The golden clouds thinned a long while later, and the frozen dark of the Basal Floor came back in pieces.
Noah lay on his back on a drift of dream with Ling asleep against his chest, her dark hair spread across both of them, one blazing leg hooked over his.
He might have been a bit...relentless.
Above them, half of a destroyed Floor drifted in silence. Islands split down their middles turned slowly in the cold. Shards of shattered Dimensions hung like broken windows, each one still holding a sliver of whatever sky it had once looked out on. Snow fell through all of it, unhurrid, as though nothing at all had happened here.
The Tree in his chest hummed.
He listened to it for a while. One lit ring at the base of an endless trunk. A single Branch with the Unsealing hanging from it. Sap sitting low in the wood, waiting. He had evolved into a lifeform no record held a name for, and he understood...only a little about what that meant.
That had to change!
So he began to test!
