He could not sense them through their essence.
That was the specific strangeness of the read. Every living thing produced essence in a way that his senses could detect. Every constructed thing that had essence built into its function produced it too, in a different quality but still detectable. The golems produced something — the weight in the ambient field that gave him their grade — but the specific character of it, the signature that would have told him what they were, was absent.
As if the essence moving through them was enclosed.
Contained inside the stone in a way that the stone's surface did not allow to pass outward for detection.
He had not sensed them as golems. He had sensed them as rocks with unusual ambient weight.
Which was, from the Ancient Ones' perspective, probably the design.
