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...?"

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