Noah's awareness snapped back into the blue-gold clouds, and no time had passed at all.
The instant he had left was still the instant he returned to, frozen and stretched and waiting, and Calliope stood before him exactly as she had, the massive obsidian Runestone at her back, her eyes fixed on him and shining bright with a curiosity that had sharpened into something almost hungry!
She had seen the stone reach for him. She had seen the obsidian lightning climb his existence and the beams pour from his eyes. And she wanted, desperately, to know what he had been shown.
But Noah could not answer her, not yet, because his entire existence was BUZZING!
Something had changed in him! Something enormous and quiet had shifted in the deepest place of him, in the way he understood the very thing he had built his early climb upon, and he could feel it moving through him like a tide finding a new shore!
Infinity!
