Both of them had wounds that were not healing between their Persevere declarations the way wounds had healed in the prior vision!
The word was still producing its recovery, still generating the surge of foundational power that rebuilt what had been lost, but the atmospheric pressure absorbed a portion of each recovery before it fully expressed, leaving both Relictus slightly less after each Persevere than they had been before the recovery, the accumulation of tiny deficits producing a slow trajectory toward something neither of them was going to be able to reverse through the same mechanism that had always worked before.
Then the glacial Relictus stopped.
It went still in a way that was different from the stillness of a being catching its breath between exchanges. It went still in the way of a being that had reached into their foundational substrate and found something there they had not previously reached deeply enough to find. A letter.
A single ancient letter from a Tongue.
