The Shadow Arrives First
Some things enter a room before the body does.
The Umbral Covenant does not announce arrivals.
Serix's people know that corruption has a temperature — a thinness in the air, a wrongness in how corners hold darkness. By the time a witness can name it, it has already been present long enough to learn the room's habits.
The shadow arrives first. The body follows, often believing it led the way.
Their fragments are not confessions. They are coordinates: where the light failed first, what was touched without being seen, which names went quiet while the city pretended nothing had changed.