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!
Standing before an Immense One, standing before the whole grim procession of Those Who Remain with their honor and their harvests and their bent and broken lineages, he had never for a single breath felt himself the lesser being.
He believed in himself that much!
And well. Sometimes a man had to fake it until he made it.
He almost smiled at that.
He had another one of his bodies sent into his Provenance Realm again as this body had come here for something quieter, and it was time to stop delaying it.
He called for his children.
They came into the Provenance Realm the way he opened for them, and the Realm’s blue-gold hills folded up around the three of them, and for a moment the war and the matriarch and the Train grinding through the crossing-dark were all somewhere else, and there was only this.
Henry arrived unhurried, blue-gold hair catching the light, wearing his father’s face years younger and none of his father’s weight. Seo-yeon arrived at a run and stopped short a pace away, her small face gone still and strange.
"You feel...a bit wrong, Aba" she said.
Noah crouched. "Wrong how, kiddo?"
She frowned, searching.
"Not bad wrong. Far wrong. Like you’re standing so far away from us in positioning...or existence. Ah, its hard to say!"
Noah smiled lightly at such words as he patted her head.
"I am a bit far, but I am also here, don’t worry."
Noah stood, and opened his hand, and looked at his son and daughter the way he now looked at all living things. All the way down.
Their Lifelines lay open to him.
It was still the strangest sight he had been given, and he had been given a great many. Henry’s existence unspooled as a long line of light, an unbroken code of Existential Markers running the whole length of what the boy was, and every locus of it was legible to him.
"This will not hurt," he said. "Hold still."
HUUM!

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