Noah's eyes shone with a brilliance beyond measure!
Around him, the cloud-story of the faceless woman thinned and faded, her village and her hills and her monsters drifting apart into soft blue-gold mist and sinking back into his seas.
He rose from the throne.
He stood fully for the first time since he had takken it, tall and bare-chested, his constellations blazing, frost glittering along his left side, and Emotive slid back off his lap into the shallow seas.
Then he waved his left hand.
A page bloomed in the air before him. A single sheet of brilliant gold, wide and blank, shining softly in the dark of the Descent.
He opened his right hand, and a pen formed in it. Blue, long and slender, its nib sharp as a needle.
Then blue-gold flames erupted around him!
They poured up out of the shallow seas and wrapped around his body and his arm and the pen in his hand, roaring silently, burning without heat, so bright that the dead chains overhead lit up for the first time in Ages.
