Kane’s head turned toward the whistle.
One of the elven guards near the outer post had already torn his bow from the rack, string drawn, eyes locked past the open gate.
Other watchers broke from their positions and ran for the threshold.
The kneeling tribesman scrambled up on ruined legs and followed them, still crying, still shaking.
Kane moved with them, Mjoldr heavy in his grip, the clean clearance numbers in the system suddenly feeling like a joke against whatever the forest had decided to send next.
Outside the gate, on the packed approach road, a woman walked toward them.
She moved slowly.
Her body was tattered: hides torn, skin mapped with deep scratches and darker stains that had already begun to dry.
Blood ran in lines down one arm and from a gash along her ribs.
For a moment she looked like any survivor who had crawled out of a massacre on refusal to die.
The tribesman saw her face and broke.
"Asa—!"
He ran past the elven line before anyone could stop him.
Kane felt the wrongness in the air the same way he had felt the warm stone under the canopy, pressure where there should have been none, a wrong heat under ordinary morning light.
He didn’t call the man back.
Someone had to confirm what the eyes were already trying to refuse.
He followed at a hard walk, Mjoldr ready, the elven bows tracking the woman’s progress in tight arcs.
Asa lifted her head.
Her eyes were yellow.
Not the gold of exhaustion or fever.
Not the amber of ordinary beast-blood.
A flat, sick yellow that ate the light instead of reflecting it.
She opened her arms as the tribesman reached her and pulled him into a hard, desperate hug that looked, for one fractured second, like reunion.
"You’re alive...?" the man sobbed into her shoulder.
"Asa, you’re—"
She bit his neck.
The sound was wet and final.
The tribesman’s cry turned into a choked scream.
He tried to push her away.
Her arms locked with a strength that didn’t belong in a body that had been bleeding out on the road.
Elven guards flinched as a unit.
One loosed an arrow on pure training.
Asa turned with the still-struggling man in her grip and put his body between herself and the shaft.
The arrow punched into his shoulder instead of her skull.
He screamed again.
She didn’t let go.
Her jaw worked.
She tore a chunk of flesh from the side of his neck, spat it onto the dirt in a dark spray, and only then raised her yellow eyes toward Kane.
Corrupted.
Demon essence.
Not only beasts.
The belt had found a way to turn human stock as well.
Asa dropped the half-conscious tribesman and ran at Kane.
She was fast, faster than the wounds on her body should have allowed, low and direct, hands hooked into claws that had not been claws when she started across the road.
Kane didn’t meet her with a swing.
He stepped half a pace offline, raised Mjoldr, and threw.
The axe left his hand in a hard, flat line.
Swoosh.
The head took her cleanly at the neck.
For a grotesque half-second, her body kept running, headless, momentum carrying the corpse another two strides before the legs forgot what they were doing and the whole ruined mass folded into the dirt.
The head rolled once and stopped, yellow eyes still open, still wrong.
Kane called Mjoldr back.
The axe smacked into his palm with a wet sound.
Blood flicked from the edge onto the road.
Before him, the bitten tribesman was trying to stand.
Blood sheeted down his chest from the torn neck.
His hands shook.
When he looked up, his eyes had not turned yet, but something behind them was already failing.
"Something’s wrong," he got out.
"Something’s—inside—I can’t—"
From the tree line beyond the approach road, the forest answered.
Roars.
Not a single distressed band.
A layered, rolling wall of sound, human throats and beast throats mixed, wrong in the same way the warm stones had been wrong.
Shapes broke from the brush in a ragged flood.
Dozens at first.
Then more.
Painted bodies, torn hides, some still carrying the bone charms that had failed them, all of them moving with the same flat yellow stare Asa had worn.
Hundreds, pouring toward the open gate like the belt itself had decided to empty its dead into Sylvander’s face.
Kane was already turning.
"Close the door!"
His voice cracked across the yard hard enough that the elven watchers moved before they finished processing the size of the wave.
The gates began to swing.
Kane grabbed the bitten tribesman by the arm and hauled him inside the threshold with a strength that ignored the man’s weak resistance.
Firlia was there, face white, already shouting for the inner bars.
Misha and Thora had reached the gate arch with weapons in hand.
Kessa’s gauntlets caught the morning light as she skidded to a stop beside them.
Griselda dropped from a higher wall perch, wings flaring once.
"Bars!" Kane snapped.
"Every post on this approach. No one opens for a familiar face until we clear the eyes. Yellow means corrupted. Demon essence is turning the belt’s people the same way it turned the animals."
An elven captain near the winch shouted confirmation.
The gates boomed shut.
A heartbeat later, the first of the yellow-eyed wave hit the outer wood with a sound like wet meat and bone.
Scraping.
Howling.
Fists and claws and the occasional thrown body of someone who had already been climbed over by their own.
Thora’s voice was flat iron.
"How many?"
"Hundreds," Kane said.
"Tribes. Maybe more bands than the one we marked. The charms failed. The stones were doors. Whatever was on the other side stopped waiting for permission."
Misha’s eyes flicked to the bitten man Kane had dragged inside.
He was on his knees again, clutching his torn neck, shaking harder.
"And him?"
"Bitten. Not turned yet."
Kane looked down at the tribesman.
"How long between the bite and the change when you saw it happen to others?"
The man’s mouth worked.
Blood ran between his fingers.
"Minutes. Sometimes less. Asa was—she was already gone when she walked out of the trees. I did not see the start. I only saw the eyes."