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The moment his palm connected with THE Bellum Dreamstone, something vast moved through him.For a fraction of an instant that stretched into something longer inside his Hadean Mind, he lost the thread of his other self. The connection between his bodies flickered at the edges as the Dreamstone delivered something too grand for the ordinary channel between his distributed consciousness to carry.
The foundational truth of THE Bellum Cause did not arrive as information. It arrived as recognition, the specific recognition of a being who had always known this truth in his bones and had simply been waiting for existence to confirm it with the appropriate vocabulary.
Then the channel stabilized, and existence continued flowing through his other body even though be couldn’t tell what was happening with it!
---
On the Vessel.
Sororis Prima Evangelina turned toward Ubergulden Adelheid.
"We will be arriving at a Veiled Causal Site shortly. Get settled. Have a talk with your Custos. He is Luxuria, and yet he has been looking into my eyes and your brother’s eyes and speaking to us as though there is no difference between him and us. Your Lineage is potent enough to have influenced him and overwritten his engineering."
She paused briefly.
"I can overlook this due to the grander causes at play. The others may not. Be ready."
She disappeared alongside the other Sororis Primas, this section of the vessel’s minimal interior feeling considerably larger in their absence.
Dietrich remained.
He stood looking at Noah coldly. His Observable Force gathered to him in the silence, the ambient currents in the vessel pressing toward him with their natural deference.
"You are standing in the light of my house."
His voice carried no heat. Just the flat declarative cadence of someone stating the obvious.
"You are a guest at a table you didn’t set, eating meat you didn’t hunt. Once, eons ago, there was a light. A flickering, desperate thing that we deigned to hold. It started to believe the brilliance was its own, forgetting it was merely the wick and we were the oil. It thought it could burn without the lamp. It thought it could dictate the darkness."
He tilted his head slightly.
"We didn’t blow it out. We didn’t have to. We simply walked out of the room. We withdrew the recognition. We took back the context that gave it form. Now, it is not even a memory. It is a nothing in an existence of somethings."
His pupilless golden eyes held steady.
"Do not make us walk away, boy. Because our attention is the only thing keeping you from the void."
WAA!
He disappeared.
---
Only Noah and Ubergulden Adelheid remained.
Noah turned to look at her, and she locked her gaze onto him.
He waved his hand.
The river of brilliance visibly connecting him and Adelheid dissolved, the luminescent bond that had been sustaining the Infinite Existential Empowerment fading back into the ambient Infinity of the vessel without fanfare.
"I dislike your brother."
He said this calmly, feeling the area of his neck where that particular Gilded One had grasped him with such confident certainty earlier.
Ubergulden Adelheid moved toward him, stopping a few inches away, and looked him over with the careful attention of someone whose eyes were doing the work of instruments. Up. Down. The specific survey of a being cataloguing a discrepancy between what she expected and what she was observing!
"He dislikes you too. But...how are you matching and even exceeding the light of Luxuria right now? Even when you are not a..."
She did not finish the implied question.
"Did Sororis Prima Prabhavati have the power to grant you such a terrifying change?"
Noah laughed.
It came out genuine rather than performed, the specific amusement of a being who had just been reminded of something he had genuinely forgotten to mention.
"No. This is my own power." He looked at her with the mild amusement.
"You spoke to me so much about the gap between you and I and how I could not cross it that I forgot to mention the moment I already crossed it. Even if I am not the same lifeform as you, I have no trouble exhibiting power just like you. If not grander."
Her expression did not shift. But something behind it recalibrated.
"In fact," he continued, "I actually wanted to test exactly how powerful I am relative to a member of the Royal House. Just with my Luxuria existence. I want to see if it can affect someone like you."
...!
Adelheid looked at him in silence for a few seconds.
Then she shook her head.
"You seem to have forgotten the vast gulf between us since I last expressed it." She tilted her head slightly. "Go ahead, my Custos. It would also be useful for me to get an updated gauge of your power, to know what I am actually working with."
...!
Noah considered where his power currently stood.
