They spent two days scouting the Barrow.
Sunny mapped the Demon's patrol route through his shadow sense from the closest viable cover, a low knoll at the wasteland's edge where a tree root broke the surface. The range was tight, and the data came in fragments across multiple observation windows, but by the second evening he had enough to work with. The Demon circled the hill's perimeter twice during daylight hours, pausing at the base to survey the wasteland before returning to the shade beneath the tree. Its route never varied. Between patrols, it stayed close to the trunk, often looking up into the canopy where the fruits hung among the scarlet leaves.
The tree itself was climbable. The obsidian bark was rough and cracked, with enough handholds for someone strong enough to reach the lowest branches. From there, the branches were wide enough to serve as platforms, and the canopy was dense enough to hide in.
The critical variable was the gap between the Demon's patrols and the time required to cross the open ground and reach the canopy. It was too narrow for comfort, and Sunny couldn't see a way to widen it without drawing the Demon away from the hill.
Which was why they needed the Echo.
On the third morning, they built the disguise.
The centurion they'd killed weeks ago had left behind enough salvageable chitin to work with. Sunny and Nephis spent the better part of the day fitting the carapace plates around the Echo's smaller frame, lashing them in place with strips of seaweed and sections of Nephis's golden rope. The result looked like a centurion the same way a scarecrow looked like a farmer, but Sunny was counting on the Demon's territorial instinct to override its intelligence. A centurion approaching the Barrow without tribute was an insult that demanded a response, and that would pull the Demon downhill and away from the tree.
The plan was simple in structure. The Echo would approach from the east while the three of them circled wide to the western slope and buried themselves in the grey sand. When the Demon descended to deal with the intruder, they would run for the tree. The Echo would buy them time by engaging the Demon after the disguise failed, and Sunny would dismiss it once they were safely in the canopy.
Cassie sat on a flat stone and listened to them work. She kept the oil jars cradled in their seaweed padding on her knees, her fingers resting lightly on the clay as though she could feel the volatile contents through the walls. The jars represented weeks of harvesting and the entirety of their offensive capability. If they broke before reaching the tree, there was no plan.
By late afternoon, the disguise was complete and the Echo stood in its centurion costume like something out of a fever dream. The chitin plates didn't sit right and the scythe arms were lashed at wrong angles, so the whole assembly listed to one side whenever the Echo shifted its weight.
It also looked, from a distance of several hundred meters and through heat shimmer rising off grey sand, approximately centurion-shaped. That was all it needed to be.
They moved at sunset.
Sunny sent the Echo toward the Barrow's eastern face while he carried Cassie on his back and followed Nephis around the western approach. The grey sand was soft and deep enough to slow them. Nephis moved ahead in the white armor, cutting a path through the worst of the sand while Sunny focused on keeping his footing under Cassie's weight.
His shadow sense tracked the Echo's approach in real time. The disguised scavenger lurched across the wasteland with the grace of something learning to walk for the first time, shedding chitin fragments as it went. One of the lashed scythe arms detached completely and dropped into the sand. The Echo considered the fallen limb for a moment, then kept moving without it.
They reached the western slope and pressed themselves flat against the ground, pulling sand over their bodies until only their faces were exposed. Cassie lay between Sunny and Nephis with the oil jars clutched against her chest, breathing in controlled, shallow pulls that fogged in the cooling air.
Sunny extended his shadow sense as far as it would reach and found the Demon at the hilltop, motionless beneath the tree. It hadn't reacted yet. The Echo was still crossing the open ground, hundreds of meters from the base of the Barrow.
They waited.
The light was failing when the Echo finally reached the hill's eastern base. It stopped and stood there, lopsided and grotesque, its remaining scythe arm jutting at a weird angle. The disguise had shed most of its convincing elements during the crossing, leaving behind a scavenger wearing chitin fragments like a costume it had stolen.
At the summit, the Demon stirred.
Sunny felt it through the shadow sense before he saw it, a massive displacement of density at the edge of his range. The Demon rose from the sand near the tree and turned toward the eastern slope, its scarlet eyes finding the intruder below.
Sunny's breath caught. The next few seconds would determine whether the Demon descended to investigate or simply observed from the hilltop. If it stayed put, the plan was dead and they'd have to crawl back through the sand before the tide caught them.
The Demon descended.
It moved with a slow, measured gait
It moved with a slow, measured gait, its pillar-like legs carrying it downhill with a weight that Sunny could feel through the ground even at this distance. The metal carapace caught the last of the sunset and threw it back in flashes that looked like signal fires along its body.
"Now," Sunny whispered.
They rose from the sand and ran.
Nephis was faster. She pulled ahead within the first few strides, her legs driving through the soft sand with a power that the Starlight Legion Armor enhanced and the weeks of hunting had refined. Sunny followed with Cassie on his back, his calves burning as the sand sucked at his feet with each step, and his shadow sense split between the Demon descending the eastern slope and the diminishing distance to the tree.
The Demon reached the Echo.
The Echo's shadow vanished from his sense. The Demon hadn't even circled. It had lunged the moment it reached the base, and the Echo's disguise hadn't survived the first strike.
The impact registered as a tremor through the ground, faint but unmistakable even on the western slope. Cassie's arms tightened around his neck.
"The disguise is gone," Sunny said between breaths. "The Echo is fighting."
It wouldn't last long against a Demon. The Echo's only value now was the seconds it could steal before the Demon finished it and turned its attention uphill.
