She continued.
"I will arrange for you to remain with Seraphine. A team will be built around you. And to hone your Intent further, I will grant you access to THE Effluvium Sanctum. Another unique lifeform achieved something akin to a Primordial Intent there only recently as I may ask the other Guiders to bring them into the fold of this forming party.THE Effluvium Sanctum is a good place to become sharper, and you are in need of sharpening before the thing you have antagonized turns its full attention your way."
Her voice was soft as Noah found that THE Queen Regnant was not at all what he had expected the ruler of the Swords to be. He had braced for the kind of being that pressed on lessers to remind them of their place. Instead there was this. Caution, and care, and something that almost resembled genuine concern!
He nodded, and her fleshy tentacles pulsed, and she spoke once more.
"Based on my intuition," she said, "I want to ask. Did you...achieve it?" A pause, the tendrils stilling.
...!
"Actually. No. Do not answer that."
Did he achieve it?
Noah understood the question underneath the question. She was asking whether he had successfully fused Infinity and THE Primordial Source. Whether the resonance her own near-fused existence had felt off his Osmontian Source Infinity was what she suspected it was. Whether he had done, young and new and freshly sworn, the thing that many struggled to do, and what THE Sealed One did eons ago!
He remained silent. He neither confirmed nor denied. And she had already withdrawn the question herself, which told him she understood exactly what his silence meant and had decided not to make him say it aloud.
The fleshy tentacles of THE Queen Regnant shook, and she finished.
"Trust those around you," she said. "And also, do not. I know it is a contradiction. Hold it anyway, the way you seem to hold a great many contradictions. Ultimately, your power is your only true shield, the one thing no follower can fake their way past. THE Followers of THE Sealed One are many, scattered through the Carcosa and the Source Lands and everywhere between, and you will never know who is who until the moment they choose to reveal themselves. So we watch. And we prepare. It is all anyone has ever been able to do against him."
And as THE Queen Regnant said all of this, Noah’s existence had continued its normal weavings beneath the conversation, his Foundations running quietly the way they always did, and at this moment, something finally triggered.
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has been triggered. You have given your knowledge and your information, officially, in a pivotal weaving of existence, to a powerful lifeform and the gathering around her. The Tide moves to deliver your appropriate reward, because no effort of yours goes unrewarded, and the giving of pivotal information is an effort of consequence. Your Intent and your Osmontian Source Infinity move to affirm the return.|
|Reward delivered: a Record of Information. From among those gathered in THE Hall of Swords, two are hiddenly carrying the designation that opposes your existence. Two are THE Followers of THE Sealed One. This was the only information THE Tide That Owes Nothing was able to recover. Their specific identities are shielded beyond the Tide’s reach.|

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