I walked the eastern road with both hands out and pulled the fire down in passes.
The thatch rooftops first, the ones still fully burning, the flames dropping section by section as the mana reached them.
Then the fishing net posts along the waterfront, the dry rope going last.
The market stalls were already mostly gone, just the frames left, black and collapsed into the street in angles that said they had been burning for a while before we got here.
The others spread through the town behind me.
A boat at the dock still smoldering at the stern. The stone granary at the center of town standing intact, everything around it not.
The demons had moved fast and without particular direction, hitting what was in front of them and moving on, which meant some things had been hit and some things hadn't and some people had fallen into the gap between the two.
"Here." Leopold from the alley beside the granary. "He's breathing."
"Two more over here. One's bad." Gringo, further in.
The men worked through the rubble and the wreckage, calling out what they found. Breathing first, location and condition.
The ones not breathing, Favio and Benneth and Harold arranged in a row along the cleared section of the eastern road, each one handled with the same care regardless of what they looked like, laid straight, given the dignity of being placed rather than left.
The women from Eryndor moved to the survivors. Celina with torn strips from her own hem for the ones bleeding. Savina and Mathilda and Helene going to the women from the town who had come back in after the barrier dropped, sitting with them, holding what needed holding.
Torra was at the edge of the cleared road looking at the row.
I looked at him.
He was eight. He understood what he was seeing and was trying to find somewhere to put the understanding and there was nowhere to put it yet because he hadn't been in the world long enough to have built anywhere.
I went to him.
"Come." I said.
I gathered the Seaphero children first, the ones who had made it to the beach, pulling them together at the edge of the road.
Then the elderly.
Torra stayed close to my side while I did it, helping without being asked, taking a small girl's hand when she was standing alone looking at the wrong thing.
I teleported them to Eryndor in two groups. The children first, then the elderly. Both times coming straight back.
Torra came with me on the second return, which I had expected.
He didn't say anything when we got back to Seaphero. He just stayed close and watched the town with those eyes that had seen more than an eight year old should have and had learned to carry it without being asked to.
The injured were laid out in the cleared section by the time I finished with the fires.
Eleven of them. Three in the kind of condition that had gone quiet and still in the way bodies went when they were deciding between things.
I went down the line.
The healing mana worked through each one steadily, finding what was broken and what was bleeding and what had gone wrong in the ways that didn't show on the outside.
The three serious ones taking longer, the mana running deep. They came back slowly, eyes opening to smoke and sky and the sound of people who had survived the same morning.
Reunions happened in the space around me while I worked.
A woman finding her husband sitting up. A man's daughter running to him from the beach side. A father not letting go.
Some of them walked to the row instead.
I didn't watch those.
"LEIGH."
Kalan. From inside the collapsed structure at the end of the road, the one that had taken the worst of it, roof down, walls leaning into each other at an angle that had held by accident rather than design.
I went in.
The pocket the fallen roof had made was low and dark. The man inside had his arms around a woman and a small child, all three of them pressed together under the same beam.
The woman and the child were cold.
The man's pulse was there. Barely. The thread of it under my fingers inconsistent, his breathing so shallow it barely moved his chest.
As long as there was a pulse.
I crouched and put both hands on him and ran the mana through evenly. The broken ribs first. The internal bleeding. The lung that had partially collapsed, the mana working through it carefully, finding each thing in order and resolving it.
One long breath.
His chest rose properly.
His eyes opened.
He looked at the beam above him. Then down.
He already knew. The body knows before the mind arrives.
The sound he made had no words in it.
I stood and moved back.
•••••••
The afternoon passed slowly.
Nobody rushed it. The people of Eryndor stayed where they were and the survivors of Seaphero sat with what they had and what they didn't have anymore and nobody told them how long that was supposed to take.
Elder Elka found me near the dock.
"We're not leaving yet." Not a question.
"I know." I said.
She looked at the smoke still rising from the eastern end. At the row along the road.
"They need time." She said.
"Yes."
I sent Elficia and Elfaren back to Eryndor. Elficia's pregnancy was far enough along now that the contaminated air and the weight of what was in this town were things she didn't need.
The Seaphero children in Eryndor needed adults who weren't standing in the middle of their own grief. Elfaren went without argument.
I teleported back and climbed the granary.
Stone built. The only structure fully standing. Everything around it wasn't.
From up here the whole town was visible. The row along the eastern road. The survivors in the cleared section, some upright, some still on the ground. The women of Eryndor moving between them.
Favio and Benneth still working through what was left of the western end, looking for anything that still needed finding.
The sea beyond the dock. Still the same sea it had been this morning when Torra was chasing the waves and Nalvik was learning it was salty and Azylan was writing in his notebook and none of this had happened yet.
The demon lord was in Medalline's throne room right now. Looking at his maps. Moving pieces across a board he had decided belonged to him.
He had done this to Seaphero the way he had done it to Singrael. The way he would do it to every town between Medalline and wherever he decided to stop.
Because nothing had stopped him yet.
I looked at the row along the eastern road.
The anger that had been sitting cold and patient since Eryndor's barrier first went up was still there.
It had waited through the fortifications and the artifacts and the Branklore contract and the river crossing and all the mornings of monitoring from rooftops while kingdoms fell.
It was still waiting.
But it was getting harder to keep it there.