Chapter 5438: Yes, and No I

They had to leave!

Noah’s intuition roared the instant the words left her, and the woman before him wasted nothing. Her hair whipped around her as she turned and called out across the obsidian seas.

"Girls!" Ryaenara said, sharp now, all the play gone. "We wrap up. Right now. Come on!"

She snapped her fingers, and obsidian light flashed across THE Effluvium Sanctum. The Dora Shath’yar vanished in the same breath, and the strange two-Pantheon Gu that Eir had been battling vanished with them, plucked out of the fight mid-clash. And then Noah felt his own body caught, pulled by that same obsidian light, and he could have resisted it, could have planted himself and refused to be moved by a being he had known for the length of a single conversation.

He went along with it instead. Because he was curious!

He was so very curious!

HUUM!

In an instant, THE Effluvium Sanctum stood empty. The silver seas rolled on beneath a lethal sky with no one left to test themselves against it.

---

A nanosecond later, existence trembled across the whole of that region, and the sky above THE Effluvium Sanctum was torn open.

Vibrant slimy green tentacles pushed through from the other side and pulled the heavens apart the way a reader tears a page, and through the ragged slit, a massive green serpentine eye gazed down. It swept the emptied Sanctum slowly, coldly, an eye large enough to swallow realms, and finding nothing where it had expected something, it flashed with a deep and ancient disappointment.

In the same moment, the ground of the Sanctum erupted. A massive golden foot burst up through the obsidian seas like a volcano breaking the surface, and two eyes opened on the sole of that foot, gazing around with the same searching hunger.

They found nothing either. They looked up, and saw the serpentine eye watching from the torn sky, and the pair of eyes on the golden foot flashed with a cold arrogance before the whole limb withdrew and vanished back into the depths.

For the next few seconds, Intents of terrifying power swept through the region, one after another, vast presences passing over the Sanctum in search of a thing that had been there and was there no longer. None of them found what they hunted. None of them could. They came, and they swept, and they left just as swiftly, frustrated and empty!

In less than a second, the eye in the sky closed and the tear sealed, and a false calm returned.

And yet.

Gigaparsecs of THE Effluvium Sanctum now stood utterly still. Not a single atom moved. The silver seas that had rolled since the place was made hung frozen in mid-current, the drifting landmasses stopped in their slow spin, the lethal ambient Intent itself gone motionless, as though the passing of those searching auras had reached into the bones of the place and switched off its ability to move. Everything stood still. The great forge of the Source Lands, where beings honed themselves toward the Fifth Scale, had been forever changed in the span of a heartbeat, all because something worth that much attention had briefly, quietly, been there.

---

Elsewhere, prompts bloomed across Noah’s perception.

|You have arrived within a unique Dimension of Existence. It belongs wholly to Ryaenara, THE Mirthful Antiquity. It cannot be penetrated from the outside by any means currently known to me.|

|Environmental conditions within this dimension are extraordinary. The refinement of Intent proceeds at twice its normal rate. The ambient density of Infinity and Primordial Source is far beyond that of the Sanctum, feeding THE Devouring Estuary at a rate exceeding anything you have yet encountered. Time and space answer their holder’s will absolutely; you exist here at her sufferance. This is a place built for a being who wished to relax somewhere nothing in existence could reach her.|

Noah’s eyes swept across everything.

Floating archaic temples and shrines stretched out in every direction, shining blue and gold and obsidian, resting on small stellar lakes that hung suspended in a soft depthless dark. There were too many to count, ancient structures drifting across still waters that reflected no sky, the whole vista carrying the quiet weight of a place that had been collected and arranged across an unfathomable span of time. The air smelled of cold stone and old incense, of water that had never moved and metal that had never tarnished.

The Dora Shath’yar floated a distance off, looking around with shining eyes like beings who had been here before and still found it wondrous. Eir, unbothered by any of it, had simply carried her fight along, still clashing happily with the odd two-Pantheon Gu, throwing her Olympian Intent and Pantheon against its stolen dimensions as though nothing at all had interrupted her!

As for Ryaenara, her eyes had gone somber. She sighed, and the tension bled slowly out of her, and she seemed to talk herself back down into calm.

"I may have messed up a little," she admitted. "Almost drew the attention of some rather unsavory True Lifeforms onto you back there. Careless of me. But..." She waved a hand, and her smile returned, easy and carefree. "All’s well that ends well. We got out. No harm done, in the end."

And yet when she looked at him, her smile did not quite match her eyes, because her eyes were shining, bright and fixed, the way a being’s eyes shine when they have found a prized treasure and cannot quite believe their luck.

"Welcome to my Dimension of Existence," she said. "Nothing gets in here, which makes it a lovely place to relax, wouldn’t you say? But you. Oh, you, you, you. I don’t even know where to begin with you." She turned toward a temple drifting nearby and called back over her shoulder. "Girls, we’ll be back. Don’t destroy anything!"

The Dora Shath’yar nodded, trusting her completely, and she floated toward the temple.

Noah followed, looking around with steady caution.

A lifeform outside Vakochev’s Scales of Existence, brimming with unfathomable power, who had just yanked him out of THE Source Lands. Would she prove a source of knowledge, or a source of trouble? It wasn’t yet clear which, and so he readied himself for either, the blue of his existence coiled and quiet beneath his calm!

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