He felt numb, watching the flames rising, licking around the slender figure. She looked so small, so insignificant, and yet she had been a giant; brave, resourceful, kind-hearted... merciful when she could be, resolute when she had to be. He had been proud to follow her, in the end. And angry, when she would not let him take the final blow against the Archdemon himself, but claimed it for her own instead. And died, in the killing of the beast.
There were things he had to do now; responsibilities that had become his, with her death. He was the only surviving Grey Warden in Ferelden, and that meant taking on the rank of Commander of the Grey, or seeing it pass to some foreigner. Coming as it now did with the additional title of Arl of Amaranthine, that was not something he was willing to see occur. And there was one other responsibility he needed to deal with; a promise she'd extracted from him before her death. He might have undertaken it anyway, even without her words, but with them... with them, he was committed.
He stayed by the pyre all night, watching the flames rise and roar, fed on oil-soaked wood, and then gradually ebb away, leaving nothing but smoking ashes and a few charred bones by the time the sun began to rise. Only then did he give her his final salute, arms crossed on chest and bowing deeply, before finally turning away.
The next few days were filled with meetings; meetings with the Queen, a hearing before the Landsmeet, a meeting with Teyrn Fergus. Fergus would be his liege lord from now on, at least in theory, though in practise he would mostly report directly to the Crown as Warden-Commander; only in matters related to the governance of the arling itself would he owe any acknowledgement to the teyrn.
Finally it was all sorted out, though it had taken long enough that he'd received word that the Orlesian wardens had arrived ahead of him at Vigil's Keep and already settled themselves in there. He didn't like that; he'd have preferred to have been there to welcome them, at least as much welcome as he was willing to give towards foreign interlopers. He'd have turned them away if he could, but lacking the knowledge of how to create wardens himself, it had been made clear to him that he had no choice but to accept them for now. It would likely be years until he had sufficient well-trained wardens to send the Orlesians packing.
The Maker clearly had an interesting sense of humour, he found himself thinking as he set off along the north road with Mhairi, a warden-applicant who had been sent to accompany him to the Keep. Rather insulting, that; as if he couldn't be trusted to find his own way from Denerim to the Vigil without the help of a raw recruit. Still, it gave him someone to talk to during the long walk, and she proved to be full of potentially useful information about the Orlesians, having spent some time with them before being sent south to meet him.
It was only after they reached the keep that Loghain learned just how interesting the Maker's sense of humour was. It ended up being several very busy months later before he was finally able to give any attention to the promise the warden had extracted from him, and by then, the bastard's trail was long cold. Assuming the fool had even survived the end of the Blight War, of which there was no guarantee. Still, he needed to be found, and Loghain was willing to spend rather freely to have him looked for.
In the meantime, he had plenty to do to keep himself occupied, between having both an arling and an order of Grey Wardens to rebuild.