The individual who stepped forward from the present's side was not from any unit Varek had assigned to this position.
She had not seen Instructor Bael Mourne in eleven years, which was the last time he had been officially present at any location the present's organizational record acknowledged him as attending. He looked the same as she remembered.
His profession was Arbiter, built from the human perception of judgment not as opinion but as the act of determining what something was genuinely worth, the precise assessment of value that had no room for sentiment or error and that carried weight precisely because it was final. His concept was weight, the structural principle that everything existing in the present had a cost commensurate with its significance, a real demand it made on the organizing logic of the space it occupied.
