Page 132 of The Last Remaining Light

A thunderous crack split the night, and Elowynn turned toward the Spire.

High above the city, one of the enormous observatory crowns fractured away. Stone, crystal, and burning astrylite rained from the heavens. Suspended bridges snapped, and entire terraces vanished behind clouds of dust and falling debris.

But it was not the destruction that stole the breath from her lungs.

It was the light; silver-white radiance spilled out from the fractured wound in the Spire.

It was not fire. Nor was it astrylite.

It was something much older, primordial even.

Elowynn felt it in her blood, her bones, her very soul.

But she had no name for it. She didn't know what it was. She looked at the others, and they all had the same wonder and fear in their eyes.

The tower bled this unknown light into the darkness, the brilliance pouring from the fracture in impossible rivers, illuminating the black sky above Veylspire as though the stars had been trapped inside the stone all this time.

Around them, people stared in wide-eyed horror while others fell to their knees weeping openly.

The Celestial Spire had stood over the city for centuries, unchanging and eternal.

Now they were watching it come apart before their eyes.

Elowynn turned to Caelyn, noticing he was staring somewhere beyond the spire. Beyond the city. Beyond the mountains themselves.

When she followed his gaze, she realized with growing horror that he wasn’t looking upward like everyone else.

He was looking down.

PART IV

“Not all buried things are dead."

— Warning inscribed beneath the Celestial Archives

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“There comes a moment in every age when buried things begin insisting on reemerging.”

— Celestial Archives fragment

Caelyn stood several paces behind Elowynn beneath the wounded light spilling across Veylspire, one hand braced against the scorched archway as if the stone alone kept him upright. Blood seeped steadily through the torn fabric across his back where shards of crystal remained buried beneath his coat, and every breath seemed wrestled from his lungs.

Black frost spread beneath his palm in thin, spidery veins before shrinking back again, as though even the stone feared what he was becoming.

Elowynn kept returning her attention to him.

Veylspire was falling into ruin around them. The towers she had spent five turnings studying beneath burned against the darkness. Bridges collapsed into smoke and fire. Above it, the Celestial Spire had split open, pouring silver-white radiance into the Blackwake sky like a wound carved through the heart of the world.

And still, all she could see was Caelyn’s trembling hand against the stone. The exhaustion on his face and how he fought to remain standing.

He had come for her.

He had crossed half the continent, entered a city that would have executed him without hesitation, and found her again.

He had seen everything she had become... and he had stayed.

Now, Blackwake was spreading across Aetheris, and whatever had awakened beneath the world seemed to be pulling at him.