I came through the gate and they were already there.
All of them. The original residents and the Seaphero survivors and the elves and the dwarves and the beastfolk and the clinic staff and the merchants who happened to be in Eryndor when the tremor moved through the ground and had stayed to find out what it meant.
They came toward me the moment I was through the gate.
Not in a rush. In the particular way Eryndor moved toward things that mattered, without coordination, by instinct, everyone finding the same direction at the same time.
Elder Elka first. Then Favio. Then Celina and Benneth and Gringo and all of them, the faces I had been looking at for three years, the faces I had built walls for and made lamp posts for and healed and argued with and carried children on behalf of.
"Are you hurt." Celina said.
"Are you okay." Gringo said.
"Leigh, tell us you're not hurt." Favio said.
"What happened." Benneth said. "We felt the ground move."
"Is it over." Nalvik said. "Is it really over."
They pressed in around me with the particular energy of people who had been waiting and were done waiting and needed confirmation with their own eyes that the thing they had been afraid of had resolved correctly.
I looked at them.
All of them. The crowd of people who had been twenty when I arrived and were sixty-something now and growing, every face turned toward me with the concern that they were not bothering to manage because they had long since stopped managing their feelings about me.
Something moved in my chest.
The same thing that had been moving there more and more frequently in the past years, the thing I had been finding names for slowly, the way you found names for things that had been present for a long time before you decided to look at them directly.
I looked down at the ground.
Then I lifted my head.
And I smiled.
Not the small one at the corner of the mouth. Not the barely-there expression that people had been catching and remarking on for years. The full one. The one that had come out when I held Sena in the ruins of her enclosure and hadn't known it was happening until Elficia's hand went to her mouth.
The crowd went silent.
Then Torra hit me.
Full speed, both arms, the full commitment of someone who had been doing this for three years and had recently done it after being taken by a demon lord and had apparently decided that no amount of that history was going to change the approach.
He laughed into my shoulder.
And the laugh stretched the smile wider and something else happened, something that came from the same place the smile had come from, moving up through the chest without asking permission.
I laughed.
The crowd stared.
The particular stare of people encountering something they had heard described and had accepted as theoretically possible but had not expected to witness personally. Elder Elka's hand came up slowly to her mouth. Favio's eyes went wide. Benneth looked at the person beside him and the person beside him looked back.
I laughed and the sound of it was apparently significant enough that nobody said anything for a full second.
Then I said: "What. Is laughing a crime."
Everyone looked at each other.
Then Favio chuckled. Then Gringo. Then Celina. Then all of it at once, the settlement laughing because I was laughing and because Philantria was free and because the children were home and because three years of building something worth laughing in had arrived at this specific evening.
"I'll start getting used to this." Favio said, the loud laugh that had always been his, his whole chest in it.
"Yay! Brother Leigh is laughing!" Torra announced to everyone in range as though they hadn't heard it themselves.
Eryndor celebrated.
Azylan produced the best of everything, the dishes coming out of the kitchen in a sustained flow that said he had been preparing for a celebration and had not known when it would happen but had been ready regardless. The dwarves brought out what they had been holding in the brewery's special reserve, the Glowfruit vintage that Theron had been aging for eight months and had not yet decided was ready. He decided now.
It was ready.
The lamp posts ran warm and steady through the night. The Sequoia tree at the center of everything, exactly where it had always been. Five children who were home ran through the celebration with the energy of people who had been frightened and were done being frightened and were spending the relief on movement.
The laughter filled Eryndor and went past the walls and into the mountain ranges and found the forest and the road and the dark beyond it.
For one night, Philantria could hear it.
•••••••••••••
*Ten years later.*
"Brother Leigh."
I turned around.
Torra was behind me on the path between the residential zone and the orchard. He was fidgeting with something. His hands were doing the thing his hands did when he was trying to find the start of a sentence he had been constructing for a while.
I looked at him.
Then at Jenna beside him.
Their hands were intertwined. The particular way of two people who had been holding each other's hands long enough that the grip had become the natural state rather than the deliberate one. Their eyes had the quality that eyes had when they were looking at the future and finding it good.
I looked at them for a moment.
Around us, Eryndor had become something that required a different word than settlement. The buildings ran from the inner zone to the outer zone and beyond, the expansion of the past decade having turned a mountain clearing into a place that appeared on maps now, the maps that had once marked this territory as uninhabited.
Children ran between the structures, some of them the original children of Eryndor grown into people, some of them new arrivals, some of them born here to parents who had arrived with nothing and built something.
