A plan had formed at the table, piece by piece, each being choosing the road that fit what they were, and Noah tallied the shape of it. Information from Erwin, wherever he drifted. A map of the enemy's entrenchment from the Usurper. Guidance holding the Paradoxes together. Every road served the same war without a single thread tying it back to him for an enemy to cut.
He glanced at the quiet Eon, who met his eyes and said nothing, because they had already spoken and her path was set. He glanced up at the distant coiled presence of Nereon in the library's high dark, and the leviathan's grief pulsed once in acknowledgment, his own arrangement already made.
Things were coming together. The laid-out paths were clear!
Noah raised his hand, and a glass cup filled with golden liquid settled into it. More cups appeared down the length of the stone table, one before each of them, and even Nereon's vast presence gathered something golden into itself in the dark above.
