Elves and household fighters scrambled aside as the elephant crashed into the wreckage of its own making, tusks gouging stone, legs kicking once in a final reflex before the yellow light in its ruined eyes went out.
The corrupted nearest the body climbed over it without mourning.
The gap in the gate, at least, stopped getting wider.
Kane dropped from the carcass, breathing hard.
The system flicked a brief combat summary at the edge of his vision: load tolerated, no structural failure, strain within limits.
He ignored it.
Thora arrived at his shoulder, blood freckled across one cheek, compact axe dark.
"The flood is still coming."
"I know."
Kane’s gaze lifted past the broken gate, past the yellow-eyed tide, past the smoking piles of the first wave, into the tree line where the elephant had come from.
Something stood there.
The shape in the tree line resolved into a woman.
Kane knew her at once: the scarred lip, the weight of authority that had held a painted ring from loosening on him when he still had an empty hand and an offer instead of a swing.
She stood between the trunks the way the heat-haze presence had stood, except this time the body was solid.
Her eyes were completely white.
No iris. No pupil.
Just flat, milk-bright surfaces fixed on him across the slaughter yard and the broken gate.
Possession.
Something older sitting inside a borrowed frame and looking out.
Kane raised Mjoldr.
The woman fainted before the axe could leave his hand.
She folded without a cry, as if whatever had been holding her upright had simply let go.
At the same instant, every corrupted tribesman inside the gate and on the approach went down in a single, ugly wave.
Bodies dropped mid-climb, mid-bite, mid-scream.
The yellow light in their eyes snuffed out together.
Chest motion stopped.
The sudden absence of the roar left a hole in the air that made the remaining elven shouts sound too loud.
"What?" an elven sergeant got out, bow still drawn on nothing.
"Did they die?" another voice called from the wall.
"All of them—did they just—"
"Hold your lines," Kane said.
He was already moving.
"No one leaves the arch. No one touches a body until we know whether this is finished or only paused."
He jumped down from the elephant’s carcass into the yard, stepped over the newly fallen, and walked toward the tree line where the scarred woman had collapsed.
Thora fell in at his shoulder without being asked.
Griselda took height again.
The rest of the household held the breach as the elves stared at a battlefield that had stopped fighting back.
The woman was still breathing when Kane reached her.
Barely.
Her neck had already been torn open: deep, ragged, the kind of bite that should have ended her long before she walked out of the forest with white eyes.
Blood soaked the dirt under her head.
The white film over her eyes was fading in patches, ordinary color bleeding back in broken pieces.
When her gaze found his face, there was a person in it again for a moment, not a passenger.
"Who?" Kane asked.
Her mouth worked.
The word came out wet and thin.
"De—devils..."
The breath after it rattled.
Her eyes fixed on a point past his shoulder and stopped tracking.
The chest under his hand rose once more and did not rise again.
Kane stayed crouched there longer than the tactical situation deserved.
A small, useless guilt moved through him.
If he had stayed in the belt a few more hours, if he had pushed the scarred woman harder instead of walking away with an offer and a mark on a tree, some of the band might still be breathing on the correct side of a gate.
He set the thought aside the same way he set aside extraction locks and pod questions.
He was not in a position to undo the morning.
He was in a position to stop the next one from being worse.
"Thora. Pull our people into a secure cordon around the bodies. No one loots. No one burns until Griselda and the city warders say the essence is inert."
He raised his voice for the elven captain nearest the gap.
"You will send a fast rider to Menual under my seal. Message is simple: no new arrivals from the forest belts are taken inside without full eye-and-vein checks. Any yellow film, any black tracking under the skin, any charm of the bone-circle pattern, quarantine and hold for my household’s word. If they refuse the check, they do not enter. Repeat it back."
The captain repeated it, already signaling for a runner.
Misha had come down from the second ring. Her barrier work had left a fine tremor in her fingers that she ignored.
"The Queen needs this before the rumors grow legs," she said.
"White eyes. Mass drop. A possessed speaker naming devils on our doorstep. If the World Tree is the first target they have always wanted, then this was not a random emptying of the belt. It was a probe that spent a whole people to see how fast we close a gate."
Kane nodded once.
"Then she hears it from us, not from a panicked ward report. Firlia, with me when I go up. Everyone else holds the yard and starts the count of the living."
Sira dropped from her tree, bow still in hand, orange hair full of leaf litter and fury.
"The boat?"
"Delayed," Kane said.
"We do not sail to the Giants while Sylvander’s outer approach is a corpse pile and the forest is still answering to something that can wear a woman’s face. We clean this. We brief the Queen. Then we decide how much of the clock we still own."
Kessa wiped black-tinged blood from her gauntlets onto a fallen hide, ears still flat.
"Fun while it lasted. Next time the forest sends a party, I want the thing that was driving them, not just the driven."
"So do I," Kane said.