Ridiculously, he had gained the immensity of devouring the severed hand, and the records and memories had still gone and corrupted themselves the moment he reached for them again.
Noah turned that over. He had genuinely believed he was not underestimating this being! He had sealed it, drained it, devoured a piece of it, and spoken its name in defiance of its own rules, and he had felt, through all of it, that he had the measure of the thing well enough to keep climbing over it. But to reach across eons and corrupt the records inside a severed body part, after that body part had already been cut away and sealed and buried and finally eaten, was a different order of capability. He had to move THE Riven up onto a far higher pedestal than he had wanted to.
And as he thought about it, a worse question surfaced.
If this thing truly was a master manipulator, THE Primordial Deceiver, THE Infinite Liar, then was that severed hand even truly a piece of its body at all?
