Page 161 of The Last Remaining Light

A low sound moved through the survivors, and Elowynn felt Caelyn adjust his footing beside her. He had gone still again, his attention drawn toward the leftmost tunnel with that terrible distant focus. She reached for his hand without thinking and found his fingers cold.

His gaze returned to her the moment she touched him.

“The Starless are going there,” he said.

Everyone seemed to stop talking at once.

Elowynn had already heard the engineer say something similar, but hearing it from Caelyn was different. The engineer had observed a direction. Caelyn knew it. His certainty had no scholarly scaffolding beneath it, no map, no measurement, no argument. It existed in him like instinct, and the thought made her want to pull him back from every dark tunnel in the world.

“How do you know?” Korvel asked, skepticism lacing his voice.

Caelyn turned toward him, and the two men regarded one another across the dim light of the shelter.

Korvel’s suspicion had changed since the gallery. It had not relaxed, but it had become more complicated. He didn't look at Caelyn as merely a threat standing too close to Elowynn any longer. Now, he looked at him as a problem whose solution might determine whether anyone in this shelter lived until dawn.

Elowynn didn't like it.

“I don’t really know how to explain it to you,” Caelyn said.

“Humor me and try,” Korvel said dryly.

A sigh escaped Caelyn, and he nodded a few times, as if piecing his thoughts together.

“It feels like… direction,” he said. “Not a voice. Or words. Direction. The same way you know where a wound is without looking at it because your whole body is built around the pain.”

That was what he had brought back from the dark? Not an answer. A damn wound with a direction?

Caelyn looked toward the tunnel again. “It’s below us. Far down, wherever they’re going, whatever Blackwake has woken up. It's not above. Not outside the walls. It's… down.”

The lantern nearest the resonance well sputtered once, and several survivors flinched.

Alyra’s face had gone hard, though Elowynn knew her well enough now to recognize fear beneath the control.

“So, what? You’re suggesting we follow the Starless?” Alyra asked

“No,” Caelyn said. “I’m saying the route out is no longer above us.”

Lora stared at him. “That sounds exactly the same, Caelyn.”

“It’s not the same,” he sighed, looking exhausted.

“Well, it’s close enough that I’m going to need someone more optimistic to explain the difference, then,” Lora muttered as she perched her hands upon her hips.

Elowynn looked toward the three tunnels branching from the shelter.

One had been blocked by collapse. Not an option.

One sloped toward the western maintenance route that no longer existed. Also not an option.

The third descended beneath the broken arch where the darkness seemed to swallow everything it touched.

The city above them was burning, and the Vigil Orders would be hunting.

The Starless were moving with purpose.

Every safe choice had vanished, leaving only terrible ones behind.

Korvel broke the silence. “If the lower foundations connect to the old archive levels, there may be routes through them.”