Dame Seraphine answered Noah’s strike with something that was not an Intent at all!

Her existence went hazy. The clean lines of her blurred and softened until she stopped reading as a single fixed being and became something the eye could not quite hold, something that existed in more places than the one she stood in, and into that softness Noah’s Destruere poured.

HUUM!

The endless converging weight of the mirror-parallel Terminal Observable Existences, the whole of his understanding of the letter, the no he had spoken against everything that said yes, all of it entered her skin and simply... stopped being.

She did not block it and nor did she turn it aside. She drank it, drew it through herself the way the void drew light, and gave back nothing at all.

His entire attack vanished into her and was gone, and the chamber of existence held still around the absence of it!

WAP!

Then the moment broke, and everything came loose at once. The Leaf-Vessel steadied beneath their feet. The Undefined Gaps resumed their black streaming past the obsidian-gold edges of the leaf. The row of mirror-existences behind Noah thinned and faded back into the dark they had come from.

His eyes shone.

|You have glimpsed the power of a Mesozoic Scale being, briefly. The mechanism appeared to draw your attack into her existence and dissolve it entirely rather than block or deflect it. No true details could be discerned. The gap between your perception and her actual capability remains too large to read.|

He read it and let it settle, and what stayed with him was not the failure to discern her power. It was the casual completeness of how she had handled his!

He had put a great deal into that swing. She had absorbed it the way a person absorbs a thrown crumb, without breaking stride, without changing expression, and then she had wiped the slate clean and let the vessel sail on. That was the gap between the Fourth Scale and the Fifth, drawn for him in a single unhurried gesture!

He looked over and found sweat standing on Sir William’s forehead.

Noah gave a light cough. "Apologies," he said. "I was in a bit of a trance. I may have taken the demonstration somewhat further than the demonstration required."

...!

Dame Seraphine shook her head slowly, her eyes shining, and said nothing yet. Whatever she was thinking, she was keeping it with her.

Botswana broke the quiet with a laugh of open incredulity. The scarred titan crossed the deck of the leaf toward him, and the permanent grim patience that hung on him faded.

"Brother," he said, "I had no idea you were carrying that around. An Echo of the Tongue." He shook his great head.

" An Echo does not bloom on a first grasp. It does not bloom on a thousandth grasp. It comes from a being who has spoken a letter of THE Primordial Tongue so many times, across so many ages, that their understanding of it grows a body and stands behind them. So how many years, exactly? How long have you been speaking, paired with whatever strange thing you are that you won’t tell us about, to manage that on your first attempt?"

How many years.

Noah’s eyes shone, and he kept the truth where it belonged. It had been a bit over a day?

A day, against the ages Botswana was imagining!

"Long enough," he said, and shook his head.

"Bahaha. Fine, fine, keep your secrets! Come. You scared poor William half to death back there, the man hasn’t sweated in an age. So settle the wager for the lot of us. Whose explanation of Destruere did the most for you...?"

The titan was friendly beneath all the violence he carried.

Noah traded words with the Swords of Existence, answered their questions, asked a few of his own, and somewhere in the middle of it he called Seo-yeon over. She came at once and jumped up onto his shoulder, settling there with her legs swinging, watching the strange powerful beings her Mister Noah had fallen in with as she took in everything.

Dame Seraphine kept her eyes on him through all of it, turning something over behind that shining composure, before she finally looked away and gazed out into the Gaps.

The Source Leaf-Vessel answered her attention, shooting forward ever faster, carrying the whole party deeper toward THE Arkethys Observable Existence.

It was a strange thing for Noah. He spent the bulk of his existence as a tyrant and a planner, a being who moved a dozen bodies across a dozen fronts and trusted almost no one with the seams between them.

The simple act of standing on a leaf cut from an impossible tree, bantering with a party of Swords of Existence who treated him as one of their own, was a change of pace he had not expected to enjoy.

And even as he stood there listening at something Botswana said, part of him turned away, toward another of his bodies, far from the leaf and the Gaps and the easy company.

---

In THE Infiniverse.

One body stood in THE Undefined Gaps with the weight of two Observable Existences crushing down on it, skin splitting and bones fracturing in an endless rhythm before the radiant flames of Persevere and Exelissomai surged up from his heart and made each ruined thing grander than it had been a breath before.

That body suffered. It was supposed to suffer!

This body was petting a dog.

Skoll leaned his whole massive frame into Noah’s hand, tail sweeping the empty space behind him with tremendous and uncomplicated joy, and Noah obliged the goodest boy ever.

They stood together in a realm that belonged to THE Prime Cause of Harvest, deep within THE Infiniverse.

The herbs grew straight out of space here. Crimson and gold Infinite Sacred Herbs rose from nothing, their roots reaching down not into soil but into the invisible strings and standing waves of the surrounding void, threading themselves into the Prime Cause of Harvest that saturated the region and drinking from it the way roots elsewhere drank water.

They blazed faintly, the crimson and the gold of them burning against the dark, and they stretched across dozens of plots that ran on and on without any horizon to stop them, an entire farm of cultivated power hanging suspended in the body of an Observable Existence.

Ruination stood beside him as her illusory self, a churning weave of Infinity lines. THE Infiniverse stood at his other side in her bejeweled multicolored dress, her form now threaded faintly with obsidian where the Primordial Source had taken root in her since she had drawn it into herself.

This body lived here, more or less. It was the one that stayed and talked, the one that sat with the two beings closest to the heart of everything he was building and worked through the ever-shifting weavings of existence around them, where to move, what to grow, how to plan. And right now, the plan on Noah’s mind was Arkethys.

"This supposedly anomalous Observable Existence," he said, looking out across the endless plots, "with Infinite Lifeforms and Source Lifeforms killing each other over it for a million years, over a resource that produces Fourth Scale entities, elevates the rarity of an Intent, and can even help promote beings toward the Fifth Scale. It has started me thinking about all the different kinds of Observable Existences out there. The ones built for war, the ones built for knowledge, and now one that, by some accident of its malformed birth, grows the single best progression material either side has ever found." He turned to the two of them.

"And it made me ask a question. What prevents us from steering your evolution toward something similar to Arkethys?"

HUUM!