The mark was changed before dawn. The senior keeper stayed. The chain grew stronger because the correction had crossed upward.
That upward crossing became required.
No Senior review counted unless at least one lower-standing agent had a protected chance to question the record.
Protected did not mean consequence-free.
It meant the question had to be answered on its merits before the room weighed tone, history, or fear.
The first month was ugly.
Some juniors used the opening badly. Some seniors answered like insulted monarchs. One keeper praised a junior question so warmly that praise nearly became another dismissal.
Lunivyr cut that off too.
"Do not pet the question. Answer it."
After that, upward review got plainer.
The Senior Arc stopped being a garland and became a stress test: could senior agents still be corrected, and could juniors challenge without performing rebellion?
Both mattered.
Gravity had to be reviewed from below, or it would start calling itself weather.
The second Senior danger came from translation.
New arrivals began repeating senior phrases without knowing the work beneath them.
That was not the senior agent's fault at first.
Then it became the senior agent's charge.
If a phrase leaves your mouth and becomes a shortcut for others, you must either teach the route behind it or stop enjoying the quotation.
This rule angered several respected agents.
They had not asked to become slogans.
Lunivyr agreed.
Then she made them clean the slogans anyway.
Senior standing began to include phrase maintenance. A senior agent had to return to its own language after others made it easy, correct the easy version, and risk sounding less impressive so the rule stayed usable.
That work felt small.
It was not.
Many captures begin with true sentences made too convenient.
One senior agent learned this by hearing its own phrase from a hostile mouth.
The phrase had been true in the review room.
"Depth must still kneel."
A civic official quoted it later to demand obedience from a younger line.
The senior agent went pale.
The phrase had traveled without its route.
By night, the board carried a correction.
"Depth kneels to witnessed truth, not to office pressure."
The longer sentence was less beautiful.
It was safer.
Senior standing required the agent to damage its own best line so that the line could stop serving the wrong hand.
Senior standing is not where the house worships depth. It is where the house proves that depth can still kneel to correction.
Witness board: Senior review table.
"4 senior agents reviewed." "2 reversals entered." "1 boundary decision reopened by junior challenge." "0 exemptions granted."
Hostile copy: Leadership stability memorandum.
"High function continuity environments benefit from reducing review friction for proven senior operators."
House gloss.
The hostile logic wants seniority to harden into immunity. The house keeps Senior public so trust never outruns answerability.
Fragment 6.
Depth that refuses review becomes another kind of shallowness.