He knew their faces now in the way that the preservation register gave you faces — not visual images, the complete structural fact of what they were. The first had built its fable architecture from the accumulated narrative weight of things hidden and denied and controlled, centuries of being the entity behind the curtain that mortals couldn't see. The second carried the weight of order enforced across long timelines, the slow patient compression of anything that grew too large for the framework it was assigned. The third was older than both, its fable density built from the earliest versions of the story of what happened to things that rose above their designated place.
Ancien, all three. Their presence in the native-level space carried a weight that the standard floor architecture bent around rather than absorbed.
They looked at him.
He looked at them.
