Page 36 of The Last Remaining Light

Or perhaps recognized it.

His mother reached him moments later, collapsing to her knees beside him in the mud. Caelyn barely remembered her face anymore. Time had stolen most of it from him. But he remembered her expression that night with horrifying clarity.

Fear, but not of the Starless.

It was fear of him.

“What are you?” she whispered.

The suns that followed blurred together in fragments of rain and hunger and endless roads stretching southward through the chaos of the Ash Wars. The moment lanterns flickered near him, villages turned him and his mother away. Travelers stared too long whenever resonance instruments malfunctioned around his presence. Even wildlife instinctively avoided him.

And all the while, his mother grew weaker.

The blackened veins beneath her skin spread farther each sun. Caelyn remembered hiding beside her inside abandoned ruins while storms battered the broken roofs overhead. She had been coughing black blood into shaking hands by then, her body growing thinner beneath layers of soaked blankets.

“You cannot tell them,” she rasped out one night while gripping his wrist weakly. “Do you hear me? Never let them know.”

He had not understood, but he remembered nodding anyway.

Two suns later, she died beside the southern roads leading toward the western coast.

Caelyn buried her alone, placing one small stone atop her body at a time.

After that, came wandering.

The cold. The hunger. The thirst.

He spent moons barely surviving along broken trade roads while the world slowly unraveled around him. He learned quickly that people feared things they couldn't explain.

Caelyn had been ten turnings and half-starved when a refugee caravan allowed him near their fires during Frostmere. One of the merchants carried a portable starway relay—a small Astrari instrument used to locate and stabilize dormant gates salvaged from the northern observatories. Caelyn never touched it. Never even went near it.

Yet sometime during the night, the relay activated.

The explosion of resonance killed two of the merchants, incinerating them instantly.

Caelyn still remembered the screaming afterward. The panic. The way every lantern in the camp extinguished simultaneously while the resonance vanished entirely around him.

Then someone whispered the word.

“Null.”

The memory shattered apart as the undercroft chamber rushed back into focus around him.

He paid close attention to the way the cold stone felt under his palm, and the pressure he was exerting along the wall in order to keep himself upright. The starway was still humming behind them, but he wouldn’t let himself think about that. Instead, his eyes looked around the room before finding the one thing that brought him solace.

But the expression upon the face he craved to look at was not one he recognized, for Elowynn was staring at him like she no longer knew who he was.

She looked… afraid of him.

Caelyn felt something inside him hollow out. He never wanted her to look at him like that. Never!

He turned pleading eyes toward Agatha, who looked exhausted and older than he’d ever seen her. She, too, was afraid of him.

He couldn't speak. He could scarcely even breathe.

“Elowynn,” Agatha said again, this time carefully, “you must go upstairs.”

“I will not,” her melodic voice said once more.