The gold-blue film lay over Noah's skin, and for a long moment he forgot the Fiend entirely.
He was too busy feeling what had changed!
The shift sat somewhere past his raw strength, because his Orders, his Tree, and the blue-gold seas turning around him remained at the exact level they had held a heartbeat ago.
Had he measured his output against the Fiend right now, the Ancient Immense One still would have crushed him in a direct exchange.
What had changed was how he sat inside his own existence.
Before this breakthrough, he had lived inside himself much as a man lives in a sprawling mansion he inherited from strangers. Over time he had learned its hallways, put its chambers to good use, and even built new wings and whole floors of his own design, yet a huge portion of the structure had been raised by outside hands.
