He'd had a month of frozen time to run that thought through every variation it had. He knew where it ended. He knew Seraphina's argument — that Chronus had planned for exactly that, that it wasn't a failure of protection but a precision attack on the one gap, that knowing this changed nothing about the loss but changed something about the weight of it.
He knew all of that.
It was still the one morning she left.
One of his warriors — Teva, who had served Vael'kira's garrison for eleven years and who had been in the gateway when the halt activated and who had spent whatever subjective experience of that halt he'd had thinking whatever warriors thought in frozen moments — came to stand beside him.
Didn't say anything.
Just stood there.
Loki looked at the ground where Chronus had been.
'You're going to find out which of us was right,' he had said.
He had meant it.
