Thalion raised his fist. The column stopped. Horses shifted and leather creaked in the sudden quiet. Every soldier in the escort had a hand on a weapon before the command came.

"Perimeter formation." His voice carried without volume. "We camp at the tree line. Nothing enters the dead zone until morning."

Seraphina dismounted and the pull in her chest dragged harder. The anchor node under that ruin was hemorrhaging. She could feel the ley line losing coherence, pressure dropping, warmth leaking where it shouldn't. Her fire-scars pulsed in time with the decay, faint gold tracing along her forearms.

Camp went up fast, Thalion's soldiers moving with the efficiency of men who'd done this a hundred times. Tents staked in a tight arc along the tree line with the dead zone at their backs. Watch positions set at intervals. Fire pits dug shallow to contain the light.

Yona brought food. Dried meat and travel bread and a hard apple that had survived the road better than most of them. She set it in Seraphina's hands without asking whether she wanted it.

"Eat." The word held no argument. Just fact.

Seraphina chewed. The meat could have been leather for all she tasted. The apple was sour and the juice ran down her wrist and she wiped it on her trousers. Every time the node lost another thread of coherence, the gold lines on her arms brightened and her ribs tightened.

Across camp, the soldiers had left wide spacing around her tent. Same arrangement from every night since the road. Corporal Edrin was the closest, ten feet from Yona's position with his bedroll already laid out. The others stayed further back.

On the far side of camp, the prince had set his post. Three people between them for any communication. He stood near his second and spoke low, gesturing toward the dead zone and the ruins beyond it. Planning the approach for morning.

She watched without interest. He was a shape that gave orders. A presence that maintained distance.

The blank paper came out of her pack. Fourth time. She held it flat on her knee and looked at the white surface and could not think of a single word that mattered enough to write. His letter was still inside her robe. The edges were soft now, almost fabric.

Wait for me.

She folded the blank paper and put it away.

Yona watched. Said nothing. Liora stood at the tent entrance with her hand on her sword, watching the dead zone with eyes that never stopped moving.

Sleep came in pieces. The node's decay throbbed through the ground and the fire-scars answered each pulse.

Morning broke gray. Cold air carried the smell of dead soil, dry and mineral, stripped of everything that fed growth.

They formed up at the tree line. Thalion positioned the escort in a defensive wedge with Seraphina in the center. She noticed the placement. Not at the front where her fire could lead, not at the back where she'd be shielded.

Center, where any direction she lost control would hit his soldiers last.

Containment. Not protection.

She said nothing about it. He was right to put her there.

The dead zone felt wrong underfoot. Soil gave too easily, powdery gray that puffed with each step. Nothing grew within fifty yards of the ruin. Trees at the perimeter stood bare and blackened, not scorched but drained. Life pulled from them by the same force that dragged at her ribs.

The ruin itself was stone and collapsed timber. A manor house once, built over the anchor node a century ago by a family that no longer existed. Keeper families had maintained these sites for generations before someone decided they needed to stop existing. Systematic elimination dressed as natural attrition.

Now the node was unattended, failing, and the land was dying for it.

Thalion signaled a halt twenty yards from the outer wall. His eyes swept the structure and the ground and the dead trees behind them.

"Seraphina." He used her name. Not her title. "What are we walking into?"

"The anchor node is underneath the foundation." Her fire-scars glowed steady now, responding to proximity. "It needs direct contact. I put my hands on the foundation stone and feed fire until the ley line holds."

"How long?"

"I don't know. The node is worse than expected."

He absorbed that. Nodded once.

"We clear the structure first."

They entered through what remained of the main gate. Stone archway, half collapsed. Courtyard choked with dead vine that crumbled at a touch. The demon nest woke before they reached the inner hall.

The first came through a gap in the eastern wall. Fast, low, joints bending in directions that made the nearest soldiers step back on reflex. It shrieked and three more followed through the same gap.

