"You are received," the butler says, not aloud, but in the quiet logic of her inner ear. "The Rite of Continuance will now resume."

Eileen steps forward from the base of the stairs, her footfalls quiet against the marble. The room absorbs the sound in that particular way spaces do, when built more to archive than to echo. Deftly she moves forward and walks with the kind of poise that does not ask for stillness, but creates it. Her gaze drifting towards Xozo where she can see the once little wibbler standing in the queue. The girl is steady now, perhaps too much so, like she is trying to look at anywhere other then the stairs, her fingers locked around the folds of her cloak and her feet spaced carefully apart. As if matching an unspoken instruction given to her long ago. Until a fidget in her body betrays her and for just a moment, Xozo finds herself looking to the stairs as if begging to catch a glimpse of the mysterious woman who descended it. But her head is stopped by the figure at the front of her line who silences the motion with a carefully veiled rebuke.

Eileen not noticing the moment lets her gaze linger on the figure at the front of Xozo's que. A noble acting with calm indifferent precision, concluding nearly every thing spoken to it with a wave or a critical stare, forcing the que to fade again and again into obscurity. "Countess Whisperbane." says the butlers voice, directly into her ear. "Would you like me to make an introduction?"

Eileen breaks her gaze from the Countess for she has already seen this kind of figure before. It is not one she has any respect for, for it is a figure that comes from confidence not born from knowing the truth, but from learning how to avoid being asked questions that doubt ones own belief system.

Having made her assessment, she lets her gaze pass through the rest of the ballroom now, reading it the way one might read an old kitchen. half by sight, half by instinct. Courts and their nobles were not unfamiliar to her, everything in every court she had ever been in had been arranged with an intent of place. Not to please persay, but more so to correct the court into whatever shapes was desired of its rulers. Even here she finds, the same tactics, each table sitting angled with just enough curvature to enforce a direction of flow. The chairs, evenly spaced but subtly unequal in height, none wobbly of course, just prepared to different size measurements and even the tablecloths too respect the shape, for they do not hang with freedom. They drape instead like they are trying to live in accordance with precedent.

The nobles as well are caught in it too as they watch without watching. Their eyes never quite settle on her, yet they are drawn to her all the same. She can feel them adjusting their expressions, shifting the cadence of their whispers, attempting to absorb her presence without acknowledging it. It is the behavior of people who have built their lives inside a hierarchy that punishes spontaneous attention and though she does not understand why they opt for deniability she is beginning to understand how best to test her theory.

One of the tables she walks past has a trio of translucent guests whispering just loud enough to hear themselves. Their words do not reach her ears, but she knows their tone. She has heard it before, in council chambers and formal luncheons, in parent teacher meetings and retirement speeches. It is the practiced cadence of individuals who believe tradition is a form of benevolence because it saves them from the effort of engagement.

A waiter steps into her path briefly then, offering a tall glass of something bright and iridescent. It sparkles like rainwater laced with painful memory. Eileen smiles politely but does not touch it, the glass on the serving tray vanishing before she has even finished walking past it.

Her path leads her inward then, toward the central dais. It rises only slightly above the rest of the floor, but its presence is unmistakable. It is not a stage, or a platform, it is far more likely instead a decision point. One that one else dares to approache and it is clear in the way the furniture is angled that no one else has dared too in years. Its black marble surface somehow polished so finely that it reflects nothing directly, just impressions and the outlines of impressions.

Eileen steps onto it.

She does not ask for permission as she does so and the dais accepts her weight not with ceremony, but with a kind inevitability that hushes the room. A vanishing sound folding across the space with settling imposition. Conversations that had survived her approach now quietly dying in the throats of the nobles around her, whose postures adjust again, more visibly this time. Until someone at the edge of the third tier exhales too sharply and regrets it.

For the Eye does not settle on Eileen like she had predicted. It turns instead, just slightly, toward the exhaler who had let his breath escape too loudly. Its attention is not cruel, it is much more clerical instead, an audit of atmosphere. The noble straightens at once of course, eyes wide, the way someone might at the sound of a name spoken from an office down a long hallway. A moment later then, the Eye shifts again back toward the dais, recalibrating not toward a subject but towards a new condition someone has met.

Eileen remains still on the dais, hands folded with ease. She lets her gaze look around the upper tiers of the ballroom. Its patrons looking back at her not with reverence, not even recognition, but with the instinct of learning that their knowledge of control may no longer be as adequate as they had thought.

The dais too, holding her plainly as if she always belonged here. Not by designation, but by fact. In the same way that stone belongs to weight or a tune belongs to breath. Her presence suddenly becoming more than allowed, more then accounted for, as though the architecture had prepared for her without knowing why.

