Respect doesn't mean shit if she is dead.
The matriarch's words followed Noah out of the lotus and across the Elseworld.
One body of him was gone with Thalia now, swallowed by golden light, carried deeper into the Warrens to be measured by a lineage older than the Scales.
He thought about Rosalia as he went.
She had looked at him and seen a First or Second Tier Provenance Body, a budding thing, a boy who had wandered into a house too old for him!
Him! A boy!
She had weighed him against one of Those Who Remain and found the scale tilted so far that the comparison was almost a courtesy. And she had not been wrong about the numbers.
By any measure of Ages and depth and accumulated dread, he was the smaller sum by an unfathomable margin.
The thing was, Noah had never once believed the numbers!
