Marquis Ravendale's patience wore thin, and sent a much bigger army mixed with higher paid mercenaries into the mix to be deployed towards the forest.
They entered the flagged perimeter on the third day of their march.
I felt it the moment the first one crossed the line. I was at the top of the Sequoia tree, sitting in the uppermost branches where the view cleared the mountain walls and opened toward the northwest.
The settlement below was going through its morning routine, the kitchen already producing smells that reached even up here, the children's voices carrying from somewhere near the playground.
Frostina came up beside me without being asked. Flame followed, landing on a branch slightly below mine and looking out in the same direction, trying to find what I was looking at.
"They came back." Frostina said. Her tone had the particular flatness of someone who was not surprised but was annoyed about it anyway. "They are genuinely seeking their own deaths."
Flame's mana started rising.
"Stand down." I said.
He looked at me.
"Watch." I said.
I stayed where I was and worked from a distance.
The first traps went in quietly. Poison laid into the ground in a spread pattern across the path they were taking, not contact poison but airborne, slow enough that they wouldn't notice it until their coordination started going.
The illusion traps came next, anchored to specific trees, triggered by presence. Anyone who hit them would keep walking but the direction they believed they were walking would quietly stop matching the direction they were actually going.
I watched them march into the first illusion field.
They kept their formation. Disciplined. The mercenaries Ravendale had sent this time were better than the previous groups. More organized, better equipped. A proper military contractor outfit rather than hired individuals.
They marched in a disciplined circle for twenty minutes without noticing.
Flame made a sound that might have been a suppressed laugh.
I snapped my fingers.
The dome came down over the entire formation in the same motion. Sealed. Complete. What happened inside it in the next two seconds left nothing that could be identified as having once been an organized military force, disappearing into unrecognizable debris. The trees around the perimeter were fine. The undergrowth was fine.
The dome disappeared.
What remained was a crater and the quiet of a forest that had briefly had something in it and no longer did.
Frostina looked at the space where the formation had been.
"Clean." She said.
I dropped from the tree. And went towards the direction I was looking at previously.
I stood at the edge of the crater after teleporting to it and looked at the debris until I found what I was looking for. A metal insignia, intact because metal survived things other materials didn't. I picked it up and turned it over.
Ravendale's crest. The family mark of a Marquis in Amlada's western territory.
Three times.
The first group had been knights. The second had been mercenaries. This third group had been a contracted military outfit with mages and tracking equipment and the kind of funding that required a noble's full commitment to a cause.
This was not someone who would stop at four.
I teleported to the Ravendale estate.
I arrived at the gate because walking through it seemed faster than going over it. I put my hand on the iron and the gate ceased to exist. The sound of it going carried across the estate grounds and into the manor and I started walking.
My feet were doing something to the stone path. The mana running through me at that moment was not being carefully managed and the stone understood that. It softened where I stepped and resolidified behind me, leaving a trail of warped paving that looked like something very hot had been through.
Knights came out of the guard posts.
I didn't look at them. The aura I was putting out did what aura does at that concentration and they went back where they came from, unconscious, in the direction away from me. The ones who tried to be brave about it went the same way, just slightly faster.
I walked through the manor doors.
The butler met me in the entrance hall with the expression of someone who had run out of options and was performing composure on the last of his reserves.
"Sir, I must ask you to-"
I walked past him.
The office was on the second floor. I knew because I had looked at the estate layout before I left Eryndor. I took the stairs at a pace that said I had been here before and knew where everything was, which had the useful secondary effect of making everyone I passed press themselves against the walls.
I opened the office door.
Marquis Ravendale was behind his desk. Middle aged, expensively dressed, the kind of face that had spent decades being accustomed to deference and was currently failing to produce the expression that usually went with it. His butler had followed me up and was standing to one side, visibly uncertain whether staying was better or worse than leaving. Two bodyguards were positioned behind the Marquis with their hands on their weapons, which I noted the way I noted furniture.
I crossed the room and tossed the insignia onto the desk between us.
It landed and slid to a stop in front of him.
Ravendale looked at it.
"Three times." I said. "Your people have entered my territory three times. Each time they've disrupted the hunting patterns I rely on and caused distress to the animals I manage." I looked at him. "You are an interruption in my daily routine. I don't tolerate interruptions."
Ravendale found his voice somewhere underneath the fear.
"I am a Marquis of Amlada." He said. The words were steadier than his hands. "You are standing in my estate, having destroyed my property and assaulted my staff. Whatever grievance you believe you have, there are proper channels through which-"
"Your title." I said. "Doesn't interest me."
He stopped.
I looked at him for a moment longer. At the bodyguards. At the butler. At the room around us, the furniture and the records and the shelves of documents representing a Marquis's accumulated authority and position.
Then I turned and walked out.
Behind me, the fire started at the walls. I didn't look back to watch it take. I walked down the stairs and through the entrance hall and back out through the warped gate frame and teleported away before the first piece of the roof came down.
Whether Ravendale and his staff found the exits in time was not something I spent energy on.
He had sent people to Eryndor three times. He had owned Flame. He had demonstrated, clearly and repeatedly, that being told to stop was not sufficient information for him.
The estate burning was sufficient information.
••••••••
The news reached Amlada's royal court within two days.
It arrived in pieces at first, the way news from the western territories always did, filtered through layers of messenger and interpretation before anything reached the capital directly. The Ravendale estate destroyed. The Marquis's guards routed by a single individual. The stone in the courtyard melted.
The court assembled its understanding of what had happened slowly and with growing discomfort.
Marquis Ravendale had been one of the candidates being considered in connection with Princess Magenta's prospects. His western holdings were significant. His family name was old. He had been, until recently, a sensible investment of the court's attention.
Now his estate was rubble and nobody could clearly explain what had caused it except that a young man had walked through the front gate and the gate had not survived the introduction.
The captain of the royal guard, the one who had been present during a conflict with a divine healer who had treated a bruised child's wrists, sat in the briefing and said nothing.
He had already filed what he knew into the category of things that were true and needed to be treated carefully.
He suspect that the divine healer might be the same person who did such annihilation on Marquis Ravendale's existence.
Not even one survived, and the whole estate turned to ashes. Even walls made of stoned crumbled by the fire that consumed it. Which means, it wasn't an ordinary fire.
The court tightened its protocols for the western territories. Patrol routes were reviewed. Reporting chains were reinforced.
Quietly, without anyone making an announcement about it, Amlada became more careful about who it provoked and where.
To the point, any new faces entering their territory were treated with outmost care afraid of the possibility of interacting with the said mysterious young man.