Page 193 of The Last Remaining Light

Before anyone could answer, a figure emerged from the swirling light.

Master Vaelor.

The Starway dimmed behind him as he stepped fully into the chamber, brushing dust from his tattered robes.

“Where were you?” Lora blurted.

Vaelor glanced once over his shoulder at the fading gateway. “Making certain nothing followed us.”

The answer settled over the chamber like a lead weight.

Then he turned toward Agatha, and to Elowynn's complete surprise, a warm, almost boyish smile crossed his face.

"It's been a while, Agatha."

Chapter Forty-Four

“Even grief cannot extinguish every light.”

— Ancient Astrari proverb

Three suns later…

The bells of Lumenshire Abbey sounded nothing like the bells of Veylspire.

Elowynn found herself listening to them more now than ever.

They were low and mournful, but they brought with them a sense of comfort.

The sea waves didn't crash against the cliffs with the violence she remembered. Now they seemed to roll endlessly against the stone below the abbey, their cadence as lulling as a well-remembered melody.

The sounds reminded her that not every kind of permanence was found in stone. Some lived on in memory, in rhythm, and in hope.

Since their arrival, the abbey had been busy.

After Korvel and Alyra had rested, both had returned through the starway to retrieve the survivors they had left behind in the shelter beneath Veylspire. They came back with dozens of frightened men, women, and children, transforming the abbey almost overnight. Guest chambers filled. Classrooms became infirmaries. Every spare bed and corner of the floor found a purpose.

Not everyone returned, though.

The old scholar with the broken spectacles had wandered away again sometime after the first group left the shelter. On the return journey, Korvel found the man's journal abandoned near the entrance to the tunnel leading to the observation gallery where Caelyn had first discovered him. Its final pages were filled with increasingly erratic notes before dissolving into meaningless lines.

His trail ended at the edge of the great central depression, where the stone fell away into a black canyon with no visible bottom. There were no signs of a struggle. Only a single broken lens resting on the stone.

It had made Elowynn think of the fourth scholar Vaelor had spoken of—the one who had returned, only to walk into the rivers during a Blackwake.

“Some calls were simply stronger than a person's will,” Agatha had said.

Now, sisters hurried through corridors carrying blankets, medicines, and food while Sister Maelin managed to organize chaos into something resembling order. The entire abbey seemed stretched beyond capacity. Even Sister Hannah had set the bottle aside, if only for a time, to help.

Elowynn had spent the last three suns helping wherever she could.

She translated records Vaelor requested. She assisted the healers. She answered questions from exhausted scholars who believed she somehow understood more than she actually did.

Every evening, she returned to her room certain exhaustion would claim her the moment her head touched the pillow. Instead, she spent half the night staring at the ceiling or turning her constellation of crystals through restless fingers while memories of the Meridian Ring refused to leave her.

Sleep had become difficult.

Some truths changed the shape of the world too thoroughly to ignore. Mostly, it was the realization that the history she had devoted her life to studying was incomplete. None of it left her thoughts for long. But even those revelations eventually gave way to a different concern.