The achievement of one was the achievement of another.
Noah looked at Achilles sitting inside the fading pillar of his own light, and he could see it on the man's face. The king's eyes had gone wide and far away, full of something that had no easy name, a mix of awe and grief and a strange new hunger, as if he had just stepped outside a house he had lived in all his life and found the sky was bigger than he had ever been told.
Noah knew that look! He had worn it himself, not so long ago, sitting in a dark he had just reforged himself out of.
Achilles would be seeing existence differently now. The Existential Conduits rising through the snow, pillars of flowing authority stretching away into the grey. The small incandescent Conduit Lifeforms drifting under the monastery eaves, which a moment ago he would not have been able to perceive at all.