Sena was visible near the clinic entrance, tall for her age, the elven heritage in her ears and the particular composure of her mother in how she held herself, arguing with one of Renna's staff about something that required considerable animation from both parties.
The Council Chamber tower stood at the center of it all, where the old public dining area had been, the tower tall enough to see over the walls in every direction. A kingdom, by any name that kingdoms went by.
Eryndor.
"Ten years ago." Torra said. Finding the start. "If you didn't save me from the Doom Forest. I wouldn't be here."
He looked at Jenna. She looked back at him.
"None of us survived without you arriving." He continued. Then he looked at me with the direct, uncomplicated honesty that had been his defining quality since he was six years old and had pressed a glittering stone into my palm in the dark outside the Crawlers' destruction. "Thank you. For being a part of our lives."
"Brother Leigh." Jenna added quietly. "The settlement, everything it became. None of it happens without you."
I looked at them.
At Torra, who had been carried by the collar across half of Philantria and had learned to detect my teleportation by the quality of my stillness and had told me once that I didn't need to be a hero, I just needed to be Leigh.
At Jenna, who had asked in the middle of a demon attack on a beach whether I was protecting the other people too.
I reached into my item box.
Pulled out a pouch of coins.
Held it out.
Torra stared at it.
"I mean—" He started.
"You haven't changed." I said. "Getting sentimental always means you want a larger allowance."
"That's not—"
"The hair." I said. And ruffled it.
"Hey! Hey hey hey." He stepped back immediately, both hands going to his head, the careful arrangement of someone who had developed opinions about their appearance in the past ten years and was not willing to have them disrupted without complaint. "It took time to do this. Do you know how long—"
"A relationship changed you." I said.
Torra and Jenna both went red at the same time, which was its own achievement.
"I'm leaving." Torra announced, with enormous dignity. "I am taking Jenna and I am leaving."
He took Jenna's hand and turned and walked away with the composure of someone making a principled exit.
Three steps.
Then they both ran, laughing, through the gate and out into the road beyond it, the sound of it carrying back over the wall.
I watched them go.
Then I rose.
Above the gate. Above the wall. Above the residential zone and the marketplace and the brewery and the clinic and the lake and the orchard and all of it, floating above Eryndor at the height where the full shape of it was visible, the lamp posts running their quiet light through every path, the Sequoia tree at the center where it had always been, ancient and patient and entirely unbothered by the thousand years of things that had happened around it.
Ten years ago I had ridden away from an empire in the dark with a satchel of gold coins and no plan beyond not being what I had been.
I had been a weapon. A function. Something pointed at problems and discharged. The hero who kills without hesitation, who conquered kingdoms and called it duty, who had been given a name and a purpose before he was old enough to refuse them.
And then a child had needed someone to pull a hound off him in the Doom Forest and I had stopped.
And here was what stopping had made.
A kingdom in the mountains where nobody was supposed to be. Humans and elves and dwarves and beastfolk and two dragons living in the same settlement, eating at the same table, building the same thing. Children who had grown into people. People who had grown into something they hadn't been when they arrived.
Sena, who had a name I had given her.
Torra and Jenna, running down the road laughing.
Eryndor, lit from within, spreading across the valley that had once been thirty people trying to survive a winter.
I looked at all of it for a long moment.
Then something hit me in the face.
Soft. Slightly damp. Sliding slowly down my cheek before falling.
I looked at it on the ground below me.
A banana peel.
I descended.
The monkey was in the orchard at the northern edge, sitting in the banana tree I had replanted from the Abyssal Forest seven years ago, holding a second banana with the particular smugness of something that had made an accurate assessment of the situation and found it favorable.
It looked at me.
I looked at it.
A decade. A decade of barrier nodes and artifact construction and trade negotiations and council meetings and demon lords and portals and the liberation of an entire continent.
And the banana tree was still the banana tree.
"I'm not letting you go unpunished this time." I said.
I reached for the shovel leaning against the orchard fence.
The monkey peeled the second banana.
I smirked.
The battle for the orchard, the longest-running conflict in Eryndor's history, the one that had begun before the dwarves arrived and the beastfolk came and the kingdom had a name and would continue long after all of those things had become ordinary, resumed.
••••••••
Leigh, the former Hero of Philantria, the liberator of the continent, the mayor of the first mixed-race kingdom in recorded history, the man who had closed two demon portals and defeated a demon lord and built a settlement out of nothing in a mountain range that nobody had thought to look at.
Protecting his crops.
From a monkey.
As he always had.
As he always would.
The End.