There was a danger in accomplishnt that most beings never examined because the examining required unflinching honesty that accomplishnt itself tended to make difficult.
The danger was perception. When sothing grand was achieved, the mind reached for a category large enough to hold it, and the categories it reached for were often too large. An accomplishnt perceived as unfathomable beca a destination rather than a waypoint, and destinations ended journeys.
A being who had climbed to a peak they considered the ultimate peak had no reason to look for the next one, and if they had no reason to look for the next one, the next one would not be found, and the one after that would not be found, and the vast architecture of what they might have beco would remain unbuilt because they had mistaken a single floor for the whole structure.
The correct relationship to accomplishnt was simpler and considerably harder to maintain. Each achievent was a point in an endless journey. Significant because all points in a worthy journey were significant. No more significant than the next point, which had not arrived yet, and would be grander.
This was the only way to keep moving. To look at sothing genuinely extraordinary and think: good. What cos next?
Noah had been practicing this relationship for longer than he would have consciously admitted!
---
He stood at the crown of a wide ancient tree whose upper canopy broke above the surrounding forest canopy into open bloom light, and what occupied the massive nest at the tree’s highest platform of branches was extrely unhappy with his presence.
The flying dinosaur had a wingspan that covered the nest platform’s full diater with room to spare, its body long and scaled in the specific dark iridescence of creatures that spent their existence above everything else and had developed the aesthetics of altitude.
A Galdr Source, the densest he had encountered in THE Strand of Broken Scales since the Utahraptor, its Source expression blazing with the bright chaotic warmth of a being defending sothing it considered inviolable. The nest around it was layered infinity and accumulated Source energy compressed into the architecture of a ho rather than a weapon, and the creature was currently deploying both as weapons with the indiscriminate thoroughness.
Noah directed the storm.
He had been building it before the creature realized the storm was directed, gathering the obsidian Infinity that saturated the upper air of THE Strand into the swirling formation of a lightning system rather than a collection of individual strikes, and the system was making no accommodations for the nest or its occupant.
The multicolored current within the lightning carried his Galdr Source through every discharge, each bolt carrying Source against Source impact at the contact point rather than simple electrical force.
The Galdr Source beast persevered twice!
The second Persevere ca from a reserve that had been significantly depleted by the first, and what it healed was less than what the storm had taken, and the storm continued. The creature fought with the full extraordinary capability of sothing that had survived by being the apex of its particular environnt for years, its lightning capabilities and its superior aerial mobility and its territorial fury all expressed at maximum.
The storm was broader than all three!
When the Galdr Source beast collapsed, it collapsed with finality.
Eon arrived at the tree’s upper branches as the storm dissipated, her golden Source expression bright and her eyes brighter, the expectation in them visible before she spoke.
"This will be the fifth one." She looked at what remained of the nest and the creature with the calculating attention of soone who had spent the last hour developing a working knowledge of what five Galdr Source defeats ant.
"With it, we can finally make headway into grasping sothing about THE Primordial Source."
Noah nodded.
Five. In whatever passed for an hour in THE Source Lands, where ti was not a factor his body recognized but his awareness still tracked through the accumulated weight of events, they had moved through five Galdr Source creatures that wielded a letter of THE Primordial Tongue. The hunting had been excellent. He was not going to say this out loud, but the hunting had been genuinely excellent!
He raised his hand.
The fifth fragnt rose from the creature’s broken Source and drifted toward him without requiring the summoning, the obsidian light of it moving with the patient certainty of sothing arriving at its destination.
The other four fragnts answered from wherever they had been resting within his Source expression, coming forward to et the fifth, and the five pieces of the letter of Persevere began rotating around him in slow orbit.
The rotation accelerated.
The obsidian light between the five fragnts intensified as they moved, the pieces recognizing each other and completing the connection between them, and then the acceleration reached its conclusion and the pieces rged.
A blinding beam of obsidian light shot upward from the convergence point into the bloom-lit sky above the canopy, the signal of a completed thing announcing itself to whatever this place used for an observer. Noah frowned at it briefly. Whatever attention it drew, it drew. He had not been operating with subtlety as a primary consideration.
He looked at what the five fragnts had beco.
A...letter. Ancient in the way that things were ancient when they had existed before the fraworks used to asure age had been established, its form carrying the specific geotry of a language that did not use an alphabet any surviving writing system had derived from. It communicated toward him as it rotated, the letter actively oriented toward his Source expression rather than passively existing in the air between them.
As if it had been waiting to be completed.
As if it had been waiting for him specifically.
It surged forward and entered him.
The comprehension arrived not as information but as recognition, the understanding settling into his Source at the foundational level rather than the cognitive one, the letter becoming a thing he knew the way he knew his own na rather than a thing he had learned.
Persevere.
Through boundless adversity, persevere. Through all the unfairness of existence, persevere. Through the weight of every force that pressed against what you were trying to build, persevere!
Through the monts when the calculation said the odds were unacceptable and the mont demanded you act anyway, persevere. So long as you persevered, everything would be okay!
Not a promise. A principle. The first and most fundantal letter of THE Primordial Tongue, the language of THE Primordial Source, and it was the one that said: continue.
For the first ti, Noah opened his mouth.
"Persevere!"
...!
BOOM!
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