The formal induction ceremony for junior investigators of the Knights of Favonius lasted forty-five minutes and involved a great deal of standing very still while someone read from a document that had clearly been written by a committee operating under the impression that ceremony required sentences of no fewer than forty words. Ethan stood in the correct position with the correct expression and listened with the part of his mind he kept available for things that needed to be tracked without being thought about, while the rest of him was already three steps ahead, mapping the room.
The ceremony hall was the oldest room in the Knights of Favonius headquarters — a long, stone-vaulted space that smelled of candle wax and old wool and the specific preserved solemnity of places that had been taking themselves seriously for a very long time. The floor was original, the same flagstones that had been laid when the building was first constructed four hundred years ago. The walls were Mondstadt granite, dark and close-grained, the kind that held well. He had not been permitted in this room before today. He was, with some difficulty, refraining from pressing his palm against the nearest stone surface and reading everything it had to say.
Later, he told himself. There would be time.
For now he tracked the room's other occupants instead, with his eyes rather than his hands. Five other inductees — three of them noble-born like himself, two from families with military traditions old enough to substitute for Vision-gifting. None of them interesting. The presiding officer was a senior Knight named Brennan whose posture communicated thirty years of habit and whose eyes communicated that he had conducted this ceremony enough times to have opinions about it. Behind him, to the left, stood the observers.
Jean Gunnhildr stood near the wall with the particular quality of attention that characterised her even at rest — not the passive attention of someone being present, but the active attention of someone for whom being present meant continuously processing everything in range. She was younger than Ethan had expected, carrying more responsibility than anyone her age should have been given by an organisation that kept promoting her because she was the only one reliable enough to absorb more work without complaint. She had not looked at him directly yet. He noted this with interest, because she had looked at every other inductee.
Beside her, Kaeya Alberich stood with his weight on one hip and his expression at the precise angle of relaxed that took considerable practice to maintain as a default. He had been looking at Ethan since the ceremony began. Not obviously — his gaze moved across the room with the smooth, apparently random sweep of someone with nothing particular on their mind — but it came back to Ethan at intervals, which was a pattern, and Kaeya was the kind of person who did not produce patterns by accident.
Ethan kept his own gaze forward and filed this for later. He had been filing Kaeya-related observations since his first month in the junior auxiliary, two years ago. The Cavalry Captain was one of the more complicated elements of the Mondstadt equation — a man with multiple agendas and a talent for ensuring that none of them were quite visible at the same time, which was a skill Ethan respected professionally and watched very carefully.
Further back: Lisa Minci, who had the expression of someone present at a ceremony they considered optional but were attending out of professional courtesy, and whose attention — when it briefly landed on Ethan — had the quality of something sharper than idle curiosity. Amber, in her scouting uniform, who was the only person in the room who looked genuinely pleased to be there, and whose evident warmth toward the entire proceeding was either entirely natural or an extraordinarily convincing performance. Given everything he knew about Amber, he was fairly confident it was natural, which was its own kind of remarkable.
The ceremony concluded. Brennan shook hands with each inductee in the order they were standing. When he reached Ethan he paused for a fraction of a second before extending his hand — a fraction that Ethan catalogued without expression — and said: "We've heard good things from Ser Aldous. He's not a man who says them lightly."
"He's not," Ethan agreed. "I'm grateful for the training."
Brennan moved on. From the left of the room, Ethan felt rather than saw Kaeya's gaze settle on him again with the particular quality of someone who had just noticed something they intended to think about.
✶ ✶ ✶
The Hall of Records was on the second floor of the eastern wing, accessible to junior investigators by default and interesting to most of them for approximately one week before the volume of material rendered it tedious. It was a long room filled with shelves that had developed a particular geological quality — layers of documentation accumulating over decades until the room itself became a kind of sediment, the oldest records at the bottom and the newest pressed up against the ceiling in increasingly improvised stacking arrangements.
Ethan liked it here. He had liked it since his first day, when he had discovered that the shelving was original stone construction and that the wall behind the oldest section of records had not been plastered in living memory and that the depth of available echo here was, conservatively, everything the Knights of Favonius had ever done in this building from the day it was built.
