Freda tried to sit up. Morgana helped her, one hand under her shoulder, the way she’d done when Freda was new to her training and got dizzy after complex castings. The familiar gesture from seventy years ago.
"My head," Freda said.
"You hit it on the fountain’s edge," Morgana said. "The injury is healed. The headache will pass within an hour."
Freda looked around the room — the cots, the patients, the soft light of dawn coming through the single window. The smell of a medical space. The particular quiet of somewhere where people were recovering rather than functioning.
"Vael’kira," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Cassius — did he—" She stopped. The look on Morgana’s face answered the partial question. Freda closed her eyes for a moment. "He got out. He reached Lord Loki."
"Yes," Morgana said. "He did."
"Good." Freda’s voice was thin but steady. "That’s — that’s what mattered. Did Lord Satou, How is everyone —"
"He came," Morgana said. "Everyone came. It’s alright, Freda. You don’t have to hold everything together. It’s alright."
Freda exhaled. The specific exhale of someone releasing something they’d been holding for longer than they realized.
And then, because she was a mage and had been a mage since she was old enough to feel the tug of elemental current, she did what mages did when they were checking themselves after injury. She reached inward, reflexively, automatically, the way a person reached for a bruised arm to assess the damage.
She reached for the fire.
It was the first element Morgana had ever taught her, decades ago in a practice room in this same city — the simplest, the most instinctive, the one that had been easiest for Freda to access from the very beginning because fire was honest about what it was and asked the same in return.
She reached.
Nothing.
She tried again — not panic, just confusion, the way you tried a door twice when the first turn of the handle didn’t work, assuming operator error rather than structural failure.
Nothing.
Water, then. Water was further from fire than anything. Maybe the casting pathways for fire were damaged specifically, maybe the injury to her head had created—
Nothing.
Earth. Wind. Light. Darkness. She reached for all six, in the rapid sequence of someone checking circuit breakers, going through them methodically, refusing panic, operating on the premise that this had to have an explanation that made sense, that there had to be something that would account for the absence without it being—
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Freda sat very still.
The medical hall continued doing what medical halls did. Patients breathed. Staff moved. The dawn light through the single window shifted fractionally as the sun cleared the horizon.
Freda’s hands, lying in her lap, were completely still.
"Master," she said. Her voice had changed — not the roughness of someone who’d been unconscious, but a different kind of roughness, something underneath it.
"I know," Morgana said. Very quietly. "I know, Freda."
"I can’t—" Freda stopped. Started again. "It’s not there. I’m reaching and it’s—" She looked at her hands. "I’ve reached for fire every morning for seventy years. When I wake up. The same way I breathe. It’s just — it’s just something I do. And now—"
She stopped again.
"Freda," Morgana said.
"I can feel the core," Freda said. Her voice was very controlled in a way that was the opposite of calm — the specific control of someone applying every available resource to staying above a surface, with nothing in reserve. "It’s there. I can feel it. It’s — it’s full. It’s all there. But when I reach for it—" She looked up at Morgana, and what was in her eyes was the specific quality of someone asking a question they already knew the answer to and needed to hear confirmed anyway. "Master. Tell me what happened."
Morgana told her.
She told it the way she told things — completely, accurately, without softening the important parts because softening them would have been an insult to Freda’s intelligence and to the understanding that Freda deserved.
She explained what Chronus had done. What the anchor threads were. What aging them past existence meant. What Jessica’s healing attempt had found. What the standing temporal effect meant for every future attempt at recovery.
She told Freda that the core was intact. That the training was intact. That years of knowledge and memory and instinct remained exactly as they had been.
She told Freda that none of it was accessible. That no method they had tried had overcome the standing effect. That everything they’d found pointed toward permanence.
She said the word. Permanent.
Freda sat with it for a long time.
The medical hall continued. Someone across the room coughed softly. A patient three cots down made a small sound in their sleep.
"I’m never going to use magic again," Freda said.
"I’m so sorry," Morgana said. And the words were inadequate — they were words, and what had been taken from Freda was not something words could address, and Morgana had been alive long enough to know that saying sorry was sometimes the only option available even when it accomplished nothing.
"I’m never going to cast magic again," Freda said. Still very controlled. Testing the fact, turning it over, applying it to specific things. "I’m never going to — the purification technique you taught me for the Merc Assault mission. I’m never going to do that again. All the — everything you spent years—"
"Freda—"
"I’m not — I’m not falling apart," Freda said quickly. "I’m just — I need to say it out loud. I need to hear what it sounds like when I say it." She looked at her hands again. "It sounds like something that isn’t true yet. But I know it is."
Morgana reached out and covered both of Freda’s hands with one of her own.
"Listen to me," Morgana said. "What happened to you this morning — what was done to you — is the worst thing Chronus has ever personally done in two hundred years of being my problem. And I have a long list." Her voice was very steady. "It is not the last thing that will happen to you. You are eighteen years old. You have every memory of every technique, every theory, every principle I ever taught you. You have knowledge that most mages three times your age don’t possess. And you are alive."