Night came in over the coast without ceremony.
Azylan found a kitchen still standing on the western end of the road, stone-built like the granary, the walls intact and the hearth usable. He went through it once to check what was there, came back out, and started directing.
The women of Eryndor moved with him without being asked. Celina at the fire. Helene and Savina sorting what the kitchen had against what Azylan had pulled from the item box. Mathilda on the bread.
The Seaphero women who were steady enough drifted in after a while, hands finding tasks, the work giving them somewhere to put what didn't have anywhere else to go yet.
The smell of it reached the street before long.
Outside, Favio had found a clearing. Half a kilometer east of the town, past the last of the burned structures, where the ground was soft enough and the grass was long and the sea wind came through it steadily.
He came back and looked at me.
I moved the bodies.
One by one, the row from the eastern road, teleported to the clearing in the sequence Favio had marked out. The Seaphero residents who were able came with shovels they had pulled from the tool sheds that had survived. The men of Eryndor worked alongside them, taking turns on the digging, nobody keeping score of whose turn it was.
The burial took two hours.
No ceremony. Just the work of it, and the names said quietly by the people who knew them, and the ground closed back over each one properly.
That was what they could give them. They gave it.
---
The food was ready when they came back.
Tables pulled from the houses still standing, set end to end in the cleared section of the eastern road under the open sky. Bowls passed down the line. Bread torn and shared. Everything Azylan had been able to make from what the kitchen had and what the item box provided, which turned out to be more than the street expected.
They sat down and nobody spoke.
The quiet had a specific weight to it. Not uncomfortable. Just full. The kind that came after a day that had been too much to summarize and nobody was trying to.
I looked at the faces along the table. Seaphero's survivors eating in silence, the grief sitting openly in some of them and turned inward in others. The Eryndor residents eating alongside them, not pushing anything, just present.
I set my bowl down.
"The demons that came here." I said. "None of them went back."
Heads came up along the table.
"When a scouting force doesn't report back, a larger force gets sent to find out why." I said. "Seaphero will be hit again. Harder."
The cleared road was quiet.
A young man near the center of the table had been sitting straight since the burial, carrying something in his posture that said he had decided he was the one responsible for whatever came next. Aquen. The chief's son. The chief hadn't made it back from the eastern road.
He looked at me steadily.
"Then where do we go." He said.
Elder Elka set her bowl down and looked at him with the warmth she brought to everything.
"Eryndor." She said. "We have enough food for everyone. More than enough. And room."
Aquen looked at her. Then at the others from Seaphero along the table.
Nobody went against it.
"We have nothing left here to go back to." A woman near the end said it quietly. Not with bitterness. Just the plain fact of it.
Aquen nodded once. "Then we accept."
They finished the meal without rushing it. Then they went back to the clearing, one more time, standing at the graves in the dark with the sea wind moving through the grass around them.
Whatever they said there, they said it privately.
When they came back to the road the Eryndor residents were waiting.
Aquen looked at the group. At the men and women and the two dragons in human form and the elves and the single person standing slightly apart from all of it who had not said much all evening.
"What's the transport situation." He said. "Carriage? Horses?"
Nobody answered immediately.
Favio looked at me.
I looked at Aquen.
Then I teleported everyone.
The night air of Eryndor's mountain valley was different from the coast. No salt. No wave sound. Crickets in the farm fields and the breeze moving through the fruit trees in the orchard and the lamp posts running warm light along every path in the settlement.
The Seaphero residents landed on their feet and stood very still.
Aquen turned a full circle slowly.
"What." He said.
"Where's the road." Someone behind him.
"What are those lights."
"Is this...how did we...we were just at the coast."
Gringo was already walking toward them with the easy manner of someone who had arrived here the same way once and remembered what it felt like.
"Welcome to Eryndor." He said.
A woman near the back of the group was looking at the houses. Stone, two storeys, uniform, the light from inside them warm and even. Then at the paths. Then at the lamp posts running the full length of the residential zone.
"Who built all of this." She said.
"Leigh did." Gringo said.
She looked at me.
I was already walking toward the gate to check the barrier.
"He built all of it?" She said.
"Yes, all of it." Favio said. "And he's been adding things since then."
"When did he get here."
"About two years ago."
She looked at the settlement again. At the size of it, the infrastructure, the lamp posts, the paths, the farm fields visible beyond the residential zone.
"In two years." She said.
"He works fast." Favio said. The tone of someone who had stopped being surprised by this a long time ago.
Aquen was still looking at the lamp posts. At the light they produced, steady and warm, running the full length of the path without a single flame visible in any of them.
"How." He said. "How do they work without fire."
"Magic stones." Nalvik said. "He made an equation for them. They charge automatically."
Aquen looked at Nalvik.
"He made an equation." He said.
"He makes a lot of things." Nalvik said.
One of the Seaphero men had walked to the nearest lamp post and was looking at the base of it. At the rune encryption running around the concrete pole. He put his hand on it carefully.
"I've never seen runes like this." He said. "I've seen rune work. The mages in our town used it for the fishing nets. But this is-" He stopped. "What tier is he."
The Eryndor residents exchanged a look.
Benneth made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
"We don't ask that." He said pleasantly.
The man looked at him.
"Why not."
"Because the answer doesn't help you understand it any better." Benneth said.
Aquen had been watching me across the settlement since we arrived, the way someone watched something they were trying to take accurate measurements of.
"He doesn't talk much." He said.
"No." Gringo agreed.
"Is he always like that."
Gringo considered this with genuine thought.
"Cold?" He said. "Yes. Always."
"Should we be worried about that."
Favio chuckled. The full, easy laugh of a man completely at peace with the question.
"No." He said. "He says the harshest things you've ever heard and then turns around and does something like this." He gestured at Eryndor. At all of it. "He's just Leigh. You'll understand eventually."
Aquen looked at the lamp posts again. At the paths. At the houses.
At me, checking the barrier at the gate, my back to all of them, apparently unaware of the conversation.
"Eventually." He said.
"Usually takes about a week." Gringo said.