He had been disciplined about it for the first two weeks. Orientation, the administrative assignments that junior investigators were given to establish their familiarity with the organisation's systems, the social work of learning which colleagues were worth knowing and which were worth avoiding. He had done all of this correctly, producing the impression of a diligent young investigator with good instincts and an unusually systematic approach to procedure. By the third week, when he had the room to himself reliably between the ninth and eleventh hour of the morning, he had begun the actual work.
He worked section by section, starting with the oldest wall and moving forward in time, reading in carefully bounded sessions that lasted no longer than twenty minutes before he broke contact and rested. He had learned his limits well enough over the years to know that the nosebleeds came at thirty minutes of concentrated contact and the disorientation at forty, and he had no interest in being found unconscious in the Hall of Records three weeks into his tenure as a junior investigator.
Most of what the walls held was what he expected: the administrative texture of an organisation going about its work over four centuries. Meetings, briefings, arguments about resource allocation. A Knight who had once, memorably, thrown a document folder at another Knight and stormed out in a direction that suggested the stairwell rather than the exit. Two instances of what appeared to be secret romantic correspondence being destroyed in this room, which he noted and immediately set aside as irrelevant to his purposes. The ordinary machinery of an institution that had been running long enough to have deeply ingrained habits, some useful and some not.
He found the first anomaly on a Tuesday morning, in the section of wall behind the shelf that held patrol logs from seven to twelve years prior.
A conversation. Two men, standing close to the wall in the manner of people who did not want to be overheard. The grey rendered them clearly enough: senior uniforms, faces he could almost place against the mental roster of Knights he had been building, voices low and clipped with the specific terseness of people discussing something they had already decided and were now confirming rather than deliberating.
"Meissner's family has been notified," one of them said. "Patrol accident, as agreed. The report is filed."
The other man said nothing for a moment. Then: "He should have let it go."
"They never do, when they get that far in."
The grey lifted. Ethan stood with his hand still on the wall and waited for the mild head-pressure that followed a clean read to pass, and thought about the word 'they.' Plural. He had been looking for one anomaly. He had found a reference to a pattern.
He spent the rest of the morning reading the official records for Knight Meissner. Patrol accident, as the echo had confirmed: a report dated nine years prior, signed by a senior officer whose name he now had, citing exposure on the Stormbearer Mountain route in winter conditions. Clean paperwork. The kind of clean that came from being written carefully rather than from being accurate.
He came back the following morning with a list of every Knight death or disappearance filed as an accident in the past twelve years, which was eleven entries, and he began cross-referencing them against the patrol logs. Most of them held up: genuine accidents, genuine bad luck, the ordinary attrition of people who did dangerous work in difficult terrain. Three did not.
Meissner, nine years prior. A woman named Sorensen, six years prior, whose file said drowning and whose patrol route had not taken her within two miles of water. And a junior investigator named Haenel, four years prior, whose report said equipment failure on a solo reconnaissance and whose service record showed three formal commendations in the eighteen months before his death for, specifically, work in identifying unusual financial flows in the lower city.
Ethan read Haenel's file three times. A junior investigator commended for tracking unusual financial flows, dead four years ago in what his report called equipment failure, whose file had been signed off by the same senior officer who had handled Meissner. He was careful not to make the expression he was feeling on his face, because the Hall of Records had a second-floor window that looked out onto the courtyard below and someone was crossing it, and the gait was Kaeya's.
✶ ✶ ✶
He closed the files. He put them back in their places on the shelf with the care of someone handling evidence rather than records. He spent a few minutes at the window with a different file open in his hands — a genuinely tedious report on border patrol frequency from eight years ago — and when Kaeya appeared in the doorway he was reading it with the expression of someone doing their assigned work.
"Enjoying the archives?" Kaeya asked. He leaned against the doorframe with the practiced ease of someone who had made an art form of appearing to be wherever he was by coincidence.
"Very much," Ethan said. "The patrol frequency data from this period is surprisingly detailed."
Kaeya's smile did not change, which was itself a kind of information. A genuine response to a boring answer would have produced slight deflation. This one held. "I wouldn't have expected patrol frequency to hold much interest for someone with your assessment scores."
"Assessment scores identify capability," Ethan said. "Patrol frequency data identifies how the organisation actually uses what it has. They're different questions."
A pause. Kaeya's single visible eye moved from Ethan's face to the file in his hands to the shelf behind him — specifically the section of shelf where the patrol logs sat, which was not the section from which Ethan had ostensibly retrieved the document he was holding. The look lasted half a second and communicated, with impressive efficiency, that this had been noticed.