Nephis reached the tree. She didn't pause to wait for them. She jumped and caught a crack in the obsidian bark, then started climbing with the kind of explosive speed that made Sunny briefly revise his estimate of how many soul shards she'd consumed over the past weeks. She reached the lowest branch and turned, pulling the golden rope from her soul sea and throwing one end down.
Sunny arrived at the trunk and set Cassie on her feet. His legs were screaming and his lungs felt like they'd been scraped raw, but the timeline was collapsing and there was no room to recover.
"Summon your staff," he said.
Cassie obeyed without asking why. The wooden staff materialized in her hands and Sunny positioned her body, turning her to face the slope they'd just climbed.
"Wind. Now."
The gale erupted from the staff and tore across the hilltop, ripping fallen leaves and loose sand from the ground and scattering them in a wide arc. The blast stripped the surface bare around the tree's base, erasing every footprint and scuff mark their approach had left behind. Grey sand billowed into the air and drifted east on the momentum of the gale.
Sunny felt the connection sever in his soul sea, a sphere of light winking out and leaving the water a fraction darker. The Spell's voice followed.
[Your Echo has been destroyed.]
He absorbed the notification and kept moving. Everything else could wait.
He looped the rope around Cassie's waist and knotted it, then tugged twice. Nephis hauled from above, pulling the blind girl upward with a speed that was almost violent. Cassie rose along the trunk with her staff in one hand and the oil jars in the other, her face locked in the blank concentration of someone trusting their life to a knot and another person's grip.
The Demon's shadow reappeared in Sunny's sense. It had left the Echo's remains and was moving uphill, fast, heading for the tree with focused intent.
Nephis hauled Cassie onto the branch and threw the rope back down. Sunny caught it and climbed, pulling himself upward hand over hand while the ground shook beneath him in accelerating intervals.
He reached the branch and rolled onto it just as Nephis dismissed the rope, dissolving the golden light before it could catch the Demon's eye. The three of them pressed flat against the broad surface of the branch and held still.
The Carapace Demon burst around the trunk like a landslide given purpose, its four arms spread wide and its scarlet eyes blazing. It circled the base of the tree in a tight patrol, scythes scraping against the obsidian bark hard enough to leave marks while its pincers snapped at the air with the sound of industrial shears.
It found nothing.
The wind had stripped the surface clean, and the branch they occupied was wide enough that the Demon's upward gaze couldn't find them past its edge. After circling the trunk twice more, the creature expanded its search to the surrounding hilltop, moving outward in widening arcs that eventually carried it to the boundary where the wind's effect ended.
There it found their footprints, two sets leading downhill toward the wasteland.
The Demon roared. The sound hit Sunny's chest like a physical impact, a metallic shriek that reverberated through the tree and set every leaf above them trembling. Then the creature launched itself down the slope, following the footprints into the grey waste with a fury that shook the island.
It found nothing at the bottom. The footprints ended at the flat sand where they'd buried themselves, and the sand offered no further trail. The Demon stood in the wasteland, scanning the empty ground with its scarlet eyes.
Then the sea began to rise.
The ground shook with the familiar low rumble, and the smell of salt reached them even at the tree's height. The dark water was returning. The Demon turned and climbed back toward the hilltop with the stiff, furious gait of something that had been denied a kill.
Sunny let himself breathe.
They were on the Barrow and hidden in the tree, with the Demon below them and the dark sea rising to seal the island shut. Stage one was complete.
Now they waited for dark.
Night came fast.
The grey sky went black and took the world with it. The Demon settled at the tree's base, its massive form a dense knot of shadow that pulsed with a slow rhythm. The dark sea pressed against the Barrow's slopes, and Sunny could feel the things in it, shapes moving beneath the surface at the edge of his range, drawn toward the island the way the vision had described.
Cassie passed him the oil jars. Sunny took them carefully, feeling the weight of the volatile liquid shift inside the clay.
Nephis had shaped a torch from bone and seaweed during the wait, and she held it now in both hands, standing on the branch with her back straight and her breathing even. She was a silhouette defined only by the absence of stars behind her.
Sunny moved to the edge of the branch, directly above the Demon's resting position, and looked down into absolute darkness.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Ready," Nephis said.
White radiance flared beneath her eyelids. Fire burst from her hands and ignited the torch, a single point of light in the darkness. The flame caught and held, bright and steady against the dark.
Sunny leaned over the edge and threw both jars.
He heard them whistle as they fell, and then he heard the Demon react, a blur of motion and the sharp crack of chitin on clay as the creature's scythes intercepted both jars in midair. The clay shattered and the two liquids rained down across the Demon's metal carapace in a wide spray, mixing on contact into the black corrosive oil.
Against the Demon's polished metal, it did nothing. The oil slid across the armor without leaving a mark, pooling in the joints and running down the creature's legs in dark rivulets.
Nephis threw the torch.
It spun end over end, trailing a tail of fire, and struck the Demon's carapace dead center. The oil caught instantly.
The Carapace Demon erupted in flame.
Fire raced across its metal body in every direction, following the oil into every joint and crevice until the creature wore a layer of burning light that turned it from a shadow in the darkness into the brightest thing on the Forgotten Shore. The polished armor amplified the effect, reflecting the flames outward in every direction until the Demon blazed like a star dragged to earth.
In the pitch-black night, the burning Demon was visible for kilometers, a waypoint in the darkness that nothing with eyes could miss.
The Demon roared. The sound tore through the fire and the night, and in its wake Sunny heard something answer from beneath the water.
The dark sea was moving.