Noah stood in the frost and looked at the wreckage of the Gilded Ones, and let them feel how little their kneeling moved him.
Marxist rose first, because the shrewd ones always recovered fastest, floating up out of the broken foliage with several other Fourth Scale Ealdor Gilded Ones gathering around him, their Intents shattered, their bodies injured, their pride a ruin they were trying to reassemble in real time. The old man's bright eyes had lost all their welcome. What sat in them now was hate, and beneath the hate, the cold working calculation of a being trying to understand what had just happened to him!
"Who are you?!" Marxist asked, and the fake fucking warmth he had greeted Noah with at the settlement was entirely gone.
Noah regarded him calmly.
