He came on the ninth day.
Not a portal. He walked — from the nearest point he could reach by his own movement, the journey taking six hours, which meant he'd left before dawn.
He came to the gate at noon.
Alone. No guards, no staff, no theatrical arrival. Just Loki, in traveling clothes, arriving the way a person arrived at a place they'd decided to go.
Satou was at the gate.
He hadn't been waiting — he'd been at the field and had come back and had read Vessa's perimeter notification and had understood immediately.
They looked at each other.
"You walked," Satou said.
"From the northern road junction," Loki said. "Six hours." He looked at the settlement. "Vael'kira has horses. I didn't want to arrive in a hurry."
He came through the gate.
He looked at the construction site. The eastern residential expansion. The memorial field's edge past the main building.
