The tiered seating held ten Shadow Novices and the specific quality of ten beings who had arrived at a threshold simultaneously without any of them having chosen to arrive there together .
The face was still there .
That was the first thing each of them registered independently — that the interval between Doctor entering the amphitheater and the current moment had not changed what was pinned to the Shadow Beast's form . The features still legible . The preservation process Doctor had applied producing exactly the result it had been designed to produce . The face not deteriorating under the amphitheater's specific light . Present in the same quality it had been present in when the recognition moved through the tiered seating at different speeds .
The ten Shadow Novices occupied the tiered seating with the specific internal quality of each of them absorbing the same information through ten different registers .
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Virex closed his fist .
