The chamber waited.
It had that quality. Old rooms that had held significant conversations for long enough developed it, the specific patience of a space that had seen enough outcomes to stop being anxious about any particular one. Whatever was about to happen had happened here before, in some form, and the room had absorbed it and continued.
Valerian watched Lavinia Morgan stand.
She did it the way she did everything he'd observed her do this morning. Without performance. The motion of someone who had decided to stand and was now standing, no transition required.
She was not old in the way Braham was old, or Eldred. Where those two carried centuries like weather that had shaped them gradually, Lavinia carried hers differently. Compressed. The specific density of someone who had moved faster than the people around her for long enough that she'd arrived at a level of age and power that the others had simply accumulated over more time.
