His coat was in rags at the edges where the temporal field had aged the fabric. A communication stone sat beside his open hand, dark and inert.
Satou knelt.
For a moment he didn’t move further — just knelt there, looking, some part of him still refusing the information his eyes were providing.
Then he looked at Cassius’s face.
There was a smile on it.
Not a grimace. Not the rictus that pain sometimes left behind. An actual smile — small, peaceful, the kind of expression that belonged to someone who had, in their final moments, found something worth smiling about.
Satou didn’t understand it.
He reached out and gently closed his hand around Cassius’s — the hand that had been resting against the wound — and held it.
"I’m sorry," Satou said. His voice came out unsteady. "I’m sorry I wasn’t fast enough. I’m sorry you were alone."
He felt something on his face before he understood what it was.
Tears. Falling steadily, without his permission, down a face that had stayed composed under Malakor’s full aura, that had stood unmoved in front of twelve demon lords, that had never — not once, not during the siege, not during any of it — simply broken like this.
He didn’t try to stop them.
Something else was rising alongside the grief — something colder, sharper, the specific quality of rage that didn’t burn loud but settled deep, the kind that became permanent rather than passing. Satou felt it settle into him the way frost settled into ground, slow and total and impossible to remove once it had taken hold.
He gathered Cassius carefully into his arms — the way you carried someone you were bringing home, not the way you carried something that no longer needed care, though Satou couldn’t quite make himself think of it as the second thing.
He rose into the air.
The flight back to Vael’kira took less than a minute. It felt much longer.
—--------
Loki and Seraphina saw him first — a shape descending toward the plaza, and then, as he came lower, what he was carrying.
Loki was moving before Satou had fully landed.
"No," he said. The same word from before, but different now — not disbelief at destruction in the abstract, but the specific, personal refusal of someone recognizing a particular shape, a particular coat, a particular person.
Satou descended the rest of the way and Loki reached him before his feet had fully settled, his hands already extending, and Satou — carefully, with a gentleness that came from somewhere he hadn’t known he had — transferred Cassius’s body into Loki’s arms.
Loki’s legs gave out.
He went down to his knees in the broken plaza, Cassius cradled against him, and the sound that came out of him was nothing like the theatrical performances Satou had known for years. It was raw. Unguarded. The sound of someone who had recruited a grieving young vampire from a burning village three centuries ago and offered him purpose instead of vengeance, and had watched that purpose become two centuries of friendship, and was now holding what was left of it.
"I’m going to kill him," Loki said, between breaths that weren’t quite breaths. "I’m going to find him and I’m going to kill him. Chronus. I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care if it takes everything I have. I’m going to kill him."
Seraphina knelt beside him. She didn’t say anything. She put a hand on his shoulder and stayed there.
Satou stood for a moment, watching, the tears still on his face, the cold rage still settling deeper.
Then he wiped his face with the back of his hand — a deliberate motion, the conscious decision to set the grief aside for the moment because the moment required something else from him.
"Loki," he said quietly. "We will. Together. But right now—" He looked around the plaza, at the bodies, at the city beyond it still burning in places. "Right now there are people who are alive and who need help. Morgana—"
He turned to her. She was still holding Freda, her composure rebuilt but visibly costly.
"Can you portal me to my settlement?" Satou asked. "I need to bring Jessica. And whatever else we can carry. We need to find the survivors before we do anything else."
Morgana looked at him for a long moment.
Then she nodded.
"Loki. Seraphina." Satou’s voice carried the specific steadiness of someone choosing to lead because someone needed to and he was the one capable of it right now. "Search the city. Find everyone you can. I’ll be back as fast as possible."
Loki didn’t answer immediately. He was still holding Cassius.
"Loki," Satou said, gentler. "He’d want you to help the living first. You know that."
A long moment.
Then Loki nodded, once, and carefully — so carefully — set Cassius down on the plaza stones, arranging him with a deliberateness that was its own kind of grief, before standing.
"Search the city," Loki repeated. His voice was steadier now, though it cost him visibly. "Yes. Survivors first."
Morgana opened a portal.
Before Satou stepped through, she pressed something into his hand — a small, smooth stone, similar to a communication stone but carrying a different signature.
"One-use teleportation stone," she said. "Calibrated to this location. When you’re ready to return, activate it. You won’t need me to open another portal."
"Thank you," Satou said.
"Don’t," Morgana said. Then, quieter: "Thank you. For finding him. For bringing him back. He shouldn’t have been alone out there."
"I’ll always help a friend," Satou said simply.
He stepped through the portal.
—------
THE SETTLEMENT
Lyra was at the table when he arrived — folio open, the same focused posture she’d held for days, except now her head came up immediately, the way it always did when something in the air changed.
She took one look at his face and stood, despite Jessica’s protests about her resting.
"Satou," she said. "What happened."
He told them.
He told them as efficiently as he could — Vael’kira, the invasion, Cassius’s message, the isolation field, the casualties, Freda’s severed magic, Cassius’s body on the hillside. He kept his voice level through most of it, the organizational steadiness he’d maintained at the council and at the plaza.