***Aldrik***
I stood there for a long time.
Long enough for the evening crowd to thin around me, for the last market stalls to begin closing, for the light to shift from gold to the deeper purple of approaching night. Long enough for my legs to start trembling from the effort of staying upright.
He was still there. Still laughing, still talking to the young man beside him, still moving with that particular unhurried grace that I'd watched from across rooms for months without ever appreciating what I was seeing.
Still exactly like Cassius.
Still impossible.
My mind kept cycling through the same loop. Cassius is dead. I watched him die, I held him while he died, I heard his last words, I'd been told they sealed him in a stone tomb at Ravenshollow. Cadiz had refused to let me attend, and I hadn't fought it because I didn't deserve to be there, I didn't deserve to stand at his grave and pretend grief gave me rights I'd never earned in life.
Cassius is dead.
And yet.
