Thelenai begins by admitting that the Shroud, which she helped design and expand over decades, is far more fragile than outsiders realize. She and Ghrelin explain that the Empire now depends too heavily on a dangerous, distant system built around harvesting leviathan blood in Yarrowdale, and they concluded that the Empire has effectively outgrown both the Shroud and the city.

Because of that problem, the Senate authorized a secret research effort in Yarrowdale more than a decade earlier. Thelenai and Ghrelin reveal that their goal was not just to drain leviathan blood, but to remove the marrow itself, keep it alive after the beast died, and eventually transport or duplicate it so kani could be produced near the Empire's inner rings. They describe this as a potentially transformative breakthrough that could expand grafting, reduce sterility, and even treat the mental decline that afflicts aging Sublimes, which strikes Din as both wondrous and horrifying.

Thelenai then explains why the work proved so difficult: marrow continually produces titan's blood in its purest form, making extraction, storage, and transport extraordinarily dangerous. Malo recognizes that the solution involved ossuary moss, and Thelenai confirms that they developed a precise injection process to preserve the tissue. Ana realizes that the symbols Din copied earlier were not a cipher, but technical instructions for binding and preserving the marrow.

Thelenai and Ghrelin say the project still faced a deeper obstacle because every leviathan is biologically different. To interpret that randomness, they created augury, a temporary mind-altering graft taken as a dissolving pellet that heightens an axiom's ability to identify patterns and make predictions from minimal evidence. These augurs became essential to the marrow research because they could analyze the ever-changing leviathan anatomy in ways ordinary minds could not.

When Ana asks why augury is unknown elsewhere, Thelenai and Ghrelin admit it produced severe long-term side effects, especially apophenia, paranoia, and obsessive pattern-seeking, so it was never approved for use inside the Empire. However, they continued using it in Yarrowdale, which lies outside formal imperial limits, on volunteers such as Sunus Pyktis. Ana angrily concludes that this secret program created a brilliant madman whose predictive abilities explain the murders, sabotage, and investigators' failure to catch him, turning the case into something far more dangerous.