Page 150 of The Last Remaining Light

He didn’t look like the dangerous, wounded man who had crossed the continent for her. He looked younger. A boy standing beside a ravine beneath a starless sky, watching a ruined village and learning too early that the world could become monstrous without warning.

The memory was not hers, but she swore she saw it anyway.

“Caelyn,” she whispered.

The child took one step toward him, and Alyra instinctively lifted her blade.

“No,” Caelyn said. The word was quiet, but everyone heard it.

Alyra didn't lower the blade. “She is Starless.”

“I know,” he said.

The child stopped a few paces away. Her clouded eyes stared up at him, searching. Black veins threaded beneath the delicate skin of her cheeks. The rag doll hung limp from her hand, dragging along the dirty floor.

Elowynn’s throat tightened. “Caelyn… please,” she begged quietly, trying to pull him along.

He ignored her.

Slowly, he lowered himself to one knee. The movement pulled a sharp breath from him as the wounds across his back protested. Elowynn tried to stop him, but he shook his head once. Not looking at her. Not looking away from the child.

The Starless around them remained motionless.

Staring. Waiting. For what, no one knew.

Caelyn held out one, trembling hand. He didn't touch the child, only opened his palm between them.

The child’s head tilted as she looked down at it.

Elowynn thought she saw something shift in the girl’s face. The faintest hesitation, as though some buried remnant of what she had been had reached toward the surface and failed to break through.

Then the child placed the rag doll in Caelyn’s hand.

Lora made a soft, broken sound, her hand clapping over her mouth as she pressed into Alyra’s back.

Caelyn could only stare at the doll. His fingers closed around it with such care that Elowynn nearly wept.

Then the child stepped back.

She turned and followed the others into the shadows along the gallery wall, leaving the path open as though she had given them permission to pass.

Caelyn remained kneeling for one breath too long before Elowynn crouched beside him despite the terror clawing at her ribs. “We need to go.”

He nodded, but his gaze remained on the place where the child had vanished. “I know.” His voice had become hollow. Emotionless.

With Elowynn and Alyra’s help, he stood again. This time he didn't resist leaning on them. The doll remained clutched in one hand, its fabric dark with old blood and ash.

No one commented on it.

They reached the stairway at the far end of the gallery and descended into colder air. Behind them, the Starless didn't follow. Elowynn kept waiting for the scrape of footsteps, for the sudden rush of bodies, for the violence she understood better than this impossible restraint.

But nothing came after them.

The eastern relay shelter waited at the bottom of the stairs behind a sealed iron door marked with Council sigils half-hidden beneath dust. Korvel knelt before the lock and worked at it with a set of tools he produced from inside his coat.

Lora, having noticed the tools, opened her mouth to speak. Then she seemed to decide she lacked the strength or energy to be properly scandalized, thus refraining from asking about them.

The lock clicked after several tense breaths, and Korvel pushed the door open.