Page 57 of The Last Remaining Light

A single figure stood atop a distant ridge overlooking the road, no more than two hundred paces away. It was thin. Motionless. The darkened veins beneath its pallid skin were visible even from a distance.

It was watching them.

One of the guards quietly whispered a prayer beneath his breath while the greasy-haired merchant crumpled in a faint beside his wagon.

The scholars couldn't look away, however. Fear might have drained the color from their faces, yet curiosity held them captive, their eyes fixed upon the figure despite every instinct urging them to flee.

Later, after dusk, while sitting near the camp’s fire, Seralyth murmured low enough for only Elowynn to hear. “They rarely travel alone.”

Elowynn whipped her head toward her mother, her thick braid coming around to almost slap the other side of her face.

“What do you mean? Have you seen them before?” she asked.

Her mother’s expression darkened, her fingers tightening almost imperceptibly around the folds of her woolen cloak.

“Yes,” she whispered.

Eowynn could feel the grief in her mother’s answer. For a fleeting moment, Seralyth looked less like the composed Astrari noblewoman and more like someone who had tragic memories buried so deep, she would not survive them if they surfaced.

Elowynn didn't ask her about it again, though she desperately wanted to.

Another span passed, entirely uneventful. It was horribly dull.

By this point, Elowynn had read so much during the journey, she was beginning to suspect she could recite entire resonant manuscripts from memory while half asleep and possibly dying from boredom.

Somewhere along the journey, she accidentally befriended the young human scholar named Perrin after correcting one of his resonance calculations over evening rations of dried venison, berries, and stale bread. Unfortunately, this mistake resulted in him seeking her out almost every evening afterward with increasingly enthusiastic questions regarding historical observatory architecture and whether Astrari minds truly processed resonance differently than humans.

She had also discovered Perrin possessed the remarkable ability to speak uninterrupted about observatories for nearly an entire bell.

Still, the conversations helped break the monotony of the road.

The boredom finally waned when the mountains emerged across the horizon, piercing the scenery of fields and forests. At first, only light-colored shapes beyond the clouds could be seen, indecipherable in what they truly were.

As the caravan grew closer, they became larger and more prominent.

Great snow-covered peaks rose toward the heavens like ancient stone gods guarding the heart of Aetheris. The roads began to steepen after that, winding up through narrow mountain passes lined with derelict observatories and cracked resonance pillars half-buried beneath weather and time.

By the eve of Frostfall, whispers of Veylspire spread in excited ripples throughout the caravan.

One more sun, they said. Perhaps less. Once they crested the peaks, Veylspire would be seen at the base.

Elowynn should have felt excitement.

Instead, she bore emotions so tangled together she no longer knew where one ended and another began. Wonder. Fear. Anticipation. Guilt.

Longing.

Always longing.

She wondered constantly what Caelyn was doing back at Lumenshire. Whether he still climbed the sea walls during the dawn bell or whether he missed her as painfully as she missed him. Whether the abbey already felt emptier without her there. After all, he was her best friend. She had never considered they would part like this, believing they would always run around the abbey together causing mischief, or doing their library chores each sun, or exploring the hidden caves carved deep beneath the abbey.

The memories lingered, replaying over and over, as the caravan rounded the final mountain pass just after the mid-sun bell on the first sun of Frostfall.

Veylspire appeared spread out far below.

Elowynn forgot how to breathe.

The city rose from the center of Aetheris like something pulled directly from celestial myth. The mountain range encircled the entire perimeter and crystalline towers, monumental in size, stretched toward the heavens beneath a clear sky. Prodigious observatory domes gleamed silver-blue across the mountainside, their golden telescopes jutting toward the heavens like siege towers aimed at the stars. Weathered stone bridges embedded with enormous astrylite crystals connected towering structures built directly into the sides of the cliff. Their windows were glowing with muted resonance even from this impossible distance.