Then more from the south wall and the collapsed roof and a cellar entrance half-buried in rubble. Twenty at least, maybe more in the deeper structure. These weren't the road pack from two days ago. These had fed on the ley line's bleeding energy for months and it showed in their size and speed. Coordinated in ways the road demons hadn't been.

Thalion's earth magic responded before his sword cleared the sheath. Stone spikes erupted from the courtyard floor and caught the nearest demon through the chest. Vines snaked from the dead ground and tangled legs. His soldiers filled gaps with steel and discipline, holding formation while he shaped terrain to their advantage.

Seraphina burned.

Golden fire left her hands in controlled bursts, targeting the ones pressing the flanks where soldiers were thinnest. Fire hit, demon dropped, she moved to the next. No cruelty this time. No holding them alive to watch them cook.

A demon broke the southern line and charged the soldier beside Edrin. She put fire through its skull at fifteen feet. The soldier flinched from heat and kept position. Edrin caught a claw across his forearm from a second demon that came through the same gap. He cut it down left-handed and didn't stop fighting.

A vine-pinned demon took his sword through the chest. He kicked the body aside and shouted adjustments without breaking stride. Two soldiers shifted left. A third filled a gap on the right. Stone ground shut over a cellar entrance that was feeding more into the fight.

She healed herself twice. A claw had caught her forearm when she turned too slow. A demon inside her range slammed its shoulder into her ribs before she burned it off. Golden light closed the cuts and eased the bone in seconds, quiet enough that only the nearest soldiers noticed.

The soldiers saw it. She fixed herself and not them during the fight. One man took a gash across the thigh. Another had claw marks down his shield arm. They fought through their injuries and watched her close her own wounds without pause.

The gap registered on their faces. None of them said a word about it.

A claw caught his shield arm. Same arm as the road. His earth magic absorbed the worst. His jaw locked and he didn't slow down.

Twenty minutes, maybe less, though it felt longer.

The last demon died pinned between stone spikes and golden fire. Its scream bounced off the ruined walls and faded into gray sky.

Quiet.

Thalion's soldiers held position for a ten-count, then exhaled. Weapons lowered. One man leaned on his sword. Another sat on a piece of fallen wall and pressed his hand against the gash on his thigh. Edrin held his forearm against his chest and winced.

Seraphina stood in the center of the courtyard with fire still warming her palms. Demon bodies were already dissolving into the gray soil, corruption returning to the earth.

"Structure clear," Thalion said. He checked his soldiers and counted wounds and assessed readiness without rushing any of it. His shield arm hung slightly different than before, and he didn't favor it. "Begin stabilization when ready."

She knelt beside the soldier with the thigh gash first. Put her hands on the wound and D'Lorien healing fire spread under her palms. Skin knitted. Bleeding stopped.

She moved to the next. Fixed every wound her fire hadn't caused and the ones demons left behind. Edrin's forearm. The claw marks on the shield arm. A bruised rib on a soldier who hadn't mentioned it.

When she reached for Thalion's arm, he stepped back.

"I'm functional."

"You're injured."

"I said functional."

She let it go.

The courtyard smelled of demon ash and old stone. The nest was cleared, the approach to the anchor node open, guards posted at every entry point.

Seraphina moved toward the foundation where the ley line pulsed weakest, fire-scars burning their brightest.

Relief spread through the formation. Shoulders dropped and weapons came down. A soldier uncapped his water skin.

Then the sound started.

Not from the ruins. Not from a single direction.

From everywhere.

Rustling and scraping, the noise of many small bodies moving through tight spaces. Claws on stone and paws on dead wood. From the dead trees beyond the perimeter, from gaps in the walls too small for demons, from hollows in the collapsed structure that no one had thought to check.

Animals, dozens of them, emerging from every hiding place the demon nest had covered. Gray-eyed and moving with stuttered coordination that belonged to nothing alive.

A fox dragged itself across the courtyard on a leg bent the wrong way. A deer stumbled through a gap in the eastern wall with foam at its mouth. Something small and striped pushed out from under a collapsed beam, shaking, barely able to stand.

They kept coming.