The smoke came first.
One column from the eastern edge of town. Then three. Then the space between them filled in and it stopped being columns and became a line, black and thick, rolling up from the thatch rooftops and the fishing net posts and the dry timber of the market stalls along the eastern road.
Then the screaming.
Voices at different distances, layering over each other. A woman near the boats. Children further in. Men shouting over the top of both, the kind of shouting that was trying to organize something that had stopped being organizable.
Azylan looked up from the grill.
The children had gone still in the water.
Torra came out of the sea at a run, feet hitting the wet sand, crossing the beach toward me. He reached me and took my hand.
"Leigh." Quiet under all the noise. His eyes already wet. "Help them."
Elder Elka's hand found my arm from the other side. Not grabbing. Just there.
The citizens crested the dune line at the town's edge running hard, looking back over their shoulders while still moving forward. Women pulling children by the wrists. Old men with bare feet in the sand. A girl carrying a younger one on her back, both of them silent, past the point of sound.
Demons behind them.
Not scouts. A raiding force, loose and fast, moving through the town the way the fire was moving through it, following whatever ran.
They cleared the dune line.
I raised my hand.
The barrier went up between them and the running people. The demons at the front hit it at full speed and stopped hard, the ones behind pressing forward into them, the whole advance folding against the wall.
The citizens poured through to our side.
Women. Children. Elderly. The men weren't with them.
A woman near Elder Elka turned back toward the burning town. Said one thing. Didn't say it again.
Favio moved.
Four strides to the barrier, and when I dropped the section in front of him he hit the demon on the other side before it had finished recovering from the wall.
It went back three feet.
Favio looked at his fist.
Then at the demon getting up.
"Right." He said. And hit it again.
Gringo came through the gap beside him. Leopold after that. Nalvik, Kalan, Harold, the men of Eryndor moving through onto the beach without coordination, without anyone saying go, just moving in the same direction because that was the direction.
I watched.
The option to end it was there. It was always there. I left it where it was.
Gringo took a sword across his forearm. Hissed. The cut was real, blood immediate, and then the healing mana running through the barrier found him and closed it in seconds. He looked at the arm. Looked at the demon. Set his feet.
Leopold took a hit to the shoulder that should have folded him. It didn't. He stepped into the follow-through and put the demon down with both hands.
Benneth was working two at once, giving ground in centimeters, his face carrying the calm of someone who had decided where this ended and was moving toward it.
Kalan broke a demon's jaw with an elbow. Looked briefly surprised. Kept going.
Gringo was grinning.
Nalvik had a cut above his eye running blood into the lashes and hadn't stopped moving.
I ran the healing mana through the barrier continuously. Wounds closing after a moment, not immediately. Long enough to feel. Short enough to keep them in the fight.
Pain was information. I wasn't going to take it away before it had said what it needed to say.
They knew what pain was. Cold through walls that couldn't hold it. Going to sleep with nothing because the food went to the children first and the women second and the men ate what remained, which on the bad nights was nothing. Bodies that had learned where the line between down and stopped actually was and had crossed it enough times to stop being afraid of the approach.
That knowledge didn't leave. It sat in the muscles and the joints and the specific way a man plants his feet when he has decided he isn't moving.
Formidable. Quietly, without announcement.
I watched them hold the beach against demon-class opponents and felt something I didn't look at directly.
Then the second wave came over the dune.
Larger. The kind of numbers that changed what the beach was.
I stepped forward.
"Enough." I said.
The men of Eryndor were spread across the sand between the barrier and the wave, breathing hard, the fight behind them in every direction they had moved.
They looked at me.
I raised my hand.
Snapped my fingers.
Every demon on the beach froze. Mid-stride. Mid-swing. Whatever motion they had been in, held.
I waved my hand.
Ash. All of it at once, the frozen forms coming apart into grey and drifting on the sea wind, the second wave and everything already on the beach going together, the sand settling back into itself.
The sea kept coming in.
Nalvik let out a long breath.
"We can't match that." He said it like a measurement he had taken and accepted. No weight on it either way. "Not even close."
Gringo looked at the cut on his arm, already closed, the blood dried.
"We held them though." He said.
"Against demons." Leopold said. Like confirming a fact he was still checking.
Favio looked at his hands the same way he had looked at them after the monkey. Finding out what they were made of at a point in his life when he had stopped expecting new information on the subject.
He looked at me.
I looked back at him.
Said nothing.
He nodded once. Slow.
The citizens of Seaphero were behind the barrier line, watching. The women with the children pulled in close. Looking at the empty beach where the demons had been, at the men of Eryndor still standing in it.
Elder Elka was already moving toward the nearest group of them, hands out.
Torra appeared beside me and took my hand.
The smoke from the town rose against the afternoon sky. Black. Steady. The buildings along the eastern road still going, the thatch rooftops and the net posts and the dry market stalls burning the way dry things burned, completely and without negotiating.
The ash from the demons drifted on the wind toward the water.
Disappeared.