From the portal that Morgana opened in the garden’s northern wall — Satou’s people.
Lyra came through first.
She moved more slowly than usual — the pregnancy made long distances uncomfortable, and Satou had argued with her about coming, and she had explained to him with complete patience that this was not a decision he was going to make for her, and the argument had ended there the way arguments with Lyra usually ended. She walked into the inner district on Satou’s left side, her posture straight, her expression composed in the way she composed herself when composure was the thing most needed.
Behind her: Gruk, his massive orc frame quiet and still in a way he rarely was. Kelvin, carrying nothing, his hands at his sides for once rather than full of folio and notes. Vessa, her midnight-black scales dimmed of their usual gold-pattern brightness, moving with the deliberate slowness of someone treating a space as sacred. Theron. Valka. Harkon — the old orc who’d arrived at the settlement broken and had built himself back into someone, here for a man he’d met briefly but whose death had been described to him and who had died for reasons he understood personally.
Others. Settlers who’d heard, who’d asked to come, who understood without being told that this was the kind of moment that required witness.
They arranged themselves in the garden and the space around it — settlement people and Vael’kira survivors mixed without plan or instruction, the two groups finding the same space naturally, the way people found the same room when they were there for the same reason.
Freda was there, standing with Morgana’s hand at her elbow. She had insisted on standing rather than sitting. She was very pale and very still and looked like someone who had decided that stillness was the most reliable thing available to her right now and was holding it with both hands.
The casket was plain dark wood. Loki had chosen it himself, from what Vael’kira’s remaining craftspeople could provide. No ornament. No inscription yet — there would be one, later, when words had been decided on, but today was not the day for deciding words. Today was the day for the person who had been inside what the inscription would eventually describe.
They set it in the garden on the morning of the second day after the invasion, in the soil Loki had turned the previous morning, and the assembled people of Vael’kira and of Satou’s settlement stood in the early light and were quiet.
Loki spoke first.
He stood at the head of the grave with his hands at his sides and none of the performance that usually lived in his voice, and he looked at the casket and then at the people around it, and he spoke the way he spoke when there was nothing left to perform.
" Few hundred years ago," Loki said, "I found a young vampire in a village that had just burned. He was the only survivor. He was sitting in the ash where his house had been and he was looking at the sky and I could tell, from looking at him, that he hadn’t decided yet what to do with the rest of his life." He paused. "I sat down next to him in the ash. I didn’t introduce myself. I didn’t explain who I was or what I was doing there. I just sat with him for a while, because that seemed like what was needed."
He was quiet for a moment.
"After an hour or so he looked at me and said: you’re that demon lord. The one they call theatrical." He paused again, and something moved across his face that wasn’t quite a smile but was adjacent to it. "I said yes. He said: well. Do you have anything that needs doing, or are you just going to sit here?" Loki stopped. Breathed. "I told him I had a great deal that needed doing. He said: then I suppose I had better help you. And that was — that was how it started."
He looked down at the casket.
"Cassius spent two centuries being the most precise, most reliable, most honest intelligence operative I have ever worked with. He could have retired thirty times. I offered, every decade, because it seemed important to offer. He always said he’d think about it. He never thought about it seriously. He had purpose and he knew what purpose felt like and he was not going to give it up for comfort." He paused. "He was also the most consistently right person in any conversation I ever had with him, which was occasionally infuriating and permanently invaluable."
He was quiet again.
"He died getting a message out," Loki said. "Making sure that what he found in that plaza reached the people who needed it. That was — that was exactly what he would have chosen. Exactly the version of this that he would have called acceptable, if acceptable was a word he was willing to use about any of this." A pause. "I don’t think it’s acceptable. I want to be honest about that. I think it is — terrible. And I think I am going to be angry about it for a very long time. But I know what he would have said about my being angry, and it would have been something precise and correct that I would have argued with, and the argument would have lasted three weeks, and by the end of it I would have had to admit he was right."
Loki’s voice, through all of this, had stayed steady.
It was not a natural steadiness. It was the steadiness of someone who had made a specific decision about what this moment required and was holding to it with everything they had.
"He told Satou, in his last message, not to let me blame myself," Loki said. "He said it wasn’t a failure of intelligence. He said Chronus hid this because Chronus is old and experienced at hiding things. He spent his final minutes making sure that when I heard what happened, I would hear, at the same time, that it wasn’t my fault."
Author Note : Cassius has sent those last message through his remaining power, Morgana was the one that decoded the message with magic.