She looked at her hands.
Her hands that had cast six simultaneous elements in the plaza of Vael'kira and held a demon lord's attention with coordinated temporal field disruption and bought Cassius the seconds he needed to survive long enough to send a message. Her hands that had inscribed the displacement spell that had thrown Cassius outside the isolation field with the last of her mana.
Her hands that had reached for fire every morning for seventy years, reflexively, automatically, the way you reached for something that was always there.
"But the victory doesn't fix what was done to me specifically," she said. "Chronus is sealed and the working is stopped and the eighty thousand people are home. And I still can't feel anything. I reach for it and there's nothing there."
She said it flatly.
