Noah touched his chest.
He did it without thinking, as a man touches the place where something has changed inside him, and the moment his fingers rested over the center of himself, he felt it.
A tree!
It stood inside his existence, where his Root had always been, grown past anything a Root could be. A trunk of blue-gold light rose up out of the deepest place in him, broad and straight and huming, and it went up. And up!
And up, past the reach of his gold eyes and his Dream and his Infinity, climbing into an endless height he could sense, its end somewhere far beyond his sight. Branches waited in the dark above. A canopy, perhaps. He could feel the weight of it hanging up there.
Only the very base of the trunk was glowing!
He had lit it. Barely! A thin band of blue-gold light around the bottom of a tree that went on forever, and everything above that band dark, waiting.
