The largest house in the settlement was worn down. But the door opened for me without hesitation, and I was given a seat at the table like it was already mine.
Food was offered. All of it grown by their own hands. Vegetables, fruit, grain. No meat. Simple. Nothing wasted.
"Leigh. If you don't mind, can you tell us what exactly happened?"
The man asked it while still holding Torra.
Torra squirmed until he was set down, then drifted toward the fruit on the table and helped himself.
"I found an overturned carriage in the Doom Forest. Hound attack. They were heading toward the empire. Torra was the only survivor. The rest had been torn apart."
That was what happened. I said it.
Torra looked at me and nodded.
The room changed after that. Some of them wept. Others went rigid, hands pressing into their knees, gripping the table edges.
The grief moved through the small space like it had weight to it, filling every corner.
I sat inside it and waited for it to pass.
"Forgive us..." The elder woman's voice held steady despite the tears on her face. "My family were dear to all of us. There are very few of us here. We hold each other as family. This loss is not a small one. If we had known, we never would have let them go."
A woman beside her reached over quietly and rested a hand on her arm.
Then someone else spoke.
"We haven't even introduced ourselves to Torra's savior."
"You're right." The elder woman looked at me. Tears still on her face. Smiling anyway. "I am Elka. Torra's grandmother. The elder of this village."
I did not understand how that was possible. The grief and the smile, existing in the same face at the same time. I had no reference for it.
"I'm Favio, and this is my wife, Celine." Pointing to the woman who was comforting the elder.
The others gave their names one by one. There weren't many. It wasn't difficult to keep track.
"Leigh. Thank you for saving Torra."
Elder Elka crossed the room and hugged me.
I did not move. My arms stayed at my sides. She held on anyway, and I sat there and let her, because I did not know what else to do. No one had done this before. Not to me.
There was nothing to say, so I said nothing.
Torra appeared at my knee a moment later and climbed onto my lap the way he always did, without asking, without announcing it, as though it had simply already been decided.
He held out an apple.
Overripe.
Soft in the wrong places.
I took it and ate it.
It wasn't good. But something settled in my chest while I finished it. Quiet. Unnamed. I left it alone.
The conversation continued. Questions about Torra's family, about the road, about the details that the others needed to hear. Not once did anyone turn to ask about me. Where I had come from. What I was.
They had accepted a man named Leigh, sitting at their table, eating a bad apple. That was enough for them.
Every room I had ever walked into, people measured me. Calculated what I was worth, what I could do, what it would cost them to keep me close or push me away. That was the only way anyone had ever looked at me.
These people were not doing that.
I noticed it the way you notice something missing that you had always assumed was permanent. A strange, off-balance feeling. Not unwelcome. Just unfamiliar.
As the sun began to fall and the gathering broke apart on its own. People moved toward the doors with a particular kind of urgency, not rushed, but purposeful.
The way people move when they know exactly how much time they have left and do not intend to waste it.
Favio and his wife walked Torra and me to his family's house. Dusty. Cobwebs thick in every corner. The air sitting heavy and still, the way air does in a place that hasn't been lived in for a while.
Favio didn't stay. One look at the remaining light and he and his wife made their goodbyes and left.
Their faces had gone a specific kind of grim. Not fear exactly. Something more practiced than fear.
"Leigh." Torra tugged the hem of my shirt. "Close the door. When it gets dark the baddies come out."
I closed the door. Found a candle on the shelf under a layer of dust and lit it with a thread of magic.
The dark came fast here. Mountain ranges on all sides swallowed the last of the light without ceremony, and suddenly there was nothing outside the window but black.
Then the sounds started. Low. Screeching at the edges. A growl that sat underneath everything else like it belonged there.
Dark Crawlers.
I looked at Torra. He was already under the table, knees to his chest.
Calm.
Not frightened, calm.
The kind of calm that comes from something happening so many times it stops being extraordinary.
This was every night.
The worn-down houses. The small number of people. Favio's face at the sight of the sunset. It assembled itself into something clear and obvious, this was normal to them.
In a very bad way.
Then a shout split the dark outside.
"Get the pitchfork! Fight it off!"
Torra's head came up. "That's Brother Gringo!"
I picked him up and moved.
Two houses over, Crawlers had surrounded the house. Gringo stood in front of his sister with a pitchfork between himself and the creatures. Their parents were already on the ground. Bleeding.
I took the pitchfork from Gringo's hands and ran fire magic through it. Crawlers are weak to fire. They turned to ash on contact, one after another, efficiently.
No other doors opened.
I understood that. When every night is already a fight to survive, you guard what little you have.
I had spent eight years operating by the same logic, just wearing armor with an empire's crest on it.
"Brother Leigh. To your right. Baddies."
Torra's voice. Small. Steady.
I handed him off to Gringo and went to the parents first. Green mana, quiet and even, pressed into both of them until their eyes opened. When they looked up I was already standing.
"Stay down. Don't become liabilities."
Behind me, I heard Torra whisper to Gringo. Informative and unbothered.
"He's just like that."
A pause. Then Gringo's family settled. Like it was explanation enough. Like that was simply who Leigh was, and there was nothing wrong with it.
Both my hands caught fire.
No chant.
No gesture beyond the intent.
I pushed it outward and moved through the settlement until there was nothing left standing that shouldn't be.
When I stretched my search magic across the surrounding area and found no movement, I let the flames go.
What remained on the ground were small stones.
Magic stones, shaken loose from the Crawlers.
In the complete dark of the mountain settlement they caught what little light existed and scattered it. Glittering across the dirt like something had knocked a piece of the night sky loose.
"Wow."
Torra slipped out of Gringo's hold and ran to the nearest one. Picked it up with both hands. Turned it over. Then walked back and pressed it into my palm with the particular seriousness of someone presenting something important.
"Look, Brother Leigh. Sparkles."
I looked at it.
Gringo and his sister moved through the dark collecting the rest, their parents helping once they were steady on their feet. When everything had been gathered, Gringo brought the satchel to me and pushed it into my hands.
"Yours. You earned it." He steadied himself. "And thank you. For saving us."
I had heard more thanks today than in eight years of war combined.
I tossed the satchel back.
"Keep it. Hide it somewhere."
I picked up Torra and turned back toward the house. He waved over my shoulder at Gringo's family, cheerful and easy, like the evening had gone exactly as expected.
Inside, I set him on the table and stood in the middle of the room.
The walls needed work. The ceiling had places that wouldn't last another season. Dust had settled into everything. The whole structure was losing a slow fight against time, and no one here had enough to stop it.
This was not a place fit for a child.
That was a fact. And facts, in my experience, pointed toward action.
I was going to fix this house. Then the others. Then whatever was letting those Crawlers through every single night.
No one had told me to.
No emperor, no decree, no king pointing me at a problem that served his interests.
I was standing in front of something that needed doing, and I was the one who could do it, and that was the whole of the reasoning.
I did not examine it further than that.
It was enough. It felt, without me intending it to, like the first right thing I had done in a very long time.