Page 4 of The Last Remaining Light

Almost no one spoke of Astermere anymore. The Sisters avoided the name whenever they could, while her mother mentioned it so rarely that Elowynn sometimes wondered if she was trying to forget it altogether.

“Yes," she answered. “I am.”

Caelyn nodded once. "I heard the bells the night it fell."

Silence settled over the room. Seralyth's shoulders seemed to sag beneath an invisible weight, but Elowynn couldn't stop staring at him.

"You heard them from here?"

"No, but the currents carried the resonance," he said. "The abbey bells rang from midnight until dawn afterward."

“Oh.” Elowynn’s expression fell. Until now, she had not known that the bells she heard that night—after their arrival through the starway—had been ringing in response to Astermere’s fall and the resonance reverberating through the currents.

Pain twisted within Elowynn’s chest, and the burning of tears behind her eyes threatened to emerge again. She was grateful that someone had spoken of Astermere like it had been a real place instead of a ghost everyone avoided. Not as a rumor. Not as a tragedy. As a real place. A real loss.

Caelyn glanced toward the hearth, suddenly looking sheepish. "Sister Agatha says the western storms may worsen tonight," he said, as though the weather were somehow a perfectly reasonable thing to discuss. "The sea becomes violent during Duskfall."

He cleared his throat and smoothed a hand over his cloak. The moment stretched just long enough for regret to settle across his face.

"I should go."

"Thank you, Caelyn," said Seralyth with a smile.

He nodded, then hesitated near the doorway after opening it.

"The bells sound nicer from the east garden," he said without fully looking toward Elowynn. "If you dislike hearing them." And then he disappeared back into the corridor, the door clicking shut behind him.

Elowynn scrunched her nose, her lips tugging down as she stared after him. “He speaks strangely," she decided.

To her surprise, her mother laughed softly. "He does."

"Why?"

"Because he thinks far too much before speaking his mind,” her mother sighed tiredly.

Elowynn considered this. "Father said that was a virtue, like my observing."

Pain flickered across Seralyth’s expression before she could hide it.

"Yes," she whispered. "He did."

That night the storm worsened, just as Caelyn had said it would.

Wind howled against the abbey walls hard enough to rattle the windows while rain lashed the walkways. Below, the waves crashed endlessly against the cliffs, their rhythm weaving with the slow, mournful toll of the bells somewhere beyond the fog.

Elowynn lay awake long after the Sisters extinguished the corridor lanterns. Her small chamber in the abbey was modest compared to the vast, gleaming rooms of Astermere: a narrow bed draped in heavy wool blankets, a cedar chest tucked beneath the window, and a tiny washbasin resting atop a weathered wooden stand. The tall arched windows were assaulted by the weather as flashes of distant lightning briefly illuminated the stone walls and the little cluster of crystals arranged carefully beside her bed—the closest thing she had managed to recreate from home.

Now, as she lay in her bed, her mind raced. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw crystal ceilings collapsing in glittering ruin while darkness spread through the currents beneath the earth.

Eventually, she abandoned any attempt at rest.

After tucking her feet into wool slippers, she reached for her cloak that she kept on a hook near the door, and pulled it tightly around herself. Then Elowynn slipped quietly from her chamber into the darkened corridors of the residential wings.

Most of Lumenshire slept; only the low glow of astrylite lanterns remained beneath the archways while the distant sound of thunder rolled beyond the stained-glass windows.

She wandered aimlessly at first, drifting through the empty stone corridors. Eventually, she remembered the east garden Caelyn had mentioned and found the narrow passage leading to it near the library wing.

The moment Elowynn stepped beneath the archway, she stopped.