I went to my workstation and started on the purifying stones. Monster cores from the Abyssal Forest reserves, the equation I had built for the lamp posts and the barrier cores adapted to a different function.
These weren't charging. They were filtering, pushing clean mana outward continuously in a slow radius, the way a candle pushes light, gradually reclaiming the surrounding air from the contamination bleeding in from Medalline's direction.
I made enough to cover the forest in a grid pattern. Dropped them in sections as I moved through the tree line, each one anchoring itself to the soil the way the barrier anchored to the mountain rock.
While I was placing the last one I thought about the food supply.
The forest animals and the game Flame hunted were the settlement's primary protein. The contamination hadn't destroyed that yet but it was a variable now, something that could be managed but that required attention.
A second source made sense. Something that didn't depend on the forest's condition or the surrounding territory's stability.
Water. Fish. Everything the sea produced that Eryndor had never had access to because Eryndor was in the mountains and the sea was not.
I had been meaning to address that for months.
I went back to the settlement gate and found, as I had largely expected, that the subtle shift in the air around my feet that preceded teleportation had been noticed.
Torra was already attached to my arm.
"Where are we going." Not a question. An announcement that he was coming wherever it was.
I looked at him. Then at the arm he was holding.
"You can feel when I'm about to teleport." I said.
"You get quiet differently." He said, as though this were obvious. "Like you're calculating."
Two years. He had spent two years watching me closely enough that the way I stood when I was about to teleport had become distinguishable from the way I stood when I was doing anything else.
I didn't know how to feel about that so I filed it and moved on.
Azylan was at the gate behind Torra. And Nalvik beside him. Both of them with the expression of people who had observed the Torra situation unfolding and decided proximity was a reasonable strategy.
I looked at Azylan.
"Sea food." I said. "Come."
His entire face changed.
I picked Torra up and teleported all four of us to Singrael's eastern coast.
Seaphero.
The coastal town sat where Singrael's eastern territory met the sea, the water stretching out from it in every direction the eye could follow without finding an edge. The demon lord's forces hadn't reached this far east yet. The town was quiet with the particular quiet of a place that knows something bad is happening somewhere else and is waiting to find out how close it gets.
Torra hit the ground running.
I set him down and he was at the shoreline in seconds, one foot in the water, then both feet out when the wave came in, then both feet back in when it retreated, laughing at the rhythm of it, his voice carrying back over the beach with the specific quality of a child encountering something for the first time and finding it exactly as good as the world had implied it would be.
Nalvik stood at the water's edge and looked at the sea with the expression Elder Elka had worn looking at the night sky. Like something he had been told existed but hadn't believed in the way you believe things you've actually seen.
He crouched and put his hand in the water when the next wave came.
Tasted it.
Looked up.
"It's salty." He said.
Azylan laughed. Not unkindly. The laugh of someone who had grown up near enough to the coast to know and had forgotten that not everyone had.
"It's always salty." He said. "All of it. The whole sea."
Nalvik looked at the horizon.
"All of it?" He said.
"Every drop." Azylan confirmed.
Nalvik stayed crouched at the water's edge thinking about this.
I stood behind them and looked at the sea and thought about the lake I was going to build when we got back. The size it needed to be. The species it needed to carry. The filtration system to keep the water clean and the temperature regulation to keep the tropical varieties alive in mountain conditions.
Torra was calling something to the waves now, having apparently decided they were responsive to instruction.
Azylan came to stand beside me.
"This." He said quietly. Looking at the water. At the fishing boats anchored offshore. At the nets visible through the clear shallows. "This is going to change everything I can do in that kitchen."
"That's the intention." I said.
He was quiet for a moment.
"Thank you, Leigh." He said.
I looked at Torra chasing a retreating wave down the sand, Nalvik watching him with a slowly widening smile, the sea doing what the sea did regardless of demon lords or open portals or anything happening on the land behind it.
"The fish selection." I said. "Tell me what you need."
Azylan pulled out the small notebook he had started carrying and opened it to a blank page.
He was already writing before I finished speaking.
Azylan's notebook filled up fast.
He wrote with the focused efficiency of someone who had been thinking about this problem for longer than today and had a specific list waiting behind the first question.
Fish varieties first. Then shellfish. Then the things that weren't quite either, the crustaceans and mollusks and soft-bodied things that a coastal kitchen treated as entirely different categories from the ones inland kitchens didn't know existed.
He described preparation requirements alongside each entry. Which ones needed cold water to stay healthy.
Which ones needed specific substrate. Which ones would eat each other if housed together and needed separate sections.
Which ones were hardy enough to adapt to a non-coastal environment and which ones needed conditions replicated exactly or they wouldn't survive the relocation.
I listened and remembered everything.
When he finished writing he looked at his list and then at the sea.
"There's more." He said. "Things I've only worked with once or twice. If you see them, take them. I'll figure out what to do with them."
"What do they look like." I said.
He described three things. I noted all three.
"And anything you don't recognize." He said. "Take that too."
I looked at the water.
"Stay here." I said to the group.
Then I considered the problem of getting under the water without making the experience unpleasant for people who hadn't asked to get wet, and built a solution before Torra could ask what I was doing.
The bubble came up around all four of us at once. Not a sphere exactly, more the shape of the space we were standing in, sized to accommodate comfortable movement.
Clear on all sides. The air inside it sealed and self-replenishing, the pressure regulated to match the surface so ears wouldn't suffer.
Torra looked at the barrier wall beside him and put his hand on it from the inside.
"We're going in." He said.
"Yes." I said.
"In the water."
"Yes."
"Without getting wet."
"Correct."
He looked at Nalvik. Nalvik looked back at him. Some kind of agreement passed between them about the appropriate response to this information.
I walked us into the sea.
The water came up over the bubble's exterior and the light changed immediately, the particular blue-green quality of shallow coastal water filtering the sun differently than air did.
The sand bottom was visible below us, the bubble displacing the water around it as we descended, fish scattering from the disturbance and then, when we held still, returning to inspect whatever new thing had appeared in their environment.
Torra pressed both hands against the bubble wall and stared.
Nalvik crouched down and looked at the sand through the floor of the bubble, at the small things moving across it, at the shells and the movement of water over the bottom.
Azylan had his notebook out again.
"There." He pointed at a school of fish moving in formation through the water to our left. "Those. All of those if you can."
I separated from the bubble.
Not dramatically. I stepped through the barrier wall the way I stepped through most things, the water pressure adjusting around me automatically, the temperature cold but not a problem.
I moved through the water toward the school and gathered them into the item box in a sweep, a contained section of the surrounding water going with them to maintain their immediate environment during transit.
Back to the bubble. Through the wall again.
"Next." I said.
Azylan pointed.
We moved deeper.
And the adventure of picking out our next food for the table has just started.