High above the apex platform, beneath the cavernous vault of the Board ceiling, the world-size surveillance grid was entering its end-post death throes.
For thirty thousand years, the grand ceiling dome had not been made of stone or bronze. It had been a huge, ball-shaped array of thousands of six-sided crystal lenses, each one timed together with a star-pattern of high-sky Precursor monitoring satellites and underground ley-line sensor nodes.
Across these shimmering crystal-clear displays, the Twelve Archons had watched the mortal world like lords overlooking an ant colony.
They had watched the harvest yields in the Azure River Basin, calculating royal grain taxes down to the single bushel. They had monitored the birth of every mortal child who possessed a spiritual root, cataloging their names in the Great Ledger so their life-force could be harvested upon their ascension. And a secret school of natural philosophy or clockwork building dared emerge among the common folk. Each time, the surveillance grid had highlighted the village in crimson light, dispatching heavenly tribulations to burn the offending scholars into ash before their ideas could spread.
It was the omniscient, all-seeing eye of heaven.
The grid was divided into nine office quadrants, mapping the entirety of mortal great realm across three oceans and six million square leagues of mountain, forest, and desert. Each side had its own glowing amber border, pulsing with high-hum tracking data that reported the heat, air pressure, population count, and tax rule-following of every mortal settlement on the surface.
