"Can you heal it?" Morgana asked. Her voice was very controlled.
"I can try," Jessica said. "Pathway regrowth is possible — it’s slow, but I’ve done it before, for injuries that severed magical connections through trauma." She focused, drawing on more of her reserves, directing her healing magic toward the empty space where Freda’s lattice should have been. "I’m encouraging new growth. It should—"
She stopped.
Jessica’s brow furrowed. She pushed more healing magic into the attempt, watching with the specific intensity of a healer who had just seen something she didn’t have a framework for.
"It’s growing," she said slowly. "The pathways are forming. I can see them—"
And then her expression changed completely.
"They’re aging," she said. "Right now. As they form. I’m watching new growth age and crumble in real time — like they’re experiencing decades in seconds, the same moment they come into existence." She pulled her hands back, breathing hard, staring at the empty space where new threads had formed and immediately turned to dust. "I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s not damage. It’s—" She searched for the word. "It’s a standing effect. Something that’s still active. Anything that tries to regrow there gets destroyed the instant it exists."
Morgana went very still.
"He left something behind," she said quietly. "Not just the injury. A permanent condition. So that even if someone tried to fix it—"
"It would just happen again," Jessica finished. "Every time. Forever."
The medical hall was very quiet.
Morgana looked down at Freda — at the small, sleeping face of the girl she’d trained from a frightened seventy-year-old apprentice into someone who’d held a demon lord’s attention with six elements working in perfect harmony. The girl who would wake up, eventually, with every memory of every spell she’d ever cast intact, with seventy years of muscle memory and instinct and identity built around magic — and would never, for the rest of her existence, be able to touch any of it again.
Not because it was gone.
Because Chronus had made absolutely certain it could never come back.
The scream that came out of Morgana then was not the controlled ancient stillness from the plaza.
It was something else entirely — a sound that came from a thousand years of carefully maintained composure finally, completely breaking, carrying through the medical hall and out into the broken streets of Vael’kira, the sound of someone understanding, in full, exactly how thoroughly and deliberately they had been hurt by someone who had planned every part of it specifically because he knew what it would do to her.
Jessica reached out and put a hand on Morgana’s arm — not trying to stop the sound, just present.
"I’m so sorry," Jessica said quietly.
Morgana didn’t answer for a long moment.
When she finally spoke, her voice had gone past anger into something colder and steadier — the specific quality of a thousand-year-old being arriving, finally, at a decision that had no going back from.
"For many years I kept him away from this city. And the one morning I leave—" She looked down at Freda. "He didn’t just hurt her. He made sure I would have to watch this. Every day. For as long as she lives."
She stood.
"Tell Lord Satou," Morgana said, "that whatever he’s planning against Chronus — I want to be part of it."
’’Yes i will’’ Said Jesisica
—-----------
VAEL’KIRA — MEDICAL HALL SECOND DAY AFTER THE INVASION
Morgana had not left the cot.
For the entirety of the first night — through the recovery work happening in the halls around her, through Jessica moving between patients, through the distant sounds of Loki’s surviving garrison establishing some semblance of order in the broken city — she had sat in the chair beside Freda’s cot and not moved.
She had done what needed doing from that position. Answered questions that required her knowledge. Directed the other surviving mages in the ward-work needed to stabilize the medical building’s structural integrity. Sent written messages to Loki and Satou when decisions required her input. All of it from the chair, with one hand resting on the cot’s edge, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from the small body lying in it.
She had not slept.
Sleeping was something she did because physiology required it, not because she found it restorative. Tonight, physiology did not seem to require it.
She had spent the night doing something she hadn’t done in a very long time.
She had been afraid.
Not of Chronus — she’d known Chronus long enough to understand his methodology, to map his capabilities, to hold an accurate fear of him rather than the exaggerated kind. Her fear of Chronus was real but measured. Old and settled, like most things in her at this age.
What frightened her now was the silence inside Freda.
She could feel it without reaching — she’d been close enough to Freda for long enough that the absence registered the way a missing piece of furniture registered in a room you knew well. The hum that had been there for seventy years, the specific signature of a mana core connected to its pathways, the particular quality of a sleeping mage that any experienced practitioner could sense the way you sensed a fire in an adjacent room without seeing it.
Gone.
Not quiet. Not dormant. Gone, the way the fire was gone when there was no fire.
The core still hummed. Full, intact, rich with potential.
And completely, permanently alone.
Morgana sat beside it through the night, and did not sleep, and was afraid.
Freda’s eyes opened at dawn.
Not dramatically — not the sudden awakening of someone returning from crisis. The slow, uncertain return of someone who had been very far down and was climbing back up through layers of unconsciousness, the kind of waking that took several minutes from first movement to full presence.
Her eyes blinked. Once. Twice. The emerald green unfocused, then slowly sharpening on the ceiling of a room she didn’t recognize.
"Freda."
Her head turned toward the voice. Morgana. Sitting beside her, and something in Morgana’s face — something carefully controlled but present underneath the control — made Freda’s eyes focus faster, made the process of returning to herself accelerate.
"Master," Freda said. Her voice came out rough and small.
"I’m here," Morgana said.