On the far tiers, servants begin to move again. Their trays shimmer with things that glow more than they nourish. Their steps are careful and their eyes never lift. But their rhythm has changed its tune. A kind of posture one adopts when the room's center of gravity has shifted and no one wants to be caught too far from the edge.

The Eye then pauses, its iris narrowing again. The overlays behind it shifts with the grace of a filing system retrieving the right drawer.

A second scan now begins, the pupil taking her shawl into account first, trailing over the soft drape of its weave, noting the thread she repaired one night during a storm with her hands still trembling from holding a frightened child. It scans the soles of her shoes, worn smooth by steadiness. It assesses her breath, slow and deliberate. Her heartbeat, quiet and unchanged.

Then it finds something is does not understand, something ancient, something glowing, something familiar, a connection perhaps to its creator... The overlays twitch... One dissolves completely, another deepens, a third winks out of existence... A recalibration begins, another round of scanning. Several more overlays vanish, the cycle repeating four more times with painful results.

Then, gently, the Eye drifts upward itself as if the scan is complete.

The sound that follows is not an exhale, not truly. It more like an adjustment of posture, the release of held muscle, the creak of old ceremony trying to find its place again. No one announces the end of the scan, but the room treats it like the close of a stanza. Conversation resuming in fragments, cautious and overly mannered. Wine glasses are lifted not for thirst, but for choreography. A single spoon clinks gently against the rim of a saucer, and that is enough to invite other gestures back into motion.

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Yet none of them recover fully. There is no forgetting what just passed overhead and a few of the bolder ones even try to move in her direction.

But not directly, never directly, for that would be improper. Instead, they move like wind that is trying to discuss unusual weather patterns too a gardener equip with a leaf blower. Perhaps they hoped to discuss how continuance was never meant to proceed without a ubiquitous agreement on formal alignment or some other such nonsense Eileen muses.

Yet Eileen remains motionless, careful and examining. She is trying to figure out why they are unnerved by the eyes inability to classify her and why it is so important for them to know the why of it. Even Countess Whisperbane from across the room has set down her goblet and has stopped holding court. Why was any of it so important...

Then just as the Countess takes a measured step forward, a faint crinkling arrives to the side of Eileen, soft as paper warming under a desk lamp. The scroll butler appears, not directly on the dais but instead wedged between her and the gathering interest directed towards her. Its parchment folding limbs stilling the ballroom again but not because of fear as if the butler is a threat. But rather because his presence is a reminder that the ritual itself has not completed itself yet.

The butler bows now more shallow than before, a courtesy not towards Eileen but toward the function she now occupies. "Distinguished Delay," he says without voice, his words sliding quietly into the interior of her hearing. "The Rite awaits indulgence. You are summoned to the Endorsement Room."

He does not touch her and he does not lead. He pivots, weightless, toward a corridor that looks like no one else has looked at it before in generations, wherein he waits. Not for her decision, but her presence as if to say she is already permitted and that the function of the form now must be satisfied.

She steps off the dais as easily as one rises from a garden bench. The Eye does not follow and the Countess does not advance. And in the hush left behind, everyone resumes their practiced conversations, louder this time, as though to prove they had not been watching at all.

The corridor accepts her with a breath that is not quite inhalation, not quite anticipation, but something gentler, like a well used cushion adjusting to a familiar shape. The sconces along the wall burn with steady light, their flames shaped like stylized ink droplets suspended mid signature. The floor beneath her feet has no echo, only texture, like parchment that has been walked before and chosen to remember it softly.

Eileen walks without hurry. The scroll butler moving ahead of her at a fixed pace, neither urging nor waiting. His presence no longer seems as crisp as it did on the dais. Instead here in this narrowing hallway, it feels more like he is an extension of the corridor itself. His parchment edges fluttering slightly as he turns a corner, and the air shifts with him when the space narrows again.

The sconces responding too with a curve, shaped like blooming ledgers instead of pens, each one unfolding itself gently along the edges as if confessing the faintest of secrets. A subtle scent floating up from the corridor then, a blend of plum and pressed flowers mixed with the powder of aged ink. It is the fragrance of regulation, a fragrance used to remind paper of its duties and citizens of their place.

To her left, a portrait hangs in solitary pride. It shows a woman in a clean silhouette, standing with her head slightly turned, posture exact. She wears only a pair of impossibly precise heels, her stance somewhere between grace and exhaustion. Her face is not blank, but overwritten with an open ledger, the columns neat, the headings unreadable, the margins filled with annotations no one has ever spoken aloud. Eileen does not pause to view it though, for it feels like the portrait was created in sorrow.

