Noah held the illusory ring in his hands, and turned it, and looked at it with the eyes he had now.
"You are a glimmer of an Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin," he said slowly, "worn inside the shape of a ring. That is what you are. That is what you have always been, and I could never see it until now."
He turned it again in his fingers. "So tell me. How did you manage that, when the Immense Ones shattered your existence to pieces? Or is your own Root of Immensity so grand that even they could not shatter it?"
...!
For a long moment, there was only silence.
The snow fell. The clock-hands of Atlas's Dimension turned somewhere far away in another of his bodies. And the ring sat quiet in his hands, and Noah waited.
Then the old engineer spoke.
|It seems you have had quite a leap,| Atlas said.
