They buried forty-seven of their own.
Korr had the count by the end of the first day. Forty-seven fighters who'd gone to sleep the night before the battle and hadn't woken up. The number was low enough to surprise him, but he didn't dwell on it. The centaur shaman, still weak, had helped identify bodies when the faces were too damaged to recognize. Her voice stayed flat and clinical through each identification. Afterward, her hands shook and she wiped them on her coat like she was trying to scrub away something that wouldn't come off.
The elder spread the number without ceremony. Korr scratched it into the mud with a stick because paper was scarce and the numbers needed to exist somewhere outside his head. The elder stood beside him while he wrote. Neither spoke.
The imperial dead were harder to count. Bodies stretched across the northern approaches in clusters — some from the initial assault, some from the rout when the thorn vine tsunami rolled over the ridge. Korr sent teams out to bury them on the second day. Grumblings. Why bury them? They'd come to kill everyone. Let the crows have them. Let the thorn vines take them.
"He would have buried them." Sera stood at the edge of a mass grave, watching Mira's people work. "Chris always buried the dead. All of them. He said dead people were just people who'd stopped moving, and people deserved to go in the ground proper."
Korr looked at her. "When did he say that?"
"After the bandits, the first time. When everyone wanted to leave the bodies for the Barrens wolves." She shrugged. "He dug the holes himself. Took him most of a day."
They buried the imperial dead.
Three of the eight Ents that had marched against the entity never returned — killed, or damaged beyond recovery, or rooted somewhere in the dead zone east of the village where nobody could safely reach them. The survivors filtered back over the course of a week, moving with the patience of their kind. Bark scarred and cracked. Branches bare in patches where the entity's tendrils had stripped them. The ancient Ent was the last to arrive. When it did, it settled into the gap in the northern wall — the one its own uprooting had created — and planted its roots so deep that the ground shook for a full minute. A chunk of masonry from the wall section fell into the hole it made. Nobody moved it.
The wall positions they'd left empty were a problem. Korr walked the perimeter every morning, marking gaps with stones. The list of gaps was longer than the list of positions that still had Ents in them. The thorn vine mats helped — they'd settled into dense carpets covering most of the approaches, and they'd respond to threats without needing direction. But carpets didn't have eyes. Couldn't see an approaching army and sound an alarm.
"We need people on those positions," Korr told Mira. They stood on the northern wall, looking out at the dead ground where the imperial camp had been. The camp was gone — torn apart by the rout, scavenged by centaurs, overgrown by thorn vines that had sprouted purple flowers and, inexplicably, small sour berries. "Not Ents. People. We don't have enough Ents to hold the full perimeter anymore, and we can't count on another growth surge if we get hit again."
"We barely have enough people to bury the dead and fix the walls." Mira's voice was tired. "You want me to staff watch positions too?"
"I want you to tell me how many fighters you have left. Then I'll tell you what I want."
She did. The number was smaller than he'd hoped and larger than he'd feared.
The centaur elder came to Korr on the fourth day. He just materialized at Korr's elbow while the demon was inspecting the southern approach, hooves quiet on the packed earth despite his size.
"We need to talk about what comes next."
"Nothing comes next until we've buried the dead and fixed the walls."
"And after that."
The elder's posture had a stiffness to it, a formality, that said this wasn't casual. His one good hand rested on the neck of the young centaur who'd been shadowing him since the battle. She looked nervous.
"Our southern plains are dying." The elder let that sit for a beat. "They've been dying for years. The empires have been pushing their borders, burning the grasslands, draining the water tables. We held on because holding on is what herds do. But there's nothing left to hold onto. The foals are hungry. The mares are tired. The old ones are dying faster than the young ones are being born."
"You told Chris this already. The night you arrived."
"I'm telling you now. Because Chris isn't here to answer. Not in a way that can answer. And someone needs to."
Korr was quiet. Wind moved through the tree's canopy overhead, black-and-white patterns sliding across the ground between them. Somewhere in the village, someone was hammering.
"What are you asking?"
"Permission to stay." The word came out hard, like the elder resented having to shape it. Centaur herds didn't ask permission. They went where they wanted and fought anything that objected. "My people have nowhere else to go. The grasslands won't support another season. The empires won't let us through their territories — we tried, after the drought three years ago. They chased us back with arrows." He shifted his weight. "This place is growing. The soil the tree touches is richer than anything I've seen in decades. If you'll have us, we'll stay. We'll work. We'll fight. We'll earn our place."
Korr looked at the tree. The pulse was steady, unchanged. Chris couldn't answer. But Korr understood him well enough.
"He would have told you yes before you finished asking." Korr's voice was rough. "He would have said something awkward about everyone deserving a home, and then he would have offered you food, and then he would have worried about whether we had enough food, and then he would have grown more food, and then he would have worried about whether the new food was good enough for guests."
The elder's mouth twitched. "That sounds like him."
"Yeah." Korr turned back to the southern approach. "Stay. You don't need my permission. You need Chris's, and Chris would have given it the second you showed up."
