Page 151 of The Last Remaining Light

Cold, stale air spilled out from within. The chamber beyond was larger than Elowynn expected, built in a circular design around an old resonance well that had long gone dim. Emergency shelves lined the walls. Several lanterns hung from iron brackets, their astrylite cores faint but intact. At the far end, three narrow tunnels branched away into darkness. One, if Korvel had told the truth, led beyond the city wall.

Elowynn should have felt relief. Instead she found herself looking back up the stairs toward the gallery they had just crossed, toward the Starless who had parted for them.

Her thoughts settled on the child…

With a resounding thump, Elowynn closed the door and locked it again from the inside.

Caelyn leaned heavily against the shelter wall with that ruined doll still held in his bloodstained hand.

With a cold certainty, Elowynn seemed to understand that the city was not the only thing changing from Blackwake.

Whatever had awakened beneath Veylspire had recognized Caelyn, and she didn't know whether that recognition meant salvation or ruin.

She didn't have long to dwell on that thought when something moved near a stack of emergency crates.

Chapter Thirty-One

“We believed the Starless wandered because they were lost. We never considered they might know exactly where they were going.”

— Restricted Archive Fragment

“Is someone there?” Elowynn asked, her voice carrying through the chamber.

The quiet in the room was not the silence of old stone and forgotten equipment, but the held breath of frightened people trying very hard not to be found.

The movement near the crates had Alyra lifting her resonance blade at once, the radiant glow throwing hard light across the walls.

A woman gasped somewhere to the left, covering her face. Beside her, a child whimpered. The sound was quickly smothered by an adult hand. Within a single breath, the shadows of the shelter dissolved into people.

There were perhaps two dozen of them.

Some wore the plain gray work coats of lower district laborers. Others were scholars, their robes torn and soot-streaked, their faces pallid with shock. A few looked like attendants from the upper transit galleries. There were children too, huddled against their parents or against strangers who had likely become guardians by necessity during the collapse above. Several injured lay along the far wall atop unfolded emergency blankets, and the metallic scent of blood had told Elowynn that not all of them had arrived here whole.

For several bells now, Veylspire had existed around her as a disaster. Burning bridges. Screams. Starless in smoke. The wounded Spire bleeding light into a sky without stars.

But here, beneath the broken city, the disaster had faces.

A woman pressed a trembling hand over a wound on her husband’s shoulder, and there was a boy far too young to understand what was happening beyond the chamber door. Along the far wall, an elderly scholar clutched a pair of cracked spectacles as though they were the last sensible thing left in the world.

Elowynn felt Caelyn adjust his stance, some of his weight lifting from her. At first, she thought he had stumbled, but she’d sensed that he’d seen them too.

He straightened as much as his wounds allowed. The movement cost him, his breath hitching.

Some old instinct had returned to him. He was bleeding, barely standing, and half-swallowed by whatever Blackwake had dragged to the surface inside him, yet the first thing he did upon seeing frightened strangers was try to make himself less of a burden against her.

Elowynn tightened her arm around his waist in warning, but he didn't protest.

A man stepped forward from the huddled survivors, though he stopped well before reaching them. He was broad through the shoulders and dressed in the dark green coat of a transit engineer, the left sleeve torn from shoulder to wrist. Blood had dried along one side of his face, matting the hair near his temple. His eyes remained sharp as they moved from Korvel to Alyra’s blade, then to Caelyn.

There his eyes remained. Elowynn felt that stare like a hand closing around her throat.

Korvel noticed as well and moved before anyone else could speak. He stepped forward with the kind of authority that didn't require raised volume, only the expectation of obedience.

“Korvel Thorne, Council Archivist of the Spire,” he said. Titles had power in a city built on hierarchy. It was seen by the way several of the survivors straightened.

“How many are here?” he asked.

The engineer blinked, dragged his gaze from Caelyn with visible effort, and answered.