The afternoon had been quiet enough that the children had fallen asleep under the Sequoia tree.
Torra with his back against the trunk, Flame curled beside him in his human form, the others scattered on the grass in the particular sprawl of children who had exhausted themselves and didn't care where they landed.
The farm was doing what the farm did in the afternoon, growing slowly and without drama. Elficia was in the herb plots. Azylan had something going in the kitchen that had been producing good smells since midmorning.
The roar came from the forest to the north.
Not one. Several. Overlapping, the sound of multiple animals in a state that animals didn't usually reach, the particular pitch of something that had stopped operating according to its own nature and was running on something else instead.
Torra woke up and a rabbit hit the edge of the settlement's gate at speed, shrieking, its eyes wrong, the pupils blown wide and black in a way that had nothing to do with light levels.
It turned toward Torra.
Torra screamed.
The artifact at his neck activated before I had covered half the distance between us. The barrier snapped up around him, invisible, immediate, and the rabbit hit it and bounced back onto the path.
I was beside him a second later. The rabbit didn't get a third attempt.
Elfaren came from the herb plots at a run, which I had not seen him do before.
"We can't reach them." He said, arriving beside me, looking at the tree line where more sounds were coming from. "Elficia and I both tried. Their minds are closed. The contamination is blocking the connection entirely."
I looked at the forest.
The demonic mana had been spreading outward from Medalline and the open portal for weeks. I had been filtering it from Eryndor's interior and managing the barrier's perimeter but the forest outside the walls was a different question, a large territory I had been purifying in sections without being able to cover everything simultaneously.
The animals that lived in it had been absorbing the contamination the way soil absorbs water. Gradually, then past the threshold where gradual stopped mattering.
More of them came through the gate now, the ones that had been moving through the settlement's exterior every day since Elfaren and Elficia had negotiated the arrangement months ago, now running wrong, moving wrong, the easy animal intelligence replaced by something that pushed forward without regard for what was in the way.
I looked at what was in the way.
The residents of Eryndor were handling it.
Benneth had a shovel. He was using it the way I had used the hoe at the river crossing, efficiently and without apparent concern for the size of what was coming at him. Leopold had a pitchfork.
Gringo had gotten between two agitated deer and was pushing them apart with both forearms like he was separating livestock, which was essentially what he was doing.
Savina had grabbed a rake and was using the head of it to herd three wild rabbits away from the garden plots with the focused practicality of a woman who had grown vegetables in difficult conditions for most of her life and was not going to let them be destroyed now.
The other children were awake now.
Torra had a stick. He was using it to chase a squirrel that had clearly made a decision it was already regretting, prodding it back toward the gate with the authority of someone who had chased this specific squirrel before under different circumstances.
Nico had a twig. He was doing essentially the same thing with a different squirrel. Jenna was behind him, hands on his shoulders, directing him left and right like she was operating something mechanical.
All the while...
Favio was wrestling a monkey.
Not metaphorically. He had both arms around it, the monkey was applying everything it had to getting free, and Favio was winning, his feet set wide, his face red from the effort but his grip not moving.
The monkey was significant in size.
Favio was more significant.
He got the monkey to the gate, released it outward, straightened up, and looked at his own arms with an expression of genuine discovery.
"Look at that." He said to no one in particular. He flexed. Slowly. Examining the result. "Two years ago I couldn't lift a full harvest crate without my back giving out." He flexed again. "I just wrestled a monkey."
Celina walked past him carrying a bucket she had apparently been using to discourage something near the kitchen.
"Very impressive." She said, without stopping.
"I genuinely just wrestled a monkey, Celina."
"I saw." She kept walking.
He watched her go with the expression of a man who felt his achievement was being insufficiently acknowledged.
I looked at the settlement. At the contaminated animals being redirected, herded, driven back through the gate by people using farming tools and sticks and in one case a large bucket.
Nobody was seriously threatened. The artifacts had held on the children without anyone needing to test the upper limits of what they could stop.
The residents of Eryndor could handle themselves.
I noted this and found it was not surprising and was still something.
What I didn't like was the gap in the barrier that had let contaminated animals through in the first place. The barrier filtered demonic mana from the air. It was built to respond to demonic presence, to what the enemy sent deliberately.
An animal carrying contamination it had absorbed from the surrounding environment wasn't the same signal. The barrier hadn't read it as a threat.
I sat down cross-legged in the middle of the path and started working.
The rune encryption took twenty minutes to revise. A new detection layer that read contamination levels rather than demonic intent, with a purging function attached to it.
Anything crossing the barrier threshold carrying contamination above a certain level would have it removed on entry. Not the animal. Just what had gotten into it. Clean entry or redirected entry, nothing harmful passing through.
I tested it twice. Then stood up.
"Flame." I said.
He was beside Torra, watching the last of the redirected animals disappear into the tree line.
He looked at me.
"The forest outside is your hunting ground." I said. "Start patrolling it. Anything that looks like what we just dealt with, drive it back from the settlement perimeter until the purifying stones are in place."
He straightened. The bright attentiveness he had whenever something gave him a clear task.
"How far out?" He said.
"As far as you've been hunting." I said. "You know the territory."
He nodded and shifted and was airborne inside three seconds.
I let him handle it while I resolve it.