Page 133 of The Last Remaining Light

Or perhaps he was trying to fight it.

“Elowynn,” Alyra said sharply.

The voice cut through her thoughts and was enough to pull Elowynn back into her body.

Alyra stood a few steps ahead with her resonance blade angled low in one hand, its narrow crystalline edge glowing pale blue through the smoke. The light caught along the sharp lines of her face and made her look colder than Elowynn had ever seen her.

“We need to keep moving,” Alyra said.

Lora stood beside her, both arms still clutching several stolen astrylite crystals against her chest. Elowynn briefly wondered how she had not lost them yet. Lora’s usual expression, the bright, irreverent spark Elowynn had come to rely on over the turnings, had vanished.

She was staring at Caelyn.

Not at the Spire. Not at the Starless gathering below.

At Caelyn.

Elowynn saw the moment it fully dawned on her.

Not the boy from the letters, nor the distant figure Elowynn had spoken about after too much wine or too little sleep. Not the childhood friend Lora had teased her about for five turnings with increasing lack of subtlety.

This was him. Broad-shouldered, bleeding, half-swallowed by darkness, standing between them and ruin as though his own survival mattered least of all.

“You’re really not how I imagined,” Lora said.

Caelyn lifted his head slightly. His eyes were still wrong, too dark and too aware. But some part of him seemed to register the statement, because his mouth pulled into something that might have resembled a smirk, had he not looked close to collapse.

“I’m having a difficult night,” he said between pained breaths.

Lora let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “Yes, well, that does seem to be a theme.”

Alyra looked between them with an expression that suggested she was moments away from dragging all three of them by their hair. “Introductions can continue when we are no longer standing beneath a collapsing observatory district.”

“Oh, we already met,” Lora quipped before another roar rolled through Veylspire.

The sound was lower and deeper than before. The wounded Spire flared even brighter, and the silver light pouring from it cast the street in harsh light.

Far below, people screamed as another bridge gave way. Elowynn saw bodies fall through drifting smoke, saw lantern light wink out around them like dying stars.

Her heart nearly tore open.

She had begun to love this city. Watching it die felt like losing a part of who she’d become.

Caelyn pushed away from the archway with visible effort. “Alyra is right.”

His voice was rough enough that Elowynn turned back at once. He avoided her eyes when she looked at him. That was how she knew he was hiding the worst of his injuries.

“I know the lower archive annex,” Elowynn said, forcing herself to think past the panic clawing up her throat. “East of the old rail transit galleries. It was built into the mountain before most of the upper district. If any part of this level holds, it will be there.”

Alyra nodded once. “Lead.”

Elowynn moved without question. Fatigue and weakness no longer mattered.

It was fear and adrenaline that carried her forward.

The streets beyond the eastern observatory tower had transformed into something she could barely recognize. Smoke poured from fractured galleries and reso-tech workshops. It drifted low across the stone, turning every figure into a shape half-seen before it collided with them or vanished into the dark. Scholars fled without dignity now, their fine robes torn and streaked with soot. Nobles stumbled barefoot through shattered crystals, their feet leaving bloody prints across the streets. There were even observatory attendants dragging injured people toward walls already crowded with the wounded.

Blackwake had stripped Veylspire of performance. No one looked important anymore. No one looked powerful. They only looked afraid.