He disliked comparing himself to Vakochev’s framework more with each passing day, disliked the way the framework assumed its own comprehensiveness, disliked how it presented its tiers as fixed destinations rather than arbitrary waypoints someone had chosen to mark on a road that extended well beyond their final measurement. He had his own Scales. He was on his own path.
But there was still merit in knowing where his power fell relative to a Paleozoic Gilded One of the Royal Houses, if only to calibrate what he was working with in this place. And beyond the practical calculation, if he was being honest with himself, which he generally preferred to be, he simply enjoyed doing things he was not supposed to be capable of.
There was a specific satisfaction in it that none of his grander strategic victories quite replicated. The small personal violations of fixed expectations!
He let Quintessential Indulgence flow outward from his Absolute Luxuria Ego, the passive radiation sharpening into focus, and alongside it he activated THE Apotheosis of the Wanton, allowing his desire to press itself gently into the local arrangement of reality, suggesting a direction without commanding one.
Then he looked at Adelheid directly and spoke.
"We do not know each other well. But you will come to know me soon enough."
"Most men seek the fire of protection. They huddle and pray the cold forgets them. I am not those men. I have walked into the storm because the storm told me I could not, and I then become the storm. If... all of existence stands on one side of the line and I stand on the other, existence must move. I will not."
He took a slow step toward her.
"I have seen many things fall by my own hands. It changes nothing. I have my Way. My Civilization. The ground I choose to die on is chosen. My dream is set, and I will do anything to achieve it."
A pause.
"Anything."
BOOM!
He moved toward her, closing the remaining distance, and lifted her chin upward with one hand as he was taller, so that they were separated by inches rather than by the width of a conversation.
The Infinity on his breath washed across her face in a warm multicolored current that carried the full density of Nearu Absolute Infinity at the proximity, and he looked at the smooth curve of her jaw and the unbroken gold of her eyes.
She did not blink.
She did not step back or produce any of the responses that his Quintessential Indulgence might generate in beings without sufficient Ego density to hold their own against its broadcast.
She simply looked at him with the composed attention she had brought to every prior exchange, and then, shockingly, she moved closer rather than away, her cheek grazing his as she turned her head and brought her lips to his ear.
"We shall come to know one another soon enough." Her voice was a murmur, private and precise.
"But understand that this unfolding will happen on my terms, and no other’s. I have carried a dream since the moment I first looked upon my people and saw it was out of reach. An impossibility the day I conceived it. Yet I will see it through. Whether I move toward that horizon with a bonded Custos at my side or stand utterly alone, my path also remains set. You will either join my path or..."
She began to pull back.
...!
Noah turned his head.
She was pulling back. He turned. Their noses arrived at an inch of each other’s, and between them, in that inch of space, boundless Infinity began to dance with the patient inevitability of substance that had been building toward this particular configuration for longer than the conversation had been aware of.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
"Or what?"
HUUM!
The Infinity between them buzzed, the ambient current shifting!
BOOM!
The Infinite Existential Empowerment bloomed between them again without either of them having reached for it deliberately, the rivers of Infinity surging along the bond with the urgency of a connection that had been suppressed for the last several seconds and was now reasserting itself with interest! The bond was like an attractive force that pulled their two existences towards each other!
He closed the final inch.
The instant their lips connected, his Nearu Absolute Infinity poured into her in a wordless torrent, the full density of what he carried flowing through the contact point with the force of a tide that had been waiting for the channel to open, and he put his hands around her back and drew her closer with the calm authority of a being who had decided on a course of action and was executing it without hesitation!
Ubergulden Adelheid raised her hand.
She snapped her fingers once, and a golden bubble expanded around both of them, the Observable Force of her Gilded engineering containing the storm of Infinity that was currently threatening to make itself visible to the broader vessel around them, sealing the turbulence inside a private sphere where only the two of them would register what was occurring!
After a brief hesitation...
She leaned in, and Observable Force erupted between them like a compressed tide finally released, her power meeting his with the specific quality of a being who had decided not to lose and was committing to that decision with everything she had available.
The golden bubble held around them, confining the storm.
Outside it, the pale gold walls of the Ubergulden vessel remained perfectly undisturbed!