"I know," Freda said quietly. "I know I’m alive. I know it’s — I know." She looked at Morgana. "I just—" She stopped. Her voice, which had been so carefully controlled, cracked slightly at the edge. "I reached for fire this morning and it wasn’t there. It’s always been there. Every morning. For years." She pressed her hands together, feeling the absence in them. "And it felt like — it felt like reaching for you and finding you weren’t there. That’s what it felt like."
Morgana didn’t say anything for a moment.
Then she moved from her chair to sit on the edge of the cot, and she pulled Freda into an embrace the way she had done in Freda’s first year of training when the work was too hard and the progress felt too slow and the exhaustion was real — without ceremony, without performance, just the specific warmth of someone who had been your entire world for seventy years and intended to keep being it.
Freda didn’t cry. Not then. She held on, with both hands, and didn’t cry, and Morgana held her, and neither of them said anything for a long time.
In the medical hall, around them, the dawn continued and the patients breathed and the city outside began, slowly and haltingly, the process of being something other than what yesterday had done to it.
—--------------
Jessica came to check on Freda mid-morning.
She sat across from her with the straightforward warmth she brought to all her patients — not performing comfort, just present, the genuine attention of someone who had been a healer long enough to know that presence was sometimes the only tool available.
"How’s the head?" Jessica asked.
"Better," Freda said. She was sitting up properly now, eating something Morgana had found for her, her green hair brushed back from her face in a way that looked like it had required deliberate effort.
"Good." Jessica paused. "I tried again this morning. The healing. I wanted to tell you myself — I tried several different approaches. The standing effect is consistent. It responds to everything the same way."
"I know," Freda said. "Morgana told me."
"I’m not giving up," Jessica said. "I don’t know what will work. I don’t know if anything will. But I want you to know I’m not treating this as finished. I’m going to keep looking."
Freda looked at her. Something in the younger elf’s face shifted — not hope exactly, more like the acknowledgment that someone else was choosing to carry part of the weight, which was its own different thing.
"Thank you," Freda said. "For being honest about it. The — the not knowing. It helps more than it sounds like it should."
"Honesty usually does," Jessica said. She paused. "Morgana told me you held him back. Chronus. That you lasted twenty minutes with six elements coordinated."
"I couldn’t stop him," Freda said.
"No," Jessica agreed. "But Cassius got out because of those twenty minutes." She held Freda’s eyes. "Lord Satou and Lord Loki arrived because Cassius got out. The seventeen thousand people who survived this city are alive because of decisions made in a chain, and one of those decisions was yours." She paused. "I thought you should hear that said plainly."
Freda was quiet for a moment.
"Cassius," she said, and stopped. "He—"
"He sent the message," Jessica said gently. "He got it through. Lord Satou found him." She didn’t say more than that — didn’t need to, the past tense in "found" carrying everything else.
Freda nodded slowly. Her eyes moved to the window.
"He told me not to be sorry," she said. "In the plaza. When I was casting the displacement spell and he knew what it was. He said don’t be."
"He knew what he was doing," Jessica said.
"Yes," Freda said. "He did." She was quiet for another moment. "I’m going to be at the burial. I don’t care if I need help standing. I’m going to be there."
"We’ll all be there," Jessica said.
—-----------
VAEL’KIRA — THE PLACE CASSIUS CHOSE
Loki buried him in the inner district.
Not a cemetery — Vael’kira had a cemetery at the city’s northern edge, a proper formal space with marked grounds and maintained paths and all the appropriate infrastructure of a city that had existed long enough to develop traditions around its dead. Cassius was not buried there. Loki buried him here, in the small garden behind the intelligence hall where Cassius had spent most of his sixty years in the capital — the building he’d made his own, had filled with the records and networks and accumulated information of two centuries, had sat in on hundreds of early mornings reviewing reports before anyone else in the city was awake.
The garden was simple. It had been simple before the invasion — Cassius had not been a person who filled spaces with unnecessary things — and the invasion had not changed it. Two trees. A stone bench. A patch of grass that had stayed green through the past twenty years through some combination of positioning and whatever minor ambient magic the intelligence hall generated.
The ground was soft.
Loki had dug the grave himself. Nobody had offered to help and he hadn’t asked. He’d spent three hours in the garden with a shovel in the grey early morning, and when he was done, he’d stood beside what he’d made and looked at it for a long time before going back inside to get ready.
They came from two directions.
From the city’s survivors — the seventeen thousand who remained, many of them still carrying the physical evidence of the previous day’s injuries, some on crutches or supported by others, some whose temporal aging damage made movement difficult. They came anyway. They filled the inner district streets around the garden and the building and spilled into the surrounding blocks until the space couldn’t hold them and they stood in whatever was adjacent, linked by the specific quality of a population that had survived something together and was here to mark one of the people who had given them the time to survive it.