The lake sat in a bowl carved by mountains that had not moved in longer than the Lands of Stone had been called by that name.

Damian and Serala descended to its edge after two hours of flight, the kind of two hours that covered distances armies spent weeks crossing. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

The mountains surrounding the lake rose on every side in walls of dark stone that made the water below feel like something secret. The surface of the lake held the sky above it in a reflection so clear that landing beside it was briefly disorienting, one sky above and one sky below with the thin line of the shoreline the only evidence that the world had a floor.

Serala walked into the water without stopping.

She went up to her waist, then her chest, then her shoulders, and then she went under, and the lake took her with the easy acceptance of a body of water that had no opinion about what entered it. Damian sat on the bank and closed his eyes.

Three minutes passed.

The water erupted.

Serala came out of the lake holding an aquatic Primal Beast by a section of its body that it had not expected to be held by.

Her transformed body braced against the resistance of something that had not intended to leave the water today. The beast was enormous, its body built for the deep lake in elongated proportions that made it look wrong in the open air, its hide a layered blue-black that caught light in segments.

Blue flames burst from its throat as it roared, the power of a Fifth Circle Warrior behind the sound, and the mountains around the lake returned the roar and sent it back diminished.

Serala pressed down on it.

She did it with the straightforward application of a body that was built beyond the scale of Fifth Circle opposition, and the beast’s struggles slowed, and then stopped, and then it made a different kind of sound. She carried it toward the bank with the focused expression of someone who had located the meal and was now thinking about the preparation.

Damian kept his eyes closed.

He was sitting with the Primordial Source carefully and with the full attention his Primeval mind could provide. It did not feel like his Land and Sky Physiques, which were presences with their own characters that spoke in their own ways when he addressed them. It did not feel like Persevere or Exelissomai, which were carved into him and therefore indistinguishable from himself.

It felt like standing at the edge of something that had no far side he could see and knowing the entire time that the standing itself was changing him.

Whenever he connected to it, he felt the depth of what it was authority over.

Any power structure. Any classification. Any system that the Lands of Stone had built or the Demons had built or the Ancestral Celestials in their floating domains had built, the Primordial Source looked at all of it and found it workable.

He had used it to demote the Murderous Saint and dozens of beings around him simultaneously without significant cost, and the cost he had felt had been less about the Primordial Source and more about his own existence being the vessel through which it operated.

The Letters had changed since he touched it.

Persevere felt deeper now. Exelissomai operated with an efficiency that made its previous applications look like early attempts at something he now understood better. He had been using both continuously throughout the journey, the storm of obsidian and blue flame they produced together following him and Serala across the sky as naturally as his cloud followed him, and the accumulation was sitting in his existence in a way he could feel at the edges of his refinement.

He was in the last stage.

Langa, the fifth and highest Amadlozi refinement tier, the level where a being’s presence reshaped the conditions of everything around it, was where his current Primeval Viridis existence had arrived.

One more push, one more application of Exelissomai sufficient to complete it, and his Lineage would change. From Primeval Viridis into something unknown, and he was becoming intensely curious about what unknown felt like from the inside.

It was an interesting power that he was only beginning to understand how to hold.

"It’s time to eat."

He opened his eyes.

Serala had the beast prepared with the efficiency of someone who had spent years in Covenant learning to do things in the field, and the flames she was using to cook it were the natural byproduct of her own cultivation rather than anything she had assembled deliberately.

She had found flat stones near the water’s edge and arranged them.

The smell reached him and announced that she was better at this than he was.

He sat beside her and they ate without speaking. When he looked at the food, it was good. When he looked at her, she was looking at the lake, and her expression was...a gorgeous one.

From above, if any being had been passing through the sky over the lake at that moment and had bothered to look down, they would have seen two figures sitting on a mountain lakeshore sharing a meal, and around them a hurricane of obsidian flames and blue Mana spinning in a contained circle that the lake’s surface reflected perfectly, and blue Mana descending through the storm’s eye into both their bodies with a continuous flow that pushed their existences further than they had been pushed even an hour ago.

Persevere and Exelissomai, their effects now amplified through the Primordial Source, working without pause.

When the meal was finished, Serala stood and looked at the lake once more with the expression she had worn while eating it, and whatever she had been deciding appeared to arrive at a conclusion she kept to herself. She turned.

Damian was already standing.

He reached over and picked her up.

She made a sound that was part surprise and part something else, and she was in his arms with her back against one forearm and her legs over the other, and he looked at her expression from this angle for a moment before he looked ahead.

"Hold on tight," he said, and stretched his neck once, the crack of it loud in the mountain silence.

Serala secured her arms around his shoulders with a resigned composure.

He shot forward.

BOOM!

The lake disappeared behind them in the time it took the water to register the departure. The mountains were gone a second later. The terrain below became abstraction, forests and rivers and dark hills and pale grasslands and the occasional cluster of lights that represented a tribe or a settlement passing beneath them at a rate that made the distances between them irrelevant, and the wind that should have been tearing at both of them at this speed was being managed by Primeval bodies!

The River of the World was ahead.

They flew toward it!