Chapter 5437: Potential! III

An entity who was not under Vakochev’s Scales of Existence.

Noah’s eyes shone at that, and every ounce of his composure went toward being careful, because a being outside the Scales was a being outside the map entirely. He kept his own hand where it was!

"You know who I am," he said easily. "But I don’t know much of anything about you. And I was taught, a long time ago, not to shake hands with strangers."

...!

His words only made her smile brighter. She lowered her offered hand without offense and focused on him fully, her large vibrant eyes settling on him with an interest that had teeth in it.

"A wise teaching," Ryaenara said, and her voice carried the weight of enormous time. "Though knowing a name is already more than enough. In ages long past, before your Vakochev ever dreamed of his neat little Scales, if a being knew your true name, they could simply speak it and collapse your existence where you stood, wherever you happened to be in all of existence. Names had power then. Real power. The kind that has mostly been forgotten by things as young as you."

She waved the thought away lightly.

"But no matter. I have a great deal on my mind, and I cannot act on any of it until I confirm a few things first. So. Why don’t we play a game? I call it a game of potential. I will show you some interesting things, and in return you show me a glimpse of what you are. A fair trade between strangers who won’t shake hands."

Noah raised his brows.

In his experience, when a being dealt with the particularly powerful, they tended to fall into a few types. There were the ruthless ones, who killed you before you understood you were in danger, no games, no words, just an ending. There were the ones who liked to play, who would toy with a thing and kill it slowly, savoring the length of it. There were the talkers, who loved the sound of their own grandeur and gave away real knowledge in the rambling, so that letting them run their mouths was often worth more than any fight. And there were the collectors, the ones who did not want you dead at all but wanted something from you, and were the most dangerous of all because you could not tell where their patience ended.

The being before him was plainly the playful type. What he did not yet know was whether she was also one of the ones who gave knowledge.

For now, she had not touched a single one of his interests, and so he played along. He nodded.

Ryaenara smiled and waved her hand, and revealed a Gu.

It hung above her palm in the shape of a small sun, a round radiant insect body glowing with soft warm light, and down its back descended a single row of wings, top to bottom, nine of them in all, each one alone with no counterpart on the other side. They lay folded and dark against the little sun’s glow, waiting, and the air near the creature carried a faint dry warmth, like standing too close to something very old that had once been very hot.

"Gu Lifeforms were abundant before Vakochev laid down his Scales," Ryaenara said, lifting the sun-shaped thing so he could see it clearly. "They were among the wildest lifeforms nature ever produced. They thrived in the absence of structure, in the days before laws, and most of them were culled or hidden away once Existence was made orderly. This one I call the Novemplume Solaris, the nine-winged sun. It measures potential. Not what a being is now, but the whole range of what a being could become across the full span of their existence. Whether they will remain exactly where they stand, or whether they have it in them to grow into something grander."

She turned it, and the nine dark wings caught the Sanctum’s silver light.

"Nine wings, nine thresholds," she went on. "The first wing lighting is potential, in your modern terms, to form at least an Olympian Intent and reach the Fifth Scale. Two wings, the potential for a Primordial Intent and a firm grasp of the Fifth. Three wings, the potential to reach the Sixth Scale. Four wings." Her smile sharpened.

"Four wings is the potential to become True, to hold an Intent that exceeds all of Vakochev’s tiers entirely. And five wings, huhu. Well. Above that, the distinctions stop mattering very much, and I stop explaining them to strangers." She held the creature out toward him.

"You needn’t do anything at all. You simply allow the little one to look at you. That is the whole game. So. Do I have your permission for it to gaze upon you?"

...!

Noah’s eyes flashed as he studied the monstrous little thing.

|Novemplume Solaris. A pre-Scales Gu Lifeform. Function: measures the total potential of an existence across nine ascending thresholds, expressed as illuminated wings. First wing, Olympian Intent and Fifth Scale potential. Fourth wing, True Lifeform potential. Thresholds beyond the fourth are undocumented. It is a measuring instrument, not a weapon. It reads.|

He gave a light nod.

Ryaenara’s anticipation was plain as the Gu awoke. The little sun brightened, and eerie eyes opened across its glowing surface, and they turned upon Noah, looking, measuring, trying to read the whole vast range of what he could become. She watched with a stillness underneath her smile, genuinely curious what the nine wings would show.

Noah felt nothing really as he kept all his defenses up.

And in the next moment, the Gu trembled.

WUUUU!

It shuddered on her palm, and it shrieked, a thin rising cry, and golden obsidian light blazed up around it. The first wing lit, a bright flare against its sun-body. Then the second, almost at once. The third followed before the second had fully brightened, and then the fourth, and the creature’s shriek climbed into something frantic as the wings kept coming, the fifth and sixth igniting in a cascade it could not keep pace with!

Its small insect tentacles thrashed, its muscles pulsing and swelling, the golden obsidian light pouring off it in waves as the seventh wing lit, and the eighth, the little thing screaming now in what could only be called horror, a measuring instrument confronted with something it had no measure for!

All nine wings blazed at once!

HUUUM!

Every threshold, lit. The whole of its scale exhausted in an instant, and still it shrieked, still the light poured out of it as though it were trying to show a tenth wing it did not have and an eleventh beyond that, its body convulsing, unable to contain what it had been asked to read.

And then the Gu exploded!

BOOM!

Noah’s eyes opened wide. And across from him, Ryaenara lost her smile.

It fell away completely, all the mirth and all the play draining out of her fair face in a single heartbeat, leaving something unfathomably serious in its place, and in the next moment her hands moved, fast, waving in rapid ancient patterns, and pillars of obsidian light descended from the lethal sky one after another and smashed down into Noah!

His body had already reacted. His Intent and his Osmontian Source Infinity blazed up in the same instant, blue lava-like flames sheathing him head to heel, THE Loyal Reach half-summoned to his hand before he had consciously decided anything!

But the pillars of light were not attacks.

|You have been veiled and masked by THE Ananke Intent of a True Lifeform, the second ranking of True Lifeform Intents, built on inevitability. She is not striking you. She is hiding you, and her Intent makes the hiding a thing existence cannot refuse.|

|Your lifeforce is veiled. Your Intent is veiled. Your weavings, your authorities, your Osmontian Source Infinity, everything that could be read from your existence is being masked and rendered impossible to discern by any external perception.|

|Your name is being obscured. It can no longer be easily recalled by any being who learned it, and layers of protection are being woven around it so that True Lifeforms cannot attack you through your name alone.|

|Additional masking in progress: your rate of growth is being hidden, your True Lifeform status is being concealed from measurement, and the signature of your fused authority is being wrapped so that it cannot be traced back to you across existence. To any instrument that looks upon you now, you will read as far less than you are, and far harder to find.|

Noah held his blazing stance, and looked at the being across from him, who had entirely lost her smile, and who now moved with a grim urgency he had not seen a trace of a moment ago.

Ryaenara gathered the scattered remains of the exploded Gu into her palm, the golden obsidian embers of the ruined measuring thing, and looked at them, and then looked at him, and her voice came low and serious and without a shred of play left in it.

"We have to go," she said. "Now."

...!

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