At the end of the hall, Eileen finds a door that does not wait for her to reach it, it simply opens. There is no dramatic flair, no sound of grandeur, just the soft whisper of a correction being made to a document that knew better then to speak up. Beyond the doors lay the salon.

It is not grand like the last one that Xozo had followed her into. It is not even all that large by regular room standards. But it is lush in its choices and deliberate in its mood. The room is shaped like a memory folded over itself, furnished like a place built for three people to argue gently and for only one to be heard. At the center sits a single proper chair, flanked by two others that do not quite match. A table rests in front, too wide for three teacups and a kettle but far too small for consensus.

The scroll butler glides her to the table and folds himself flat, spreading across its surface like a cloth that knows the script. He unfurls with reverence, paper smoothing itself without creases or resistance. Even as a paper tablecloth, his words still whisper into her ear. "Please be seated, Distinguished Delay. The Endorsement for Continuance cannot proceed until the rites have been properly indulged."

Eileen sits without hesitation, the chair accepting her without creak or ceremony. In front of her the paper tablecloth butler flattens itself further, taking on the quality of a table runner, though its fibers ripple faintly with some unspoken anticipation.

Then from above and without fanfare, a lacquered tray crashes into existence and while its landing is not cushioned, wobbling dangerously close to a catastrophe, it makes no sound on impact. Only a small gleam of light follows it down, like an afterthought and when it brushes the silver dome protecting it, it makes the dome vanish. On the tray sit five decanters, arranged in a crescent. Each is filled with a liquid that seems to resist classification. One glows faintly with a color that suggests gold but isn't. Another is opaque, a deep rose that seems to shift in intensity depending on how long it is viewed. The others are stranger still, clouded white with a mineral shimmer, a blue so pale it might as well be the absence of sky, and the last, black is sealed with a cork that looks older than the tray itself.

Beside them sits a single teacup. It is delicate, but its proportions are wrong. The handle is placed slightly too high. The curve of the rim is uneven, but not from damage for it feels like a craftsmen tried recreating it from what it read in a poem. The teacup has a saucer too which is placed just beneath and it leans the teacup to one side with quiet defiance.

A silver ladle rests beside the cup, its handle, gently curved, and its bowl like end shaped with the careful elegance of forgotten names. It hums faintly too, not in pitch, but in presence. As if it recognizes the ceremony but not the guest and yet still is trying to make the best of it.

Beneath the ladle lies a folded note. Eileen picks it up between two fingers and reads the handwritten script, simple and precise:

Continuance No. 11: Compose a Flavor Appropriate to Your Weight. Too little, and you will not resonate. Too much, and you may not be permitted to remain. Stir only once.

She reads it once, then again. Then folds it closed and slides it beneath the tray, the same way one files a letter that does not require a reply.

She does not hesitate though. Her hand move first to the pale gold decanter. She lifts it, gives it a slow swirl. The liquid clinging to the sides like honey. She nods, "Warmth," she says, as though confirming the address of an old acquaintance. She pours a shallow measure into the cup, no more, no less.

The rose-colored vial is next. She uncorks it, inhales, and lets out a small breath. "Nostalgia," she murmurs, "but anxious, unsettled, not quite remorseful, a curious little thing." Two drops she adds to the teacup.

Then the white liquid. She does not pour it. Instead she dips a finger into it and rubs it along her gums. Her face does not change, but she sets aside the notion of adding it with the others. Using the same finger, she then dips it back into the vial and traces the rim of the teacup. A shimmer of frost follows, delicate but incomplete.

The blue vial follows. She tilts it, watches the weightlessness of it swirl. It feels like dusk and also nearly nothing at all. She almost pours it in too but then thinks better of it. She adds it to the saucer holding the teacup instead, a spill in advance.

Then she lifts the final decanter, it feels heavy in her hand. More with consequence then threat and unlike with the others she does not feel the need to uncork it or even let it announce itself. She decides then to hold it for a longer breath before then letting it fall to the floor.

The sound is not a shatter, it is paper tearing in a room where no one speaks. The black liquid explodes outward but does not stain anything for it evaporates upon contact with the air.

Eileen then takes the ladle. She stirs once, clockwise.

The butler voice speaks again inside her thoughts. "Elegantly subversive. Properly unresolved. We find this acceptable."

Unfazed, Eileen finds the tea in front of her does not change. But the room does. "I would be delighted to meet you again, Distinguished Delay. Whenin of course you find yourself trapped on the other side. Here is a parting gift for your memories."

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