The elder said nothing for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice was rougher. "Thank you."
Korr grunted. "Don't thank me. Thank the tree. When it's ready to talk, it'll probably say something embarrassing about community."
News arrived in fragments. A trader passing through who'd picked up word of the battle from other traders. Centaur scouts ranging further out, bringing back reports from the main trade routes. Elara, who still had contacts among the imperial soldiers who'd deserted during the rout.
The empire was in chaos. Commander Valen's career was almost certainly over — the kind of failure the Imperial army had suffered at the walls of a village in the middle of nowhere wasn't the kind of thing that got forgiven. Reports of the entity had reached the capital. The military leadership was arguing about everything — what to do about the dungeon, what to do about the village, what to do about the fact that an ancient horror had nearly eaten half their army while they were trying to subjugate a settlement that didn't appear on any of their maps.
Sera and Korr sat on the northern wall at dusk, the dead ground stretching out before them, the last light turning the sky copper and grey.
"That's the empire's problem now." Sera picked at the strap of her bracer. "They came here to crush us. They failed. They can argue about it until the sun burns out for all I care."
"They'll be back." Korr picked at a splinter in the wall's surface. "Maybe not with an army. The failure will make them cautious. But they'll send someone. Diplomats, spies, traders. They'll want to know what we have and how to take it."
"Let them come."
Korr turned to her. She was staring at the horizon, jaw set.
"The other empires are watching too. Veylan sent a message through neutral channels. The demon lord wants to discuss terms."
Sera snorted.
"The message was vague. 'Open to discussion regarding mutual interests in the region.' Diplomatic nonsense." Korr shrugged. "Equion sent inquiries through trade networks. Torben increased patrols along their border with the Barrens. Darken and Luxion are both watching."
Sera turned to look at him. "Every empire on the continent knows something grew here."
"Yes."
"And they're all going to come poking around."
"Yes."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Lyra."
Korr raised an eyebrow. "What about her?"
"That girl who visited before the battle. Jarves's daughter. She was with the imperial army." Sera's voice was careful. "She was kind to Chris. She gave him information. She could be useful."
"If she's still alive. If she's still in position. If she wasn't executed for being near the command tent when everything went wrong." Korr shook his head. "Too many ifs."
"She's the only person we have on the inside." Sera's voice hardened. "Unless you've got a network of imperial spies I don't know about."
He didn't. Korr let the silence stretch, then nodded. "When we know more about what happened to the imperial army's leadership, we'll figure out if she's still viable. Until then—"
"Until then we're blind on the inside." Sera turned back to the horizon. "Story of our lives."
The centaur shaman reported on the third week. She sought out Korr specifically — since the battle, she'd spent most of her time either sleeping, eating, or sitting with her hands pressed into the soil near the tree's roots, doing something with her magic that Korr didn't pretend to understand.
"He's getting stronger." She stood in the village square, her equine body casting a long shadow in the afternoon light. The symbols on her flanks were starting to reappear, faded but visible, drawn in something that looked like charcoal and plant sap.
"Stronger how?"
"The day after the battle, he was a blur — I could sense him everywhere but I couldn't find him anywhere. Now he's sharpening. The picture's coming into focus." She paused, choosing her words. "He's not ready to communicate. Not in any way that would make sense to us. But he's aware. He knows we're here. He knows what we're doing."
Korr absorbed that. "Is that good?"
"It means the fusion is stabilizing. The entity isn't overwhelming him. The network is supporting him." She spread her hands. "Ask me again in a month."
She walked away. Korr stood in the square and looked at the tree, trying to imagine being spread across a network of roots stretching for miles, aware of everything and unable to touch any of it. A fly landed on his arm. He brushed it off.
Oswin was already thinking about trade.
The massive plant growth had changed the landscape for miles in every direction. The thorn vines alone could be harvested — the thorns were hard enough to serve as needles, the vines could be woven into rope or fabric if processed right, and the sour berries sprouting on the densest mats were tart but edible. The soil around the village was richer than anything the Barrens had produced in living memory. Centaur scouts reported that grass was growing in places that had been dead grey rock a month ago.
Oswin had lists. Multiple lists. He showed them to Korr on the fifth day, spreading sheets of bark with charcoal scrawl across a table that had survived the battle mostly intact. His face had an animation it hadn't carried since before the battle.
"Thorn vine rope, if we can figure out how to process it. Berry preserves — they're sour but sugar fixes that, and we can get sugar through Equion trade routes. The new growth cedar along the eastern ridge could be harvested for lumber once it's established. The soil—" he tapped a line, "—the soil alone is worth ten times what we were producing before. If we can get seeds, we could grow enough food to supply a small city."
"We're not supplying anyone. We're feeding ourselves."
"Of course, of course. But surplus is leverage. Surplus is trade. Surplus is—"
"Oswin."
The trader's mouth snapped shut. But his eyes were bright. Korr could see the calculations running behind them.
"Fine. Make your lists. But the walls come first."
Oswin nodded, already writing. A beetle crawled across the bark sheet he was writing on. He flicked it away without looking and kept going.