktis's silver item, the prince's explanation of Yarrow's silver regalia, and Pyktis's remark about his father expecting him to die in the Shroud, reaches a disturbing conclusion: Pyktis may have concealed a connection to Yarrow's royal line. Shaken, Din refuses to explain the full theory to the augurs, promising only that Pyktis lived a false story among them, and leaves as the female augur angrily insists Din must be wrong because none of this had been foreseen.