So here's what nobody tells you about winning a battle: the winning part lasts about thirty seconds and then you spend the next week dealing with the aftermath, which turns out is just funerals and guilt and watching people you care about heal slower than you need them to.
Thorne was still in medical. Still hooked up to machines that beeped in rhythms I'd memorized by now because I'd been sitting in this chair for—what, five days? Six? Time was doing weird things where hours felt like minutes and also like years, and I'd stopped asking healers when he'd wake up because the answer was always "soon" which was medically accurate and emotionally useless.
