Chapter 5413: Estuary! III
So if he believed that, then it was time to raise his value and leverage his position. He could not simply blurt out that he believed two beings in this hall were their enemies. But he could give her something else. He could answer the question she had told him not to answer and more, the one about whether he had achieved the fusion, and let that revelation and others reset how this entire gathering weighed him. He had meant to stay quiet and small. It seemed he could not afford to be either.
And just as he prepared to reveal his answer to the question she had withdrawn...
BOOM!
His existence almost collapsed in on itself!
Something broke, and then reformed, and all of him began to feel a sensation without precedent, a deep structural shifting at a level beneath his Scales and his Causes and his Intent. Information flooded into him as it happened, and above him, in the isolated stretched Dimension of Existence he shared with THE Queen Regnant, a blue singularity erupted over his head. Its immensity pressed outward, and Noah felt it at once, felt that it was grander than THE Genesis Tesseract had been, grander than anything that had come out of him so far!
HUUUM!
As it formed, the information poured in.
|Threshold reached. A sufficient volume of Osmontian Source Infinity now saturates your existence. The fusion has settled deep enough that your distinction as a True Lifeform is no longer forming. It is clarifying. What you are is beginning to declare itself. But what you are is too grand. Advancement for you is a million times harder than advancement for others. Your status as a True Lifeform moves to rectify this. Your Osmontian Source Infinity moves to rectify this.|
|As your Osmontian Source Infinity saturates you, an inherent quality of your existence is surfacing. It does not come from your cultivation, your Scales, your Causes, or your Intent. It comes from beneath all of them, from something your fused authority has unlocked access to. You did not earn this through any deed. You qualified for it by becoming what you are. A True Lifeform of fused authority is, by its nature, something that has its own unique qualities.|
|Inherent characteristic unlocked: THE Devouring Estuary.|
|Your existence has gained an inherent, always-present quality with no activation cost and no upkeep. Existence, in your vicinity, perpetually bleeds toward you. Infinity, Primordial Source, ambient existential substance, the loose unclaimed essence of any domain you occupy, all of it drifts into your existence on its own, the way water finds the lowest point and the way an estuary draws every river to the sea. You do not reach for it. It comes. It has always, since the moment of this unlocking, been coming.|
|This is distinct from THE Tide That Owes Nothing and from your Foundations. Those are expressions of your Intent and your Egos. This is older. This is your own heritage. It operates beneath your Intent, at the level of what your bloodline simply is, and it cannot be switched off.|
|Property: The intake scales with the richness of your surroundings. In a barren stretch of THE Undefined Gaps, the bleed is a trickle. Within an Observable Existence, a saturated domain, THE Source Lands, THE Infinite Carcosa, or any place dense with Infinity and Primordial Source, the bleed becomes a flood. The grander the place you stand in, the faster you grow simply by standing in it.|
|Property: The intake accelerates as you grow. The larger your existence becomes, the wider the estuary’s mouth, the more it draws, the faster it fills you, which makes you larger still. Your lineage’s gift is not a fixed faucet. It is a widening river that feeds its own widening. Left unchecked across time, the rate of your growth from this trait alone will compound without a known ceiling.|
|Property: What bleeds into you is not merely stored. It arrives already aligned to your existence, your Causes, your Intent, requiring no refinement to integrate, because the lineage that grants this trait does not gather essence the way lesser beings gather it. It claims essence. What enters THE Devouring Estuary stops being its own thing and becomes yours, quietly and completely, the instant it crosses into you.|
|Assessment: This characteristic makes you an existence that grows richer the longer it exists and the grander the company it keeps. You no longer only advance through effort, adversity, giving, and consumption. You now advance, perpetually and inherently, simply by being, and by being near grandeur. The clearer your distinction as a True Lifeform becomes, the more of this inheritance will surface. This is the first trait. It is not the last.|
|THE Estuary Star is forming.|
BOOM!
Above his head, the singularity took shape.
It resolved into a nine-pointed star, but not the clean dark crossguard of THE Loyal Reach. This was blazing, and fleshy, and the nine points wriggled as though each were made of tentacles, slow and wet and writhing, a star that breathed! And at its very center, an eye opened!
HUUUM!
The eye was wrong in the way the oldest things are wrong. Its pupil formed a spinning lemniscate, a sideways figure-eight turning slowly within itself, the symbol of the infinite rendered as something that watched. It felt foreign. It felt cold, and old, and ancient past the framing of the current age, a thing that did not belong to Noah’s time or anyone’s time, a characteristic surfacing out of a depth that predated everything around it. And the moment the eye opened, all of the surrounding existence in the stretched instant began to bleed toward it, the loose substance of the carved-out dimension drifting upward into the lemniscate pupil, claimed, taken, made his!
WAA!
THE Queen Regnant’s tentacular body fluctuated.
It rose from the throne, the hundreds of glistening trunks beneath her shifting and squelching, her immensity unfolding as she lifted herself toward him, the writhing mask of her head focused entirely on the breathing star and its watching eye. And her sweet voice, for the first time, carried grace and immensity underneath the sweetness that had not been there before.
Her figure was brilliant! Her power leaked out slightly as it was overwhelming! Her regality, even though her tentacles may not be everyone’s taste...her regality was magisterial!
"You," she said, the tentacles around her aperture pulling tight. "You hold the Inheritance of those that are True?"
...!
WAA!