"Different questions," Kaeya agreed pleasantly. "Welcome to the Knights, Voss. I'm sure we'll find many interesting things to discuss."
He left the way he had arrived — with the easy, unhurried gait of someone going nowhere in particular — and Ethan watched him go and thought: he did not come here to welcome me. He came here because something told him to look, and he looked, and he found something he intends to keep looking at.
He filed this under 'Kaeya: active interest, unknown direction, handle carefully.' Then he put the patrol frequency report back on its shelf, checked the corridor was empty, and spent the remaining eight minutes of his available window with his palm flat against the stone wall and his eyes closed, reading the Hall of Records for everything it knew about the name Haenel.
✶ ✶ ✶
It took him a further week, working in careful sessions around his actual assigned duties — which he performed with the diligence of someone who understood that the cover mattered as much as the work underneath it — to assemble the complete picture.
Three Knights, over the course of ten years, had independently stumbled onto evidence of Fatui financial operations in Mondstadt's merchant district. The evidence, in each case, had led them toward the same network: a layered system of front accounts and proxy transactions that Ethan recognised from his own mapping work as the infrastructure the Fatui used to move Mora across national borders without official record. All three had brought their findings, or fragments of their findings, to the Hall of Records to cross-reference against existing intelligence. None of them had lived long enough to file a formal report.
The deaths had been arranged by someone with enough access to the Knights' scheduling and patrol records to make each one look routine, and enough motivation to ensure that the files were processed and sealed before anyone could ask questions. The signing officer, whose name appeared on all three reports, had retired five years ago. Ethan pulled the retirement file. Standard, unremarkable. He pulled the officer's last known address from the residential register. He made a note of it and did not yet decide what to do with it.
He sat in the Hall of Records on the last afternoon of his second week, with the window light going amber and the building settling into its after-hours quiet, and he thought about what he had. A cover-up. Three deaths. A Fatui financial network that the Knights had been kept from investigating by someone on the inside who was no longer there. This was, by any measure, significant. It was also, by any measure, a thing he could not take to anyone yet without explaining how he had found it, which meant it needed to sit in his notes until he had the standing to table it through channels that would not immediately ask where the information came from.
He thought about Haenel. A junior investigator, about his own current age, commended three times in eighteen months. Someone who had followed a thread into a dark room and not come back. Someone whose death had been filed as equipment failure and signed and sealed and put on a shelf to wait until someone patient enough to ask came along.
He had been patient enough to ask. He had listened. And now Haenel's work — four years cold, three deaths cold — was sitting in his cipher-written notes waiting for the moment when he could act on it.
"I heard you," he said quietly to the empty room, which felt necessary in a way he did not entirely analyse. "I'll use it."
He gathered his notes and left the Hall of Records as the last of the afternoon light faded from the window, and on his way out he passed Jean Gunnhildr in the corridor — head down over a report, moving with the purposeful distraction of someone who had too many things to do and had learned to do three of them simultaneously.
She looked up as he stepped aside to let her pass. Her eyes took him in with the same quality of attention he had noticed at the ceremony — thorough, rapid, arriving at some preliminary conclusion she kept to herself. Then she gave a short, precise nod and moved on, already back in her report before she had cleared the doorway.
Ethan watched her go and thought: she carries this whole city in her hands and she knows it and she has never once put the report down to ask whether someone should be carrying it differently. He felt the particular ache of watching someone he knew was going to be pushed past breaking point by an organisation that kept handing her more, and he could not yet say anything about it because he was three weeks into his tenure and did not have the standing to speak to the Acting Grand Master about workload distribution without it sounding like exactly what it was.
He added it to the mental list of things he would address when he had the standing. The list was getting long. He was working as fast as the situation permitted, which was not as fast as he wanted, which was the condition he had been operating under for sixteen years and which he had learned, at some point in the last decade, to treat as information rather than frustration.
The story was in motion. The Traveler was somewhere in these streets right now, waking up to Paimon and to Mondstadt and to a quest that would eventually bring him into contact with everyone Ethan needed to be in contact with too, running parallel tracks that would converge in their own time.
He had three dead Knights, a Fatui financial network, a Cavalry Captain who had already noticed him, and an Acting Grand Master who needed someone she could trust in a room with better walls than she currently had.
He had work to do. He went and did it.