It cracked once — when he said Cassius’s name and described finding him.
Jessica was already moving before he finished — pulling her medical bag from its place, the supplies she kept ready, the look on her face the specific focus of someone whose entire identity oriented around exactly this kind of moment.
"How many survivors," Lyra asked. Her voice was tight, but her mind was already working — the tactical assessment engaging even through the grief.
"I don’t know the full number yet," Satou said. "But the casualties are significant. Loki’s city—" He stopped. "It’s bad, Lyra. Worse than the siege, in some ways. There was no fight. Just — destruction."
Lyra absorbed this.
"Go," she said. "Take Jessica. Take whatever supplies we have that can be spared. I’ll coordinate from here — figure out what else the settlement can send." She looked at him, and underneath the tactical focus was something else — the specific worry of someone who loved him and could see exactly how much this had cost him already. "And Satou. Come back. After. Don’t—" She stopped. "Just come back."
"I will," he said.
Jessica was ready. She crossed to him, gripped his hand briefly — not a long embrace, there wasn’t time for one, but enough. "Show me where to go," she said.
He activated the stone.
—-------
Satou stepped through the portal with Jessica beside him, and Vael’kira hit them immediately — not as a visual, not as sound, but as smell. Ash. Blood. The specific quality of stone that had been aged past its natural state and crumbled into dust.
Jessica’s hand tightened briefly on her medical bag.
In the central plaza, Loki and Seraphina had been working through the immediate area during the time Satou had been gone — moving through rubble, pulling survivors from beneath fallen structural sections, carrying those who couldn’t carry themselves. A small group of people had been laid in the plaza’s clearing, the ones they’d found so far — maybe forty, maybe fifty. Some conscious, some not. The medical staff who’d survived were doing what they could with what they had.
Loki looked up when Satou arrived.
He didn’t say anything. He looked at Jessica, and then at the city behind him, and then back at Satou with the expression of someone who had been moving on purpose for the last thirty minutes specifically to avoid stopping and feeling the full weight of what he was moving through.
"We found who we could reach," Loki said. "There are more. I can hear them — in the residential district, in the eastern garrison quarter. Some are trapped. Some are—" He stopped. "I don’t know the full picture yet."
"Jessica will handle what’s here," Satou said. "Keep searching."
Jessica was already kneeling beside the nearest unconscious survivor before Satou finished the sentence — her golden healing light activating, her hands moving with the focused speed of someone who had treated battlefield casualties before and knew exactly what the first minutes cost.
It was Morgana who determined the full scale of it.
She stood in the center of the plaza, closed her eyes, and reached outward with the kind of wide-area awareness that a mage of her experience and age could manage — not a targeted search, but a total sweep, feeling for every life signature within the boundaries of Vael’kira’s walls, distinguishing between present and absent, between breathing and not.
The sweep took perhaps three minutes.
When she opened her eyes, Satou saw the answer on her face before she said a word.
"Just under sixty thousand," she said quietly. "That was the population this morning." She looked down at the plaza stones. "I am counting seventeen thousand signatures. Some are faint — very faint. Some may not survive the next hour without help." She paused. "The rest—"
She didn’t finish.
She didn’t need to.
Seventy percent. Somewhere between forty and forty-three thousand people who had woken up in this city this morning and were no longer here to wake up tomorrow.
The plaza was very quiet for a moment.
Loki stood with his back to them, facing the remains of the coloured glass spire at the district’s edge — or what remained of it, a third of it standing, the rest scattered across the street below in fragments that had been beautiful this morning and were just wreckage now.
"Loki," Satou said.
"I heard," Loki said. His voice was completely flat.
"Seventeen thousand people are still alive," Satou said. "That number changes if we don’t move."
A long pause.
Loki turned. Whatever he was feeling was present in his face — not hidden, not managed — but he was moving again when he turned, and that was what mattered.
"Search teams by district," he said, to Seraphina and the surviving garrison officers who’d assembled nearby. "Prioritize anyone trapped or critically injured. Bring everyone to the medical hall we’re establishing in the administrative building — it’s the most structurally sound that’s still standing."
Seraphina nodded and moved immediately.
Jessica called from where she was working: "I need clean water and whatever medical supplies survived. And if anyone here has healing ability at any level, I need them beside me now."
Two survival came forward after hearing what Jessica had said wanting to save the others too.
The work began.
—---------------------
Morgana found Jessica in the makeshift medical hall that had been established in one of the surviving administrative buildings, where Freda lay on a cot, still unconscious, her green hair spread across a pillow that someone had found for her.
"Lady Jessica," Morgana said. "Before you continue with the others — would you look at her? Please."
Jessica came immediately.
She examined Freda with the same thoroughness she brought to every patient — checking breathing, checking the head injury from the fountain (minor, already healing, nothing concerning), and then, at Morgana’s quiet direction, extending her healing magic toward the center of Freda’s chest.
Jessica’s golden light moved through Freda’s body the way it always did — gentle, thorough, reading the full state before deciding where to focus.
She found the absence immediately.
"There’s—" Jessica frowned slightly, concentrating harder. "There’s a core here. Fully intact. But the pathways connecting to it are—" She paused. "They’re gone. Not damaged. Gone, like they were never there at all."