By the middle decades of the twentieth century, the surviving ancient powers surrounding Crestfall had reached a shared realization independently: modern civilization had become too large, too interconnected, too informationally dense, and too psychologically unstable for older forms of immortal visibility to survive safely any longer.

The age of hidden courts had ended.

The age of hidden infrastructure had begun.

Earlier centuries still allowed immortals to move through society as patrons, nobles, scholars, clergy, financiers, or secretive rulers operating beneath fragmented systems. Modernity changed the equation entirely. Industrialization, mass media, surveillance, war, telecommunications, bureaucracy, and rapidly expanding scientific culture made sustained direct influence increasingly dangerous even for the oldest survivors.

Humanity now observed itself too aggressively.

Dalethia understood the transition earliest and most completely. The completion of Las Dueñas and the growing complexity of Crestfall itself convinced her that civilization no longer required visible shepherding in the older sense. Humanity had become self-propelling. Dangerous. Creative. Terrifyingly productive.

She no longer believed direct rule was even possible.

Her appearances in public life became exceptionally rare. Most political influence shifted indirectly through institutions, inherited relationships, carefully cultivated social gravity, and the invisible architecture of Crestfall itself. To most residents, Dalethia became local myth more than living figure: the impossible woman at the estate above the city who might still exist, might not, and was better left uninvestigated regardless.

Las Dueñas became her world.

The rest of the surviving ancients adapted differently. Sun-Hee withdrew almost completely beneath Crestfall, becoming increasingly associated with hidden infrastructure, underground systems, biological study, and the invisible machinery supporting the city's deeper equilibrium. Her existence shifted from social actor into urban myth among those who knew enough to fear such myths.

Elizabeth retreated into near-total silence alongside Las Dueñas itself.

Aniyya remained the most externally active, though even she increasingly preferred operating through commerce, finance, private holdings, shell identities, and later corporate structures rather than direct personal influence. The modern world suited her adaptability more naturally than the others.

But even Aniyya began appearing less frequently over time.

Humanity interpreted this withdrawal as triumph. Superstition faded. Rationalism expanded. The old monsters disappeared into fiction, folklore, conspiracy theory, and entertainment. Most people genuinely believed the modern world had finally escaped the age of myth.

In some ways, they were correct.

The surviving ancients no longer ruled humanity in any traditional sense. They no longer shaped nations openly, manipulated religions directly, or maintained supernatural courts visible enough to govern civilization from behind the curtain. Humanity truly had inherited history.

The problem was that humanity inherited it atop an unstable foundation.

Beneath Crestfall, the Wound continued adapting to the modern world alongside the city itself. The pressure became denser, subtler, more psychological, and increasingly entangled with modern human systems: anxiety, alienation, loneliness, information overload, industrial trauma, urban isolation, ambition, and endless emotional noise feeding downward into the fracture beneath the city.

The ancients withdrew partly because they understood something humanity did not.

The world had not become safer.

It had simply become too complicated for people to recognize what still lived inside it.