The first letter hung in the rain, and existence began to pay for it.
That was the thing Noah had built into the bones of THE Osmontian Tongue, and it was the thing that made the letter terrifying. A normal word of power was a candle, burning the speaker's own fuel until it guttered out. This was the opposite. The character that meant I AM did not consume Noah to stay real. It bled Existence to stay real, and Existence, faced with a truth too precise to deny, simply paid, and kept paying, because the letter was not a request that could be refused. It was a fact that existence had agreed to honor, and honoring it had a cost, and the cost did not come out of Noah!
He had thought of it as a cornerstone. He had underestimated it!
