I left without saying anything to anyone.
They were checking the structures. They didn't need me standing there watching them do it.
I went to Amlada first. Walked through the capital under an invisibility spell, checking the damage the mana outburst had done.
Buildings with cracked foundations. Market stalls collapsed. Amanda's shop had lost its front wall entirely, the display cases pushed outward by the earthquake, everything she had built her business around sitting in pieces on the street.
I noted it and moved on.
Singrael next. Then Branklore. Then Winterly. The damage varied by location and proximity to the portal's entry point but none of the kingdoms had been untouched.
The mana imbalance had hit everything simultaneously and each kingdom was dealing with the aftermath in the particular way of populations that had no framework for what had just happened to them.
I got to Medalline last.
The empire looked worse than the others and I understood why when I found the source of it.
Emperor Karvian Von Medalline.
He had used everything available to him. His mages, his resources, years of accumulated power pointed at a single objective. Breaking the seal. The man had spent his entire reign taking things that weren't his and had apparently decided the demon realm was the next item on the list.
He was in his throne room when I arrived.
The throne was occupied by someone else.
The demon lord was young, which I hadn't expected. He sat in Karvian's throne the way someone sits in a chair they have decided belongs to them, with the ease of someone who has never had to fight for comfort and doesn't intend to start.
The emperor was standing to the side, reduced to whatever function the demon lord had found useful for him, which appeared to be standing there and looking grateful he was still alive.
Demons filled the palace. Not the chaotic press of something that had broken through a hole and poured in without direction. Organized. Settled. As though the palace had simply changed management and the new management had brought its own staff.
The demon lord was laughing at something. The sound of it had a quality that sat wrong in the air, too light for what it was, the way a sharp thing can look harmless if the light hits it right.
I stood in the room and watched.
He was mocking the humans around him. Not cruelly, which would have been straightforward. With the particular amusement of something that finds the situation genuinely funny, that looks at a species that opened a portal to its own destruction out of greed and finds the whole arc of it entertaining.
He wasn't wrong about the greed. That didn't make him less of a problem.
Then he stopped laughing.
His eyes moved across the room slowly. Not looking at anything specific. Looking for something he had sensed without being able to locate it. He had good instincts. Better than I had expected from someone newly risen to his position.
"A rat hiding in a hole." He said pleasantly, to the room at large.
The demons went alert immediately. The emperor looked confused, scanning faces, trying to understand who the comment was directed at.
The archmage the emperor had apparently been proud of was doing something with his hands that was supposed to detect hidden presences and was producing nothing because he was looking in the wrong layer of reality.
I started walking.
Slowly. Not because I needed to be slow. Because the slowness was its own message. The pace of someone who has already finished calculating and is taking their time getting to the conclusion because the conclusion isn't going anywhere.
I stopped in front of the throne.
The demon lord's eyes were almost on me. Not quite. He could feel the presence without being able to fix a location to it. His expression had shifted from pleasant to something more focused, the amusement still there but underneath it now something that recognized it was in a different kind of conversation than it had been a moment ago.
I didn't say anything.
I let him feel what I was feeling.
Not all of it. A specific portion. The anger that had been sitting cold and patient since the barrier went up over Eryndor, the part that was his specifically, targeted and precise, aimed at him alone in the room full of demons and humans who felt none of it.
He gasped.
It was a small sound, which told me he had caught himself before it became larger, which told me he had reflexes and pride. His hands tightened on the throne's arms. Sweat appeared at his temples.
He was fighting it, pushing back against the bloodlust pressing down on him with whatever resistance his demonic constitution could produce.
It wasn't enough and he knew it wasn't enough and that knowledge was part of what I wanted him to have.
I held it for another moment.
Then I pulled it back.
He took a full breath. Then another. His expression had reorganized itself by the time he had his air back, the pleasantness restored over whatever was underneath it now, but his eyes were still moving across the space where he thought I might be.
I smirked where no one could see it and teleported out.
That was enough for now.
He knew something was in the room with him that he couldn't see and couldn't locate and had chosen to let him breathe rather than not. He would spend time thinking about what that meant. Good. Let him spend time on it.
---
I went back to Amlada.
Amanda's shop front was still in pieces on the street. I put it back. Not because I had a particular obligation to Amanda beyond the contract, but because her shop was on the supply chain and a supplier with a collapsed storefront was an inconvenience I didn't need.
The old couple's general store was next. The seed shop. The front had held but the interior shelving had come down and taken most of the stock with it. I sorted the structural damage and left the inventory to them because putting their stock back in the order they kept it wasn't something I had memorized.
I went back to Medalline and fixed the merchant guild's entrance hall, which the earthquake had cracked through the center in a way that was going to make the building structurally questionable without intervention. The guild master's records were intact. His pricing instincts were still going to be a problem. I couldn't fix that.
There were others. Not every business in every capital, but the ones that had some functional connection to Eryndor's supply runs.
The places I would need operational when things settled enough to resume normal scheduling. I worked through them without announcing what I was doing or why, fixing what needed fixing, leaving when it was done.
It took days.
The rumors started on the third one. An archmage repairing buildings. Moving between kingdoms. No affiliation, no explanation offered, no payment taken.
The stories spread the way stories spread when they don't have enough information in them to be complete, which was quickly and in several conflicting directions.
By the time I finished the last repair on the list the rumors had graduated to legend in certain parts of the capital markets, the mysterious archmage who appeared after disasters and fixed things and vanished before anyone could ask questions.
The truth was considerably less interesting.
I had suppliers I intended to keep using and they needed functional buildings to operate out of.
That was all there was to it.
I teleported back to Eryndor and checked the structures myself from the outside, running a scan across everything I had restored, confirming it had held correctly in the days since.
It had.
I went to check on the tarantula enclosure next because the babies were at a growth stage that required monitoring and the monitoring wasn't going to do itself.